Brief History: Red Scares

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A woman protests a Communist-sponsored May Day parade in New York City in 1952.

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Even before President Barack Obama took office, critics from John McCain to Joe the Plumber were painting him red. Amid the push for health-care reform, the attacks have intensified. Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer charged that Obama planned to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda" in a Sept. 8 back-to-school speech.

It's not the first time a phobia of socialism has made U.S. headlines. Since the early 20th century, few issues have stirred more political alarm. Facing a series of massive worker strikes in the years after the start of the Russian Revolution, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and rising Justice Department star J. Edgar Hoover took on a "red menace" of radicals, anarchists and Bolsheviks. By 1920, the pair had arrested up to 10,000 alleged subversives. (Most cases were thrown out.) With the onset of the Cold War, fears flared anew. Indeed, the term socialized medicine was coined in the late 1940s by critics of President Harry Truman's national health-care plan. From 1945 to 1960, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)--which was founded in 1938 to hunt down suspected Nazi sympathizers--interrogated more than 3,000 people. And in 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his infamous witch hunts for communists in the Federal Government. When no evidence backing his charges emerged, the Senate censured him in 1954.

Red-baiting continued after the fall of the Soviet Union, albeit with its ardor considerably cooled. George H.W. Bush attacked Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign for visiting Moscow as a student, and an old photo of John Kerry with the socialist President of Nicaragua haunted him in 2004. All of which means Obama might have to get used to this.