Reddit reviews American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (The American Moment)

I don't understand why you're trying to parse this issue other than to be perversely intellectually dishonest.

It is wholly incorrect to believe "Red Scares" were exclusively aimed at Communism and Communism alone, as if to say that most Americans and businesses were totally cool with Socialism, but hey if you're a commie then you gotta go!

That's nonsense.

Red Scares were inextricably linked to the rampant, well-organized and funded anti-leftism that had been going on for decades in the United States especially during / toward the end of World War I where union membership had been on the rise, and fighting unionist expansion was of particular interest to organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

"Red scare tactics were frequently employed in attempts to halt the surge of unionization," according to Michael Heale, Reader in History at Lancaster Universtiy, in his book "American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within." NAM even issued pamphlets titled "Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America" in the 1930s.

The way you speak of Red Scares, you make it sound like they were isolated incidents aimed explicitly at Soviet-style International Communism and/or the radicalism associated with that ideology. But that is clearly not the case. They were very much part and parcel of a broader, political movement that included anti-leftism of every stripe, and the people behind these organized movements didn't care for the academic differences between socialism and communism; they were all cut from the same, troublesome cloth.