When Picnic debuted in February of 1953, the United States was still embroiled in the Korean Conflict half a world away. Josef Stalin, having ruled the Soviet Union, since 1928, was nearing the end of his life, but communism appeared stronger than ever and seemed ready to expand into many of the world's developing nations. There were rumblings in Vietnam, then a French colony, and requests by the French for American assistance in maintaining order marked the beginning of America's long involvement with that Asian nation.

In the United States, fears of spreading communism and apprehensions regarding atomic weapons (the first such devices were used eight years earlier on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan) lead to the persecution of many people from suspected spies to common citizens with only the most tenuous of ties to communist politics. Feeding on the public's communist paranoia, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House...