On Wed, 05 Mar 2003 15:09:55 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
> joanna bujes wrote:
> >
> >
> > Also, I seem to remember reading somewhere that what decimated the
> CP in
> > the U.S. was not McCarthyism as much as Krustchev's official
> owning up to
> > the reality of Stalinism in the SU.
> >
>
> There were a number of factors operating of course, but one of the
> greatest successes of Trumanism (a more accurate label for the red
> hunt
> than mccarthyism) was the driving of not just CP members but of
> anyone
> sympathetic to communism out of the labor unions: i.e., the barring
> of
> reds or "reds" from coalition activities. That made a big difference
> in
> the quality of the '60s movement, which would have been quite
> different
> had there been a significant radical presence in a number of major
> unions.
Remember, that from around 1936 to the end of WW II, the CPUSA was very much a part of the New Deal coalition. In NY and a few other states, the Communists played a major role in securing voter turnout for FDR and other Democrats. After, the war, with the heating up of the Cold War, the Truman Administration began to drive the Communists out of the New Deal coalition, which meant among other things, purging them from the unions, including especially the CIO unions, which Communists had done so much to organize in the first place.
This political shift was signalled by among other things, the publication of Arthur Schlessinger Jr's book *The Vital Center* which attacked the hitherto prevalent Popular Front politics, calling upon liberals to break all ties with the CPUSA, and which denounced Communists as enemies of liberal values.
In the 1948 presidential election, the CPUSA backed former vice president Henry Wallace against Truman. Wallace in turn was very heavily redbaited by the Truman campaign and by people like Norman Thomas, Sidney Hook and others who were identified with the so-called "democratic left." So liberal Democratic politics in the immediate postwar period were dominated by redbaiting, in order to put an end with the Popular Front politics that had previously prevailed, but which were now seen as an impediment for the struggle against the Soviet Union.
Not too surprisingly, the Republicans soon took up refbaiting, and made the Democrats including the Truman Administration itself the object of their attacks. Truman's administration was said to be "soft on communism." The Algier Hiss case was used to embarass the Truman Administration (which was also blamed for "losing China") and the way was paved for the emergence of fullblown McCarthyism
Jim F.
>
> Carrol
>
>
> > Joanna
>
>
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