With the growth of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, the subject of communism in America began to loom large in the public consciousness. Draper began to think of writing a "traditional" history of the American Communist Party based upon documentary sources and meeting scholarly standards and slowly began work on the project in his spare time. He was set free to work on the task full-time in 1952 by a grant from the newly established Fund for the Republic, set up as an autonomous organization by the Ford Foundation. Under the direction of political scientist Clinton Rossiter of Cornell University, the Fund for the Republic determined to publish a full-scale history of American communism. David A. Shannon of the University of Wisconsin was tapped to write the history of the CPUSA during the post-war period, while Draper was chosen to produce a monograph on the party's early years. Robert W. Iverson wrote "The Communists and the Schools" (1959) in that series