As a result of the development of the "Cold War" in the late 1940s most Americans came to believe that communism threatened world peace and the liberties of free people everywhere. Including the United States. Indeed, the issue that aroused more American passion than any other in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the fanatical fear of communism which led to the Second Red Scare. Like the first Red Scare following World War I, the Red Scare of the 1950's was a product of hysterical overreaction to exaggerated charges of radical subversion. Indeed, the fear of communism reflected in the Second Red Scare was not a single, temporary aberration, but very much in the tradition of American attitudes toward radicalism. That fear was intensified in
