Commonsense Anticommunism
Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19926890 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Luff (0000-0002-0696-0243, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Pages | 304 |
| Publication date | 2012-05-21 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Commonsense Anticommunism (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | University of North Carolina Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5149/9780807869895_luff |
| OpenAlex | W4236179822 |
| ISBN | 9780807869895 |
| Open Library | OL25101880M |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's "first line of defense" against Communism. This account shows how the American Federation of Labor (AFL) fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's "commonsense anticommunism," it argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the American Civil Liberties Union, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Deal order led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists, and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s. Relying on untapped archival sources, the author reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, such as J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make her story a fresh retelling of the interwar years
Civil liberties · Communism · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Sedition · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · 1901-1913 · 1901-1953 · 1913-1921 · 1919-1933 · 1933-1953 · American Federation of Labor · Anti-communist movements · Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) · politics and government · united states
| Citations per year | 0.63 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2023 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |