Notes
Notes INTRODUCTION 1. For example, see Patterson, Grand Expectations, 201–2, who argues that McCarthyism “derived much of its staying power from the frightened and calculating behavior of political elites and of allied interest groups, not from the public at large.” On this point, see Heale, “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy,’” in Stokes, State of U.S. History, 139. 2. The most sustained treatment of labor anticommunism can be found in Ronald Radosh’s American Labor and United States Foreign Policy. As the title indicates, Radosh describes union leaders’ involvement in American diplomacy and covert operations from World War I through the 1960s, concentrating especially on AFL participation in efforts to undermine the early Bolshevik revolution and AFL-CIO support for CIA-organized coups in Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s. I follow Radosh in examining labor anticommunists ’ relationship to the state; my study fleshes out the domestic front of Radosh’s story. Cochran’s excellent Labor and Communism focuses mainly on Communism, rather than anticommunism, through the mid-1930s, carefully charting shifts in CPUSA labor organizing strategy, and picks up labor anticommunism in the late 1930s through Taft-Hartley. As for histories of anticommunism and McCarthyism, my account builds on Richard Gid Powers’s Not Without Honor and Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes. I follow Powers in treating anticommunism as a coalition of diverse groups with distinctive approaches, rather than a transhistorical antiradical tendency. In this study I flesh out labor anticommunism , which is not prominent in his account. I rely on Schrecker’s astute analysis of the effects of McCarthyism on its victims, and the often-duplicitous intentions that underlay red-baiting and McCarthyism. Schrecker has called for more study of unions’ role in building American anticommunism, and my study responds to this need. I differ from Schrecker in seeing anticommunism as less continuous with an antiradical impulse arising out of American or western culture, and instead more as a political reaction to a political movement. I also see J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI as a more contradictory force, sometimes containing reaction and sometimes fueling repression. 3. A quick word on terminology. In this book, I use “anticommunism” to refer to the broad range of ideological and political movements and policies that opposed Communism after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and “McCarthyism” to refer to the regime of loyalty oaths and investigations in the period from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. While many of the legal structures of what became McCarthyism were created before World War II, the scope and intensity of public and private anticommunist repression dramatically increased in the late 1940s. I use the word “red-baiting” to signify the use of false or specious imputations of Communist sympathies for political advantage. I capitalize “Communist” throughout, for readers’ ease, although I acknowledge the complex con- 226 Notes to Pages 2–10 siderations underlying the question of capitalization; for a thorough treatment, see Filardo, “What Is the Case?” 4. On labor and early civil liberties, see Rabban, Free Speech in Its ForgottenYears; Pope, “Labor’s Constitution of Freedom”; and Weinrib, “The Liberal Compromise.” On radical labor movements and AFL collaboration with repression, see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters. On AFL antiradical rhetoric, see Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 69–70; Powers, Not Without Honor, 121–22, 176–80. 5. Greene, Pure and Simple Politics; Sanders, Roots of Reform; Clemens, The People’s Lobby. In this book I extend their reinterpretation of the political history of the AFL through the interwar years. Labor historians have heeded the call to “bring the state back in” to social history, with salutary results. We have learned how popular struggles shaped politics and policy, but most of this work has focused on militant workers’ actions.We have much less research on the impact of conservative union leaders, who dominated the institutional labor movement, or conservative workers. 6. On industrial democracy, see McCartin, Labor’s Great War. 7. Theodore Draper became the leading proponent of the traditionalist case with Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia. This debate culminated in a series of exchanges in May 1985 in the New York Review of Books, in letters responding to Draper’s essays “American Communism Revisited” and “The Popular Front Revisited.” Emblematic revisionist works include Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Great Depression; Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States. 8. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes laid the groundwork for the espionage...
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