An American Night

If the Red Scare had only fired, imprisoned, and publicly executed members of the Communist Party, it would have been enough to dramatically alter the terrain of politics in the United States. As much as the Communist Party is remembered for some unsavory positions, from the support of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to turning around just over a year later to support the US government’s “no strike pledge” during World War II to defense of Joseph Stalin, the CPUSA was, in the words of historian Michael Denning, the “most important left-wing political organization of the Popular Front era.”

Without many of the party’s key campaigns and coalitions, it is very possible the 1930s in the United States would have looked less like the New Deal and more like Peron’s Argentina or Franco’s Spain: there were not only real far-right movements in the United States, many of the elite business interests were hostile to even the program of social reforms proposed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From organizing marches of the unemployed in the early 1930s, the defense of nine Black youths falsely accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, to forming the backbone of early Congress of Industrial Organizations, as one labor organizer put it, “social security, unemployment insurance, early de-segregation orders were the direct result of Communist Party’s organizing.”

Yet the real effect of the Second Red Scare went far beyond the suppression of active Party members and other Marxists. Paul Robeson, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Dorothy Healey, Mike Gold, John Garfield, William Patterson, Richard Wright, Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein, Herbert Aptheker, and Claudia Jones were only some of the artists and intellectuals who were deported, lost their jobs, fled the country, had their passports revoked, and/or were jailed under the Smith Act.

And numerous popular, populist civil rights and labor organizations that were either led by Communists or loosely affiliated with the CPUSA as “front” organizations were banned or hemorrhaged members, including a broad base of noncommunists, from the Council on African Affairs, the Civil Rights Congress, The Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the anti-Zionist Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, the Yiddish language newspaper Morgen Freiheit, anti-fascist organizations such as the American League against War and Fascism and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (later American Peace Mobilization), even early environmentalist organizations such as Friends of the Earth.

Such broad-based organizations made connections among anti-fascist, anti-racist and ecological thinking in a socialist framework. Fighting capitalism was to fight racism, and vice versa. The liberal, national, and often pro-business framework of the post–Second Red Scare early civil rights movement looked very different from the politics of the Civil Rights Congress or the National Negro Congress.