Krista Nolan
Mr. Richmond
Modern Literature 12
22 October 2012
American Communism: Running Rampant Since The 1930s Ever since the dawn of American creation, the forefathers of the United States advocated for democracy, whereas the government is maintained, solicited, and suited specifically by and for its people. But in fact, after the tenets of this so-called democracy failed to shield America from the barrage of the first World War and almost simultaneously spur its own onslaught of the Great Depression—and as it had become more apparent in the 1930s—communism was stead-fast intertwining itself into the lining of the still-infantile United States government. Therefore, in theory, communism—the system of a social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party—was found to be better fit for a democratically-prescribed community whose people could not take care of themselves without self-destruction. A great part of the rise of an American Communist party is oddly attributed to an event that happened outside the country—the infamous Russian Bolshevik Revolution, in which the previous royal family, (the tsar, the tsarina, their five children and a couple servants) were kidnapped from their home and viciously slaughtered in 1917. Then as a new ruling party called the Bolsheviks lead by the aggressive socialist Lenin came to power in the name of the “working class”, America desperately tried to prevent similar “Red Scares” within its own borders. Instead, the U.S. hopelessly invited these Marxist ideas onto its front doorsteps. “As a result, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would forever after dwell in the imagination of the revolutionary left in America,” Expressed Richard Gid Powers in his book, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (Pg. 9). Soon the American government was taking over certain aspects of life like leisure activities, violating constitutional law by declining the people the right to assembly and freedom from unlawful seizures, and only regarding the thoughts of the people considering how the government should be run if it was beneficial to the capitalists that ran the country—thus transforming into the very being it tried to rid itself of. Many people would like to think that what they do with their own time should be their business—but on the contrary, in the interest of capitalism and morality, the U.S. had regulated and restrained certain leisure activities since the 1930s. Believing that ill-advised morality had caused the lapse in Russian government, the American government tried to drastically change people’s lives so that they would look at the government as a benevolent, rather than taxing, body. The government started with the Prohibition Era—the period from 1920 to 1933 in which the distilling of alcoholic beverages was outlawed, considered a federal offense, in the United States. Initially, the government could only see this act of temperance as beneficial for U.S. citizens—by 1916, twenty-six out of the forty-eight states had banned alcohol within their borders, and after havoc caused with World War I, the U.S. enacted the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917, which diverted the grain from normal use of distillation to increased consumption—thus, by speeding up the process, the temperance movement would save time and resources ("The Prohibition Era"). A permanent ban on the sale, transportation, importing, and exporting of alcoholic beverages was enacted by passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by Congress in 1918, and then two years later, in the Wartime Prohibition Act. The results were dramatically less than satisfactory. Instead of promoting the nation's health and hygiene, the opposite was true as the illegal manufacture of alcohol filled part of the void, and those illegal products were often