Interestingly enough it has on and off throughout the times and by specific groups, generally speaking the cold war prevented it. To answer question we must review the ideals of the early 1900s. Well the thing is progressive republicans were generally progressive leftists until the 1930s. With that being said even after the 1930s the southern democrats still maintained rather conservative right wing views. FDR was the first to install generally progressive ideals to the democratic party, whereas the southern democrats maintained conservative ideals.

In the 1900s communism was a fairly liked ideal and in the decades before, especially in the north. I will acknowledge that socialism and communism are both vastly different, however they are both rather leftist and were very like in the north. There had been the early red scare which usually seemed like big business fighting unionization ideals, however this could be argued.

Post world war 2 the communist party was the most prominent political party to back civil rights for African Americans which in turn had raised their popularity. However post world war both Soviet Russia the leading communist world power and the United States the leading capitalistic world power had to figure out the post war world.

The Long Telegraph which was sent by U.S. Ambassador to Russia had played an important role in relations between both nations. The Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sent a similar Telegraph describing the U.S. With all this being said tensions between the U.S. And Russia had impacted how the United States treated Russia. The installation of HUAC and other organizations made to find communists in the United States made it difficult to be open about communism. Socialists and other leftists were just thrown in as communists.

All of these things show the roller coaster of what made it less than possible for communism to gain prominence in the U.S.