I agree that at the turn of the century, class struggle was a significant thorn, but as someone else (SA?) wrote, that was part of a series of struggles across the Western world, wasn’t it? But by the 1920s the left (in the USA at least) was (Wikipedia tells me) in more than a bit of trouble. So you have the roaring 20s with tax cuts, speculation, supply side economics, union busting, so on, right as the Soviet Union was beginning to grow in strength.
In other words, my amateur recounting of the history of the period: class struggle broke out all around, as did World War I. Significant actions were carried out (strikes, the growth of a Socialist Party, etc) and gains were made in the period in the USA, and an all out transfer of power occurred in Russia. But post WW1, advances in the US were mostly reversed.
With the arrival of the Great Depression, the presence of a non-Obama and an all around more simplistic (i.e., logical) political climate, led to a more logical response. More controls, etc. Safety nets. So on.
Why witch hunts? To make the spectre of communism real and urgent. But IMHO, this doesn’t seem to have been from a fear of an internal domino effect, but the conscious or subconscious need to shore up and establish capitalism by creating a single caricature of an opponent (which the SU quite certainly seems to have assisted, what with the gulags and so on). Internal concessions, it seems to me (and I realise my uninformed opining puts me at good risk of embarrassment), were a response to internal pressures - growing prosperity brings growing demands. Civil rights movements the world over are echoed in demands for women’s rights, minority rights, so on. No doubt Soviet advertisement of equality added to the internal pressures, but my guess is that this was not a significant motivation.
While the standard practise of placing powerful individuals at the centre of historical narratives is no doubt erroneous, so is the notion (IMHO) that simple equations with suitable variables for the economy (GDP, what not) and other factors are deterministic predictors of future political and economic outcomes. Powerful individuals, IMHO, do matter. As do the feedback loops (that influence the attitudes of the populace), systems of analysis, etc. If George Bush had been elected rather than Ronald Reagan, I suspect PATCO and the 80s might have taken a different turn, and not provided “evidence” that the recessions of the 70s are the cause of failures on the left in the late 70s and early 80s. If Obama had turned out to be less of a corporate tool and credentialist and high-talking accomodationist, who knows?
I am rambling as usual.
—ravi