Talking Communism.

One evening in 1950, a year after the Communist revolution in China, a Houston couple sat down in a local Chinese restaurant. The woman, a radio writer, asked the Asian owner some questions regarding a program she was producing on recent developments in China. A man seated at a nearby table overheard the conversation, rushed to the nearest phone, and informed the police that people were "talking Communism." The police then arrested the couple and incarcerated them for fourteen hours before concluding that there was no case.

A History of Paranoia.

This was not an isolated incident. Several decades worth of anticommunist paranoia reached a fever pitch during the 1950s. By 1957 nearly six million persons had been investigated by administrative agencies and legislative committees because of their alleged disloyalty to the United States, with only a handful of dubious convictions resulting. Congress had...