Commonsense anticommunism
Subtitle: labor and civil liberties between the world wars
By: Jennifer Luff
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Chapel Hill, NC
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780807835418
Subjects: Politics and government; Communism; American Federation of Labor; Anti-communist movements
Description: "Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's "first line of defense" against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's "commonsense anticommunism," she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, 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, Luff 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, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgments; title: Introduction; title: The AFL and the origins of modern civil liberties; title: Labor and liberties : the American Federation of Labor, 1886-1915; title: Spycraft and statecraft : surveillance before the Great War; title: Sedition and civil liberties : the AFL during World War I; title: Becoming commonsense anticommunists; title: Communism, civil liberties, and the red scare; title: Secrecy and surveillance : anticommunism and the Bureau of Investigation; title: Surveillance scandals and the downfall of the Bureau of Investigation; title: From commonsense anticommunism to red-baiting; title: Commonsense anticommunism and civil liberties; title: Labor's counter-reformation : the American Federation of Labor and the end of reform; title: Anticommunism, the Dies committee, and espionage; title: Labor's red scare : the AFL and the architecture of anticommunism, 1939-1941; title: Epilogue; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.