Communism, Peace Activism, and Civil Liberties: From the Waldorf Conference to the Peekskill Riot

In 1950 the Justice Department indicted W.E.B. Du Bois, then director of the Peace Information Center, on the grounds that he had failed to register as a foreign agent. In his account of these events a few years later, Du Bois wrote: "Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called Communists. Is this shame for the Peacemakers or praise for the Communists? Accursed are the Communists, for they claim to be Peacemakers. Is this shame for the Communists or praise for the Peacemakers? This is the paradox which faces America" (160). This article addresses part of the process by which the cause of peace became associated with Communism in the early years of the Cold War, resulting in violations of the civil liberties of those who continued to speak out for peace. The attacks on both the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (March 1949) and the Paul Robeson concert at Peekskill (August 1949) are the focal points. These attacks helped cement the association of peace with Communism, while illustrating the weakness of the pro-Soviet left, and highlighting points where the United States cold war claims to stand for freedom were vulnerable, namely its limits on freedom for those who opposed the cold war consensus and the lack of basic civil rights for African-Americans. The concern is less with the details of the attacks than with their significance. The Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) reached its peak of popularity during the Popular Front period of the late 1930s and during World War II, when its policies were in accord with the government. But the public's relative tolerance toward the Soviet Union and the CPUSA rapidly diminished after World War n. as the Cold War took hold. As E.P. Thompson suggests, the causes of "peace" and "freedom" broke apart, with the Soviet Union claiming "peace" and the United States claiming "freedom" (158-60). By 1948, American Communists, convinced that their own government was preparing for war with the Soviet Union, accused the United States of being the biggest threat to world peace. Conversely, the U.S. government argued that Communism, at home and abroad, was the biggest threat to freedom. Proponents of the cold war consensus in the United States argued that Americans must "live in crisis--prepared for war." At the same time, they sought to undermine the Communists' claims to be the defenders of peace ("Arms We Need" 209; Schlesinger). Thus the United States government worked to discredit the international Communist "peace offensive," which sought to mobilize public opinion against war and atomic weapons. American Communists continued to argue that U.S. "warmongers" had to be stopped, assuming that "winning the peace for all humanity" depended on defending the interests of the Soviet Union ("How America's" 4-5). Thus two different means to peace--emphasizing military preparedness, anti-Communism, and the defense of freedom versus emphasizing the abolition of atomic weapons and preventing war against the Soviet Union. The Communists had lost the debate about the means to peace by the time of the 1948 presidential election, in which they supported Henry Wallace's third party candidacy. In that election, the bipartisan cold war consensus built around containing the Soviet Union trounced the Progressive party's notion of peaceful coexistence. The campaign spelled the beginning of the end of Communist influence in the United States and contributed to the marginalization of the peace movement. Historians have written about 1949 as the "year of shocks": the Soviets exploded an atomic device, China "fell" to the Communists, and the Alger Hiss trials raised disturbing questions about espionage (Goldman, ch. 5). As standard accounts have it, these events increased the fear of Communism and the determination to contain it, at home and abroad. But by 1949 the Truman administration had already launched its attack on domestic Communists and other alleged "subversives"; Communists, peace activists, and civil libertarians were already on the defensive. …