Communism aswell as anti-communism, socialism and liberalism, feminism and sexism,racism and antiracism, pacifism and militarism, are examples of wide-spread ideologies â which may be more or less positive or negative de-pending on our point of view or group membership.
Tobacco was the American colonies' chief export. The Jamestown colonists had not found gold, nor a route to the South Seas, nor the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. But they had found tobacco. Tobacco had brought the settlement from wretched failure to giddying success.
Brought ashore from the cargo holds of ships, the blight quickly made its way to the potato fields where it spread havoc. One third of the crop was lost that year. This escalated to a loss of 3/4 of the crop in each of the two succeeding years.