8/6/2019 HIST4322 Paper 1 Communism an Iternal Threat

1/2

John West

HIST 4322

2 September 2010

There were two schools of thought on the United States reaction to the Soviet aggression: the

Riga school which held that the Soviets were evil and bad, and the only way to deal with them was

through brute force. The other school of thought was Yalta school, which was more of the idea of

appeasement if we compromise with the Soviets, then they will stop wanting to take more. As history

has shown, though, the United States followed the Riga school of thought. When dealing with a force like

the Cold War, which could lead to end of world destruction (as both sides had nuclear capability), one

has to expect the worst, but hope for the best, which lent itself to the Riga school.

The fear was that if the Yalta school of thought was followed, and it was wrong in its assumption

about Soviet Russia, it would have come back to haunt the United States. For example, if the United

States had not built up the arms in Europe, the Soviets could have easily expanded beyond the Eastern

Block states. And had they taken over Western Europe, what would the United States have done? When

evidence came up that there were some high level spies in the U.S. government, Stalins espionage

offensive had not only uncovered American secrets, it had also undermined the mutual trust that

American officials had for each other (Haynes & Klehr, Yes: Venona and the Cold War, p. 55).

But on that side was the extremism that was McCarthy and McCarthyism. Even Haynes and

Klehr who thought the second red scare was necessary, called McCarthy a demagogue (p. 57).

McCarthy was able to blacklist and ruin many people who had nothing to do with Soviet Russia and the

political policies that McCarthyism feared. In that extreme side of it, more people were hurt in the hope

that a few were the evil Commies . (I)n the late 1940s and early 1950s, every few months newspaper

headlines trumpeted the exposure of yet another network of Communists who had infiltrated and

American laboratory, labor union, or government agency. Americans worried that a Communist fifth

column, more loyal to the Soviet Union than to the United States, had moved into their institutions

(Haynes & Klehr, Yes: Verona and the Cold War, p. 56).

8/6/2019 HIST4322 Paper 1 Communism an Iternal Threat

2/2

McCarthyism created a beast, it created things that were not necessarily there. It tried to show

us, the Americans, as being the perfect light while the Communists were the evil dark side. It created

more out of the fear of Communism than what was there. For example, if a person refused to do the

loyalty oath (such as if they are an American and thinks it is ridiculous to do it), they were seen as guilty

of being a communist.

In many ways, Communism, at least the Soviet version of it, did threaten Americas internal

security after WWII. The Soviets were another totalitarian government, and the United States had just

played a part in taking down three totalitarians (Germany, Japan, and Italy). When Stalin dropped the

Iron Curtain, and put in puppet Soviet governments in Poland, Romania, Hungary, etc., many every-day

people feared what would happen next. They had seen what Hitler had done to Germany and the Jews,

and feared what Stalin, or a Soviet state, would do here. We know there were soviet spies leaking

information.

In addition, the United States wanted to open markets for trade. The other huge governmental

force in the world wanted to close themselves off from that open trade, but it also wanted to expand, and

thus close more markets. That issue put the United States and the Soviet Union on opposite sides.

The Soviet factories were up and producing at full steam. Many of the European infrastructure

had been demolished in the war, even Britain from the air raids, so that left the United States and the

Soviet Union as strong forces after the war. While the Soviet Union did have some damage from the

German invasion, they had pushed the Germans out before the end of the European war and were a

great deal better off than the rest of the European countries.

General Patton had wanted to continue from Germany and roll into Moscow, but the United

States was not able to do that. But Patton was correct that conflict was coming, and that the United

States needed to be ready to deal with it. While the U.S. reduced their military forces after WWII, they

were still the speedbump in Stalins path for dominating more of the world than he already had under his

control. Early on, he put Soviet puppet governments in place in the countries around Soviet Russia as a

buffer zone.