ABSTRACT
By the late 1940s, Americans had begun to view their wartime Soviet allies with a mixture of fear and hostility. Gone were the warm feelings of sympathy for the gallant people of the Soviet Union, whose heroic struggle against the invading Nazi hordes had encouraged United States citizens to see them as potential partners in a postwar democratic alliance to keep the peace. As the Soviet Union consolidated its hold on Eastern Europe, Americans watched with increasing concern the evidence of brutality abroad and domestic espionage at home. An increasingly wary American public, uneasy about Soviet advances in Eastern Europe and alarmed by the Truman administration’s sharp attacks on domestic Communists and their defenders on the Left, closed ranks behind the federal government loyalty program.
