At the beginning of the Cold War, liberals had a national security problem. As the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote in 1946, liberals "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: The Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, the Alsops warned, "it is the right - the very extreme right -which is most likely to gain victory."
Over the following three years, it did change. Anti-communism, a minority view among liberals in 1946, was by 1949 a cornerstone of liberal belief. Much of the credit goes to Harry Truman, who rallied liberals and other Americans behind containment and the Marshall Plan.
But Truman didn't do it alone. At the Democratic grassroots, organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) put the struggle against communism at the heart of a new liberal worldview. When former vice president Henry Wallace tried to ally liberals and communists in 1948, the ADA helped defeat his third-party candidacy. And after Republicans took back the White House in 1952, the ADA helped ensure that anti-communism never became an exclusively conservative faith.
