RED APPLE: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York by Phillip Deery (review)

Among the many dark pages in American history are the late 1940s and early 1950s, when two committees—the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and later Senator Joseph McCarthy’s—ran roughshod over civil liberties, destroyed or derailed careers, drove some into exile, and others to an early grave. Restricting himself to New York, Deery has written a documentary-like overview of the period, acting as a historian with a conscience who humanizes the victims without canonizing them. None of them would have even wanted a nimbus. The New Yorkers were a diverse group, not all of whom were Communists. Helen Reid Bryan, a fiftyish Quaker, was not. As administrative secretary of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), which HUAC considered a Communist front, she refused to surrender the committee’s records and was sentenced to three months imprisonment. JAFRC chair, Dr. Edward K. Barsky, was also targeted; it did not help that he provided medical aid to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. For his humanitarianism, he was sentenced to six months, serving five. Howard Fast, then a committed Communist, watched his career take a nose dive, when his novel, Citizen Tom Paine (1943), was banned in New York secondary schools. Writing jobs dried up, and his radicalism reduced him to a polemicist. Only after Nikita Krushchev revealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 did Fast leave the Party. Nor was academe exempt from the witch hunt. Lyman Bradley, chair of New York University’s German Department and JAFRC treasurer, was given a three-month sentence. Ironically, he was not a Communist but stood by what he thought were his rights. Edwin Burgum, who was a Communist and an NYU professor with extensive publications, was terminated. His wife, unable to deal with the pressure, committed suicide. The Russian composer, Dimitri Shostakovich, is treated as a New Yorker because Stalin sent him to the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, known as the Waldorf Conference, where he was greeted by a picketer with a “SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP THRU THE WINDOW!” sign. It was bad enough that in Russia he was accused of composing music that smacked of bourgeois formalism and had to apologize for deviating from Socialist Realism, which was another way of saying music that was purely Soviet and not exportable to the West; or simply, inferior music. Finally, there was the lawyer, O. John Rogge, who sought a middle ground between anti-Communism and Stalinism, defending both JAFRC and David Greenglass, who named his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as Communist agents. Sadly, Rogge discovered there was no middle ground. By setting his case histories against a Cold War background, Deery has written one of the best accounts of the period that Dalton Trumbo called “the time of the toad.” Toads are harmless; toadies are not.