By the 1930s, America's Great Depression had changed the focus of censorship from sex to politics. To the consternation of the political and financial establishment, socialism was increasingly seen as a legitimate alternative to capitalism. Many artists had unionized, and class divisions within the broader society were reflected in American art. In 1933, Diego Rivera's gigantic frescoed mural, Portrait of America, commissioned for New York's Rockefeller Center, was physically destroyed because it contained a portrait of Lenin. The following year, four artists employed by the New Deal's Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) were accused of Communist tendencies because of left-wing images in their murals.

Of course, the demand for decency in art remained. In 1934, Paul Cadmus's painting The Fleet's In, which depicted sailors flirting with prostitutes, was removed from the Corcoran Gallery at the government's request. But political art continued to arouse the greatest controversy within the U.S. government. The Relief Bill of 1940 required a loyalty oath for Federal Arts Project (FAP) artists, and when August Henkel refused to sign it, his murals at the Brooklyn Airport were destroyed. In 1943, Arshile Gorky's Newark Airport murals simply disappeared.

By the end of World War II, the Cold War mentality had defined all leftist artworks as "communistic," a term that came to be applied to most "modernist" or "abstract" art. In 1947, Representative Fred Busbey (R-Ill.) denounced a State Department-funded exhibition of twenty contemporary and abstract artists as "infiltrated by Communists," resulting in the withdrawal of funding. Also during that year, the Photo League was placed on the Solicitor General's list of subversive organizations, denying members virtually any chance of employment.

In 1953, Representative George Dondero (R-Mich.) attacked Anton Refregier's Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural in San Francisco for its allegedly Marxist imagery, and it took the action of arts organizations to save the mural. During the same year, artists Alexander Calder, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ben Shahn were placed under surveillance by the FBI. In 1957, legislation to create an Arts Advisory Council, as requested earlier by President Eisenhower, was rejected after testimony that the council might be taken over by Communists or "modernists." . . .