Red Scare Research Articles

The Formation of American Post-war Belarusian Studies

American post-war Belarusian studies during its initial stage differed from similar processes in other countries. The CIA, which was interested in using the Belarusian emigration for its own purposes, the Congress, and some senators, with whom the leadership of the Belarusian- American Association actively worked, originally played a significant role. The CIA supported the activities of the Chairman of the Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic (in exile) Nikolai Abramchik, who was one of the first Belarusian emigrants to publicly declare Moscow’s anti-Belarusian policy, using such concepts as the “Russian genocide of the Belarusian people”, “occupation of Belarusian lands”, etc., calling on America to “protect the oppressed Belarusian people”. In 1954, a special commission of the Congress held hearings on the topic “The Communist seizure and occupation of Belarus”, during which a kind of methodological guidelines for the “correct” study of the history of Belarus were determined. Against the background of McCarthyism and the fight against the “Red scare” allegedly coming from Moscow, it completely fitted into the so-called totalitarian concept in American Russian studies (then Sovietology), and hence Belarusian studies, which was being formed. It was in such a difficult political and ideological situation that the first study by N. P. Vakar “Belarus. The Creation of a Nation” was being created in the Russian Research Center of Harvard, which was published in 1956, and not only received general recognition in the American scholarly community, but also superseded all kinds of political pamphlets in the academic space.

The Sacred Exchange: Creating a Jewish Money Ethic

The Sacred Exchange: Creating a Jewish Money Ethic

Copland and Communism: Mystery and Mayhem

In the midst of the second Red Scare, Aaron Copland, an American composer, came under fire for his communist tendencies. Between the 1930s and 1950s, he joined the left-leaning populist Popular Front, composed a protest song, wrote Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, traveled to South America, spoke at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, and donated to communist leaning organizations such as the American-Soviet Musical Society. Due to Copland’s personal communist leanings, Eisenhower’s Inaugural Concert Committee censored a performance of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait in 1953. HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities) brought Copland to the committee and questioned him on his communist connections. Copland clearly denied any and all communist activities or affiliations. This raised the questions: what impact did the contemporary political climate have on Copland’s music? What actual ties did he have to communism? Does it matter? To answer these questions, I examined the primary sources in the Copland Collection at the Library of Congress, during the fall of 2019. In addition to selected secondary sources, I focused on the relevant letters, hearing records, and other materials contained in Box 427: the box on HUAC. In addition to the Performing Arts Reading Room Aaron Copland Collection, I utilized the Folklife Collection and their resources on Aaron Copland. I will conclude there is significant external evidence Copland associated with communists, but since Copland himself continuously denied the identity, it is difficult to conclude whether Copland was or was not in fact a communist. It is much easier to conclude that Copland was, at the very least, politically left-leaning, although his political beliefs held a secondary role to the musical style in his compositions.

Scott Rutherford, Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020)

Scott Rutherford, Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020)

Vaneesa Cook, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Reviewed by: Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left by Vaneesa Cook David Mislin Vaneesa Cook, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) In this bold, incisive book, Vaneesa Cook makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the American “Religious Left.” She argues that the most effective movements of the political left in the twentieth-century United States were thoroughly suffused with religious values. Specifically, the decades between 1920 and 1970 witnessed the emergence of a “religious approach to radicalism,” the hallmark of which was a commitment to a small-scale approach of community building (3). Rather than the “state-centered political program or economic system” advocated by communists and other secular leftist movements, Cook’s subjects urged “a democratic and spiritual method of molding communities into the Kingdom of God on Earth” (61). Thus, “through community building and direct action, they offered an alternative to secular Communism and religious conservatism” (3). In five chapters, Cook chronicles this spiritual project from the disillusionment that followed World War I, through the Great Depression, World War II, the Red Scare of the early Cold War, and finally to the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of identity politics. Tracing the influences, life, and work of figures such as A.J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Dorothy Day, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, Pauli Murray, and others, Cook builds her case that religious [End Page 121] commitment was crucial for the success of the American left. The book’s subjects recognized that “religious values had the power to inspire members of a community to exercise their best virtues, to keep their base instincts in check, and to live out their highest ideals” (64). Cook’s study makes a compelling argument that religion has profoundly shaped American society, not merely guiding radical politics but being inextricably embedded in them. Through the efforts she examines, “the American Left” cultivated “a moral foundation and language that made religion and radicalism congruent” (9). Beyond highlighting the crucial role of religion in political activism, this recognition reframes the chronology of leftist politics in the United States. Alongside the decade’s conservatism, the 1920s witnessed a range of innovation in socialist community-building. The religious nature of their radicalism also allowed Cook’s spiritual socialists to come through the Red Scare largely “unscathed” and able to offer a socialist “vision of moral social change” at the height of the Cold War (3). Though most of Cook’s subjects are familiar to scholars, she presents them in novel ways. In particular, she urges a reinterpretation of the pacifist commitments that have long been the focus of scholarly interest in figures like Muste. Cook urges the importance of viewing such pacifism not as an end in itself but rather as one component of the campaign to build God’s kingdom on earth. Moreover, she deftly uses their pacifism as a means to explore divisions among her subjects on the relationship between means and ends. World War II prompted disagreement about the precise issue of violence and the ideal society. Day and Muste opposed involvement in the conflict on the principle that “means must always match the ends” and war “shattered the entire” effort to build the Kingdom of God. Others, like Eddy and Wallace, argued that a “temporary resort to violence” was needed to “protect the seeds of the Kingdom from being trampled underfoot by Fascist soldiers” (98–99). This disagreement reflected larger debates about individual transformation versus institutional change and the accommodation of competing views within radical movements, all of which Cook examines in the book. Given Cook’s seeming wish for this book to bring history to bear for the contemporary Religious Left and its leaders like William J. Barber, III, there are some issues that might have been more fully addressed. One admirable characteristic of her subjects was their frank acknowledgment of the monumental scope of their task. Unlike the frequently naively optimistic Social Gospel reformers with whom Cook contrasts her subjects (though perhaps too starkly in the case of Walter Rauschenbusch), these were people who recognized that “socialism as a spiritual project … could take millennia to achieve” (5). [End Page...

Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

The Searchers: Aristoteles Revisited

In the first half of the 20th Century, the “western” was a major genre in Hollywood filmography. Starting as a simple and almost childish type of entertainment easily attained by the audience, it evolved into a more sophisticated form of film communication and art, and become the preferred genre for some film directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford, among others. This evolution allowed the genre to become an important tool of analyses and criticism of American Culture, History, Myths and Society, especially during the time of the McCarthyism and the Red Scare, a time when progressive and more critical views on these subjects could not be openly dealt with. Among the authors who saw the “western” as this privileged means of expression, Ford definitely stands tall, and in his filmography, “The Searchers” occupies a front row seat. For all of the above, we intend to bring some light to this movie, analysing some aspects of its narrative from the perspective of the Aristotelian principles of dramatic construction.

Red scare and revelation: the Minute Women of the USA guarding Christianity during the Cold War

ABSTRACT The Cold War gave rise to a number of anticommunist women’s organizations in the United States. In an era when women were seen as guardians of the moral character of their children and families, midcentury American women looked for ways they could protect their families and resist communism and its attendant atheism. One of these groups – the Minute Women of the USA – lobbied against communism and for conservative values in the state and federal government and in public school systems. Scholars often refer to the religious characteristics of the organization, but they rarely explore in depth how the group was influenced by religion. This article explores the political and social religious activism of the Minute Women, situating them within the anticommunism of the period while also leveraging Jonathan Herzog’s “spiritual-industrial complex” as a framework for interpretation. The result is a more complex depiction of the role of religion in the Minute Women organization and its pursuits, and a more thorough understanding of how religion shaped politics and culture during the Cold War. Finally, it addresses the role of groups like the Minute Women in ushering in a more religiously, politically, and socially conservative grassroots movement in US politics, particularly among women.

'I chose the values I regarded as American': sexuality, ethnicity, and FBI informant Angela Calomiris

For personal or political reasons undocumented and controversial to this day, Greenwich Village lesbian photographer Angela Calomiris joined forces with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Second World War to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As Calomiris rose through CPUSA ranks in New York City, espionage efforts resulted in the Attorney General's office declaring the avant-garde Film and Photo League to be a subversive communist organisation in 1947, and the conviction of communist leaders during the Smith Act trial two years later. Interestingly, despite J. Edgar Hoover's indeterminate sexuality and well-documented harassment of gays and lesbians in public life, what mattered to him was not whether Calomiris adhered to heteronormativity, but that her ultimate sense of duty lay with the US government. This article demonstrates how this distinction helped Calomiris find personal satisfaction in defiance of patriarchal conservative expectations and heteronormative cold war gender roles. This article, which utilises FBI files, press coverage, some of Calomiris's papers and her memoir, concludes with a brief discussion of Calomiris's later life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continued to craft her identity as a left-liberal feminist, with no mention of the service to the FBI or her role in fomenting the second Red Scare.

“Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s

Abstract Emmett Till's mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Till's murder was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired an outpouring of protest, in which labor unions played a prominent role. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) campaigned energetically, from the stockyards of Chicago to the sugar refineries of Louisiana. The UPWA organized the first mass meeting addressed by Till's mother, Mamie Bradley; packinghouse workers petitioned, marched, and rallied to demand justice; and an interracial group of union activists traveled to Mississippi to observe the trial of Till's killers firsthand, flouting segregation inside and outside the courtroom. Analysis of antiracist unions like the UPWA can help rectify a weakness in the “whiteness” literature by illuminating the contexts and strategies that have fostered durable interracial working-class solidarity. The UPWA, which managed to survive the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s relatively unscathed, represents an important link between the “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s.

THE DEPICTION OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR ON AMERICAN TELEVISION DURING THE SECOND RED SCARE

This article analyzes the portrayal of the Eastern Front of World War II on early American television, specifically the documentary anthology series The Twentieth Century . It explores how most early portrayals of World War II on television excised or minimized the Eastern Front in response to the Second Red Scare. Although The Twentieth Century was one of the first to display the Eastern Front in detail, its portrayal paralleled Cold War propaganda of the Soviet Union and its people. This work analyzes three episodes of the series devoted to the Soviet Union’s role in the war and notes how each utilized certain traits of U.S. anti-communist propaganda. Other matters considered are the mediators in the crafting the display of the war and the way the history was presented to satisfy the interests of the sponsor and the network. It concludes that the presentation of the Soviet people responded to Cold War imperatives with episodes produced in times when tensions were high having sharper criticism, whilst periods of eased relations leading to less propagandistic depictions.

THE SECOND RED SCARE: AN ERA OF UNJUSTIFIED FEAR

This essay analyzes how the federal government, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Rosenberg case both shed light and distorted the threat of the communists to the American public. This work interprets how the Second Red Scare’s public opinion was based on fallacious information.

Red Scare? A Study of Ethnic Prejudice in the Prosecutions Under the Economic Espionage Act

We empirically test whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) engages in ethnic prejudice against Chinese in its prosecutorial decisions under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996. Using data of EEA cases from November 1996 to June 2021, we conduct Becker's outcome test for evidence of ethnic prejudice. We find that Chinese-named defendants were more likely to be dismissed by trial or acquitted by jury, and were found guilty on fewer counts, and on average received harsher indictments. These results are robust regardless of whether we consider all cases or only arguably ``marginal'' cases. We also find that, for those publicly listed victim firms whose trade secrets were allegedly stolen by the charged defendants, the stock market reaction was much more muted to the news on the case filing date if the charged defendants are of Chinese descent. Our study provides the first systematic evidence that the DOJ's prosecutorial decisions in the application of the EEA may have been tainted by ethnic prejudice against Chinese, including American citizens of Chinese descent.

Red Scare? A Study of Ethnic Prejudice in the Prosecutions under the Economic Espionage Act

We empirically test whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) engages in ethnic prejudice against Chinese in its prosecutorial decisions under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996. Using data of EEA cases from November 1996 to June 2021, we conduct Becker's outcome test for evidence of ethnic prejudice. We find that Chinese-named defendants were more likely to be dismissed by trial or acquitted by jury, and were found guilty on fewer counts, and on average received harsher indictments. These results are robust regardless of whether we consider all cases or only arguably ``marginal'' cases. We also find that, for those publicly listed victim firms whose trade secrets were allegedly stolen by the charged defendants, the stock market reaction was much more muted to the news on the case filing date if the charged defendants are of Chinese descent. Our study provides the first systematic evidence that the DOJ's prosecutorial decisions in the application of the EEA may have been tainted by ethnic prejudice against Chinese, including American citizens of Chinese descent. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

The Supreme Court’s Un-Americanism Pendulum

Examining the Bill of Rights through the post-WWII Red Scare opinions of the Supreme Court reveals an array of strategies of judging and interplay between the judiciary, the legislature, and the electorate. The transitions are more gradual than appointments of justices would suggest and hint toward judicial sensitivity to political undercurrents. Legislative action that mostly failed to pass had full impact on the Court’s majority. The choices of the liberal justices may have undermined their long-term interests.

Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt

Reviewed by: Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt Mark Thomas Edwards Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism. By Nicholas T. Pruitt. (New York: New York University Press. 2021. pp. x, 279. $45.00. ISBN: 9781479803545.) Evangelicals and fundamentalists were once marginalized in the study of American religious history, but now they receive too much attention. Thankfully, a new generation of scholars is proving that we still have a lot to learn about liberal, mainline, and ecumenical Protestants. Elesha Coffman, K. Healan Gaston, Kevin Schultz, Gale Kenny, and Gene Zubovich, among others, are moving the field beyond the "history of theology"—with its attendant obsession with the Niebuhr brothers—and establishing broader connections to American public life and identity. Nicholas T. Pruitt's new book is a welcome addition to that endeavor. His subject is the ecumenical Protestant "pluralistic bargain" (3) that culminated in support for the liberalization of immigration law under the landmark Hart-Cellar Act (1965). Pruitt's subjects were cosmopolitan in the (David) Hollingerian sense of championing controlled ethnic, racial, and religious diversity within a framework of continuing white Protestant supremacy. As Pruitt aptly puts it, "the pluralistic bargain amounted to an attempt by Protestant churches to incorporate progressive mores of toleration while bracing themselves against modern [End Page 633] cultural forces that threatened to decenter Protestant Christianity within American society" (7). Open Hearts, Closed Doors is an institutional history of Protestant home missions that highlights the social gospel's paradoxical inclusive-exclusive nature. Following the establishment of immigrant quota systems between 1917–1924, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pursued kinder, gentler forms of "Christian Americanization" (43)—like community centers, immigrant schools on Ellis Island, and the Bureau of Reference for Migrating Peoples—as alternatives to the violent nativism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Ecumenical Protestants advocated toleration for Japanese immigrants but did not begin challenging immigration restriction laws until during and after World War II. In the name of wartime "Christian brotherhood" (92), the FCC and SBC expanded refugee relief, aided the resettlement of interned Japanese Americans, and lobbied for increased immigration from Asia. Pruitt finds that "tri-faith" Christian Americanism still aimed to keep the country white and Protestant even while becoming more accepting of diversities of culture and language. Perhaps the most important Cold War liberal project ecumenical Protestants undertook was applying steady pressure on Washington for a more open immigration policy, including the passage of Hart-Cellar. The costs for doing so were both immediate and long-term: Ecumenical Protestants found themselves repeated targets of Red Scare churches and politicians, while the eventual consequence of their activism was the undermining of any white Protestant establishment. Pruitt concludes his study with a brief discussion of how evangelicals have taken up ecumenical Protestants' "pluralistic bargain" in the twenty-first century. He might have used that space to relay how ecumenical churches today have repented of Protestant exceptionalism and embraced a thoroughgoing cultural and religious pluralism centered around supporting immigrants—as Grace Yukich explored in One Family Under God (2013). But that is a minor point of disagreement. Pruitt has masterfully documented and detailed an unexplored dimension of Protestant social Christianity in action, including its direct and lasting impact on American life and politics. His book deserves a wide audience. [End Page 634] Mark Thomas Edwards Spring Arbor University Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press

The Supreme Court's Un-Americanism Pendulum

Examining the Bill of Rights through the post-WWII Red Scare opinions of the Supreme Court reveals an array of strategies of judging and interplay between the judiciary, the legislature, and the electorate. The transitions are more gradual than appointments of justices would suggest and hint toward judicial sensitivity to political undercurrents. Legislative action that mostly failed to pass had full impact on the Court’s majority. The choices of the liberal justices may have undermined their long-term interests.

Portrait Under Construction: Lotte Jacobi in Soviet Russia and Central Asia

Traveling in Russia and Central Asia in 1932–33, the German-Jewish portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi produced an extraordinary archive of several thousand photographs documenting Soviet industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and, most profoundly, the revolution's human face. Yet she never assembled a photo book or other reflection about her experience. Based on a study of the archive in its entirety, this essay tells the story of Jacobi's journey through the lens of her photographs, building a portrait of the worlds in which she moved under the auspices of the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto. It discusses her portrayal of a diverse array of workers, collective farmers, peasants, street traders, intellectuals, and political figures, first in Moscow and Michurinsk and then in the newly established socialist republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where she was hosted by leading indigenous communists such as Abdurahim Hojiboyev and Fayzulla Xo'jayev. The essay theorizes some of the key problems that her corpus raises: the relative weight of political commitment and external control in its production; whether it operates in a realist or mythic mode; the extent to which it presents Soviet Russia's role in Central Asia as that of a modernizing state or colonizing empire, as its tsarist predecessor had been; and the critical status of what she called “types” with respect to the nineteenth-century racist “type” photograph. A coda considers Jacobi's belated return to her Soviet corpus for the first time in the late 1950s and early '60s, a period characterized by a post-Stalinist thaw and the nominal end of the Red Scare in the United States, to which she had emigrated in 1935 in the wake of Hitler's appointment as chancellor and Germany's subsequent transformation into a one-party dictatorship.

Charlotte’s Web: A Fable of the Rise and Fall of National Socialism

Charlotte’s Web has many incongruous literary elements: odd names, illogical plots, and bloody morals which cannot be adequately explained by the commonly accepted origination story. Juxtaposing the story, with its illustrations, with the contemporary post-World War II thinking, one hypothesis is that the story is a fable of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, similar to the commonly accepted fable of Animal Farm referring to Stalin’s USSR. Importantly, the Aryanesque names, the swastika connections to both the spider web and Navajo blanket, the odd salutations, the black flag of terror and the moral lessons such as the “old pail trick” make this conclusion inescapable. E.B. White has previously compared American capitalism, especially with its seductive but fraudulent advertising, with Nazi Germany and its propaganda as early as 1938. Written in the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, the story can be best read as a clarion call to the danger of post-war America turning into a totalitarian police state of terror, which is to White “SOME STATE” that is “TERRIFIC.”

Formation of “Red Scare” Concept in USA in First Half of XX Century

The issue of how the an important and multifaceted aspect of domestic and foreign policy formed by US FBI, called the "Red Scare" is addressed in the article. It is shown that this political and ideological concept seemed unacceptable for distribution in the United States, since it created a danger of the penetration of communist ideas and their adherents into all government bodies and major public organizations. Factors that influenced the strengthening of the FBI’s position in the fight against communist ideology in the United States in the 1920s, in particular, terrorist acts carried out by left-wing forces, which allowed the FBI to implement a program of struggle (Palmer raids) with organizations, adhering to communist views are examined. The measures taken by the FBI and its director John Edgar Hoover in the 1930s against Soviet intelligence, which contributed to reinforcing negative perceptions of the “Red Scare” within the agency are highlighted. The authors conclude that the position of the FBI influenced the building of the attitude of the entire US intelligence community in this vein, which in turn had a great impact on the development of the country’s domestic and foreign policy.