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  • Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism by Colleen Doody
  • Seth Wigderson
Colleen Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana, University of Illinois Press 2013)

In her book on anti-Communism and the development of conservative thought and action after World War II, Colleen Doody agrees with those scholars who see a contested New Deal liberalism and a powerful conservatism before the latter’s flowering in the 1970s. Her most important contribution is to show how “the ideas that became central to this [conservative] movement developed at a grassroots level much earlier.” (4)

Using Detroit as a case study, she shows how conservative anti-communism grew out of anti-unionism, white supremacist racism, anti-secular Catholicism, and business hostility to the New Deal. Detroit is a fitting place to study these four. A well-known union city, it was home to the third largest Communist Party organization in the nation. But it was also a city where conservative politicians who linked labour and anti-communism often won elections. As the Black population increased and looked for a place to live, the city erupted in racially charged housing fights. And, as she tells us, Detroit was a Catholic centre with 70 per cent of its million parishioners attending mass once a week.

Anti-communism had been well-established in Detroit in the 1920s and early 1930s by the Ku Klux Klan and its murderous offshoot, the Black Legion. But the crisis of the Depression challenged pro-capitalist views and the successful role played by Communists in organizing the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) weakened the self-confidence of local elites. Doody uses a postwar letter from a Detroit News reader to identify a mix of “fear of big government, antipathy toward organized labor, and hostility toward communism.” (19) She traces the role of anti-Communism in the chaotic local and state elections, noting that it worked best when combined with other conservative themes. For instance, she notes a claimed correlation of Communism and high taxes which allowed anti-communists to attack supposedly high-tax liberal New Dealers. But she pays less attention to analyzing the liberal anti-Communism of Walter Reuther, Gus Scholle, and G. Mennen Williams. Liberal anti-Communism in the White House and the union hall preceded the McCarthy onslaught and helped validate anti-Communism.

In her treatment of the intersection of racism and anti-Communism, Doody shows how opposition to integrated housing mixed easily with anti-radicalism. Given the frequent Communist Party presence in open-housing fights and in Black organizations like the National Negro Labor Council, the racists had an [End Page 375] easy task of identifying the left with the “threat” of integration. By defining racist exclusion as a defense of hard-won property values, conservatives were able to win away a significant portion of New Deal supporters.

Liberals, who wanted to achieve better race relations using moderate means, limited themselves both by their own anti-Communism and their top down approach. Some more analysis of the Communist Party’s attractiveness to Blacks would have been helpful. The Communist strategy of mass protest clashed with the liberal approach of “quashing mass action,” in, for example, their responses to the 1948 police murder of Black teenaged car robber, Leon Moseley. (65) In the struggle for fair employment, the liberals’ only victory in the early 1950s was to keep a Communist-supported fair employment referendum off the Detroit ballot. Yet the conservatives ultimately gained from the red-baiting of civil rights activists.

What may be the book’s most original chapter examines Catholic anti-Communism. For these conservative Catholics, the real enemy was secularism. They were not interested in the businessmen’s libertarianism; instead, they defended what they saw as Christian civilization. The Catholic Church had been preaching anti-Communism as well as anti-secularism for a long time and events during the Spanish Civil War only reinforced the Church’s hatred of the left. Yet many Eastern European immigrants were attracted by charismatic radical leaders like the often-elected Michigan state Senator Stanley Nowak and supported the radicals who built the cio. Nevertheless, among Detroit’s Catholics there...

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