Communism, Facism, and Socialism

During the 1930s and 40s communism and fascism was on the rise in the world and was causing hysteria in Europe and the USA. With the Birth of the USSR, came the birth of the United States Communist Party in 1919. In history class we learned about how during the great depression communist parties membership grew to a large amount but not enough to become a large political party, however it is quite amazing how such a radical political party would get popular. The reason this happened was because communists took the confusion and hysteria during the great depression to their advantage, and spread ideas on how Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually create its own destruction. With the millions of Americans who faced unemployment through the great depression, it makes sense that people would move towards the idea of communism, social and Fascism which had worked so well in other countries. Even during FDR's time as president he began to implement more socialist ideas into the government. In order to bring meat prices up the government took cattle from farmers, killed them, and gave them back canned meat of that same meat. With the rise of new social parties during the 1930s the communist party began to attack multiple socialist groups, calling them Social Fascists,. The radicalness of the communist party was their downfall, because this was not appealing to the American people as the party began as the amount of people in the party never went over 30000. In California Upton Sinclair a radical socialist who was fed up with the New Deal, which did not help his fellow Californians he founded EPIC a group that supported the idea that allowed the government to take over farms and put jobless men and women on them to make their own food and any goods made would be traded with barter. Sinclair went democrat and ran in the general election and had an outstanding victory. Both Democrats and Republicans were worried about this man and thought that if he won it would lead to communism in California. Luckily he lost by 88000 to 1.1 million but if 70000 votes switched the history of the United States could have changed for the worse. On the other side of the spectrum Fascism began to get very popular in the United States. People began to believe that Fascism was the way to go, because during the depression many Fascist countries didn't seem to get affected by the crash. Many nativists liked the idea of how many Fascists preserved the national tradition of the country and Christianity. Fascist groups got many supporters that one rally in 1938 had 20,000 people in Madison Square. All in all during the great depression many radical groups began to show up as people began to think that capitalism was no longer working in the United States.
http://www.shmoop.com/great-depression/ideology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.html