You forget just how many in this country flirted with Communism in the 1930s.
I don’t know about how many of them flirted with communism. You mean the Progressives? The thirties were just not ever covered when I was in school. They used to end the history with WWI, saying that WWII was not far enough in the past to evaluate either the run up to it, the war itself or the aftermath. Heck they barely even covered the depression, except to say that it happened as a result of traders buying on margin.
That’s part of the reason that I was so interested in reading the book, In the Garden of the Beasts. It was written from actual journals of the ambassador to Germany during the thirties.