The CPUSA during the McCarthy Era

 

          The CPUSA, or Communist Party USA was established in 1919, and is the largest communist party in the country. It had a fairly significant effect on the country in the 1920's and 1930's, most notably for fighting the Jim Crowe Laws and racial segregation, but it's most significant history was during the McCarthy Era.
          After the "Red Scare" of 1947 was passed, things became significantly harder for the CPUSA. The Truman administration's Loyalty Oath Program drove many "leftists" (members of the CPUSA) out of Federal employment, and also established the notion that communists were subversives, and many members were fired from federal and private employment. Some private organizations extended the program even further. The motion picture industry created a blacklist of actors, writers, and directors who were suspected of having pro-communist feelings or had come into contact with supposed communist at some point in their life.
          During the Foley Square Trial of 1949, the CIA prosecuted eleven members of the CPUSA's leadership. The CIA argued that the party endorsed a violent overthrow of the government, but the advocates insisted that they intended to advocate a peaceful transition to Socialism. Large numbers of protestors protested the trial, and it became widely publicized. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in 1949, and with the discovery of Soviet espionage, support for the CPUSA dropped rapidly with the growing fear of Communists. By the mid 1950's their membership base had dropped from it's 1944 peak of around 80,000 to 5,000, about 1500 of which were FBI informants. Support continued to drop over the next few decades, and was never as big as it was before the Red Scare. Today, the CPUSA consists of roughly 2,000 members,

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA
              http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7511
written by: Sam Melvin, English CP III