Little “Red Scares”: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 ed. by Robert Justin Goldstein (review)

Robert Justin Goldstein indicates that historians are largely familiar with U.S. history’s two red scares: the first following World War I in 1919–20, and the second more-publicized witch hunts after World War II, led by figures such as Pat McCarran, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy. Yet as Little “Red Scares” contributors reveal, reactions to modernization, immigration, and industrialization during the interwar period drove many Americans into causes such as socialism, pan-Africanism, unionization, and communism. At the same time, elected officials, law enforcement, and citizens at local, state, and federal levels countered such causes with “little” red scares via inquisitions, deportations, terror, and delegitimizing individuals and parties influenced by Bolshevism. While the cases covered in this volume never matched the intensity of the larger red scares, Goldstein argues that concern about leftist ideologies remained a central feature of American political life between the two world wars. Using a “baker’s dozen” of U.S. and European scholars, Little “Red Scares” excavates lesser-known stories of political repression (xiv). Despite the first red scare’s easing by 1920, the material excesses that defined the following decade, and the Great Depression, the authors maintain that a powerful conservatism emerged to battle radicalism and that such battles varied over time and place.

The well-researched chapters of Little “Red Scares” cover an array of subjects. Ernest Freeberg notes that while the Harding and Coolidge administrations eased surveillance and lifted censorship, the repression of radical organizations at state and municipal levels birthed a civil liberties movement that by the mid-1920s pushed the Ku Klux Klan into retreat and helped reduce lynching and mob violence. Athan Theoharis argues that public outcry over the Palmer Raids led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to scale down its activities after 1924. Yet following Hitler’s rise and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, FDR in 1935 increased the bureau’s reach to monitor fascist and Communist activities. But as Michael Heale posits, New Deal programs (especially the Wagner Act) led to violence in the 1930s, visible during labor strikes such as those in Gastonia, North Carolina, and Dearborn, Michigan. Alex Goodall and Kenneth O’Reilly examine the nearly forgotten Fish and Dies Committees, respectively. Hamilton Fish’s short-lived 1930 inquiry, despite its range of witnesses, revealed the “systemic weakness” of anticommunism in the early Depression period by its lackluster bench and presenting of “compromised evidence” (103). Martin Dies’s investigations of un-American activities (1938–45) commenced with the nadir of the New Deal; more influential than Fish’s work, the Dies Committee institutionalized the practice, later perfected in the 1950s, of “naming names” (259).

Robbie Lieberman examines the “black scares” that coincided with the interwar period’s hysteria over communism. Calling for a “more expansive black freedom movement,” he places the headwaters of civil rights activism in post–World War I America (262). With the Great Migration underway, black Americans’ expectations for equality ran high. Yet defenders of the racial status quo suppressed and delegitimized the black freedom struggle through a combination of lynching, intimidation, and race riots (e.g., Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida). Timothy Reese Cain and Stephen Leberstein each analyze anti-Communist attacks on education, finding that from kindergarten through the university, leftist educators routinely were purged from their positions and that unions or even entire schools were suspected of promoting the work of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Leberstein shows that while the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 45, the New York teachers’ union, indeed contained Communist members, it also addressed the educational system’s failings, including the corporal punishment administered to Harlem school children. Such “anti-racism,” he finds, placed AFT Local 45 in the crosshairs of the Rapp-Coudert Committee that during the 1940s conducted the largest purge of college teachers...