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Reviews in American History 28.2 (2000) 278-283



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Lest We Forget:
Legal History and Anti-Communism During the Cold War

Linda Przybyszewski


Arthur J. Sabin. In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. xv + 262 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

I should start this review by admitting that I have signed a loyalty oath. The place: Columbia University. The year: 1995. Yes, 1995. I was a post-doctoral fellow already grateful for a Columbia-owned apartment, a paycheck, and another year's breathing space before tenure. Whatever annoyance I felt at receiving this request to sign my name in accordance with a New York State law dating from the late 1940s was overwhelmed by my delight at encountering an actual historic relic. What fun, I thought, I can show this to my survey class! Just like the hand-cut nail the plumber found loose under the floor boards of my house! After all, promising not to try to overthrow the United States Constitution was hardly a problem for a woman who had devoted the past nine years to studying it.

My mostly amused reaction to this relic of the Cold War tells us how much has changed since the events described in Arthur J. Sabin's In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday. This distance may also explain the difference between the enthusiastic blurbs for this book and my tepid reaction. Athan Theoharis wrote that this book makes an important contribution to constitutional and political history; Lawrence Friedman praised the narrative for its clarity and accuracy and predicted that it will be "recognized as fresh and significant." I suspect that the support for this book arises more from a general desire to applaud those scholars willing to fight the good fight --that is, to condemn the wrongs done to communists for their mere beliefs than to the book's actual merits. A recent lead article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, "Cold War without End," (Nov. 28, 1999) reminds us how much many still feel is at stake in judging anti-communism during the 1950s. With the innocence of the most famous martyrs now thrown seriously into doubt--Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg--it becomes all the more important for scholars to draw attention to the abuses of the legal systems for [End Page 278] political reasons. (Maybe I should have kicked over that loyalty oath after all). But Sabin's is not the best book for appreciating those abuses.

This book grows out of Sabin's earlier work, Red Scare in Court: New York vs. the International Workers Order (1993), also published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The striking picture by Rockwell Kent found on the cover of In Calmer Times, a winged Liberty being burned at the stake atop a pyre of books can be found in the first book as can several important quotations and ideas. Red Scare in Court offered a narrative of the legal dismemberment of an insurance company through a civil suit in 1951 because of the communist beliefs of some of its leadership. Sabin asks in the preface to this first book, "would the law remain silent in the face of an attempt by government to liquidate a perceived political threat?" The New York Department of Insurance had argued that the IWO had violated the laws on insurance companies because it posed a political hazard (as opposed to a financial one) to its policyholders because its communist leaders might take the money and run to the Soviet bloc. Much of Red Scare in Court devotes itself to the legal arguments and the testimony of the witnesses. It offers a detailed account of the IWO's defeat and ends with the words of one of the IWO's attorneys who urges us to notice the case's "critically important lessons for the future, if the American heritage of a constitutional system of written law designed to preserve fundamental rights of all people is to...

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