I was not born yet but if his times were like ours I imagine anyone with a brain knew what was going on. To someone not paying much attention a “little communism” may sound like a good thing. However, there is no such thing. Like “a little pregnant” what is going on early turns into a MUCH bigger thing down the line.
I was not born then either, but what I have seen is that from 1918 to 1950, especially in England (but in the USA as well) it wasn’t considered by many to be much more than a youthful dalliance, to discover a man was a “bolshevik” and had been a member of the Communist party.
There were conversations like “What? He isn’t a bolshevik, is he? God, how I dislike them...” which indicates it was perceived as being not that much more of a black mark as someone who was an atheist or womanizer.
Of course, that was before the West became fully privy to the murderous depredations and evils of communism because the media and government dupes in the West went out of their way NOT to see and report on the bloodletting and tyranny that was going on.
Of all the things that I admire about Joseph McCarthy (see my Freep Page) it is that he made being a communist something that people became ashamed of and had to actively hide. In doing so, he paid with his life, but I think, bought this country decades more of freedom, though that began to crumble when the radicals from the sixties began entering government.
We are probably more riddled with people in government who have communist tendencies now than we ever were back then (which is saying a lot, because there was a LOT of that) but now, they mask it by saying they aren’t communists and they love America, but when they say it, they don’t mean it the way you or I would!