The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression

Augmenting the work of Arthur J. Sabin, Michal R. Belknap, Geoffrey R. Stone, and others, Robert M. Lichtman's new book offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of every major decision made by the Supreme Court in cases relating to anticommunist political repression in the 1950s. While its principal purpose is referential—Lichtman provides potted summaries of the reasoning in each case—the work also offers general observations about Supreme Court jurisprudence in the McCarthy era. After having asserted First Amendment defenses of Communist party membership in the 1940s, the Court, Lichtman argues, largely bent to the repressive winds of the early Cold War. Paralleling the alliances made in other branches of government, conservative justices were aided by Cold War liberals who sought to protect the Court from accusations of “softness”: the most clear example was Felix Frankfurter, who delivered the fifth vote in a series of 5–4 opinions upholding practices of political repression. He then executed a tactical retreat after the “Red Monday” (so dubbed by J. Edgar Hoover) decisions of June 1957 dramatically circumscribed the scope of anticommunist laws and ignited a fire storm of right-wing protest. His replacement by Arthur Goldberg in 1962 effectively marked the end of the Court's tolerance for McCarthyism

Communism · Jurisprudence · Political science · Politics · Supreme court · Warren Court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies