The conspiracy that never was: United States government surveillance of Eastern European American leftists, 1942-1959

In the decade following World War II the American government's conflict with Communism abroad aggravated its suspicion of radicals at home. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) grew increasingly alarmed at the pronouncements of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and anyone who sympathized with Party's ideas.;As the Cold War intensified, HUAC and the FBI came to see these groups as dangerous. The fact that the CPUSA leadership boasted a huge proportion of Eastern Europeans convinced such operatives as J. Edgar Hoover and Richard M. Nixon that there was a nefarious anti-American conspiracy being hatched in the Eastern European American community. The nativism common to these men tended to confirm their beliefs.;The United States government launched an extensive surveillance campaign in the Eastern European American community to find proof of that conspiracy. No legitimate evidence was found, so the FBI hired an informer to supply fabricated information. As a result, several activists were imprisoned or deported, and certain organizations were forced to disband.;Government documents released at my request under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with those affected by these events show that the accusations of subversiveness were ill-founded and mendacious. The alleged conspiracy was in the minds of misguided right wing ideologues.;Most Eastern European Americans were highly critical of the manner in which the Communists ruled Eastern Europe. Yet there was a significant minority in the Slavic-American and Lithuanian-American communities who considered the advent of Socialism in their homelands as a desirable development. These individuals tended to belong to anti-fascist groups or to politically conscious mutual benefit societies. Some of these organizations had members who also belonged to the CPUSA, but they were not directly dominated by the Party. Rather, they represented a spectrum of political persuasions, united in the Popular Front spirit that had been launched in the 1930's.