The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U. S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963 (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution) 0815628412, 9780815628415

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Communism,

Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945 -1963

The Strangest Dream Communism, Anticommunism, and

the U. S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963

Robbie Lieberman Drawing on extensive archival material and oral history, Robbie Lieberman illustrates how grassroots peace activism in the United States became associated with Communist subversion after World War II, enabling proponents of the cold war virtually to silence the opposition until the early 1960s. The persecution of peace activists as subversives dates back to colonial time, but the specific link between communism and peace developed out of the unique conditions of the cold war— Communist agitation for peace, American notions of national security and freedom that rested on containing communism at all costs. Not until peace organizations challenged external and internal anti-Communist attacks were they able to achieve a new level of respectability. As cold war tensions ease, it is important to assess the early years of the peace movement with regard to the issue of communism that dominated American life in those years. With this book, Lieberman seeks to clarify attitudes about peace and the fate of the peace movement not previously addressed by a major work.

Front: Union members guard Paul Robeson as he sings at a concert in Peekskill, New York. AP/ Wide World Photos.

The Strangest Dream

BX Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution Harriet Hyman Alonso,

Charles Chatfield, and Louis Kriesberg, Series Editors

The Strangest Dream Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963

Robbie Lieberman

Si Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2000 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5160

All Rights Reserved First Edition 2000 00

O1 02 03 04 05654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence

of Paper

for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.€)™

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lieberman, Robbie, 1954—

The strangest dream : communism, anticommunism and the U.S. peace movement 1945-1963 / Robbie Lieberman. — 1st ed.

p-

cm. —

(Syracuse studies on peace and conflict resolution)

Includes bibliographical references (p.

) and index.

ISBN 0-8156-2481-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Communism— United States—History.

2. Peace movements— United

States—History—2oth century. 3. War and socialism—United States — History. 4. Anticommunist movements—United States—History.

I. Title. II. Series.

HX83 .L54 2000

335-43'0973—dc21 99-086248

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Katy and Jeannie

Last night I had the strangest dream, I never dreamed before I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. —Ed McCurdy, 1950

Robbie Lieberman is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois

University at Carbondale. Her first book, “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. She is currently working with David Cochran on Prairie Power, a collection of oral histories of 1960s student radicals from the Midwest.

Contents

Illustrations Preface

xili

Introduction: “Study War No More”? 1. “The Spring Song”: Communism and the Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

7

2. “Friendly Henry Wallace”: The Progressive Party Loses the “Fight for Peace” 3. “Hold the Line”: The Waldorf Conference and the Peekskill Riots

4. “Put My Name Down”: Responses to the Communist Peace Offensive

5. “The Strangest Dream”: McCarthyism in the Peace Movement 6. “The H-Bomb’s Thunder”: Communism and the

Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy

135

7. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”: Women Strike for

Peace and the Early Sixties

Epilogue: “The Times They Are A-Changing”? Notes Primary Sources

Suggested Reading Index

159 179

195 227 231 239

Illustrations

“Peace Unlimited” (Wallace-Taylor Peace Bond)

46

Paul Robeson and supporters at Peekskill, September 4, 1949

76

World Peace Appeal

89

W.E. B. Du Bois, “I take my stand for peace”

94

“Dr. Spock Is Worried”

160

Herblock cartoon, from Straight Herblock

176

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Preface

he American public met the end of the cold war and the mostly bloodless anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe with a great deal of caution. U.S. policy makers, in particular, feared the loss of stability that the cold war had provided, fears that seemed borne out in Bosnia, where more than

a quarter of a million people lost their lives (and where U.S. troops were dispatched in 1995 to help enforce a fragile peace agreement). But, at the same time, the end of the cold war brought historic opportunities. Not since the end of World War II had there been such high hopes for peace. Without the ideological barriers set by the cold war, progress was made toward resolving long-standing conflicts, as in South Africa and the Middle East, and there

were renewed hopes for reversing the arms race, beginning with an end to nuclear testing and reducing military spending at home. Although the much touted “peace dividend” vanished over the Iraqi desert in 1991, and military spending remained at cold war levels (“The world is a dangerous place,” the politicians continued to tell us), some things did change. Notably, the opportunity existed, for the first time in forty-five years, for public discussion of just what peace is all about, and what part the United States should play in preserving it. This discussion was stifled for decades because peace was construed so narrowly as tantamount to the containment of communism. Any other notions of peace were treated as suspect for aiding and abetting the expansion of our ultimate enemy, the Soviet Union. Indeed, grassroots peace activism was assumed by many to be dominated by Communist agitators. For instance, in December 1962 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) summoned fourteen women from an organization called Women Strike for Peace to testify at hearings on Communist infiltration in

the peace movement. Among those who decried these hearings was the man

xilt

xiv

whom

Preface

Time magazine called “the Number One U.S. Pacifist,” A. J. Muste.

Muste charged that HUAC’s attack on the peace movement was dangerous because it would contribute to making Communist and peace synonymous in the minds of the American public. Muste was well aware that much damage had already been done in this regard —the peace movement had been stifled by cold war anticommunism. But by the early 1960s it seemed possible that one might effectively challenge the idea that peace activists served the interests of the Communists. Of course, neither grassroots peace activism nor the persecution of peace activists as subversives began with the cold war. These actions had a long history, dating back to colonial times when the Quakers protested against the use of force and violence in dealing with the Indians. Many Friends were bound in chains for refusing to fight in the French and Indian War, and they suffered equally harsh penalties for refusing to take sides in the American Revolution and the Civil War. During World War I, conscientious objectors faced brutal treatment, and other opponents of war—notably the Industrial Workers of the World and some anarchists and Socialists — were punished as well, by legislation such as the Espionage and Sedition Acts and by private citizens demanding “100 percent Americanism.” The idea of peace activists as serious threats to national security only grew stronger during the reaction that followed World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. From that time on, the government kept close tabs on the peace movement. The FBI considered Jane Addams, founder of the Woman’s Peace Party (which developed into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), “the most dangerous woman in America.” The infamous “spider chart” prepared in the War Department in 1923 indicated the supposedly subversive affiliations of various peace and religious groups. Despite the fact that the secretary of war recalled it because of its many “errors,” the chart served for years as alleged evidence of the ties between international socialism and domestic proponents of peace. In some ways, then, this book is a continuation of overlapping stories: the general difficulty of talking about peace during wartime and the specific problem of promoting the cause of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Yet, this is a new story, too, because of the unique conditions of the cold war. For one thing, nuclear weapons made the stakes higher on all sides. After World War II, both the peace movement and its opponents claimed to be concerned about the very survival of humankind. In addition, the cold war meant not just the possibility of all-out war between the superpowers but also

Preface

xv

the probability that both would intervene militarily in other countries as part of their global battle for power, influence, and wealth. Each country could make a good case that the other was not interested in peace. Finally, both felt the effects of a militarized economy and culture. That is, the cold war was not just cold; it was a war, and wartime conditions prevailed, including a limited tolerance for dissent on both sides. I began this study after several years of directing a peace-studies program, and wondering why teaching about peace was treated as a marginal activity on U.S. college campuses. At the same time, I was conducting research into the history of American communism, and I began to ask why these two subjects — peace and communism — did not seem to intersect in the scholarly literature. E. P. Thompson’s 1984 essay, “Beyond the Cold War,” provided a partial answer to both questions. Thompson proposed that the causes of “peace” and “freedom” broke apart after World War II, to the extent that those

who worked for “freedom” in the Soviet bloc faced harsh punishment, while those who worked for “peace” in the West were viewed as Communist agents or dupes. I set out to explore one part of this claim, trying to unravel the story of how grassroots peace activism in the United States became associated with Communist subversion in the early years of the cold war. What role did Communists actually play in the peace movement during these years (1945-1963)?

What were their goals and methods of organizing? How did their involvement affect non-Communist peace activists and organizations, especially during the McCarthy era when the definition of subversive activities and affiliations was extremely broad? What were the effects of anticommunism on the U.S. peace movement? The story that emerged from my investigation is filled with ambiguity, irony, and tragedy. Although American Communists contributed to the peace movement as skilled organizers and dedicated activists, their very presence and commitment led to serious problems as well. This dual legacy stemmed from another ambiguity, the fact that American Communists had a genuine interest in peace, yet they saw peace as bound up with the fortunes of the Soviet Union. Even with the best of intentions, therefore, Communists appeared

to be, in the words of one former Communist, “unwitting tools of Soviet foreign policy.” But the association of peace—as in peaceful coexistence — with Communist interests did not come about simply because of the involvement of Communists in the peace movement. The idea of that link was actively promoted by the U.S. government in order to gain support for another sort of peace,

xvi

Preface

one more in line with the cold war consensus of containing the Soviet Union. In smearing everyone who promoted peaceful coexistence with a broad antiCommunist brush, the government virtually silenced the opposition to the cold war. The definition of Americanism that had anticommunism at its core was promulgated not only by the government but also by private citizens and organizations, from the veterans of the American Legion to the intellectuals of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. But the peace movement suffered due to both attacks from without and dissension from within. Many peace activists took steps to rid their organizations of Communist elements and influences, which frequently raised difficult questions about civil liberties. Some peacemakers were motivated by their own anticommunism, others by fear of drawing attacks from outside. In any event, peace organizations were weakened by internal disagreements over the issue of Communist participation. Even as the peace movement began to revive in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it continued to be haunted by the issue of communism. My research for this book relied heavily on archival work and oral history. Thus, I am indebted to many people for their assistance in this project. First and foremost, I thank all those who wrote me letters and allowed me to interview them on the subjects of communism and peace. The generosity of spirit and the candor of most of my interviewees (as well as their gossip) made this part of the research really enjoyable. Thanks to Jane Adams, Eleanor Belser, Joseph Belser, Elmer Bernstein, Dan Bessie, Barbara Bick, Mary Clarke, Paul Deats, Howard Fast, “Ping” Ferry, Marge Frantz, Gerald Fried, Helen Garvy, Lucille Gold, Sanford Gottlieb, Dorothy Healey, Lyla Hoffman, George Houser, Homer Jack, Robert Kempner, Robert Lees, Shirley Lens, Joan Levin-

son, David McReynolds, John McTernan, Walter Muelder, Louise Peck, Sid Peck, Alice Powell, Richard Powell, Betty Rottger, Hank Rubin, Lillian Rubin,

Boone Schirmer, Peggy Schirmer, John Schuder, Sheila Scott, Donald Shaffer, Benjamin Spock, Amy Swerdlow, and John Swomley. Thanks also to archivists from coast to coast who helped me make my way through mountains of documents. Phil Runkel of Marquette University was especially helpful in directing me to useful material and taking an interest in my project. Wendy Chmielewski and the rest of the staff at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection were also extremely helpful at every stage. I received a Special Research Project Grant as well as a Summer Research Fellowship from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, both of which

Preface

xvii

were invaluable. A Travel to Collections Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities paid for one of my many research trips. A number of graduate students provided research assistance. Thanks to Jan Jacobs, Consuelo Leon, Michael Raley, Erik Schmeller, T. J. Urbanski, Pam

Vaughan, and Laura Wheaton. People who read early drafts of particular chapters also made contributions to the book. Thanks to my colleagues at SIUC — Jane Adams, Kay Carr, Rick Jensen, Marji Morgan, and Rachel Stocking—and to others who provided both thoughtful criticism and encouragement, especially Harriet Alonso, Charles Chatfield, Ellen Schrecker, R. Allen Smith, and Alan Wald.

Special thanks to Cynthia Maude-Gembler, the editor at Syracuse University Press who suggested that this project would fit well into the press’s series on peace studies and conflict resolution, to Mary Selden Evans for seeing it through to completion, and to Charles Chatfield, series editor, who read several drafts of the manuscript thoroughly. Last but not least, thanks to my parents, Ann and Ernie Lieberman, for their support (moral, intellectual, and financial), and to my husband, Rich Fedder, and my children, Katy and Jeannie, for enabling me to travel and write without having to worry about them and for encouraging me to do my best work.

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The Strangest Dream

Introduction “Study War No More”?

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside; I’m gonna study war no more —Negro spiritual (traditional)

his book argues several propositions that at first glance may seem contradictory. The first is that American Communists were genuinely interested in peace, yet their loyalty to the Soviet Union guaranteed that their efforts would be attacked as “un-American” and would be ineffective. At the same time, I argue that the attacks on peace activists and organizations —Communist oriented or not—were out of proportion to any threat they might have posed. Attacks from outside sent the message that there was no such thing as legitimate opposition to the cold war. Attacks from inside failed to recognize either the weakness of the Communist movement (especially after 1948) or

the sincerity of individual Communists and former Communists who sought ways to work for peace. These attacks had long-term effects on American culture. “Peace” — or, more precisely, certain definitions of the word peace—continued to be viewed as subversive and suspicious throughout the cold war years and beyond. Now that the cold war is over and the Soviet Union has dissolved, one

would expect that cold war issues can be addressed without the sort of political and emotional baggage that has previously been brought to bear on these subjects. We are more free to ask big questions: Was the cold war necessary and inevitable? Were there alternative paths that could have been followed? What were (and are) the long-term effects of the cold war? Some scholars are addressing these questions, yet since the end of the cold war and the opening

2

The Strangest Dream

of the Soviet archives, the dominant trend in the historical scholarship has been to restate the old argument that American Communists primarily functioned as Soviet agents, and thus to suggest that much of the opposition to the cold war was illegitimate (and, by implication, that much McCarthyite legislation was necessary and legitimate). This view fails to provide a nuanced account of people’s motives, leading us back to the old view of American Communists as either cynical manipulators or dupes.! Scholarship from other vantage points does not dispel this conclusion. Indeed, a review of the scholarly record might lead one to conclude that American Communists were not particularly concerned about the cause of peace during the early years of the cold war, nor did they contribute much to the beleaguered peace movement at the time. Standard histories of the American peace movement generally fail to address the role of Communists and fellow travelers altogether. In the few cases where Communists are mentioned, it is only to show what a destructive force they were. Histories of organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) also downplay the role of Communists. The conclusion of scholars, implicit and explicit, is that Communist agitation for peace served mainly to make peace a subversive term.” Although there is some truth to this claim, a look at the public record—

the rhetoric and activities of American Communists in the organizations they led, the role they played in other peace organizations (in the 1950s and beyond), and the concern of government agencies and private citizens about Communist infiltration in the peace movement — suggests that there is more to the story. Although American Communists and those sympathetic to their point of view may have caused damage to the peace movement, drawing attacks simply because of their presence, they also made a contribution in the postwar period, calling attention to issues that merited public discussion: the military budget, nuclear weapons, the Korean War, and U.S. involvement in Indochina. Although Communists, then and now, sometimes exaggerate their role in the peace movement and their impact on the cause of peace, it does not follow that their concerns were disingenuous. Communist agitation for peace was bound up with defending the interests of the Soviet Union, especially guaranteeing its existence and its power (nuclear and otherwise) vis-a-vis the United States. But American Communists also believed their work for peace was aimed at bringing about better conditions for people in the United States and all over the world. Bert Cochran’s assessment of Communists’ interest in the “Black cause” holds true for their interest in the cause of peace as well:

Introduction

3

The general argument that Communists were insincere . . . only trying to exploit legitimate grievances for their own ends, was tainted. Communists tried to “use” people the way all politicians try to manipulate people for their own purposes. But in their case, the purpose was not personal aggrandizement or self-seeking; they had courageously championed the Black cause [substitute the cause of peace] when to do so was as popular or rewarding as the championship of Christianity in the time of Nero. If they fought fanatically and often unscrupulously to win people to the Party line, it was because they thought that on that line humanity was destined to advance to its salvation.3 It was “that line,” of course, that troubled fellow peacemakers, who argued

that American Communists’ loyalty to the Soviet Union made them unreliable allies. (This was not simply a question of party membership; the allegiance was shared, the line followed, by all those who were part of the broader

Communist movement.) What potential allies often failed to understand was that Communists were not concerned only with the fate of the Soviet Union;

many also had a long-standing interest in peace that accompanied their belief in socialism. The stories of how several of these people became interested and maintained interest in peace issues are revealing. Betty Rottger began to hate war when she was a young child living in mortal fear that her father would be drafted into World War I and killed; no one had to tell her to become a peace activist. She joined the Communist Party (CP) in 1960 at which time she found that “all the active people I knew were Communists.” Rottger later became a war-tax resister.‘ Amy Swerdlow came from a left-wing family. Though she never joined the Communist Party, by the time she was a teenager in the 1930s she was deeply involved in radical organizations and activities. She became the national high school secretary of the American Student Union in 1940, and, as she says, for

her “it was always peace.” Years after she left the Communist movement, Swerdlow helped found Women

Strike for Peace (WSP) (and later wrote a

history of the organization).° Barbara Bick was born in Washington, D.C., and one of her strongest early memories is of the Bonus March in 1932, when the unemployed World War I veterans camped on the shores of Anacostia were beaten by government troops. After World War II, she moved to California where she worked for the West Coast Communist newspaper, the People’s World. She and her husband were in the Communist Party, and he left school to help organize the Wallace

4

The Strangest Dream

campaign. Bick says that people joined the Communist Party in order “to be most effective on issues that:we really believed in, and after we left the party, we continued to work on those issues.” When Bick joined Women Strike for Peace in the early 1960s, it became her family, much as the party had been in

the late 1940s.° For many activists, World War II, and especially the atomic bomb, made

peace seem an urgent issue. Lillian Rubin and Lyla Hoffman were not pacifists, but their strong opposition to atomic weapons led them into a variety of “subversive” activities, peace included. Mary Clarke’s parents had instilled in their children a belief in giving back to the community. The two events that affected her the most were reading John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima and being in an organization in which a woman she greatly admired was red-baited. Clarke was already a peace activist when the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) came along. She was a volunteer for SANE until she heard about Women Strike for Peace.’ Peace is still a burning issue for such people, and many of them continue to devote considerable effort to the cause. For instance, in the spring of 1992 I tried to set up an interview with Marge Frantz (a Communist Party member from 1937 to 1957), but she was unavailable because she was attending a re-

gional meeting of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. From a southern radical family—her father, Joseph Gelders, was nearly beaten to death in 1936 for challenging local sedition ordinances in Alabama —Frantz moved to Berkeley, California, in 1950. She wanted to work against

the Korean War. She joined the Unitarian Church and made a group of friends; the influence worked both ways, she says. Now a retired professor, Frantz joined the WILPF in the 1970s in Santa Cruz; in the 1980s she was a founding member of Elders for Survival, a Bay-

area group opposed to the arms race. Both organizations, she says, attracted a number of former Communists. When we finally found a time to talk, in the

summer of 1995, she expressed the ambiguity that many former Communists still feel about their past. Secrecy about party affiliation, for example, was a problem that made McCarthyism worse by fueling the popular suspicion that communism was in fact a conspiracy rather than a political belief. But anticommunism was so strong that Communists really did have good reason to hide their affiliation. Like many former Communists, Frantz is critical of the dogged pattern of loyalty American Communists showed to the Soviet Union, yet she still sees some good reasons for it (and even still has mixed

feelings about World War II). On the subject of peace, she says American

Introduction

5

Communists were “unwitting tools of Soviet foreign policy,” though they did have a genuine interest in peace. Communists joined organizations such as the WILPF in order to work on these issues.® Dorothy Healey’s account of the early 1950s, in her memoir of “a life in the American Communist Party,” mainly concerns her experience with going underground. She says little about peace issues, despite the fact that this was the party’s major public focus during these years. This point is perhaps an indication of how little cohesion there was in the Communist Party of the McCarthy era. In our interview she says that Communists played a pivotal role in the peace movement going back to the 1930s. But Communists were unable to draw a distinction between genuine interest in peace and defending the interests of the Soviet Union—from their point of view, the two issues were one

and the same.°® Howard Fast argues that this position was reasonable at the time. The survival of the Soviet Union was the only hope for peace and socialism. Besides, he says, no one else was working for peace: “We were the only ones out there.” Another former Communist agrees, claiming that the Communists were the only ones who promoted a campaign all over the world to abolish nuclear weapons and that they took the lead in organizing opposition to the Korean War; they were “the most persistent,” “the boldest,” and “the most active.”!°

At the same time, many former Communists, asked about their work for peace, are somewhat puzzled. A fairly typical response is: “For me, peace issues were never separate from any other political issues.” Dan Bessie, son of Hollywood Ten writer Alvah Bessie, says, “My own CP activities didn’t principally center around the peace movement. I participated in peace marches, demonstrations, etc., participated in internal Party discussions about the peace movement, of course but that’s about it... . Not much centered around

peace activities .. . mainly local issues.” For those born into the Communist movement, the issues were all linked: labor, peace, and civil rights.!! Though a number of former Communists have repudiated their pasts, many maintain a fierce pride in their actions and beliefs. They helped build unions, promoted racial equality, and defended civil liberties. And they worked for peace. Peace is more problematic than the other issues because, by definition, it involves questions of foreign policy. As many former Communists now acknowledge openly, if the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) had one major weakness it was its obeisance to the Soviet Union. Leon Wofsy explains, “We were always so focused on what we wanted to see that it was very difficult to see things we didn’t want to see,” including “bitter truths about the

6 e e

The Strangest Dream

Soviet Union.”!2 American Communists’ inability or unwillingness to criticize the Soviet Union hampered their work on all issues, but scholars have made a good case that on those issues that focused on domestic policy, even Communists who tried to follow the party line interpreted and translated that line in light of local issues and conditions, and, as often as not, in conjunction with local people.!3 Where peace was concerned, there were fewer “local” issues (aside from election campaigns), and by definition the concern was with global conditions. That Communist concerns coincided with Soviet interests was there for all to see. If it was difficult to defend the Communist line on race relations or labor during some periods, those difficulties were nothing compared to defending the Communist line on peace as the cold war took hold. As Leon Wofsy says, “How in the hell were you going to build a powerful mass movement while being identified with the ‘main enemy’ of the United States? That doesn’t make sense. You could have made a thousand speeches and tactical decisions differently, and it wouldn’t have made a big difference.”!4 Indeed, how one viewed “the main enemy of the United States” and its

supposed agents, American Communists, came to define whether one had a legitimate voice in the political process. Thus, it was not just Communists but pacifists and Socialists as well who were persecuted for their opposition to the cold war. Contrary to Howard Fast’s claim that the Communists “were the only ones out there,” many longtime pacifists — Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) leaders A. J. Muste and John Swomley, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas among them —also opposed cold war policies, concerned about the effects of atomic weapons as well as the domestic consequences of a large military budget and a climate hostile to civil rights and civil liberties. These people were aware of the risks of defying the government during wartime because they had opposed both world wars. With few exceptions, much of the post-World War II American peace movement focused its attention on U.S. cold war policies, for a variety of reasons that had little to do with being sympathetic to communism. Some peace activists were concerned that attacking the Soviet Union would contribute to the domestic anti-Communist crusade, which in turn affected the civil liberties of all peace groups. But more often the reason was simply a belief that people should concentrate on the policies of their own government first, where they might have the most impact. The peace-education program of the American Friends Service Committee, for example, focused on specific recommendations about U.S. foreign policy, with explicit justification:

Introduction

Vd

We are well aware of the desirability of certain changes in the policy and attitude of the Soviet Union. Our suggestions deal with the policy and attitude of the United States. This is because: 1) United States policy is the responsibility of the United States and is the proper subject of attention by a group of United States citizens; 2) we believe that our suggestions, if carried out, would increase the likelihood of the Soviet Union’s making the desired changes on its side; and 3) we believe that the importance of preventing war—with the resultant disaster for the United States, its ideals and free institutions —is so great that it would be a good investment for the United States to make more than a reasonable effort to improve the situation.!5 Although some pacifists called for a policy of peaceful coexistence, others went further, criticizing the imperialistic policies of both superpowers and calling for a new sort of world order in which people’s needs would be provided for without the exploitation and injustice on which both systems, American capitalism and Soviet communism, seemed to be built. At the same time, many pacifists tried to defend the Communist Party’s right to exist and to defend Communists against the worst excesses of McCarthyism. But over and over, pacifist opposition to the cold war was equated with support for communism. No matter how evenhanded they were in criticizing the foreign policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, their positions on specific issues — opposition to the Truman Doctrine, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War, nuclear testing, and so on— marked them as subversive in the eyes of a society conditioned for cold war. Thus, pacifists also received bad press, lost jobs, and faced harassment for their positions.!® Some pacifists themselves took an anti-Communist position, not only criticizing the Soviet Union but also refusing to make common cause with American Communists and working to keep their organizations free of Communist influence. Especially active in this regard were longtime pacifists who played a leadership role in the peace movement. Pacifists who lived through World War I and the red scare that followed were opposed to alliances with Communists in the 1930s peace movement. Similarly, in the post-World War II period, pacifists, Socialists, and liberals who had experience with Commu-

nists in the 1930s viewed them as cynical, untrustworthy elements, interested only in taking over organizations for their own purposes. Thus, Swomley, Thomas, Homer Jack, and others often joined the attacks on Communists in the peace movement, even though the latter were no longer much of a force to be reckoned with by the late 1940s. Pacifists fought having their efforts

8

The Strangest Dream

linked with those of the Communists, seeking to defend the image of their organizations. But pacifists’ attempts to separate themselves from communism failed to strengthen-the peace movement, and in fact simply weakened it further. In order to make sense of the domestic politics of peace in the post-World War II period, one must understand the interplay of various forces: the development of the peace movement, the changing line and strategy of the American Communist Party, and the defining moments of the early cold war. Several well-established peace organizations that grew out of World War I found themselves in the midst of controversies about communism during the cold war. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, labeled subversive by the government soon after its founding in 1917, became the leading pacifist organization, with a clear policy of not cooperating with Communists. (Its secular counterpart, the War Resisters League [WRL], formed in 1924, had a less clear policy

and was more subject to attack during the McCarthy era.) The American Friends Service Committee was founded to help conscientious objectors by delegating them to the aid of civilian victims of World War I, but it soon expanded both its domestic and its international programs. Though the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, observers from within and without

the Society of Friends accused it of being sympathetic with communism. The Woman’s Peace Party voted to become the U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in November 1919. Its leaders had al-

ready suffered from attacks, including the surveillance and public ridicule of Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch’s loss of her job at Wellesley College because of her peace work. Attacks on the WILPF reached their height during the McCarthy era—a period so painful that many WILPF women still refuse to talk about it. The American Union Against Militarism, organized during World War I, evolved into the American Civil Liberties Union, under

the leadership of Roger Baldwin, at the height of the red scare that followed the war. There was considerable overlap in the membership, leadership, and goals of these organizations. Thus, one assumption behind the 1923 “spider web chart” prepared within the War Department was correct, even if the details were often erroneous and the charge of the connection with “international socialism” was absurd. Even those groups that promoted peace without regard for international politics, such as the Catholic Worker movement, which mainly provided direct relief for the poor, faced accusations that they were subversive. Dorothy Day, the major force behind the Catholic Worker, could

Introduction

9

not escape accusations of subversive activity and connections because of her work for peace and her refusal to disparage the Communists. The Socialist Party was at its peak of influence and acceptance during the pre-World War I era, but suffered a dramatic decline due to its antiwar stance and the red scare that followed the war. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in-

spired the founding of the American Communist Party, which was in its origins a splinter group of the old Socialist Party. The Communists viewed the Bolsheviks as a model, opting for centralized organization, secrecy, and ties to the Soviet Union; they believed American capitalists would not relinquish power without a struggle. The split between Socialists and Communists over tactics, strategy, and goals meant little to the broader American public; neither Socialists nor Communists succeeded in attracting many adherents in the 1920s. The peace movement, meanwhile, was reaching a broader audience that had begun to see U.S. participation in World War I as a mistake. In particular, the connection between war and profit making was discussed seriously both in official circles and among the public. Communism began to attract greater interest in the 1930s as people contrasted the widespread unemployment and despair of depression America with the apparent productivity and hopefulness of the Soviet Union. But people were attracted to the Communist movement not so much because of a vision of a “Soviet America” but because of particular issues: the rights of poor and working people, racial equality, and antifascism. Communists gained credibility on the Left because of their energetic and successful organizing around these issues. In 1935 the Communist International announced a new policy: Commu-

nists everywhere were to join forces with Socialists, liberals, and trade unionists in a broad “people’s front,” for the time being abandoning the goal of revolution. Communists stopped maligning Socialists (whom they had termed social fascists) and sought alliances with them, as well as with liberals and pacifists. The point was to promote democracy and the broadest possible unity against war and fascism. In the short term, the Popular Front policy succeeded in giving American Communists a degree of influence disproportionate to their numbers in labor, civil rights, and peace efforts. But these Popular Front alliances began to break down as the American Communists changed their line, abandoning peace for collective security during the Spanish civil war, and then muting their antifascism after the signing of the NaziSoviet pact in 1939. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and

the United States entered the war in December, Communists took a prowar

10

The Strangest Dream

position, regaining respectability as the United States and the USSR became allies in the fight against fascism. But pacifists, liberals, and Socialists who had seen their organizations destroyed because of the twists and turns of the Communist Party line would neither forget nor forgive; the legacy of mistrust toward Communists, especially on the most fundamental issues of peace, had significant and lasting effects. The few years after World War II constituted a crucial period. Both the peace movement and the Communist movement experienced a moment of optimism, even if the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan occasioned some doubts about the future. Communists and liberals hoped the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union would be extended indefinitely. Cooperation between the two countries could bring about a lasting peace by making possible a strong United Nations, which would solve problems without resorting to violence and dismantle the colonial system in favor of a more just world order. Such hopes for a flourishing of global peace, democracy, and prosperity were shattered by the cold war. The United States and the Soviet Union could not agree on a system of international control over atomic weapons, a gov-

ernment in Poland, or the fates of Eastern Europe or Germany. Each side interpreted the other’s actions and rhetoric as suggesting that conflict was inevitable. As the cold war hardened on both sides, the Communist Party line hardened as well. The Communist International called for an offensive against U.S. imperialism, and American Communists became convinced that the United States was on the road to fascism and preparing for World War III. Although the party line became more rigid, Communists still hoped to work on a broad front. But the 1948 presidential campaign, in which the Communists supported Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, suggested that Popular Front alliances were a thing of the past. From that point on the Communist Party had little influence in American politics; more significantly, the campaign marked the end of public debate about the cold war. The cold war view that peace and freedom depended on containing the Soviet Union was not to be questioned. The Communist Party was severely weakened by the Wallace campaign, to which it had devoted much of its resources. The government attacks that followed were directed at a dying movement. Party leaders were indicted, tried, and convicted under the Smith Act for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. (The top leaders were sentenced to jail, though many of the “second string” convictions were eventually over-

Introduction

ul

turned in the courts.) The Internal Security Act of 1950 (the McCarran Act)

required Communist and Communist-front organizations to register with the government, and included provisions for rounding up and detaining alleged subversives during times of emergency. At the same time, the party moved to consolidate its ranks, purging itself of untrustworthy elements, undergoing an internal campaign against “white chauvinism” —an attempt to root out racism within the party, which became another part of the internal witch-hunt—and sending its leadership underground. While carrying on public activities that focused on peace, the party devoted much of its resources and energy to legal- and political-defense struggles. As the United States and the Soviet Union began to interpret each other’s actions as more and more threatening, the international Communist move-

ment focused on peace as the major issue to which everything else was linked. The first manifestation of what the U.S. government dubbed the Communist “peace offensive” was a conference held in New York in March 1949: the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. The attacks, official and un. Official, on this conference, as well as on the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill

that summer, mainly served to heighten the association of “peace” with Communist interests. These events also illustrated the bravado of American Communists on the one hand and their tremendous isolation on the other (which is evident in their songs as well, such as “Hold the Line” and “Put My Name Down”).

The attacks on the Communist “peace offensive” came to a head with the circulation of the Stockholm Peace Petition, which called for an international

ban on nuclear weapons, beginning in 1950. Attempts to silence Americans who opposed the Korean War and the development of nuclear weapons, in particular the Subversive Activities Control Board’s harassment of the American Peace Crusade, increased the isolation of the Communists

and others

who shared their point of view on particular issues. Organized Communist opposition to the Korean War meant that anyone who criticized the war was viewed as subversive —there was no legitimate opposition. The public debate on peace issues was limited to such an extent during the McCarthy era that it cast significant doubt on the U.S. claim to stand for freedom. At the same time, the U.S. government, concerned that the Soviet Union had won a major propaganda battle with its “peace offensive,” took steps to promote its own image as a peacemaker. In retrospect it appears that Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet rhetoric about peaceful coexistence, the end of the Korean War, and the weakness of the

12

The Strangest Dream

American Communist Party (which had lost half its members since 1949)

should have provided the United States with all the justification it needed to try to reduce cold war tensions abroad and at home and to improve its image as a peace-loving nation. The formation of an international “ban-the-bomb” movement seemed to reflect the changing climate in which possibilities for negotiating an end to the arms race, and to nuclear testing in particular, seemed less far-fetched than they had a few short years earlier. Yet, anticommunism continued to take its toll on the peace movement; McCarthyism reached its peak just as the hopes of the peace movement began to rise. The difficulty of working for peace under these conditions was epitomized by the turmoil within the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The WILPF experienced fierce internal struggles over the issue of Communist participation. Leaders of organizations that had taken a clear stand excluding Communists urged the WILPF to do the same. The WILPF’s infiltration by the FBI only increased the tension. In 1956 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin. Forced to face the truth about the history and character of the Soviet Union, many American Communists left the party. Some were so disillusioned they gave up politics altogether; others sought new ways to work on the issues. As the cold war began to thaw and the peace movement turned its focus to the issue of nuclear testing, a young organization struggled with the issue of Communist participation. The legacy of the 1930s was crucial here, as the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy were determined to keep Communists out. As the CPUSA crumbled, some Communists and former Communists joined SANE, and the rejuvenating peace movement foundered because of anti-Communist attacks from without and within. Shortly after “the crisis in SANE,” as A. J. Muste dubbed it, a new organization concerned with nuclear testing appeared on the scene. Born of the hopefulness that accompanied John F. Kennedy’s election as president, and in direct response to SANE’s exclusiveness, Women Strike for Peace took a different approach to the issue of communism. WSP directly challenged those people who continued to link peacemaking with Communist subversion. WSP’s determination to be inclusive, to work with anyone who was interested in peace, made possible its successful challenge of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1962. Along with Linus Pauling and other outspoken proponents of peace, WSP members played an important role in promoting the partial-nuclear-test-ban treaty, signed in 1963. Afterward, the peace movement’s focus shifted to the war in Vietnam; nevertheless, the issues of

Introduction

13

communism and anticommunism continued to haunt the movement throughout the cold war.

This book is not intended to be a complete study of the peace movement in the early years of the cold war. Its focus is on Communist-led or -supported peace activities and on organizations that shared some positions with the Communists and therefore were linked with communism by those people who thought that proponents of peace were undermining the public will to fight the cold war. The underlying question is what impact all these events had on the culture, that is, what view of peace prevailed during this period and after. Because my concern is with the domestic scene, I do not address questions

involving the international peace movement in any detail. My intention is not to underplay or deny the significant connections between American Communists and the Soviet Union; indeed, I acknowledge many times the impact of

changes in the Soviet line on American Communists and their outlook on peace issues. But the story of the international peace movement is the subject . of a thoroughly researched multivolume work by Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb. In addition, I am less concerned with the leaders of the Communist Party and their direct connections to Moscow than I am with rank-and-file Communists who did not need (and in some periods did not get) directions or orders from above. As Marge Frantz explains, Communists already had a concern for the issues, and all they had to do was read the Daily Worker (or, on the West Coast, the People’s World) in order to find out the cur-

rent line. I will not define peace at the outset because a central issue in the book is the battle that arose over what peace should mean in the postwar world. However, a number of former Communists have given their own definitions:

¢ “Peace is living by the golden rule” (Betty Rottger). ¢ “More than a lack of war, [it] would include a society free of oppression” (Lyla Hoffman).

¢ “A condition in which people do not kill each other” (Elmer Bernstein). * “Resolving conflict through reason, compromise and consensus without

violence” (Lucille Gold).

¢ “A state of being where disagreements are settled by talking, negotiating and compromising until solutions are eventually reached, with NEVER a resort to the conflicts which harm or kill people” (Dan Bessie). ¢ “An absence of war” (Sheila Scott).

14

The Strangest Dream

Were these people subversive? Were they “dupes”? Not in their own view. The writer Robert Lees (who was called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951) grew up with the motto:

The World is my country All men are my brothers To do good and be just To all mankind My religion. He adds, “It was this kind of thinking that got me into plenty of hot water!”!” If some of these comments today sound self-serving, perhaps they sound different when heard in the context of the cold war, and when we consider the assumptions of both Communists and anti-Communists. My own view may be inferred from the way I use the term peace movement broadly to refer to groups that opposed cold war policies: the arms race, military intervention in the name of anticommunism, development of

the hydrogen bomb and the large increase in the military budget, nuclear testing, and the growth of a national-security apparatus. These groups include Communist-oriented peace organizations such as the American Peace Crusade, groups founded specifically in opposition to the nuclear-arms race such as SANE and WSP, and older organizations with a broad interest in peace and justice (the FOR, the WRL, and the WILPF). Many of these groups joined the Quakers in questioning the basic premise of American policy during the cold war: that the United States could carry on the work of democracy behind a “wall of military power” that would serve as a shield against communism. In 1955 the American Friends Service Committee disputed the idea that it was

possible for a great nation “to commit itself both to military preparedness and to carrying forward a constructive and positive program of peacemaking. ...[T]hese two aims have become mutually exclusive.”!8 This position still deserves serious consideration. I am cautious about the use of such terms as Communist front and infiltration, because they were used so frequently to discredit Communist peace efforts. Anti-Communists dismissed groups that opposed cold war policies or that allowed Communists to participate as “Communist fronts,” implying that their sole purpose was to strengthen the Soviet Union. Though there was, of course, some truth to such accusations, it belies the fact that these groups often had other interests as well and other members whose goals were broader, which, no matter what their interests, still had a right to exist. It also

implies that non-Communists who worked with such groups were nothing

Introduction

15

but “dupes” of the Communists when in fact many activists went in with their eyes open, convinced that peace could not be achieved without everyone’s participation. Similarly, the term infiltration was used to suggest an illegitimate activity, joining a group in order to undermine its original purposes and twist it to Communist needs. There were certainly instances where Communists were not open about their affiliation with the party, while they worked to make other organizations follow the party line; I describe some of these instances in the first chapter. But the term infiltration was reserved for Communists in order to suggest that they alone acted in a secretive, conspiratorial manner and that they lacked a genuine concern for the issues. Many former Communists reject such implications, explaining that all Communists were expected to join a mass organization (“mass org”) for the purpose of working on the issues and trying to influence people. When the party was relatively strong, in the 1930s and 1940s, Communists surely tried to get their “mass orgs” to follow the party line, and they recruited people from . those organizations into the Communist Party. As the party declined, however, and certainly by the time of the anti-Vietnam War movement, Communists were admonished to help organizations live up to what they said they believed in. Dan Bessie recalls that there were discussions in his party club about how to relate to antiwar organizations, but, says Bessie, “I can’t think of a SINGLE discussion in which it was felt that we should try to get a non-Party organization we worked with to follow our line on anything.”!° Perhaps this is self-serving, but it gets to the heart of what Communists thought they were trying to achieve. Although there were a party line, party discipline, and party caucuses within other organizations, infiltration is still a term that should be used judiciously; it does not accurately describe the relationship of many Communists (and former Communists) to the “mass organizations” they were a part of in the 1950s and 1960s.

If it is true that in general Communists joined mass organizations in order to influence rather than to subvert them, it fails to suggest just how sticky some of these situations were. Just after World War II, for example, one mem-

ber of the Young Communist League was asked to join the American Legion in order to neutralize its anticommunism. At the same time, his assignment in the legion was to work with the “Americanism” committee, which was training to break up Communist Party meetings!?° As I point out in the first chapter, Communists did manipulate organizations in the 1930s, bending them to their will, and destroying many of them in the process. But their fortunes and their strategy had changed so dramatically

16

The Strangest Dream

by the postwar period that, with few exceptions, fears of infiltration were always disproportionate to the reality. The attempt to “infiltrate” the American Legion would be laughable had it not been so dangerous. In 1972 Merle Curti claimed that one of the achievements of his 1936 book,

Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936, was that it explained how the organized peace movement that “at first had been regarded as heretical if not treasonable came to be generally regarded as respectable, at least in times of peace.”2! In 1936 Curti could not have foreseen the cold war era in which

peace was regarded as heretical and treasonable. But today, I hope, we can comprehend the tragedy of the peace movement’s isolation during this era and the lingering view that “peace” is somehow subversive.

“The Spring Song’ Communism and the Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement Oh, I wonder will there be a war this spring? Will we be fighting while the robins sing? —Robinson and Schachter, 1940

he Spring Song” reflects the Communists’ antiwar position during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, but by the time the song was written the strong peace movement of the 1930s was in ruins, and many people blamed the Communists for its demise. The extraordinary aspect of the 1930s peace movement was the broadbased alliances upon which it was built. Despite the warnings of an earlier generation of pacifists,! for a brief period many pacifists, as well as liberals and Socialists, were willing to make common cause with the Communists in order to keep the United States out of war. The coincidence of interests led to the development of two strong “united front” organizations concerned with peace, the American League Against War and Fascism (ALWF) and the American Student Union (ASU), both of which eventually fell victim to

changed international circumstances and to twists and turns in the Communist Party line. Pacifism reached a high point in the early to mid-1930s due to a strong consensus that involvement in World War I had been a mistake and that the United States should stay out of another imperialist war. Signs that such a war was brewing included Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Mussolini’s belligerent

fascism, and Hitler’s rise to power. Communists were also interested in keeping the United States out of war, sharing the pacifists’ fears of another war in which the primary beneficiaries would be bankers and munitions makers,

while being deeply concerned with preventing a war of intervention against

17

18

The Strangest Dream

the Soviet Union. The latter concern came to the fore as Fascist aggression increased. With the onset of the Spanish civil war, Communists moved toward a position of collective security, implying the need for mutual armed action against aggressors, and antifascism overwhelmed peace as a major goal. The Communists were not alone in making this shift. For many people, pacifism was a temporary stage based in large part upon the disenchantment engendered by World War I, a stage that they abandoned in the face of Fascist aggression. Even Albert Einstein, who had been an outspoken opponent of war for nearly twenty years, renounced his pacifism after being forced into exile from Nazi Germany in 1933. In the United States, as elsewhere, the isola-

tionism of the early 1930s gave way to a general belief in the need for collective security in the face of German and Japanese aggression and in response particularly to the Spanish civil war. When Franco’s forces attacked the elected Republican government of Spain, they received active military support from the Fascist powers, while the United States and other Western democracies pledged “nonintervention.” Nearly three thousand Americans responded by volunteering to fight in Spain, putting their lives on the line to defend the Spanish Loyalists (as those loyal to the Spanish Republic were called). One of these volunteers was Hank Rubin, then a college student in Los An-

geles who was left leaning but had no political affiliations. His impulse, like many other young men, was to volunteer to fight on the side of the Republic. Supported by “youthful arrogance” and “heroic fantasies,” Rubin went to fight in Spain, a decision he has never regretted. “To support what I believed, to combat forces that stood for everything I considered evil, being able to put myself at risk for other than myself, was, and is, a source of great personal pride.” About one-third of the American volunteers died in Spain, and others faced problems later because of what the government labeled their “premature anti-fascist” stance, but they risked their lives because “there was a sense abroad that the world . . . could be different, that there could be less pain, less poverty. Despair and hope lived side by side.”? The Spanish civil war generated great uneasiness for pacifists because they were also emotionally committed to the Loyalists. Many pacifists and others who opposed fascism were forced to rethink their position on neutrality, nonintervention, and violence because of the brutal aggression of Franco and his Fascist allies in Spain. Even Norman Thomas temporarily abandoned the pacifist stance that had led him into the Socialist Party (SP) nearly twenty years earlier. Thomas so strongly believed that Franco had to be defeated and

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

19

Spanish democracy defended that he appealed to President Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo and helped organize a volunteer battalion of Americans to fight in Spain. If Communists were not alone in abandoning peace for antifascism, their

change in line still offended their allies because of the manner in which it took place —with little concern for democratic process or the fate of organizations. One feature of the Popular Front that contributed to the Communists’ undoing was the fact that they were not open about their loyalties. They were “progressive” just like everyone else involved— until there was a conflict between the organization’s outlook and the Communist Party line. The Communists’ shift back to emphasizing peace in order to defend the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 led to the collapse of the united-front organizations that they had contributed so much to building. By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and Communists dropped their isolationism for interventionism once again, it hardly mattered because they had already discredited themselves so thoroughly by their previous abrupt changes in line. ‘ Former allies were simply confirmed in their feeling that Communists could not be trusted, that they would continue to march in step with the Soviet Union’s leadership on foreign policy issues. Throughout the 1930s, Communists were the dominant group on the Left,

and they played an important role in the peace movement, corresponding to their influence on labor and civil rights issues. Their role in the American League Against War and Fascism and in the American Student Union is instructive, demonstrating both the strengths and the weaknesses of 1930s com-

munism and foreshadowing some of the problems Communists would face in the post-World War II peace movement. They were not alone in using manipulative tactics, but their consistent and disciplined use of such tactics to control organizations explains much of the lingering bitterness of their former allies. It was no secret that the Communist Party was the driving force behind the American League Against War and Fascism. The organization’s point of view was set forth in the “Manifesto and Program of the American League Against War and Fascism,” adopted in the fall of 1933. The league warned against the danger of a new imperialist war, especially the danger of a war of intervention against the Soviet Union. It blamed the war danger on “monopolistic capitalism,” arguing that it was only in the Soviet Union that this basic cause of war had been removed. Because there were no classes or groups in the Soviet Union that could benefit from war or war preparations, that country stood

20

The Strangest Dream

alone in pursuing a vigorous policy of peace and disarmament. “Serious struggle against war,” stated the manifesto, “involves rallying all forces around this peace policy and opposing all attempts to weaken or destroy the Soviet Union.” Liberals, pacifists, and Socialists had no quarrel with the “Communist Party line” at this point. The ALWEF had prominent non-Communists Gncieiing American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] founder Roger Baldwin and Teachers College professor George Counts) as well as Communists (including CP general secretary Earl Browder) in its leadership. Among those who addressed the founding convention of the league were FOR member Devere Allen, who edited the pacifist World Tomorrow; NAACP field secretary William Pickens; A. J. Muste, then head of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action; Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary; and Earl Browder. One of the league’s sponsors was the League for Industrial Democracy, led by Norman Thomas. The FOR refused to affiliate as an organization, but many individual members joined. In addition, the league attracted the support of many religious leaders and organizations. The ALWF promoted activities such as calling for a halt on the sale of war materials to Japan, assisting the Spanish Republic, and opposing antidemocratic legislative investigations, while it worked to bring together trade unionists with members of the middle-class peace movement.

According to Roger Baldwin, who served on the ALWF board, cooperation between various forces on the Left turned the league into the most powerful united-front organization of the decade. “Considering the diversity of the leadership and constituency, it was remarkable that the league had so little internal controversy. On the whole, its activities all over the country strengthened the defense of civil liberties by propaganda, mass meetings, and protests.” But Baldwin overstates his case that all tensions between Communists and liberals were successfully resolved. Just a few months after the league’s founding, for example, James Humphrey Sheldon severed his relationship with the Boston and Massachusetts committees of the ALWE, which he had been serving as vice-chairman, explaining that the result of Communist control of the organization was such that I now find myself, through literature issued over the League’s name, announcedly endorsing positions which never came formally before the committee, and in which I do not at all believe. I cannot sign such an intellectual blank check, and refuse to ask others to do so.

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement a

21

I repeat that it is with considerable chagrin that I have found it necessary to take my present position, and I take it only after careful and searching consideration. I cannot keep faith with the peace movement in which I have been so long interested, and at the same time continue my affiliations with the American League Against War and Fascism.°

Sheldon recommended that others disaffiliate from the league as well, stating that he had spoken with colleagues known for their longtime devotion to the cause of peace and that he was “far from alone in reaching this conclusion.”6 Yet, the league continued, even after the Socialists withdrew in 1934 in protest against the Communists. In February 1934 Socialists in Austria were

attacked by armed Fascists. The Socialist Party in the United States held a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden to show support for the Austrian Socialists, a meeting that was broken up by Communists. Although some observers thought the Socialists shared the blame for the fracas that developed, this act was clearly outrageous and sectarian. After the incident, SP leader Norman Thomas, who had been calling for a united front out of necessity,

- began to argue that it was impossible to work with Communists, a position he would not veer from in the future. Although the 1934 meeting was an important turning point for Thomas, the ALWF continued to grow under the chairmanship of Dr. Harry FE. Ward, chairman of the ACLU. In 1937, the name changed to the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD), as staunch anti-Fascists concerned about

Spain began to change their position on intervention and war. Liberals and Communists continued to work together, until Joseph Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. The pact looked like a cover for

Soviet aggression, as the Red Army invaded Finland a few months later. The league eventually issued a statement condemning the Soviet invasion of Finland, but it was “a decision . . . reached only through liberal sweat and communist

tears,” in Roger Baldwin’s words, and the ALPD

died shortly

thereafter.’ The experience of the American Student Union was similar to that of the ALWE. Formed in 1935 by young radicals with no experience of the Socialist-

Communist feuds that plagued the American Left in the 1920s and early 19308, it offered the best chance for cooperation between Communists and Socialists. Here were young radicals determined to avoid the kind of sectarianism that had left German radicals too divided to oppose Hitler’s rise to power effectively. Indeed, the young Communists and Socialists who came

22

The Strangest Dream

together to form the ASU viewed its creation as “a great landmark in leftwing political life.”® The ASU’s early success, like that of the ALWF, depended on a consensus about the world situation and about policy that was shared by Communists, Socialists, pacifists, and liberals. Young people were especially concerned about war, and everyone involved made compromises for the sake of unity in the early years of the organization. For example, the American version of the Oxford Pledge was changed to a nonpacifist statement, a refusal

“to support the government of the United States in any war it may conduct” rather than a rejection of war in general. This change was made to please the Communists, who then took the lead in organizing massive antiwar strikes on college campuses. These strikes reached their peak in 1936, when more than three hundred thousand students boycotted classes in order to voice their sentiments against war. The consensus around the importance of keeping the United States out of war temporarily overshadowed the conflicts that lurked beneath the surface of the American Student Union. Communists and Socialists who dominated the leadership of the organization retained their allegiance to their own youth groups, the Young Communist League (YCL) and the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) respectively, but they were careful to fight out their differences behind the scenes. Although this may have been politically effective, it was morally questionable. Even those ASU leaders whose approach to student organizing was nonsectarian were not above participating in some of the duplicitous features of the Old Left political style. Thus, for example, Joseph Lash, who edited the ASU paper, Student Advocate, kept sectarian conflicts out of its pages even when such disputes had significant consequences for the organization. This act laid the groundwork for the sort of disillusionment and betrayal that some ASU members felt when they discovered how much the organization depended upon YCL and YPSL cooperation and leadership.° With the onset of the Spanish civil war, the student movement began to move from isolationism to a position of advocating collective security and anti-Fascist interventionism. The war brought home to many students the danger posed by international fascism and the shortcomings of American neutrality; the effect of the U.S. embargo on Spain was far from neutral, as Hitler and Mussolini armed the Spanish Fascists. Still, the transition, led by the Communists in the ASU, was not an easy one. It meant dropping the lessons of World War I that had inspired the student peace movement in the first place. For the Communists, it also meant defeating the YPSL’s continued op-

position to collective security (Socialists clung to their view of the United States as imperialistic and militaristic, and therefore a threat to world peace)

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

23

and alienating the absolute pacifists (vocal, if small in number) who continued to support a principled U.S. neutrality. Communist manipulation of the selection of delegates to the 1937 ASU

convention ensured a strong vote for collective security and the dropping of the Oxford Pledge from the ASU program. But the collective security position would have carried the convention in any case, so strong was the sense that something had to be done to halt Fascist aggression. This sentiment had been strongly reinforced by the ASU’s own anti-Fascist agitation, by the deaths of American students fighting in Spain, and by President Roosevelt’s October 1937 speech calling for a “quarantine” of aggressive nations. By the fall of 1937 most ASU activists were prepared to reject the Oxford Pledge and U.S. neutrality, because the pacifist and Socialist groups that still opposed collective security appeared to lack any realistic strategy for confronting the Fascist threat. In spite of the continued efforts of a dissident minority within the ASU, including factional plotting and spying on the part of some ASU staff members, the majority of student demonstrators in 1938 supported the doc. trine of collective security.1° Paralleling the fate of the ALWF/ALPD, the irreconcilable differences over foreign policy that had begun to undermine the ASU brought disaster in 1939 when Communist student leaders championed the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland and forced the ASU to support Soviet foreign policy. Communist maneuvers shattered the liberal-radical coalition on which the student movement had been built, leaving a legacy that would haunt all sides in the postwar years. As the significance of the Nazi-Soviet pact became clear, Communists returned to isolationism and denounced those who opposed their position as “warmongers.” Relative to their numbers in the ASU, Communists had always been overrepresented at conventions and in the leadership because they were highly motivated and willing to do the day-to-day organizational work. They organized more intensively than usual before the 1939 ASU convention because

they feared that an anti-Soviet war hysteria was taking hold in the United States in response to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Though they succeeded in voting down a resolution opposing the Soviet invasion of Finland, they did so at great cost. The ASU, clearly following the

Communist Party line, had destroyed its reputation. The Communists’ willingness to subordinate the interests of the student movement to those of the Soviet Union came as a shock to many nonCommunists precisely because the Communists had contributed so much to the student movement in the years prior to the Nazi-Soviet pact. Never-

24

The Strangest Dream

theless, the die was cast. As YCL leader Gil Green told a caucus of Communists in the American Student Union, their faith in the CP’s position on the

Nazi-Soviet pact meant that they would fight to establish that position in the ASU “irrespective of the consequences for the ASU.”!! It was precisely this position that turned former allies of the Communists into enemies. For example, in 1939 ASU leader Joseph P. Lash had stood for an inclusive peace movement and, when called before the House Committee on Un-American

Activities (known then as the Dies Committee), had praised the Communists for helping to build the student peace movement. By the fall of 1940, however, when Lash took over the leadership of the International Student Service, he had decided that Communists were unreliable allies who should be excluded from peace organizations. By that time, established peace organizations had already begun to question their links with Communists, concerned with the Communists’ methods and fearful of being victims of guilt by association. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom experienced much internal controversy over its association with the American League Against War and Fascism, as local boards protested the national board’s endorsement of the league. Some of the women feared being labeled “communist” because of the WILPF’s association with the ALWF, and the New York state branch, in particular, was convinced that “Communists” and “ex-American Leaguers” were trying to take over. In 1940 the New York state board passed a resolution “that all applications for membership should be accompanied by a signed blank indicating that the member has read and agrees with the principles of the W.I.L. including opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, whether Nazi, Communist, Fascist, or Militarist.” That same year both the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Civil Liberties Union approved policies that excluded Communists. A group of liberals in the ACLU protested their organization’s “purge resolution,” arguing that it was incompatible with ACLU principles and that “{i]t sets an example less liberal organizations will not be slow to imitate.”!2

The arguments within the WILPF and the ACLU foreshadowed the more intense internal struggles these organizations—and others—would undergo during the McCarthy era and beyond. The determination to keep Communists out of the postwar peace movement cannot be understood without reference to the 1930s. Many liberals, So-

cialists, and pacifists who had joined Popular Front organizations counting on everyone concerned to act in good faith vowed that they would never again trust or work with Communists. It is worth emphasizing once more

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

25

the extent to which there was political agreement among Communists and liberals in the late 1930s —all were part of one big “progressive” movement. James Wechsler, at the time a member of the Young Communist League who participated in the Communist takeover of the American Youth Congress (AYC) —an umbrella organization of youth groups— argues that it was easy for Communists to impersonate liberals because there was such a coincidence in those years between Communist proposals and what many other Americans independently believed. The split between Communists and others on the Left had less to do with issues than with style and tactics. Wechsler also provides some insight into the motivation and outlook of young Communists who viewed “infiltration” and domination in a different light than did their liberal allies. He explains that although the Communist takeover of the AYC “seems a cold and bloodless revolution in retrospect,

most of us viewed it then as an inspiring achievement in the world-wide fight against creeping fascism. We did not think of ourselves as communist ‘infiltrators’ stealthily invading someone else’s property. .. . Our coup, we were ‘ certain, had halted fascism on its own five-yard line.”!3 In the postwar period, however, Wechsler took a hard line against working with Communists. A member of the American Friends Service Committee put into perspective the issue of Communists’ role in the peace movement in a prescient letter commenting on a 1936 document that spelled out Communist domination of

the ALWF. The letter agreed that the author of the document made a strong case for believing that Communists dominated the ALWF and for doubting that the Communists were as much interested in peace as they were in defending the Soviet Union. At the same time, he pointed out that the document did not explain why there were Communists in this country, accepted uncritically the idea that they posed a threat, and, perhaps most important, did not treat Communists as people; they seemed to have no feelings and motives common to other human beings.!4 The latter view was prominent in the postwar period, when many people who shared the Communists’ concerns about peace, civil liberties, and civil

rights issues refused to work with them, considering them “something not encountered before in human experience—a considerable body of persons ignorant, frustrated, defeated and thus beset by complexes of inferiority and envy who will resort to every trick, practice every deceit, do any evil as a means to their misbegotten ends and all without a trace of compunction.”!5 John Haynes Holmes wrote those words in 1950. A longtime peace activist and civil libertarian, Holmes had resigned from the advisory board of the

26

The Strangest Dream

ALPD in 1938 and from then on refused to participate in any effort that involved Communists, even in cases of blatant violations of civil liberties, such as the indictment of W. E. B. Du Bois in 1950 for distributing the Stockholm

Peace Petition (see chapter 4). Holmes played a central role in purging Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an open Communist, from the ACLU board in 1940. Roger Baldwin was also disillusioned by his experience in united-front

organizations. Baldwin says he was so shocked by the Nazi-Soviet pact, the most traumatic political experience of his life, that he “became as outspoken an anticommunist as I had been an outspoken antifascist,” and never again took part in any united front in which Communists figured.!¢ John Swomley, New England FOR secretary, was chairman of the Greater Boston Strike Against War Committee in the late 1930s, which included So-

cialists, pacifists, and Communists. After the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed and the CP line changed, a few hundred Communists tried to break up a big Strike Against War rally on the Boston Common. The police prevented the Communists from breaking up the rally, but Swomley never forgot the incident. It led him to conclude that the Communists were unreliable allies, that “changes in the Party line destroyed united fronts and sometimes precipitated violence or the betraying of legitimate peace activity.” Swomley became a leading anti-Communist voice in the postwar peace movement.!” So did Norman Thomas, who was convinced by the breakup of the Socialist meeting in 1934 that Communists had no genuine concern for the civil lib-

erties of others. This position was confirmed for him by the CP’s attempts to silence him during World War II (when they supported the war far more vigorously than he did). Thomas played an important role in purging Communists from the leadership of the ACLU in 1940 and was prominent among those who worked to keep peace and civil liberties organizations free of Communist influence in the postwar period. Communists alienated one more powerful ally just before World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady had supported the young people in the American Youth Congress, including defending them against charges that they were Communists. When Communists drove liberal students from the American Youth Congress in 1939-1940 by using AYC resources to promote strict U.S. neutrality, even though the AYC in fact had endorsed American aid

to victims of Nazi aggression, and by giving the impression that the AYC opposed U.S. aid to Finland when such a position had never been approved by the rank and file, Eleanor Roosevelt realized that the young Communists had deceived her. They had lied about their affiliations and about their plans for a

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

27

Citizenship Institute in Washington (held in February 1940), which turned into an antiadministration event due to President Roosevelt’s defense of American aid to Finland. Eleanor Roosevelt parted company from the young people in the AYC because she felt she could not trust them. She later wrote that she was grateful for the experience, however, and that her work with the American Youth Con-

gress served as valuable preparation for understanding some of the tactics she met in the United Nations.!8 More to the point, she kept her distance from Communists, even when she shared their concerns (about peace, civil rights, and civil liberties), in the postwar era. The consensus that Communists had destroyed the 1930s peace movement

was based mainly upon charges of Communist secrecy and duplicity. Communists had used whatever means it took to force peace organizations to follow the party line. When push came to shove, their first concern was defense of the Soviet Union. The concerns of particular organizations, and the adherence to any consensus achieved within those organizations, came second. Although the duplicity and manipulative tactics of the Communists are indefensible, it is important to point out that Communists had good reasons to hide their political affiliations. Even when the CP was at its height of membership and influence in the 1930s and early 1940s, anticommunism remained

a strong political force in the United States. The House Un-American Activities Committee, formed in 1938, devoted much of its energy to searching out Communists; the AYC was among those organizations subject to its investigations. Conservative and liberal anti-Communists launched a national red scare in 1940 and 1941, seizing on the vulnerability of the Communists and in-

stituting a series of legislative probes, loyalty oath campaigns, and moves to restrict free speech rights for Communists — mechanisms that would see further use in the postwar period. In response to the efforts of powerful people to limit their civil liberties, as well as in response to their own experience (in the ASU, as well as other organizations), many Communists became convinced that they had to hide their affiliations in order to be politically effective. This strategy proved costly in the long run, no matter what the issue or organization. Yet, one must note that many open Communists fared no better; they were still kicked out of the labor movement and civil rights, civil liberties, and peace organizations. In some ways, Communists faced an unresolvable dilemma. In light of the concerns of 1950s peace organizations with “infiltration and attack,” it is worth noting that the decline of Popular Front organizations such as the ASU and

28

The Strangest Dream

the AYC was due not only to Communist intrigue but also to external forces working to expose Communists and restrict their constitutional rights. Moreover, there was-some hypocrisy on the part of those who condemned Communist machinations, because Socialists and civil libertarians were not

above using the same tactics. Roger Baldwin says that he and others used “their tactics” in trying to maintain control over the North American Committee for Spanish Democracy. Socialists in the American Student Union used underhanded

means

to defend their position, and some

observers

thought the Socialists were as much to blame as the Communists for the 1934 riot at Madison Square Garden, where most of the injured were in fact Communists. A. J. Muste’s recognition of and aversion to sectarian tactics came from his experience at using them in the Workers Party in the 1930s.!° Attempting to dominate organizations, pack meetings, and promote a party line were elements of an Old Left style that went beyond the Communists. Perhaps some of the bitterness was not just a response to the weakening or de-

struction of particular organizations but also a result of losing the battles over the correct line.?° Pacifists could also be sectarian. By the late 1930s pacifism had declined rapidly, and a split had developed between the main body of American pacifism (represented by the Fellowship of Reconciliation) and the Communistled wing of the peace movement. These developments were due not entirely to Communist machinations but also to the rigidity of the pacifist position itself.2! In 1934 Reinhold Niebuhr left the FOR, criticizing its “ethical perfectionism,’ by which he meant its disavowal of any form of coercion. This position, argued Niebuhr, only revealed “the failure of liberal Protestantism to recognize the coercive character of political and economic life.”?? Christian Marxists needed something more than pacifism, according to Niebuhr; although he recognized the inevitability of conflict, he was more concerned about

fighting the social struggle without hatred than without violence. Though there were successful examples of nonviolent resistance to fascism in Europe,

to most Americans pacifism seemed an unrealistic, if not irresponsible, approach to the deepening world crisis. In that sense, one can make a good case that the most important factor in the peace movement’s demise was neither communism nor anticommunism,

but World War II. By the mid-1930s many people viewed the international scene with trepidation, believing the choice was between fascism and war. By the time the United States entered the war, the overwhelming majority of the

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

29

American public believed the war against Fascist aggression had to be fought out of principle. With or without the Communist Party, the peace movement would have been extremely isolated during World War II. As Leon Wofsy expresses it, “[T]he history of the [Communist] Party has to be looked at in the context of what was happening in the world. Sometimes we approached issues and problems in ways that were positive and effective under the circumstances, and often in ways that were questionable or self-defeating. But still, mistakes of the Communist Party are hardly the essence of the history of political developments in the United States in the 20th century.”23 Wofsy, however, is speaking from a vantage point of decades later. Communists lacked this perspective at the time; indeed, what had attracted many f them to the movement in the first place was the sense of seriousness and self-importance of the Communists. What they did mattered; history was on their side. Former Communists now recognize the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact as a turning point in their relationship with the American public. Even those party members who still believe Stalin was justified because of the determined policy on the part of the West to deflect Hitler to the East have trouble defending the way that the American CP changed its tune in order to defend Soviet policy. As Wofsy explains, the CP’s “main contribution had been that it was way, way out front in the fight against Hitlerism, and then all of a sudden,

there was this period in which the tendency was to say this is just an imperialist war and no side is better than the other.” Dorothy Healey says dryly that the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact “was not the happiest, most glorious moment of Communist history.”4 But, again, these views are retrospective. American Communists in fact seemed to have learned little from their experience in the 1930s and 1940s. Of

course, the pact period was uncomfortable for many of them. As Bob Lees says, “To be for peace then alienated many of my liberal friends and put the radicals in the same bed as the America Firsters. .. . A lumpy bed to say the least!”25 And it had become clear that working for peace could have serious consequences in one’s personal life. Amy Swerdlow was told she would never go to college because of her participation in the Oxford-oath peace strikes, and Marge Frantz lost her scholarship from Radcliffe in 1940.° But Frantz, Wofsy, Healey, Gil Green, and thousands of others did not leave the CP, and

continued to believe, and act upon the belief, that defense of the Soviet Union came first. Their definition of peace began there. If secrecy about Communist affiliations is understandable up to a point,

30

The Strangest Dream

the Communists’ shift in line is also somewhat understandable as a response to the changing international situation. The war in Spain had a great impact on a lot of people, not just Communists, though as with other issues they were the most willing to take action. Changing one’s position in regard to particular issues, even in a peace movement, is also. defensible on some level, and the YCL faction had a right to defend its position in the ASU. But its lack of respect for the integrity of the organization, and its tactics—lies, manipulation, and ignoring decisions that had already been made— cannot be justified. Still, in retrospect it was the source of the changes in the Communist line, that is, Soviet policy, and the means by which these changes took effect —with little discussion and debate—that trouble former Communists the most. One keeps coming back to the Communists’ uncritical view of the Soviet Union, their concern with defending the Soviet Union at all costs, and

their following a line handed down by others in a movement sorely lacking in internal democracy. We must conclude that Communists in the peace movement gave people good reason to be suspicious of their motives, loyalties, and tactics. Their duplicity and their overarching loyalty to the Soviet Union would be unforgivably held against them. Thus, the experience of the 1930s peace movement set the stage for the exclusion of Communists from peace organizations during the cold war. Despite the contributions that the Communists had made, despite the fact that others used similar tactics, and despite the impact of international events, the

Communists found themselves discredited as reliable allies. Whether or not Communist actions were the primary reason for the peace movement’s demise—and it is hard to believe that they were—influential people believed that they were and acted accordingly. Based on their experiences in the 1930s, prominent pacifists and civil libertarians, including Norman Thomas, John Haynes Holmes, A. J. Muste, John Swomley, Roger Baldwin, and many others,

would refuse to work with Communists after the war, and set out to convince others to steer clear of them as well. In the postwar period Communists were no longer in the position to dominate organizations as they had been in the 1930s. Yet, to their former allies, turned implacable foes, none of this mattered. The consensus that Commu-

nists had wrecked the peace organizations of the 1930s, spread by some powerful figures in the postwar peace movement, guaranteed that Communists would be isolated in their attempts to challenge the cold war. As noted above, by 1940 a number of organizations— the FOR, the ACLU,

Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

31

and the New York WILPF—had taken measures to exclude Communists. These groups would be joined by a host of others in the postwar era who used the anti-Communist statements of such organizations as models for their own exclusionary policies. In addition, official anti-Communist attacks would mount, as a result of which peace organizations began looking for ways not only to prevent Communist “infiltration” and domination but also to prevent red-baiting and other anti-Communist attacks from without. It therefore became important not only to keep Communists out but to avoid the appearance of having anything to do with communism, either past or present, as well. In the years following World War II, peace became the central issue for American Communists, though it remained tightly linked to other issues, such as labor, civil rights, and civil liberties. But as the cold war took hold, few

people considered the Communists’ talk of peace sincere. Liberals, pacifists, and Socialists refused to work with them on peace issues, and many joined the attacks on their “peace” efforts. Thus, Communists faced an uphill battle convincing anyone they were truly concerned about peace. Their sort of “peace” became associated with the notion of appeasing the Soviet Union in the same sense that Neville Chamberlain had been accused of precipitating World War II by “appeasing” Hitler.

“Friendly Henry Wallace” The Progressive Party Loses the “Fight for Peace”

We want Henry Wallace, friendly Henry Wallace Let’s put friendly Henry in the White House. —Yip Harburg, 1948 campaign song

he peace movement collapsed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as criticism of war became un-American and arguably treasonous. But why did grassroots peace activism continue to be viewed as subversive even after World War II? One explanation is that as the cold war set in, the causes of “peace” and “freedom” broke apart—with the East claiming peace and the West claiming freedom. In the global battle against communism, U.S. policies such as intervening in other countries to keep Communists out of power and working to keep a monopoly on the atomic bomb were justified in the name of “freedom.” The Soviet Union claimed to stand for “peace” in the face of such policies, which the Communists interpreted as U.S. preparations for war. Keeping tight control over the “people’s democracies” in Eastern Europe, blockading Berlin, and building its own atomic weapons were from the Soviet point of view “peace” policies. Clearly, the claims to peace and freedom were hypocritical in many ways, but there was a grain of truth in each as well. In any case, those who worked for freedom in the East were suspect as agents of Western imperialism, while those who worked for peace in the West were suspect as pro-Soviet fellow travelers or “dupes” of the Kremlin.! Thus, the split between peace and freedom had serious consequences on the domestic front. It was not only Europeans who felt forced to choose between the “peace” promoted by the Soviet Union and the “freedom” promised by the United States. American citizens had to make a similar choice, and by 1948, when “friendly Henry Wallace” campaigned for the White House, the

32

Progressive Party and Fight for Peace

33

choice seemed clear to most people. The 1948 presidential campaign pitted the cold war view that freedom depended on containing communism against the view represented by Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party that peaceful coexistence was both necessary and possible. It was the Wallace campaign, and the reactions to it, that cinched the link between peace and communism

and led to the drastic decline of both the peace movement and the Communist movement. But the linking of peace with Communist interests was not a foregone conclusion at the end of World War II, when most Americans viewed the So-

viet Union as a worthy ally who had fought bravely and suffered unimaginable hardship in stopping Hitler’s expansion, and when the CPUSA was at its peak of popularity. For a brief period after the war, liberals and pacifists shared with Communists an optimistic view of the future, hoping for a lasting peace based on U.S.-Soviet cooperation, which would also allow for the building of a more just and prosperous world. These hopes were dashed within a few short years as the cold war took hold and a very different view of peace and freedom—centered on anticommunism and military preparedness — became dominant, making dissenting views by definition subversive. American Communists experienced great discomfort and isolation during the Nazi-Soviet pact period as they abruptly shifted from a focus on collective security to an antiwar stance. The American Peace Mobilization attracted little support; neither did the American People’s Mobilization that succeeded it after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in August 1941 and the Communist line shifted again. But when the United States entered the war in December,

Communists became fervent and vocal supporters of U.S. participation in the war. Many of the “premature anti-fascists” who had defied U.S. government policy to fight in the Spanish civil war now enlisted to fight the Nazis. On the home front Communists promoted FDR’s policies, including conscription and labor’s no-strike pledge. Their prowar stance enabled them to regain much of the influence they had lost during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Many of them commented later on how good it felt to overcome their isolation. In contrast to the pacifist view that the World War II era was a time of totalitarianism even at home, Communists viewed it as an expansive time, for their movement and for themselves as individuals. Leon Wofsy captures the feeling: “I was always ... much more spirited in periods when we were moving outward rather than in periods when we were shifting sharply to the left to correct ‘revisionism.”? It is highly significant that the periods of the Communists’ greatest

34

The Strangest Dream

strength were times when they were in accord with basic policies of the U.S. government and when the public held the Soviet Union in high esteem. The relative tolerance of communism —foreign and domestic—reached its peak during World War II as the Soviets made great sacrifices to fight the Nazis, and as the American Communist Party made contributing to the war effort its highest priority. In 1943 Life magazine published a special issue devoted entirely to acquainting the American public with the USSR. With Joseph Stalin’s picture on the cover, the magazine included sections such as “Peoples of the U.S.S.R.,” “Collective Farms Feed the Nation,” and “Russians Like Athletics.” Life as-

sured its readers that “to a remarkable degree,” the Russian people “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans,” and that Russian leaders were “tough, loyal, capable administrators.” Although Life acknowledged that there were some differences between Russians and Americans, the point of the special issue was to encourage “popular sympathy and understanding.” Thus, one section proclaimed

that the Russians

could not be

judged “by values that are the product of our Western history.” In regard to free speech, for example, the magazine offered this advice: “They live under a system of tight state-controlled information. But probably the attitude to take toward this is not to get too excited about it. When we take account of what the U.S.S.R. has accomplished in the 20 years of its existence we can make allowances for certain shortcomings, however deplorable.”? The mainstream press would treat this subject very differently a few years later, emphasizing the differences between the Soviet and American systems and painting scenarios of nuclear war between the two superpowers. Not long after Life magazine published its “Special Issue U.S.S.R.,” the Communist Party, U.S.A., dissolved to become the Communist Political Association (CPA), with explicit support for the institutions of American democracy. Those American Communists who had accepted with enthusiasm Earl Browder’s

slogan in the 1930s—“Communism

is twentieth century

Americanism” — now envisaged communism in the United States as “the fulfillment of democracy on every front.” In 1944 the Communists supported FDR’s reelection to an unprecedented fourth term. They did not even object to Harry S. Truman’s replacing the more liberal Henry Wallace as vice-presidential candidate. CPA chairman Earl Browder looked forward to a postwar period of continued cooperation, not only between Communists and Democrats but

also between the United States and the Soviet Union. Browder’s optimism was shared by others on the Left: “There was a hope in 1945 that there really would be one world.”5

Progressive Party and Fight for Peace

35

Browder and the Popular Front Communists were to be sorely disappointed. By the spring of 1945 international Communist leaders had decided

that Browder’s vision of postwar cooperation was dangerous revisionism. (Browder had suggested during the war that American capitalism had progressive tendencies, and in a 1942 speech had even offered to shake hands with financier J. P. Morgan.) Within a few months, responding to a signal from

Moscow, American Communists had reconstituted their party, chosen a new leadership, and begun to develop a new line. “Browderism” became an epithet—and grounds for expulsion from the CP —as William Z. Foster led the party into an urgent, apocalyptic battle against what Communists now saw as the reactionary, imperialist warmongers of American capitalism. Stalin’s rhetoric became more ideologically charged, as he determined to hold on to his sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and the creation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in 1947 was interpreted by some observers to

mean that Communists believed it was time to step up their attempts to take power in Western Europe.® Following the lead of the Soviet Union —as always —the CPUSA adopted a hard line. Not coincidentally, it also began a decline from which it never recovered. As the cold war took hold, the Communists’ apocalyptic view of the world contributed significantly to their isolation. In contrast to the Browder years, Communists were now expected to maintain an independent political line, centered on the idea that U.S. imperialism posed the greatest threat to world peace. Convinced that it was “5 minutes to midnight” — that the United States was turning to fascism at home and preparing for war against the Soviet Union—the CPUSA made plans to send its leadership underground and to purge itself of untrustworthy elements. Yet, American Communists still hoped to work on a broad front; indeed, their constant refrain was to go where “the people” were, to work in and with their organizations, from church groups to PTAs. Attempts to build united fronts with non-Communists while adhering to a hard line failed miserably. FDR died in April 1945; within a year Communist support for Harry Truman turned to opposition. Even as they celebrated the Allied victory in World War II, Communists warned about the links between the atomic bomb and American fascism, which in their view increased the danger of another war.

“The atom bomb is the trump card in a world war for American empire,” proclaimed Mike Gold in the Daily Worker. The only reasonable defense, Gold argued, was a strengthened United Nations and a disarmed world.’

When Truman approved of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 1946, in which Churchill called for an Anglo-American alliance against

36

The Strangest Dream

the Soviet Union, Communists accused the president of betraying Roosevelt's policies. (Many liberals also feared that those who sought war against the Soviet Union were about to get their way.) A return to “Big Three unity” — the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet

Union— became one major focus

of Communist agitation. Dorothy Healey explains how this slogan symbolizes the Communist outlook of that period: “In effect, without people... realizing it . . we were approving of the Big Three acting as the triumvirate that decided all jurisdiction for the world. It was a bad slogan, but it was the

slogan. Everything was subsumed within that. It was a very simple manner of thinking, that peace in the world depended upon U.S./Soviet/British peace and leadership.”® The Communists sometimes shifted from accusations that U.S. policies : threatened war to a more subtle argument that U.S. elites were using the threat of war to gain support for particular policies. In either case, the CP leadership argued that American imperialism was expansionist and interventionist. As the Truman administration instituted its “get tough with the Soviets” policy, the Communists placed more emphasis on peace as the overriding issue to which everything else should be linked, arguing that the Soviet Union was the most powerful force for world peace. Having reached these conclusions by the summer of 1946, CP leaders saw the Truman Doctrine, the Mar-

shall Plan, and anti-Communist legislation as part of the U.S. move toward war and fascism. In their eyes, the government and Wall Street were rebuilding Germany for the “next try” against the Soviet Union. The Daily Worker called instead for a return to FDR’s program for coexistence and cooperation with the Soviet Union and for a “revived FDR-laborprogressive alliance” to fight against domestic fascism. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities (by then a permanent committee) began sentencing to prison those people who refused to cooperate with its investigations, it only confirmed to the Communists that the methods of fascism were already being used at home: “Witch hunts, Book burnings, Thought control.” From the Communist point of view, it was the highest form of patriotism to defy this creeping fascism and speak out for peace.° Although it is tempting to argue that the Communists simply deluded themselves and therefore were responsible for their own demise, the story is not so simple. For one thing, it was not only Communists but also Popular Front liberals who had high hopes for the postwar world. Liberals expected the anti-Fascist alliance to continue; the United States and the Soviet Union would work together to end colonialism, with America in particular promot-

Progressive Party and Fight for Peace

37

ing economic development and democratization around the world. The hopes of liberals were dashed along with the Communists’ as the U.S. government appeared to take a more reactionary stance than they had expected, working with people in Germany who had been close to the Nazis, backing the right-wing monarchy in Greece, supporting the French with weapons in Indochina, and determining to maintain its monopoly on the atomic bomb. It was not only Communists who expressed concern that U.S. policies in the postwar period were promoting war and fascism. One person wrote to the president to tell him “what some of the common people think”: “The war talk from Washington which loads nearly all our press seems to me unnecessary terror to common folk and leads us to believe that diplomats and the military consider another war inevitable. Witness — the sinister story ‘If War Comes’ — in SATURDAY EVENING POST, Sept. 11, 1948 which must have been printed with the approval of Secretary [of Defense] Forrestal. This is a barbarous threat, which, if carried out, will ruin the world, and fulfill all predictions made by Russian Communists.”!° The writer urged the president to use reason instead ‘ of emotional hatred and violence. Another concerned citizen wrote the president in March 1947 to tell him

that he had been branded a Communist “by a number of supposedly patriotic citizens throughout this country, Republicans and would-be Democrats alike,” and that as a result he was being investigated by the Tenney Committee (the California Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities). The writer claimed that his only offense was that he was a “Roosevelt Democrat,”

and that he would continue to support candidates for office who would advance the policies set forth by FDR. But he was worried about his position and concerned that there was no redress for victims of witch-hunts, slander,

and name-calling: “If the hysteria now being spread by the Un-American Activities Committee, the Red-scare headlines and stories carried by the majority of our press and radio, the statement of our Secretary of Labor, Mr. Schwellenbach, that the Communist Party should be outlawed, and all the other witch-hunting activities that have been unleashed are permitted to develop, I shall inevitably be outlawed as a Roosevelt Democrat. It is a conclusion that is inescapable—and Hitler’s Germany stands as proof, if any is needed.”!! Liberals who were not already disillusioned with the Soviet Union faced disappointment with the U.S. wartime ally as well. Many liberals had admired the Soviets’ heroism during the war and sympathized with their need to rebuild after staggering losses, which included 20 million people and much of

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the country’s infrastructure. Convinced at first that the Soviets genuinely feared another war, liberalsslowly began to change their minds about the Soviet Union being a force for peace. Responding in part to the Soviets’ violations of wartime agreements and their determination to control neighboring countries such as Poland, liberals were also susceptible to propaganda that portrayed the Soviets as aggressors in other parts of the world—in Greece, China, and Korea— places where internal conditions were more responsible than Soviet intervention for Communist-led revolts. In any case, liberals would soon be forced to choose between East and West. The choice was affected by the existence of the atomic bomb, which led to a new position known as “nuclear pacifism,” the idea that peace was a necessity due to the existence of atomic weapons. Of course, the advent of many new weapons, from dynamite and the Gatling gun in the nineteenth century to poison gas and the machine gun in the twentieth, had convinced many people that war had finally become too horrible. for humanity to contemplate, but in each case they were proved wrong. Still, there was something qualitatively different about the atomic bomb. As Norman Cousins, the Saturday Re-

view editor who would play a central role in the founding of SANE in 1957,

expressed it, “Man’s survival on earth is now absolutely dependent on his ability to avoid a new war.”!? Cousins was among those critics who argued that the only way to avoid war was to form a world government that would have control over atomic weapons. World government was a popular proposal with support from many elites, from government officials to atomic scientists. It found organizational expression in the United World Federalists (UWF), formed in February 1947. But though the UWE criticized both U.S.

and Soviet foreign policies, it accepted the need for military deterrence, so that many of its supporters favored world government at the same time as they wanted the United States to stay ahead in the nuclear arms race. Thus did liberal optimism metamorphose into support for U.S. cold war policies. Communists and world federalists had no use for each other: Communists viewed world government as a foil for American imperialism and war against the Soviet Union, while world federalists accused the Communists of trying to make peace against the United States, which “amounts to wanting war.” In particular, there was no love lost between Norman Cousins and American Communists. But even so, the UWF was occasionally attacked as “Communist” during the McCarthy era.!3 Scientists who opposed further development and use of nuclear weapons faced similar sorts of attacks. As early as 1946 atomic scientist Harold Urey

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wrote that he and his colleagues were “in danger of being accused of being internationally minded and not loyal” and were “afraid of being accused of being Communists, or something of that sort.” In one agency a highly rated scientific employee was called to defend himself against charges stemming from an informant’s claim of May 1948 that he had heard the employee in conversation with others advocate the Communist Party line, “such as favoring peace and civil liberties when those subjects were being advocated by the Communist party.” Another informant refused to vouch for the employee, even though he had no specific information reflecting on the employee’s loyalty, because the “employee’s convictions concerning equal rights for all races and classes extend slightly beyond the normal feelings of the average individual” (emphasis in original).!4 The established peace movement became caught in the same sort of attacks and internal contradictions. Organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, for example, were anti-Communist but had a broad definition of peace. They were not simply against war; they promoted a “positive ‘ peace” based on social justice, which meant they were concerned with the military budget, nuclear testing, racial equality, and several other issues that came to be considered “communist” in the eyes of many Americans. Thus, they were susceptible to the same sorts of charges mentioned above: favoring peace and civil liberties, and having more than a “normal” concern for equal rights. But during the brief period of optimism that followed the war, before such attacks became commonplace, the peace movement— which had been extremely isolated — experienced a mild revival, and traditional pacifist organizations regained some prestige. Emily Greene Balch of the WILPF won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, and the American Friends Service Committee won it in 1947. The peace movement expanded into new areas: initiating tax resist-

ance, setting up cooperative communities, forming the Pacifica Foundation (a group of listener-sponsored, noncommercial radio stations), and participating in nonviolent actions against racial segregation led by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).!°

Yet, by 1948, the peace movement, along with the Communist movement, began a serious decline, and it remained relatively silent for a good part of the 1950s. Many pacifists who had opposed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan began to change their outlook as a result of Communist aggression in Eastern Europe. For instance, after the Communists came to power

in Czechoslovakia in 1948, crushing the democratic opposition, Norman

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Thomas began to support most of U.S. foreign policy; his brother, Evan Thomas, resigned from the War Resisters League. Journalist and former pacifist Dwight Macdonald became convinced that the best way to avoid war was for the West to “keep up its military strength and to be prepared to counter force with force.”!6 Philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr explained the dilemma presented by the containment policy in a 1948 article called “For Peace, We Must Risk War.”

Niebuhr acknowledged that the strategy for containing the Russians was morally ambiguous but that it was the only realistic way to achieve the high moral aim of peace. The West could no longer afford to be sentimental about the possibility of attaining mutual trust with the Russians. “One need only remember,” Niebuhr warned, “the hysterical protests against Churchill’s Fulton speech, the main outline of which has subsequently, by dire necessity, become the settled policy of the Western world, to recognize how recent is our conversion from the sentimental hopes of yesterday.” Neibuhr argued that the United States had to be ready to risk war rather than yield to Russian pressure. In his view only the continued preponderance of Western power could preserve peace.!” The Truman administration was committed to maintaining that preponderance of power. By January 1946 Truman was convinced that it was useless

to negotiate with Soviet leaders. His administration had decided by then to resist expansionist moves by the Soviets— even at the risk of war—to rebuild U.S. military forces, and to launch an ambitious program of economic assistance to nations threatened by communism. By the summer of 1946, senior officials in the Truman administration agreed, in Daniel Yergin’s words, that

“the United States was, in effect, at war with the Soviet Union, and should therefore adopt perspectives and policies appropriate to war.”!8 From then on, by definition any peace not based on military strength and the contain-

ment of communism was un-American. The new “national security” doctrine rested on these two ideas, military preparedness and anticommunism—in other words, being prepared to challenge communism anywhere in the world. Military preparedness required a renewed emphasis on technology and armed force, and a continuation of industry’s dependence on military production. This dependence, forged during wartime, provided the economic basis for what came to be called the militaryindustrial complex, as had been predicted by opponents of the cold war. The political rationale for a permanent arms race and expanding military budget rested on the threat of Soviet expansionism, based on a neat equation of com-

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munism with fascism and the supposed lessons of Munich, where concessions made to Hitler seemed to have only whetted his appetite. Having just fought a war to defeat a dictator with global ambitions, the U.S. government was understandably apprehensive about the emergence of another. From this point of view the 1930s peace movement and the appeasement of Hitler were bad memories that only heightened the sense of danger. But U.S. policy makers misunderstood the character of Soviet aggression. Stalin was more concerned with ensuring Russian security through spheres of influence than he was with spreading communism around the world. The assumption that the threat of communism—in

Greece, China, even Korea—

was created and manipulated by Joseph Stalin was inaccurate. If the national security doctrine rested on faulty assumptions, the antiCommunist crusade at home was mainly an attempt to steal the Republicans’ thunder rather than an expression of genuine concern. The Truman administration did not want to give the appearance of being soft on communism. Decades later Truman’s attorney general, Tom Clark, still asserted, “There

wasn't any softness on the part of the Truman Administration.”!9 Domestic anti-Communist measures were in part a means of gaining support for foreign policy. Thus, policy makers went out of their way to sell anticommunism to the public, beginning with destroying the view of the Soviet Union as a worthy ally. Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech pointed the way for American public opinion. A State Department report in February 1947 that found 70

percent of the public opposed to the “get tough with Russia policy” was followed in March by President Truman’s famous speech before Congress asking for $400 million to help Greece and Turkey win the battle against global communism. In his effort to “scare the hell” out of Congress, Truman carved out a new role for the United States in the postwar world, helping “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.” The expression “free peoples” had little to do with whether their governments were democratic or totalitarian; it meant they were anticommunist. Truman stated explicitly that the policy of containing communism was the way to peace: “The act authorizing United States assistance to Greece and Turkey, which I have just signed, is an important step in the building of the peace. Its passage by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of the Congress is proof that the United States earnestly desires peace and is willing to make a vigorous effort to help create conditions of peace.””°

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The Marshall Plan, which provided money to help Western Europe rebuild —with Germany at the center of this effort—was also part of the containment policy, because it would undermine leftist movements and keep Western Europe tied to the West. The plan was attacked vigorously by the Communists as an imperialist maneuver, “a cold-blooded scheme of American monopolists to establish their ruthless domination over harassed world humanity,” in the words of William Z. Foster.2! Communists were concerned that the Marshall Plan would threaten Soviet security because, among other things, it would guarantee the resurgence of Nazi Germany. But by President Truman’s definition, any policy that helped prevent the spread of communism was a peace policy. Fortune magazine summed up the new outlook, stating without irony: “The only way to avoid having American policy dominated by crisis is to live in crisis— prepared for war.22 That the American government and public seemed to have accepted this prescription was evident in the talk of war that prevailed in 1948. Top government officials suggested that war could break out at any time, the FBI compiled a report concerned with the role of American Communists in the event of war, and at least one survey revealed growing public sentiment for a preventive atomic strike against the Soviet Union.” The events of 1948-1949 seemed to only confirm the growing consensus that national security depended on military preparedness and vigilant anticommunism: the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade,

the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the success of the Communist revolution in China, the trial of Alger Hiss, and the Smith Act trials of the top leaders of the CPUSA. Harvard history professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ar-

ticulated the cold war consensus in The Vital Center, arguing that living in a permanent state of crisis was the only way to defend freedom: “Free society and totalitarianism today struggle for the minds and hearts of men... . If we believe in free society hard enough to keep on fighting for it, we are pledged to a permanent crisis which will test the moral, political and very possibly the military strength of each side. ... We must recognize that this is the nature of our age: that the womb has closed irrevocably behind us .. . that crisis will always be with us.” Whereas in 1945 the majority of Americans had been optimistic about the possibilities of accommodation with the Soviet Union, and about the role of the United Nations in preserving peace, by the 1950s most distrusted the Soviet Union and believed security was a matter of military strength.*4

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At times the rhetoric of the Truman administration was barely distinguishable from Communist rhetoric, as both linked peace with social justice. For Communists, peace was part of a broad struggle to liberate humanity from imperialism, which was the natural outgrowth of capitalism. Even if the

process of liberation might be violent, the end would be a peaceful socialist society. From the Communist point of view, “The struggle for peace is a struggle against capitalism, a struggle for the victory of socialism throughout the world.”?5 The American government’s view was precisely the opposite. In order to liberate humanity and bring about a peaceful world, communism had to be defeated. Though the rhetoric was similar at times, the conceptions of peace, freedom, and justice were very different. Peace in particular had come to have a rather narrow meaning for both U.S. government officials and American Communist Party leaders. The Communists raised issues about the military budget, atomic weapons, and military intervention, but the bottom line was that peace depended on defending the interests of the Soviet Union in order to ensure its continued survival. . Thus, in 1949 Communists hailed the Soviet explosion of an atomic weapon

as “a contribution to peace,” because it would force the “imperialists” to turn away from war preparations and reach a settlement with the Soviet Union. The Truman administration spoke of the potential benefits of disarmament and fighting a war only “against want and human misery,” but the bottom line in official circles was that peace and freedom depended on containing communism. In Charles DeBenedetti’s words, “American leaders rapidly identified peace as a condition of anti-Communist stability, an attitude which they expanded to global proportions with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine. Insistently, official Washington spoke more of security than of peace, and, accordingly, it constructed a national security structure . . . that was intended to constrain Soviet power, repel leftist revolutionary movements, and maintain domestic conformity.”26 The administration’s “peace,” therefore, depended on winning the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, creating an aggressive counterrevolutionary foreign policy, and building a domestic consensus that would support these policies. Clearly, definitions of peace and freedom depended upon which side one sympathized with in the cold war. The clash between the Truman administration’s and the Communists’ notions of peace and freedom came to the forefront during the 1948 presidential campaign. By 1946 Roosevelt’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, who was then secretary of commerce, and Glen Taylor, the Democratic senator from

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Idaho who would become Wallace’s running mate on the Progressive Party ticket, were claiming to be the true heirs of the Roosevelt mantle, opposing the Truman administration because of its “get tough with Russia” policies. At a “Win-the-Peace” conference in April 1946, sponsored by the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), Taylor said that the drums of war were

already beating, but that sticking to Roosevelt’s policies— “Big Three unity, the destruction of the last vestiges of fascism, the right of self-government for all peoples, freedom from fear and want” — would lead to peace. He argued that the United States and the Soviet Union needed mutual respect, reasonable ne-

gotiation, and an equitable compromise of differences, because if the two countries could not find a way to settle their differences, there could be no

hope for world peace.?” On September 12, 1946, Henry Wallace gave a speech at Madison Square Garden laying out his own ideas about the road to peace, ideas that contrasted sharply with the policies of the Truman administration and led to Wallace’s forced resignation from the cabinet. In July Wallace had written a letter to the president arguing his position that the United States did not seem to be making a sincere effort toward producing a lasting peace: “How do American actions since V-J Day appear to other nations? I mean by actions the concrete things like $13 billion for the War and Navy Departments, the Bikini tests of the atomic bomb and continued production of bombs, the plan to arm Latin America with our weapons, production of B-29s and planned production of B-36s, and the effort to secure air bases spread over half the globe from which the other half of the globe can be bombed. I cannot but feel that these actions must make it look to the rest of the world as if we were only paying lip service to peace at the conference table.”28 Wallace implied that the best means of achieving national security was the acceptance of separate U.S. and Russian spheres of influence, a concept strongly opposed by Secretary of State Byrnes. Given that Wallace had already expressed his point of view to Truman in July and showed his September speech to him in advance, the speech should not have come as a great surprise. Indeed, Truman did not seem initially perturbed by it. Truman biographer David McCullough explains, “As James Reston wrote in the New York Times the following day, Truman appeared to be the only person in Washington who saw no difference between what Wallace had said and his own policy, or that of his Secretary of State in Paris, who, reportedly, was outraged.” Truman wrote in his diary that he had looked at only parts of the speech, though he had told reporters who had advance copies

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that he had, as Wallace claimed, approved the whole speech. It was not until Byrnes asked to be relieved because of the damage Wallace had done to the bipartisan foreign policy that Truman asked Wallace to resign from the cabinet. One Washington insider suggested that perhaps Truman was too drunk or too stupid to understand the significance of Wallace’s divergence from the administration’s viewpoint.?? American Communists seemed to have missed the point as well. In his speech Wallace criticized the press for “propagandizing our people for war in the hope of scaring Russia,” and called the “war-with-Russia” talk “criminal foolishness.” He claimed that peace was the basic issue and would be the basic issue through the presidential election of 1948. He rejected the “get tough with Russia” policy, arguing, ““Getting tough’ never bought anything real and lasting — whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” These ideas were right in line with those views the Communists were expressing. But Wallace also stated that he was “neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian,” which was enough for the Communists to boo his speech and to continue to have doubts about whether they should back him.*° By the time Wallace declared his candidacy in December 1947, the Ameri-

can Communist Party believed it had received a signal from abroad to support a third party, and Communists gave Wallace strong support. Communists and fellow travelers ended up playing a central role in the Progressive Party, as other potential supporters seemed to back off in proportion to Communist enthusiasm for the campaign. Communists had great hopes for the Progressive Party, and they served as the hardest workers in “Gideon’s army,” but the campaign was doomed from the start by the Communists’ hard line on foreign policy issues, divisions in the labor movement and on the Left, and growing anticommunism. But it was not only Communists who initially supported Wallace’s candidacy. From the point of view of many cold war opponents, or “progressives,” the Truman administration’s efforts to promote its version of peace — containing communism by such means as the Truman Doctrine, the Mar-

shall Plan, and the federal loyalty program, all in the name of “national security” — made a third party a necessity. Henry Wallace ran for president in order to give people an opportunity to vote for a different sort of peace in the 1948 election.

Wallace summed up his position in an open letter to Stalin, printed in the New York Times in May 1948: “There is no misunderstanding or difficulty be-

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tween the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which can be settled by force or fear and there is no difference which cannot be settled by peaceful, hopeful negotiation. There is no American principle or public interest, and there is no Russian principle or public interest which would have to be sacrificed to end the cold war and open up the Century of Peace which the Century of the Common Man demands.”*! Early successes raised the hopes of Progressives that their party would make a significant showing in the election and become an influence in national politics. Huge crowds paid to hear Wallace speak, and a number of RERECECESE

RES

SECSTESESSECE

ESET EL EST TS

eEEze =

me) 1g.0000.00.00000000000)

The Wallace-Taylor Peace Bond illustrates the outspoken opposition to the cold war that made it easy for opponents of the Progressive Party to smear Wallace as a Communist. President’s Secretary’s File, Truman Library

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wealthy backers made generous contributions to his campaign. In spite of the obstacles, Wallace’s supporters managed to get him on the ballot in forty-four states. In a special election in the Bronx, New York, in February 1948, Leo

Isaacson, the American Labor Party candidate supported by Wallace, soundly defeated Karl Propper, the Democratic candidate. All of this created something of a political sensation, one that clearly alarmed the Democrats. In a June 2, 1947, memo regarding the Wallace situation, six months before

Wallace announced his candidacy, professional politicians, journalists, labor leaders, and others warned the Democrats about Wallace’s appeal. These concerned Democrats were responding to the size and enthusiasm of the crowds to which Wallace was speaking, crowds made up of “rabid left wingers” but also other groups who felt strongly that “the Truman policy means war.” One observer explained why Wallace was so “hot”: “[T]here’s a hell of a lot of confusion and frustration around the country,” and people want to hear “what

Henry is telling them. ... Don’t make the mistake of underestimating this appleknocker.” Another claimed, “The guy follows the Commy line. He takes orders. But he presents a strong appeal to the American people. Don’t mistake that. Don’t underplay his appeal. It’s tremendous.” Even if Wallace was a “fuzzy thinker,” he should not be counted on to make mistakes. The conclu-

sion: “Wallace is a major consideration in 1948! Something should be done to combat him.” Progressive Party opponents turned to anticommunism in order to combat Wallace’s appeal. In the campaign strategy he mapped out for Truman in November 1947, Clark Clifford stated explicitly, “There is considerable political advantage to the Administration in its battle with the Kremlin.” Clifford viewed the question of Communist subversion as a political one, and he suggested that Truman exploit the issue by standing as the architect of cold war foreign policy and internal security measures, and by publicly linking Wallace with the Communists. By attacking the Progressive Party as Communist controlled, the Democrats removed any possible stigma from themselves. The press also equated the Progressive Party with Communist subversion and used intimidation tactics to undercut support for Wallace. For example, the Pittsburgh Press published the names and addresses of those people who had signed a petition to put Wallace on the ballot. Accompanying the list was a suggestion that people could clear their reputations by retracting their signatures.*? The press gave the most publicity to stories that linked the Progressive Party to pro-Soviet interests. Thus, the debate at the nominating convention over the foreign policy section of the platform received detailed coverage.

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That debate began when the Vermont delegation proposed that a sentence be added to the platform saying, “Although we are critical of the present foreign policy of the United States, it is not our intention to give blanket endorsement to the foreign policy of any other nation.” Communists and their allies had already compromised in preparing the platform by agreeing to include a statement saying that the threat to world peace was the “joint responsibility of the Soviet Union and the United States.” The “Vermont resolution” went too far for those who controlled the convention, however, and after a debate on

the matter, the resolution was overwhelmingly defeated by a voice vote. By in effect giving blanket endorsement to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, the pro-Communist forces in the Progressive Party ensured its isolation.*4 At the same time, Communists sometimes took pains to avoid giving the appearance that they controlled the Progressive Party. For example, Leon Wofsy, then head of the Labor Youth League, actively encouraged the development of the Wallace Youth Movement. Yet, he was not directly active in the latter, because “as head of the Labor Youth League, I didn’t want to risk ‘tainting’ the movement.” This directive did not come from above but was, rather,

“sort of common sense. ... [W]e didn’t want to make things any harder for a movement that was trying to reach large numbers of young people in a very confusing time.”35 Confusing time or not, even those who strongly supported Wallace can look back on the 1948 campaign and see that the Communists had “a peculiar kind of ignorance about the American people.” Elmer Bernstein recalls that at one point during the campaign Pete Seeger suggested at a meeting that a group of people go to the World Series in Yankee Stadium and sing workers’ songs between innings. “I dare say,” says Bernstein, “that had we done such a thing, none of us would have escaped without serious injury. That lack of understanding of the people’s relationship to the national game I found alarming.”>¢ But the isolation of the Progressive Party was not solely the fault of its Communist supporters. As liberals actively chose the West and freedom over the East and peace, the growing gap between communism and liberalism doomed Wallace’s “fight for peace.” The leadership of both the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)

strongly opposed Wallace, and the campaign became the dividing line on which many labor unions floundered. AFL president William Green took the opportunity to paint the rival CIO as Communist. Responding to Wallace’s 1946 Madison Square Garden speech, Green said, “The time has come for a

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showdown. Unless we can come to a clear and honest understanding with Russia now we may be forced into war against her later.” In contrast to the “Communists in the CIO” who thought Russia was always right and America was always wrong, the AFL, according to Green, said “America is always right and it is Russia now that is always wrong.”3” That Green was posturing is evident by the fact that the CIO leadership in fact supported Truman for president, and it disciplined members and locals for working with the Progressive Party. CIO officials used their opposition to Wallace as part of their successful attempt to purge Communists from their unions. Labor, Socialist, and pacifist leaders, as well as government officials and liberal intellectuals, linked the Communist threat from abroad to the threat of

subversives at home. Years before Sen. Joseph McCarthy made his famous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming that there were hundreds of Communists in the U.S. State Department, the federal government took measures to root subversives out of the government and out of public life in general. The federal loyalty-security program and the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations, created by executive order in 1947, contributed to

creating an atmosphere of fear and intolerance. The loyalty program placed itself above the law, and invited abuse because of the lack of standards for

defining “sympathetic association” or a “subversive” organization. The program judged people on the basis of political associations rather than overt criminal acts. As a result, cracks developed in the liberal ranks over just how much of a threat these measures posed to American constitutional democracy, and whether the risk was justified given the overarching danger of Communist subversion. The ACLU itself was divided, on the one hand charging that the loyalty program “creates a procedural monster antithetical to fundamental principles of American democratic justice” and on the other hand refusing to challenge the attorney general’s list.** Such divisions stemmed from concerns about the ACLU’s image, but also from questions about whether Communists deserved the same civil liberties as everyone else. There were good reasons to doubt the Communists’ own commitment to civil liberties, ranging from their references to “bourgeois democracy” (implying a lack of faith in the Bill of Rights) to their support for the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II and their advocacy of government suppression of antiwar groups. One particular position that would come back to haunt them was their failure to object to government prosecution of a group of Minnesota Trotskyists under the Smith Act. Nevertheless, it was not clear that denying basic civil liberties to

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Communists—or those people accused of being Communists—would strengthen democracy or the cause of freedom. If the ACLU was conflicted about such questions, other liberals seemed less so. Communists had no concern for the civil liberties of others, so keeping them from gaining influence —even if it meant denying their civil liberties —was justified. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argued for deciding government loyalty cases on the side of the agency when there was “substantial doubt,” even if there was no evidence and even if the department’s head or its loyalty board was convinced that the individual was trustworthy, because “the failure

to discharge suspicious persons may well imperil national security.” Schlesinger also thought the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations— “whatever the merit of this type of list as a form of official procedure” — was useful in the defense of “free society,’ because it was a “convenient way of checking the more obvious Communist-controlled groups,” even though it had no provisions for challenge or appeal. In fact, he complained that the list failed to include certain organizations, notably the Progressive Citizens of America, formed to support Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential campaign—in other words, organizations that had a large proportion of nonCommunist members but “rarely, if ever, oppose Communist objectives.”>? Schlesinger was one of the founding members of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in 1947, which gave organizational form to liberal sup-

port for the cold war consensus and became Wallace’s most vociferous opponent. Other prominent ADA founders included Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, labor leader Walter Reuther, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. At its first national convention, in March 1947, the ADA expressed

approval of the Truman Doctrine, which had been announced only a few weeks earlier. The organization’s founding statement supported “the general framework of present American foreign policy” and rejected “any association with Communists or sympathizers of communism in the United States as completely as we reject any association with Fascists or their sympathizers.” During the Wallace campaign, the ADA paid for newspaper advertisements listing the Progressive Party’s major donors and the organizations on the attorney general’s list with which they were (or had been) affiliated, information that was ultimately entered into the Congressional Record. Eleanor Roosevelt greeted the announcement of Wallace’s candidacy by comparing his approach to Russia with Neville Chamberlain’s approach to Hitler. James Wechsler, formerly a Communist but by then an ADA member and a reporter who traveled with the Wallace campaign, characterized it as “a division of Stalin’s foreign legion.”4°

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In fact, Henry Wallace’s position on domestic issues was no different from that of the New Deal liberals who led the CIO and who made up the core of the Americans for Democratic Action. He based his philosophy of “progressive capitalism” on the New Deal heritage of concern for the common person combined with a strong defense of civil rights and the right to dissent. Where he differed from cold war liberals was in his willingness to work with Communists. Glen Taylor summed up their position on this issue in a nationwide radio address: “I am happy to have the support of all those who go along with our program. But just let me say to the Communists so there will be no misunderstanding, my efforts in the future as in the past will be directed toward the goal of making our economy work so well and our way of life so attractive and our people so contented that communism will never interest more than an infinitesimal fraction of our citizens who adhere to it now.”4! In addition to accepting Communist support, Wallace differed markedly from cold war liberals in his belief that cooperation and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union was possible. His idea was to continue Roosevelt’s policies of recognizing spheres of influence, treating the Soviet Union as just another great power. This vision, similar to that of the Communists, not only

offended the Truman administration and all who supported the cold war consensus but also was vulnerable to a left-wing critique that such coexistence meant accepting great-power imperialism: the United States and the Soviet Union would carve up the world in their own

interests, while the

smaller nations would be exploited and dependent. In voicing their objections to accepting a Soviet sphere of influence, cold war liberals harkened back to an old theme in U.S. history: manifest destiny. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., summed it up, “History has thrust a world destiny on the United States.” It was precisely this “world destiny” — centered on the right to spread its version of freedom around the globe —that government officials from both major parties, as well as groups such as the ADA and, a few years later, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCE), sought to defend. The idea went back to John Winthrop’s sermon to the Pilgrims on the

Mayflower when he told them they would create “a city on a hill.” Schlesinger secularized this familiar idea, replacing God with history and giving it a more aggressive tone. Schlesinger and the other founders of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom were all militant anti-Communists, and they defended cultural freedom in Russia far more vigorously than in the United States. As Christopher Lasch points out, “In effect —though they would have denied it—the intellectuals of the ACCF defined cultural freedom as whatever best served the interests of the United States government.”4?

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Socialist and pacifist leaders did not go that far—for the most part they rejected great-power imperialism on both sides —but they did take pains to undermine the Wallace campaign by linking it with communism. Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas attacked Wallace as an “appeaser” and the Progressive Party as a Communist front. Pacifist leaders such as A. J. Muste opposed Wallace, claiming that he was “the instrument and captive of his only organized support... the Communist Party and its front organizations.” As a matter of “objective political reality,” Muste said, “a vote for Wallace is a vote

for the Communist Party.” Dwight Macdonald agreed, charging that for years Wallace had been the mouthpiece of American communism. Although he is not an agent of Moscow, Macdonald said, “it is true that he behaves like one.” In Macdonald’s opinion the only sensible action for a pacifist in 1948 was “no action: that is, don’t vote.’3 Potential Progressive Party voters seemed to be

listening. Despite the campaign’s successes in the first few months of 1948, and despite the tremendous effort by supporters, and projections that the Progressive Party might poll 5 to 10 million votes, Wallace received only 1,157,063 votes, or 2.37 percent of the national vote, nearly half of which came from

New York. A number of factors contributed to the failure of the Progressive Party’s “fight for peace,” among which was the fear many liberals shared of what a Republican presidency would mean. As early as December 1947 a Max Lerner editorial in the New York newspaper PM argued that voting for the third party would not be a “vote for peace and prosperity,” as Wallace claimed, but would instead ensure the election of a Republican president who would bring neither peace nor prosperity. Wallace focused too much attention on the Democrats, ignoring the fact that creeping war and fascism were the result of Russian policies and Republican pressure. Lerner wrote: Wallace says: “I fight the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as applied because they divide Europe into two warring camps.” True, but a great and independent progressive leader would have added that the sharpest wedge in dividing Europe into two camps has been the wedge wielded by the Russians themselves. Wallace accuses the Administration of using “Hitlerite methods.” This is harsh, but again there is a measure of truth in it. Yet a great independent progressive leader would recognize that the real danger of Hitlerism in America comes not from the party with the more liberal social base, but from the party with a completely reactionary social base. And he

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would have wrestled with the undoubted fact that to bring the most reactionary leaders of that party into power means ultimately to invite Hitlerism instead of fighting it off.44

Many progressives who might have supported the ideas behind Wallace’s “fight for peace” agreed with Lerner’s assessment and opposed the Wallace campaign for fear that it would lead to a Dewey victory. One such opponent was Clifford Durr, a southern New Dealer who believed Truman at least had a fighting chance, and “the important thing was to do the best we could to keep Dewey out.”45 Lerner’s PM editorial also commented on Wallace’s isolation from the mass of American progressives. Wallace compared his supporters to “Gideon’s army, small in number, powerful in conviction.” But, argued Lerner, there was

no good reason that “the forces fighting against the peace-killers and against the freedom-killers should be ‘small in number’ It is only within the Third Party movement that they are, because the Third Party movement is not synonymous with American independent progressivism. It contains no tradeunion strength except that of the Communist wing, and no liberal strength except that which is willing to follow the leadership of that wing” (emphasis in original).*6 But why was the Progressive Party so isolated? The Czechoslovakian coup and the Berlin blockade undermined Wallace’s claims that the Soviet Union could be dealt with as a reasonable and responsible international partner,

while Truman’s move to the left on domestic issues cut into much of the Progressive Party’s support. But it was the equating of its position on peace issues with Communist interests that played the most fundamental role in the Progressive Party’s decline, and laid the groundwork for the association of all grassroots peace activism with Communist subversion in the years to come. Whether the attacks came from the Left, the Right, or the center, they so-

lidified the public perception of the Progressive Party as Communist dominated. But more important, the attacks on Wallace stifled significant public discussion on alternatives to the cold war for many years to come. By the time of Wallace’s candidacy, the basic premises of foreign policy were closed to debate. Wallace continued to question these premises, and therefore “he had to be banished from the realm of effective discourse, from the arena of ‘realistic’ thinking. .. . With the development of the closed ideological system of anticommunism, there was no room for debate on fundamental issues, only disagreements about the application of these principles to events and policies—the strategy and tactics of policies.”4” Any talk of peace that meant

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cooperating with the Soviet Union was suspect. In fact, from the Wallace campaign on, such “peace” efforts came to be reported only with quotation marks, indicating that the term was used as propaganda and had nothing to do with what ordinary people might call peace. As Virginia Durr, who ran for senator in Virginia as a Progressive, describes this period, “the labor movement was split four ways to Sunday. And then the Jewish organizations split. Then the church organizations split. Everything split, split, split... . There was just no unity at all on the issue of who was a Communist, who might be one, and it just kept anything from happening at all... . [T]hat’s what split up Wallace’s campaign so terribly.” Durr later insisted that “Wallace did a lot of good. ...1I think he may have kept us from a preemptive strike or from a preventive war... . You can’t imagine how much sentiment there was at that time for a preventive war against Russia.”*8 Durr was not the only independent progressive with such sentiments, and not the only one who stuck with Wallace even as it became clear that the campaign was a lost cause. Independent journalist I. F.Stone had numerous criticisms of the Progressive Party, but still thought it was important to vote for Wallace. Stone wrote in “Confessions of a Dupe”: “I admit everything. The Communists are doing a major part of the work of the Wallace movement, from ringing doorbells to framing platforms. Okay if you want it that way, so they ‘dominate’ the party. So what? I’m just a poor dupe who can’t take either Dewey or Truman, and is looking for an effective way to cast a protest vote against cold war, high prices, and hysteria. Wallace has had his effect on both parties already, and a big vote for peace in November might have its effect, too.” Noted scientists including Albert Einstein and Harlow Shapley thought so as well, but in spite of, or maybe because of, their strong critique of the cold war, they had no base of support either. In 1948 the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists argued forcibly against “armed peace in a two-bloc world,” a policy that, it warned presciently, would “entail tremendously and steadily accelerating armaments expenditures over an indefinite period” and “might also betray our moral position by propping up antidemocratic regimes as counter-poise to the Soviet Union.”®° But by this time the scientific community was split as well. Progressive scientists could not effectively stand up against the intensification of the cold war at home and abroad or against the government's efforts to make the bomb more palatable. Nor could they defuse those people who challenged their patriotism because of their opposition to increased militarization.

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In the aftermath of the Wallace campaign, one self-described “progressive” wrote President Truman begging him to try to understand that Communists and progressives sincerely want peace and that they “stand beside you for a forthright program and will work for non-segregation, price- controls, public housing and health.” The writer had spent an entire year living off her savings and canvassing working-class neighborhoods “in the name of peace first, Progressive Party, second.” Her main purpose in writing, however, was to tell the president not to fear the Left: “[R]anging from parlor pinks to militant communists . . . they crave peace. And are working for it on picket lines, in demonstrations, street meetings . . . all taxing activities. . . Advocates of violence are not people such as these, who have worked slowly, tediously, modestly in a peaceful manner.” Indeed, these people were “committed to support the very institutions which are now making justice a mockery.”>! It was not just President Truman who had to be convinced, however, but

just about every potential ally on the Left. By the end of 1948, Communists and the few “progressives” still willing to work with them had become isolated from Socialists, pacifists, and liberals who all now kept their distance.

Communists were expelled from the CIO and other liberal organizations. Furthermore, the top CP leaders were on trial, and the second-string leaders were preparing to go underground. Internal purges and witch-hunts contributed further to the party’s unraveling. And all of this preceded the worst of the government attacks on Communists and their sympathizers. Thus, the Communist movement, which had been at its peak of strength as

World War II came to a close, found itself already decisively defeated by 1948. Yet, many people still thought of American communism in terms of what it had been in the 1930s and early 1940s: an influential force in the labor and

peace movements as well as in cultural circles, an agitator for the cause of civil rights, and a significant participant in the Democratic Party in some cities and states. If the Communists were no longer so visible, their opponents assumed it was because they had become that much more adept at secretly infiltrating and subverting other organizations. For an entire decade after the Wallace campaign, the government, the public, and even many Communists themselves adhered to an image of what the Communist movement had been rather than what it had become. As Harvey Klehr explains: It took some years for the reality of the Communist movement’s isolation and weakness to replace its aura of hidden strength. During its most influential period Communists had partially concealed their presence in order to avoid triggering an anti-Communist reaction. This habitual con-

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tributed to this misleading image by claiming strength, an act that reflected both a defiant, brave front and self-delusion.*

Communists in the Wallace campaign, and in the peace efforts that followed, demonstrated exactly that: “a defiant, brave front and self-delusion.” All in all, the Wallace campaign represented a significant defeat for American Communists and their notion of peace. Once again, the CPUSA demonstrated that it was incapable of taking an objective position on those issues that concerned Soviet aggression. More to the point, however, the campaign exacerbated the fractures on the Left, leaving those independent progressives whose views often coincided with the Communists’, who believed in the pos-

sibility for “peaceful coexistence,” intimidated or discredited through an ideological “guilt by association.” Thus, the 1948 election not only spelled the end of Communist influence in American politics but also contributed significantly to the splintering of the peace movement. That Communists were to become pariahs in the peace movement was signified in an article by Morris Milgram, a veteran Socialist, that appeared in the FOR’s Fellowship magazine just prior to the election. Milgram argued, “Those who participate in the Wallace Party will find themselves considered by many to be dupes of the Communists, will find their community leadership sharply weakened, and will find the Wallace party reduced to nothing when the USSR finds a change of line requires its dissolution. .. . [A]nyone who welcomes Stalinists into the peace movement, or who works with them,

weakens his cause.”>4 Milgram’s warning was heeded increasingly by peace organizations in the late 1940s and 1950s, but the larger problem was that the general public was in

some sense “duped” by Democratic and Republican politicians promoting a bipartisan cold war consensus that associated the whole agenda of “peace” with Communist subversion. That association was reinforced further when, in 1949, the international Communist movement launched what in the West

came to be called a “peace offensive,” the phrase itself suggesting that “peace” was an act of aggression. Ironically, it was in its attempts to limit the discussion and definition of “peace,” in the name of national security, that the West’s claim to “freedom” broke down.

“Hold the Line” The Waldorf Conference and the Peekskill Riots

As they held the line at Peekskill on that long September day We will hold the line forever ’til the people have their way. —The Weavers, 1949

[’August 1949 internationally renowned singer Paul Robeson gave a concert in Peekskill, New York, to benefit the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, listed by the attorney general as a subversive organization. The concert was attacked violently by local citizens who were angered by Robeson’s outspoken pro-Soviet stance and support for civil rights. (Robeson had suggested that American Negroes would not go to war against the Soviet Union.) The original concert was stopped by violence, but a week later a second attempt was more successful. It was not until afterward that the concertgoers met with violent attacks. Howard Fast, master of ceremonies at Peekskill, later

wrote, “Peekskill was a decisive step in the preparation for American fascism and it was a proving ground for a great deal that came afterwards.”! In retrospect Fast’s analysis seems exaggerated, but it is a clear expression of the Communists’ outlook that the “fascists” at Peekskill had been carrying out part of a deliberate plan to destroy all the “progressive” forces in the United States. Communists were determined to “hold the line” in the face of such attacks. The “progressive” forces, of course, had received some practice at “holding the line” during the Wallace campaign. But they had not been very successful. By the end of 1948, any sort of peace activism that rested on opposition to U.S. cold war policies had become suspicious and by definition subversive. The association of peace with Communist interests was heightened when the international Communist movement launched its “peace offensive,” aimed at

oF

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preventing U.S. preparation for war against the Soviet Union by mobilizing worldwide sentiment against war and atomic weapons. It took the form of a series of international peace congresses and a petition campaign calling for the banning of atomic weapons. The pro-Soviet peace movement began to develop an international base at the August 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, held at Wroclaw, Poland. Organized by Polish Communists, the congress attracted prominent non-Communists as well, including former U.S. assistant attorney general O. John Rogge and French priest Abbe Jean Boulier. The Communists tried to combine their hard line on the issues with a broad-based approach to organizing, hoping that intellectuals might lead popular resistance to Western government measures—such as the rearmament of Germany and the formation of the Atlantic Alliance—that threatened Soviet security. This approach was set forth by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in an October 1948 interview in Pravda, and confirmed a week later by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s speech calling for political action based on a broad coalition of antiwar social forces.2 The Wroclaw congress elected an international committee to continue the work of attracting intellectuals to the cause of peace as defined by the Communists. In the United States such work meant mobilizing scientists disturbed by the consequences of their work on nuclear weapons, writers and artists concerned about the climate created by anti-Communist congressional investigations, and religious leaders who opposed the cold war on moral grounds. The attacks on domestic peace organizations and activists rather than the activities of the international peace movement brought home to the American public the supposedly subversive character of “peace” action. The result was further isolation of the Communists but also a weakening of the peace movement and the cause of peace in general. Those people who spoke out for civil liberties and civil rights also found themselves under attack, as questions of loyalty and security took center stage. Two events that brought home the idea that “peace” was a subversive idea were the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel in Manhattan in March 1949 (hereafter referred to as the Waldorf conference), and the Paul Robeson concert at Peekskill, New

York, a few months later. Both affairs would likely have passed into obscurity were it not for the attacks, both verbal and physical, that took place against the participants, catching the attention of the press and the public. Instead, these two New York events had broad ramifications precisely because the attacks, far out of proportion to any threat to national security, had a chilling

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effect on public debate about peace issues. Both affairs revealed the weakness of the pro-Soviet Left, whose definition of peace had suffered a resounding defeat in the 1948 presidential election. At the same time, the attacks high-

lighted points where the U.S. claim to stand for freedom was dubious. In February 1949 the committee elected at the Wroclaw congress met in

Paris and announced a series of meetings to be held in major cities. The most important were the Waldorf conference and the World Peace Congress, scheduled for Paris in April. Sidney Hook, a philosophy professor at New York University and one of the most vociferous opponents of the Waldorf conference, later claimed that Bryn Hovde of the New School for Social Research, who had been at Wroclaw, “provided the documentary details that established that the Waldorf Conference was largely the work of the Continuations Committee of the Wroclaw Congress.” But Hook failed to reveal the nature of those “documentary details.” In fact, he acknowledged that his own ignorance of the connection at the time is “hard to explain in view of my intense interest in the ideological struggle between the Communist and free world. I do not know how to account for the lapse.”3 Novelist Howard Fast, who attended the Wroclaw congress and was a member of the international committee elected there, claims that the Waldorf conference was his idea but

that he had a hard time selling it to the national CP leadership.4 Despite Fast’s membership on the continuations committee, the announcement in February, and the claims of critics such as Hook, there is good

reason to believe that the Waldorf conference might not have been an official part of the Soviet-led peace offensive. Howard Fast says, “[T]he accusations that it was directed from Moscow are nonsense.”> The chief organizer of the Waldorf conference was Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the nation’s leading scientists. Shapley chaired the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (NCASP), which sponsored the Waldorf con-

ference. The NCASP had succeeded the Independent Citizens Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the main organization of independent progressives behind the Wallace campaign, and was concerned with similar issues: labor, civil rights, and civil liberties but especially U.S. foreign policy and world peace. Harlow Shapley had also been at Wroctaw, but he, like Howard Fast, claimed that the Waldorf conference was not connected to the Wroclaw congress. Though his repeated statement that the conference had been in the planning for more than two years may have been an exaggeration, the evidence suggests that the connection between Wroclaw and the Waldorf confer-

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ence was, in fact, a negative one. Shapley thought the spectrum of opinion represented at Wroctaw was too narrow, and he and other American delegates were put off by the strident anti-American speeches of the Russians, especially A. A. Fadeyev, who called the Americans “jackals” and “hyenas.” Trying to convince British scientist P. M. S. Blackett to be a sponsor of the Waldorf conference, Shapley wrote, “I cannot believe that Fadeev [sic] will mess things up the way he did in Poland.”® Other Americans besides Shapley and Bryn Hovde did not like what they heard at Wroclaw. Clifford Durr found himself on the central committee charged with drawing up resolutions for the conference, where he worked to tone down the attack on the United States. Virginia Durr, who was from Alabama, took offense at Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg’s speech in which he referred repeatedly to the “Alabama lynchers.” When she challenged Ehrenburg on this point, he suddenly forgot how to speak English. Both Clifford and Virginia Durr were convinced, however, despite the Russian expressions of hostility toward the United States, that Russia was in no position to wage war. Clifford Durr was shocked by his visit to Russia in 1946. As Virginia Durr recalled: “When he came back he said the Russians couldn’t sweep over anything. They were the most poverty-stricken, worn-out people youd ever seen. They'd lost 25 million people. He said that when you flew from Berlin to Moscow you didn’t see a house with a roof on it. There was just terrible, terrible devastation. So he thought this whole idea of them preparing to sweep over Europe was just ridiculous.” Virginia Durr was equally shocked by the devastation she observed in Poland in 1948 when she traveled with Clifford

Durr to the Wroclaw congress.” She was also struck by the enormous gap between Russian and American views of what it would take to bring about peaceful coexistence. Shortly after the Wroclaw congress, Durr had a conversation over tea with a Russian woman, Madam Motilova, who told her: “‘Dear Madam Durr, you seem to be

a very nice, kind-hearted woman. I want to tell you: if you'll go back to the United States and set up a Marxist-Leninist Institute in every city in the United States, very soon we can have peace, because if people understand Marxism-Leninism. .. .’ I mean there was such a gap there of understanding: the idea that I could come back to the United States and set up a MarxistLeninist Institute in every city. ... I must say I was really taken aback. And I told her I was a Democrat; I wasn’t a Communist. She said, What is a Democrat?”8 Virginia Durr, Clifford Durr, and Harlow Shapley were independent progressives, not Communist dupes, but the critics made no such distinctions.

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Shapley, in fact, had turned down an invitation to serve on the continuations committee elected at Wroctaw. As he put it, his hope for the Waldorf conference was that it would be “a peace conference and not a war conference, a bid for understanding and cooperation and survival and not a further incitation to hate.”® (The emphasis on the word peace clearly was a reference to the anti-American speeches of Fadeyev and others at Wroclaw.) Shapley’s main concern, along with other renowned scientists, was with the free ex-

change of ideas across international boundaries. In any case, despite Shapley’s professed desire for a broad-based, “useful peace conference; one that by right-thinking people can be taken as non-partisan,”!° and despite the fact that only a handful of the five hundred conference sponsors had attended the Wroclaw congress (as Shapley pointed out), opponents of the Waldorf conference denounced it as part of the Soviet peace offensive because its focus was a critique of U.S. foreign policy. In other words, it was the message of the Waldorf conference as much as its alleged international connections that disturbed the critics. At stake in the battles that developed over the Waldorf conference and the Peekskill concert was the meaning of peace itself, but these arguments were not just about semantics, for the way one understood peace had implications for how one worked to achieve it. Newsweek explained the stakes in its report on the Waldorf conference: “‘Peace’ was a fighting word. Everyone was for it, naturally, just as everyone was against the man-eating shark. The trouble was that it didn’t mean the same thing in Russian that it did in English.”!! Newsweek's report lambasted the sponsoring organization of the conference, the “fellow-traveling” NCASP, for a definition of peace that “sounded more like Stalin’s than Harry S. Truman’s. It insisted that peace meant scrapping the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Atlantic Pact—in short,

that peace was synonymous with appeasement.”!? Newsweek informed its readers that the State Department viewed the conference as “merely part of the Cominform’s attempt ... to win the minds of the world’s intellectuals.” Life magazine snidely suggested that conference sponsors and participants were either Communists or “superdupes,” echoing the assumption made by anti-Communist intellectuals and government officials that no one with any integrity could support the conference. Non-Communist intellectuals who attended the conference disputed this assumption. Eugene Rabinowitch published an editorial in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists arguing that a number of scientists had participated in the Waldorf conference “and in other gatherings organized by groups about whose political bias they had no illusions,” because of their desire to see

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atomic weapons abolished and an effective system of international control established.!5 Other independent progressives concerned about what they saw as an aggressive U.S. foreign policy—especially the development of atomic weapons and preparations for war— participated as well. The three-day conference was attended by Communists and progressives who sympathized with Communist opposition to U.S. cold war policies, the Atlantic Pact being the most current. The conference reached capacity registration at three thousand, with representatives from sixteen nations. Confer-

ence sponsors included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Rexford Tugwell, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and the president of Smith

College, Dr. Herbert John Davis. Messages of support came from prominent people around the world, such as George Bernard Shaw and Jawaharlal Nehru. The keynote session on peace and foreign policy featured speeches by Harlow Shapley, O. John Rogge, editor and publisher of the New York Post T. O. Thackrey, and retired Protestant Episcopal bishop of Utah the Reverend Arthur W. Moulton. Panel discussions followed on such topics as economics and social science, mass communications, religion and ethics, natural science,

fine arts, and education. After the panels came a plenary session to hear the report of the resolutions committee, and the conference ended with a mass rally in Madison Square Garden. A number of speakers attacked American foreign policy and pleaded for improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Some argued that socialism was the only hope for Europe. Speakers on religion and ethics warned against the trend toward making peace a subversive word. Those participants who criticized the Soviet Union mentioned the lack of freedom in the Eastern bloc, but such criticisms tended to be vague and general, while criticisms of American foreign policy were detailed and specific. The comments of John J. De Boer, professor of education at the University of

Illinois, seemed to sum up the outlook of many conference participants. De Boer echoed the prevailing sentiment (and the Communist line) that America was preparing for war and moving toward fascism; he singled out the Atlantic Pact as the latest step toward war. Yet, he added that communism could be stopped by removing the causes: “race discrimination, poverty, and exploitation of man by man.”!6 Other speakers, among them Clifford Odets and Norman Mailer, argued that capitalism was the major cause of war. Mailer’s speech stood out because it was both sincere and nonpartisan. “I don’t believe in peace conferences,” Mailer said. “They don’t do any good. So long as there is capitalism, there is

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going to be war. Until you have a decent, equitable socialism, you can’t have peace.” Mailer expressed a deep pessimism about the future. He argued that both the United States and the Soviet Union were moving toward state capitalism. “There is no future in that. I see the peoples of both America and Russia— neither of them want war—caught in a mechanism which is steadily grinding on to produce war.”!” Judging by the hysterical response to the Waldorf conference, Mailer’s pessimism seemed justified. The attacks began before the conference itself, and during the conference, held March 27-29, its opponents received the bulk of the publicity. The newspapers themselves likely played a significant role in turning people against the Waldorf conference and making them suspicious of any such efforts on behalf of peace. Following the government’s lead, the press consistently placed the term peace offensive and frequently the word peace itself in quotation marks, suggesting that the words were disingenuous, not representing any serious concern for peace. This automatically put the participants in these “peace” efforts in a bad light: they were either trying to manipulate the American public, or they were being manipulated. Typical of the preconference coverage was the widely used headline “U.S. ‘Pink Cominform’ Will Huddle in Luxury,” a United Press story that referred to the conference as “the let’s-all-love-Russia-clambake,’ and a New

York

Times editorial that said, “If the cause of peace is advanced one inch by these goings-on it will be a miracle.”! Other popular accounts offered similar characterizations of the NCASP and the Waldorf conference. Critics attacked the Communists for co-opting and manipulating the cause of “peace,” and warned people to be wary of Communist fronts and the double standards of the Communists, who allegedly sought liberties for themselves but not for others. At the same time as the “parley” at the Waldorf received negative coverage, front-page stories about the Smith Act trials of top Communist Party leaders —indicted on charges of advocating to conspire to overthrow the government by force and violence —could have only reinforced public suspicions about a “peace” conference put on by Communist sympathizers. Newspapers also heightened the controversy by exaggerating the number of people expected to show up to protest the conference, prompting one writer to suggest that “when a newspaper over-predicts a crowd by ninety-nine hundred per cent, it is quite flagrantly attempting to rally a mob.” Much of the preconference debate had to do with the origins of the conference, specifically with whether it was initiated by international Communists

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and controlled by domestic Communists. This debate persisted for decades, and has yet to be completely settled. The fact that Harlow Shapley was corresponding with European, and American associates about plans for the Waldorf conference only a month after the Wroclaw congress, even though he had refused to be on the continuations committee, casts serious doubt on the claim that the conference originated with that committee. Julian Huxley wrote from England to express his enthusiasm for the idea of such a conference, and added that he was glad to hear that Shapley had refused to be on the continuations committee.2° Even if the conference was Howard Fast’s idea (Fast was a Communist at the time), and if for the most part the conference followed the party line in its analysis and recommendations, it does not follow that one had to be a Communist in order to oppose the growing militarism of American foreign policy or the restrictions on freedom resulting from militant anticommunism. Thus, the Waldorf conference also attracted non-Communists, providing a forum for discussion of peace issues. The fuss over the issue of Communist control detracted from the fact that here was one of the few places such vital issues were publicly debated. Harlow Shapley had good reason to be upset about the criticism that preceded the conference, as most of it was aimed simply at smearing the organizers and sponsors and undermining their point of view. Yet, he could have been more forthcoming about the nature of the Waldorf conference, rather than claiming that it was “completely non-political and independent of any political group.”?! Although it was technically nonpartisan, controlled by no political party, it did have a clear point of view, indistinguishable from that of the Progressive Party. If it was unfair to dismiss the NCASP as a “Communist front” (as did the State Department and the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities) and the conference as an “intellectual fraud,” in Sidney Hook’s terms, it was, in fact, the case that the Waldorf sponsors saw U.S. foreign policy as the main threat to world peace. The conference call criticized the “excessive militarization” that was a central part of cold war policy, commenting specifically on the military budget, aid to “reactionary and unworkable governments in Greece and China,” the use of Marshall Plan funds to rebuild Germany, the alliance with Franco, and the restrictions on intellectual freedom that accompanied these policies.” As Freda Kirchwey wrote in the Nation, the Waldorf sponsors did not commit a crime by choosing leftist speakers. But the leaders made a mistake, after designing their program, by insisting that it was not a political gathering after all.23 Speakers called for peaceful coexistence and lauded the Soviet Union for its efforts to attain peace. Those participants who criticized the Soviet Union

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did so only if they attacked U.S. policies at the same time. No pacifists were invited to speak at the conference, and Norman Cousins was booed for his

speech at the opening session in which he declared that the American people were not against the idea of peace or the need for peace, but were against a “small political group” that owed its allegiance “not to America but to an outside government.” Cousins asked the delegates to “tell the folks at home that Americans are anti-Communist but not anti-humanitarian, and that being anti-Communist does not automatically mean that they are pro-war.’24 The New York Times reported that Cousins’s speech was punctuated by subdued hissing and booing, and he received only moderate applause at the end. Lillian Hellman reportedly chastised Cousins, commenting, “I would recom-

mend that when you are invited out to dinner, you wait until you get home before you talk about your hosts.”25 A closer look at the attacks on the conference reveals a similar pressure to conform to the cold war consensus as that seen during the Wallace campaign. The result was that peaceful coexistence became an extreme and isolated position, associated almost exclusively with the Communist Left. Pressure to ac-

cept the cold war consensus came from government agencies and private citizens alike. The State Department denounced the Waldorf conference as a means to spread Communist propaganda, though, with the attorney general’s permission, it issued visas to twenty-three delegates from behind the Iron Curtain,

claiming this move as proof of U.S. devotion to freedom. The New York Times praised the decision to admit the delegates, though Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, the national commander of the American Legion, and the American Jewish League all condemned it, arguing that the NCASP and the Waldorf conference should be declared officially and immediately “subversive.” By contrast, a group of composers, conductors, and musicians— including Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland —cabled a greeting to Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: “We welcome your visit ... in the hope that this kind of cultural interchange can aid understanding among our peoples and thereby make possible an enduring peace.”6 A few days later, the State Department denied visas to Western European and Latin American delegates, arguing that aliens not coming as government representatives were excludable if known or believed to be Communists. Clearly, the department did not think admitting delegates from Britain, France, Italy, and Brazil who could not be dismissed as mouthpieces of their own governments was in the national interest. The American Civil Liberties Union sent a telegram to Secretary of State

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Dean Acheson asking him to reconsider the visas for Western European and South American delegates on the basis of the free speech position taken by the State Department the previous week when it granted visas to delegates from Russia and four satellite nations. In view of its statement on free speech, argued the ACLU, the State Department’s distinction between official and unofficial delegates did not seem warranted.”’ The State Department’s revoking of four British visas without explanation was reported as a sensation in London newspapers. None of the prospective delegates was a Communist, although two had attended the Wroclaw congress in 1948. So had Professor Olaf Stapledon, yet his visa had not been canceled. Those would-be visitors who were denied visas expressed surprise and indignation—and all had been asked about their political views. Novelist Louis Golding said he was called back to the embassy an hour after getting his visa and asked if he had been at the Wroclaw conference. He responded by saying, “I know what you are getting at. If you imagine that Iam a Communist, I am nothing but a creative novelist. I can’t get the hang of politics but peace is very close to my heart.28 Olaf Stapledon termed “fantastic” the denial of visas to his compatriots. “I suppose they let me come in because they think I am harmless. Well, I am harmless. The trouble is that too many people are not harmless, and that applies to both sides.”29

The free speech issue came up again when eighteen of the delegates to the Waldorf conference agreed to stay for two weeks of similar meetings in cities across the country. A few hours before the New Jersey meeting was scheduled to begin on March 29, the State Department notified the various embassies that the delegates had been admitted to attend only the three-day conference in New York. They were now expected to depart promptly. At the same time, Yale University refused to grant permission for Shostakovich to give a concert and talk on campus, seeing “no educational value in opening the university halls to such a meeting.” Letters to the New York Times directly raised the issue of the legitimacy of American claims to stand for freedom. One declared that the opposition to the Cultural and Scientific Conference was playing “the Soviet game,” throwing away “the one priceless advantage we hold in the rest of the world.” The writer asked pointedly: “How could lack of confidence in our democratic traditions be more clearly expressed than by an attempt to protect them by silencing or discrediting the arguments of their opponents before they are heard? Surely the strength of our democracy lies in the assurance that it is chosen, not imposed. If it cannot defend itself, it is not worth defending.”*° In a similar vein, a Yale alumnus wrote to say he was stunned by his

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alma mater’s refusal of premises to Shostakovich: “How can this country honestly complain of Soviet censorship and the Iron Curtain when our own Government and one of our greatest institutions of learning deliberately block the expression of alien ideas? We are now playing the Russian game. How can our world audience believe us when we tell them this is a land of free speech, individual liberty and open discussion of every idea?”3! The issue came up once again a year later when the State Department refused visas to a twelve-person delegation of the Partisans of Peace, headed by Pablo Picasso, that sought to present a petition to the United States Congress requesting an end to the arms race and the prohibition of atomic weapons. The New York Times issued a strong editorial statement criticizing the Partisans of Peace but disagreeing with the decision to exclude them. “We do not think there is any harm in free discussion of unpopular views; in trying to prevent it, we do more damage to ourselves than to those we silence, and, in fact, without it our own society will become conformist, brittle, and destructible.”>2 A letter from Don Brown of Corning, New York, commended the Times editorial, and offered a further suggestion: “How much better would it have been to have welcomed these speakers to our shores, shown them the ad-

vantages of America and then asked that they seek permission to tour Russian cities with a like number of American speakers. If permission were refused, the world would be informed. If granted, what a wonderful opportunity to strike a blow for peace.” Opponents of the Waldorf conference used a variety of means to disrupt it, all of which raised the issue of free speech. The State Department did not stop at rhetorical denunciations and refusal of visas. In the middle of the opening banquet, immigration officers picked up the Canadian delegation and deported two of its three members.*4 The veterans, religious groups, and Russian and Eastern European émigrés

who picketed the conference would just as soon have had the State Department ban it altogether, because, in their eyes, it amounted to “trifling with our nation’s security.”25 When it did take place, they appeared at all the conference and rally sites—the Waldorf, Carnegie Hall, and Madison Square Garden — singing patriotic songs, reciting prayers, and chanting and shouting anti-Communist and anti-Soviet slogans: “Down with the Russian skunks,” “Go back to Russia where you belong,” and “We don’t want you, you're too red for us.” One picket kept shouting, “Down with the reds! Down with the pinks! Down with the lefties! Down with the UN!” Some passers-by joined as pickets called to them, “If yowre an American, go around with us a few

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times.” Pickets included Catholic War Veterans, Jewish War Veterans, the American Legion, Gold Star Mothers, and various organizations from Soviet-

dominated countries. The most vocal protestors were organized by the People’s Committee for Freedom of Religion, who threatened the meeting's attendees, yelling, “Come on out and get your medicine. Don’t be yellow, you Benedict Arnolds.” One woman carried a sign that read “Exterminate the red rats” and a spray gun filled with water. She was finally convinced to stop using it by police officers whose uniforms were getting wet. The picket line outside Carnegie Hall was so disorganized that demonstrators shouted at photographers and reporters and at three little girls who walked into the hall to attend an Easter play.*° The conference ended with a rally of eighteen thousand people in Madison Square Garden, where two thousand pickets taunted and jeered the participants. (Five thousand more pickets were reportedly turned away.) The New York Times described the pickets as “more boisterous and pugnacious than at any time ... as noisy and militant as those usually assembled in behalf of a left-wing cause.” Refugees from Iron Curtain countries “tried to maul and tangle with persons entering the Garden, asserting they knew them personally as enemies of the United States.”>” The Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF) took yet another approach to attacking the Waldorf conference. Organized by liberal intellectuals, many of whom had been through a revolutionary Communist phase, the AIF was obsessed with exposing Stalinism on the home front. Their move to the right, motivated by staunch anticommunism, led them to strong support of U.S. government policies around the world.*8 Sidney Hook began the attack, asking President Truman to issue a statement protesting “the so-called Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace,” and claiming that Harlow Shapley was “either a captive of Communist fellow-travelers or their willing tool.” The AIF challenged speakers and sponsors of the conference to identify themselves as “the Communist party members or inveterate fellow-travelers that they are.’3? The AIF also pressured people to withdraw their sponsorship from the conference, a tactic that succeeded in a few cases but backfired in others. Some sponsors who might have agreed with the AIF intellectually were offended by the organization’s pressure tactics. When newspapers reported that a list of people had withdrawn their sponsorship, a number of the named denied that the claim was true, to the embarrassment of the AIF.

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Sidney Hook personally wrote letters to a number of sponsors claiming that he had been denied a place on the program, but there was more to that story as well. Hook’s hostility to the NCASP and the Waldorf conference was no secret. When he demanded a place on the program shortly before the conference began, Shapley’s compromise was to offer him an opportunity to respond briefly after one of the panel discussions. In an attempt to embarrass the conference organizers, Hook responded by bombarding the press and the conference sponsors with complaints at having been denied an opportunity to give a speech, confronting Shapley at his hotel room at the Waldorf, and organizing a countermeeting notable for its own ideological narrowness.*! The AIF claimed its rival meeting at Freedom House was to be conducted “in the spirit of free inquiry and honest differences of opinion—the true hallmark of a gathering of intellectuals whose minds are not twisted into the straightjacket of the Communist party line.’42 The AIF meeting focused on freedom, not peace, although pacifist A. J. Muste was afforded the platform not offered to him at the Waldorf. The main speakers at the counterrally were staunch anti-Communists, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writer Max East-

man, and Teachers College professor and AIF cochair George S. Counts. In his keynote address before nearly one thousand people, Hook compared the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany; other speakers elaborated on the theme of intellectual freedom versus intellectual repression.*? At the same time, across town, Dmitri Shostakovich called for “progressive” artists to lead the fight against “the new aspirants for world domination, now engaged in resurrecting the theory and practice of fascism.”44 Aaron Copland predicted that the present policies of the American government would lead inevitably into a third world war. Both sides had support from prominent people. The AIF made public a cablegram from T. S. Eliot in which he called the conference “an attempt to demoralize intellectual and moral integrity everywhere.” At the same time, Thomas Mann— described by the New York Times as a “novelist and foe of totalitarianism” — assailed the critics of the conference as spreaders of “hatred and war psychosis.”45 There was posturing, exaggeration, name-calling, and hypocrisy on both sides. The Waldorf conference upheld the Soviet Union as a force for peace, blaming the threat of war on American aggression, a position that reflected the Communist Party line but one that was held by many non-Communists as well. The AIF seemed more obsessed with anticommunism than with free-

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dom; indeed, Alfred Kazin and Lewis Coser believed that they were not asked to join because Hook felt they were not sufficiently anti-Communist. AIF members succeeded in asking some embarrassing questions at one of the largest sessions at the Waldorf, the one about writing and publishing, which attracted more than eight hundred people. Following the formal presentations at this session, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and others

accused A. A. Fadeyev of being a state functionary and asked what had happened to a number of Russian writers. They were, of course, not satisfied with Fadeyev’s glib responses to their questions about the fate of such internationally known writers as Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel. But the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissenters, horrifying as it was, did not receive much more of a hearing— that was hardly the point for the conference organizers. One major effect of the controversy between proponents of the Waldorf conference and the AIF was that American liberalism continued to fragment. Many liberals felt pressured to choose between communism and “the holy war against Communism.”*” The split was symbolized in an exchange of letters between a conference sponsor and the codirectors of the AIF. Theodore Brameld was a colleague of Sidney Hook and a Waldorf sponsor who described himself as critical of both the Soviet Union and the CPUSA. Brameld criticized the press for reflecting the attitudes of the pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet camp. He was sure that other sponsors and thousands of citizens were glad to see the conference called despite refusing to be identified with one or the other extreme. He also criticized the actions of the State Department. But the bulk of his letter was aimed at liberals who tried to intimidate people from identifying themselves with the conference. “One of the greatest present threats to American democracy,” wrote Brameld, “is the kind of ‘liberal’ who appears so dubious of its superiority logically, ethically, and socially that he would not only violate the First Amendment by silencing teachers who are members of a still legally recognized political party; he would encourage by his tactics, intentionally or not, those very groups who seek to destroy the entire Bill of Rights, and so eventually democracy itself.”48 Counts and Hook responded to Brameld’s charges by criticizing the Waldorf sponsors as “accomplices in the perpetration of an intellectual fraud upon the American public.” They argued that the AIF represented dignified opposition to the organized Communist duplicity and should not be linked with the State Department actions, which they opposed, or with the mass picketing, which they opposed where it interfered with orderly discussion. They concluded with an attack on “totalitarian liberals” who “never defend

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the victims of Communist action but always portray the Communists as victims even when the latter are subject to legitimate criticism.”49 The AIF had a point to make about Communists’ and fellow travelers’ silence about the lack of freedom within the USSR. But they were not above a little duplicity themselves, claiming sponsors had withdrawn when, in fact, they had not. And their behind-the-scenes work to disrupt the conference did not really represent “dignified opposition” so much as an attempt to limit the impact of the Waldorf conference by intimidating people who might have participated otherwise. Limiting the conference organizers’ opportunity to present their point of view was hardly a means of promoting intellectual freedom.°*° Writer and critic Irving Howe had a perceptive view of the situation. Howe supported the AIF counterrally, though he criticized the organization for being too supportive of U.S. foreign policy. But his detailed critique was reserved for what he saw as a new political position emanating from the Waldorf conference: “The cold war rankles—why not reach a cold agreement? Why not divide the world on a bluntly imperial basis, allowing the Russians free reign in ‘their’ sphere of influence. ..? The idea of formalizing the world’s split—in the name, of course, of one world—will be attractive to those who fear war and feel no sense of rebellion against either Stalinism or capitalism.”>! This was an incisive critique of the simplistic version of peaceful coexistence promoted by Communists and Progressives. But Howe, for all that he hoped to see the Communists weakened as a political force, seemed not to understand just how much confusion and chaos there was on the proSoviet Left. The Waldorf conference had lasting consequences for many of its participants who experienced harassment and intimidation. HUAC compiled a list of the Communist-front affiliations of the conference sponsors, which included such organizations as the League of American Writers, the National Negro Congress, and People’s Songs, Inc. HUAC chairman John S. Wood, a Democrat from Georgia, inserted a statement into the Congressional Record charging that 291 of the 500 sponsors had “associated themselves with Communist-front organizations.” Five sponsors, including Norman Mailer, were dropped as judges for the National Fine Arts Award, which carried a prize of one hundred thousand dollars, because they carried “a red taint.” Clifford Durr lost an opportunity to join the Princeton faculty when several alumni complained about his having given a speech at the Waldorf conference.*? Although it may have alarmed government officials and anti-Communists

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of all sorts at the time, in retrospect the “peace offensive” in the United States, beginning with the Waldorf conference, looks more like the last hurrah of the American Communist movément, a desperate attempt to recover from the losses of the Wallace campaign. Instead, it merely intensified the problems revealed during the campaign, and further isolated the Communists and those progressives whose positions approximated the Communist outlook. The peace offensive failed to reverse the CPUSAs decline. At best, it raised opportunities for dialogue on big complex issues — opportunities that virtually no one wanted to avail themselves of, not even those Socialists, pacifists, and lib-

erals who shared some of the Communists’ concerns. A few anti-Communist observers thought the Waldorf conference was tragic because of the missed opportunity for dialogue that it represented. Dwight Macdonald, an AIF supporter who characterized the Waldorf conference as “strictly a Stalinoid affair,” was surprised to find that he could talk to

the Communists about the issues and that they were “much less effective and dangerous than I had expected.”53 Joseph Lash, no stranger to left-wing infighting, concluded that without a doubt the conference was Communist

dominated. Yet, he also characterized it as “an interesting study of the complexities and contradictions to be found today within the left-wing camp.” Lash expressed surprise at the amount of criticism of the Soviet Union within the conference, which he thought reflected “a profound ideological insecurity behind the facade of Stalinist orthodoxy.” In any case, Lash argued, the issues raised by the Waldorf conference and the AIF counterrally were “momentous.”*4 Like Lash, Dwight Macdonald also thought the conference was significant for what it revealed about the split within the Communist ranks. He described the process by which a resolution on world peace, so “vague” and “innocuous” that even he could have signed it, was pushed through by veteran Communists working to persuade the delegates not to insist on a more militant (that is, pro-Soviet, anti-American) resolution. Macdonald concluded,

“It was, all in all, a richly confusing session, which brought to a head the conflict visible all through the Conference between the American leaders, who fa-

vored a ‘soft’ or ‘popular front’ policy, and the American ranks plus the Russian delegates, who favored a ‘hard’ or ‘third period’ policy.’ For all the confusion, Macdonald suggested that “[t]he Waldorf Conference showed one thing very clearly: the Communists are on the defensive, in this country at least.”56

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But it was not just Communists and peace activists who were on the defensive by this time. The harshest attacks from the defenders of “Americanism” were reserved for those people who simultaneously promoted peaceful coexistence and civil rights. In the context of the cold war, emphasizing the lack of civil rights for African Americans embarrassed the United States in its claim to stand for freedom. At the same time, promoting a notion of peace that relied on peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union became tantamount to treason. Some people believed such ideas did not deserve a public hearing. W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were singled out for attack, both by the government and by their fellow citizens. Robeson, in particular, became a touchstone: denouncing him became a way to prove one’s loyalty to the United States, while attending his concerts or owning his records was used as evidence of Communist leanings. The uproar began over a speech Robeson gave at the Paris Peace Congress in April 1949. Newspapers in the United States widely quoted Robeson as having said that American Negroes would not go to war against the Soviet Union. Although the Daily Worker reported that the “little people” backed Robeson, black leaders rushed to distance themselves from his remarks, and the white

press castigated him as a traitor. The civil rights establishment met to create “a united front to make sure that America understood that the current black leadership totally disagreed with Robeson.”5’? Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Walter White, and Mary McLeod Bethune were among those who

made public statements insisting that Robeson did not speak for American Negroes. Hearst newspapers dubbed Robeson “An Undesirable Citizen,” while HUAC held hearings that offered prominent African Americans the “privilege” of expressing views contrary to Robeson’s “disloyal and unpatriotic statements.”58 The committee’s star witness was Jackie Robinson, whose entry

into major league baseball Robeson and the Communists had worked to facilitate. Robinson referred to Robeson’s alleged remarks in Paris as “silly” and stated that black people could win their fight against race discrimination “without the Communists and we don’t want their help.”°? Robeson claimed he had been misquoted, that his emphasis had been on peace, not on “anybody going to war with anybody.” This statement was true, yet his position on cold war issues was clear: his primary concerns were with preventing a war against the Soviet Union and gaining freedom for black people in the United States. At a welcome-home rally held on his behalf in June, Robeson said: “Yes, I love this Soviet people more than any other nation,

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because of their suffering and sacrifices for us, the Negro people, the progressive people, the people of the future in this world. At the Paris Peace Conference I said it was unthinkable that the Negro people of America or elsewhere in the world could be drawn into war with the Soviet Union. I repeat it with hundred-fold emphasis. THEY wiILL NoT.”®! Robeson argued that blacks should not and would not go to war on behalf of a racist U.S. government that showed little concern for extending democracy at home. “We do not want to die in vain any more on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia! Let it be wherever we are lynched and deprived of our rights as human beings!” Given the commotion over Robeson’s Paris speech, the combination of his outspoken views on civil rights and his pro-Soviet sentiments, and the mounting pressure to demonstrate loyalty in the cold war, perhaps the trouble that developed at Robeson’s concert in Peekskill in August 1949 was predictable. Though Robeson had given concerts in that part of Westchester County in previous years, this time area residents, led by veterans who strongly opposed Robeson, mobilized to prevent the concert. Howard Fast had agreed to chair the concert, scheduled for August 27, that was announced by the Peekskill Evening Star as follows: “Paul Robeson, noted Negro singer and in recent months an avowed disciple of Soviet Russia, will make his third

appearance in three years. . .. Sponsoring the concert is “People’s Artists, Inc., ’ an organization listed as subversive and branded as a Communist front by the California Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948. Funds collected by

sale of tickets will be used ‘for the benefit of the Harlem Chapter of Civil Rights Congress.’ ... The ‘Civil Rights Congress’ has been cited as subversive by former U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark.”® An editorial the same day suggested, “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out.” Encouraged by such articles and editorials in the local press, and with the aid of the local police force, a group of veterans succeeded in preventing the concert by barricading the roads leading to the concert grounds; burning the platform, chairs, songbooks, and programs; and beating up people who made it into the concert grounds. Witnesses reported that the violence was accompanied by anti-Semitic and antiblack rhetoric, and some of the concertgoers feared for their lives. Despite several requests for help, county and state authorities failed to arrive on the scene until ten o’clock, more than two hours after the violence began. Milton Flynt, commander of Peekskill Post

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No. 274 of the American Legion, boasted afterward, “Our objective was to prevent the Paul Robeson concert and I think our objective was reached.”® Although the demonstrators, backed by District Attorney George Fanelli, denied responsibility for the violence, signs appeared around Peekskill reading, “Wake up, America, Peekskill did!” The CP leadership in New York State wanted to protest by holding a rally in Harlem, but an opposing group vigorously argued for rescheduling the concert. Within twenty-four hours of the August 27 Peekskill riot, several hundred Robeson supporters met at the nearby estate of Sam and Helen Rosen, formed the Westchester Committee for Law and Order, and agreed to make another attempt to hold the concert. Howard Fast described the uneasiness and fear at the meeting, adding, “Yet I think they sensed, all of them, that something had started which would never stop if they retreated.’ Robeson agreed with the plan to “beard the lion in his own den and go back to Peekskill.”® The veterans who had provoked the riot also refused to back down; they voted to hold another protest parade on the highway in front of the concert ' ground. They did not want to appear cowardly, “intimidated by Communist threats of ‘getting even’” As Commentary suggested, there were probably some protestors who were “not exactly displeased at the prospect of battling it out with the Communists.”® The concert was rescheduled for September 4, this time with a promise of police protection. The organizers did not put much stock in that promise, and came prepared to defend Robeson and the concertgoers with some 250 trade unionists who volunteered to act as guards. Veterans and other local residents were determined to disrupt the event, and the stage was set for a confrontation. Some twenty thousand men, women, and children enjoyed the Sundayafternoon concert, but as they left the concert grounds, angry mobs overturned a number of cars, dragged people out of cars and beat them, and stoned vehicles along roads and highways for several miles. One hundred fifty people received treatment at area hospitals for cuts and bruises from broken glass and beatings. A CBS on-the-spot recording broadcast that evening included shouts by the crowd of “Go back to Russia!” and “Hey, go on back to Russia, you niggers!”©? Individuals who attended the concert reported that the authorities did little to stop the violence and sometimes even participated in it. Sarah M. of the Bronx said, “I saw several injured people ask the troop-

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Union members guard Paul Robeson as he sings at the rescheduled concert in Peekskill, New York. AP/Wide World Photos

ers and policemen for help. They were not only refused help, but were laughed at, called such names as ‘Dirty Jew, ‘Dirty nigger, ’ and some of these injured were hit with the billies of the policemen. I also saw some troopers and policemen throw rocks at the cars and buses.””° Nina P. of New York City described how she was injured: “A group of hoodlums came directly in front of the bus and threw a huge boulder in. This boulder struck my left hand and when I looked down I saw that the third joint of my middle finger was barely hanging by one tendon. Witnessing this whole incident were State troopers who were laughing. .. . As the stones kept coming, all I could think of was: This is not America. This is Nazi Germany. I don’t want to live like this.”7! Although other observers commented on the parallels with German fascism, District Attorney Fanelli wrote a report to Governor Dewey commend-

ing the efficient and effective work of all the law enforcement agencies involved. Accounts of the riot differed wildly, but there seems little doubt that

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one of the main reasons for the hostility directed toward the concertgoers was Robeson’s Paris speech and his connection with Communists. Under pressure, Governor Dewey ordered a grand-jury investigation to inquire whether the incident at Peekskill was “a part of the communist strategy to foment racial and religious hatreds.” Fanelli was put in charge of the investigation, which concluded that the underlying cause of the violence at Peekskill was Robeson’s inflammatory statements “derogatory to his native land” during 1949: “The fundamental cause of resentment and the focus of hostility was

Communism ...and Communism alone.”72 Whether they blamed the Communists or the veterans, observers and ana-

lysts condemned the violence at Peekskill. Communists and their sympathizers may have been alone in viewing the events at Peekskill as part of a plan to institute fascism in the United States, but they were not alone in arguing that the riot could have serious and far-reaching consequences. The ACLU collected eyewitness reports of the Peekskill riots and concluded that the events involved intimidation of not just Communists but also those people committed to democratic principles. For example, two days before the concert someone fired shots into the home of Stephen D. Szego, a businessman not in sympathy with the CP who had rented his land for the concert. The ACLU report argued that, contrary to the press coverage, the Communists did not provoke violence. The problem was that the rioters thought they were carrying out a patriotic duty and that the nation would applaud them. “They believed that in denying freedom of speech to a political minority they were following the lead of the federal authorities.” The national press echoed the ACLU’s suggestion that such violence was an aid to Communist propaganda, that “it lowers us to the level of the Communist police state.”’”4 Eleanor Roosevelt hammered this point home in her “My Day” column, expressing what seemed to be the majority view: “This is not the type of thing that we believe in in the United States. If peaceful picketing leads to this, all the pickets do is to give the Communists good material for propaganda. I dislike everything that Paul Robeson is now saying. I am opposed to him politically and I think he is doing great harm to his own people... . I still believe, however, that if he wants to give a concert or speak his mind in public, no one should prevent him from doing so.”’> When asked for his opinion, President Truman said that Mrs. Roosevelt had covered the situation perfectly in her newspaper column.” It is noteworthy that the critics were virtually unanimous in opposing the methods of the anti-Communists, not the substance. They expressed a con-

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cern that such events made the United States look bad. Even Commentary, which blamed the Communists for the violence, argued that the vets had managed “only to furnish the Communists here and abroad with a first-class

propagandistic springboard:””” Liberal and right-wing critics of the Peekskill riots in essence argued that the dominant cold war view of peace could be perpetuated without violence. The domestic cold war consensus was ultimately backed by force and violence: legal force as in the Smith Act trials of top CP leaders, and more violent force as in the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg a few years later. But the point was that violence was necessary only in extreme situations; otherwise it was an embarrassment in the “land of the free.” Thus, the Truman administration could promote the cold war consensus through policies that deprived people of their civil liberties, while at the same time joining the chorus of voices criticizing the violence at Peekskill. A peaceful Sunday-afternoon concert hardly constituted a threat to the established order. But there were limits to the liberal position on freedom of speech for Communists and fellow travelers. Eleanor Roosevelt refused to sign a public statement circulated by the ACLU that called for “every encouragement” to be given “to the fullest freedom of expression by Communists as by all others in order that the American people may determine through public debate of all issues, the road to progress.””8 The Truman administration concluded that al-

lowing Robeson to make appearances abroad was not in the best interests of the United States. The government denied Robeson a passport for the next eight years, contributing significantly to the decline of his career and his health. In the fall of 1950 the Fellowship of Reconciliation considered sponsoring a concert by Paul Robeson in order to demonstrate its commitment to civil liberties. The FOR’s committee on civil liberties surveyed other groups to see if they might be interested in cosponsoring such an event. The committee received positive responses from Robert Ludlow of the Catholic Worker, Donald Harrington of the Community Church of New York, and Bayard Rustin of the West Coast FOR. Freda Kirchwey of the Nation Associates, Norman Thomas, and A. Philip Randolph all opposed the idea, arguing that it would be too confusing to the general public. The FOR committee’s report quoted Kirchwey as saying, “Theoretically and morally it is the thing to do but practically I think Robeson and his friends would wreck the purpose you have in mind.” The FOR executive committee voted unanimously to drop the idea.”

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Robeson was more than a symbol of disloyalty. Though he was not a Communist Party member, he was still a prime example of the pro-Communist Left’s unwillingness to criticize the Soviet Union. Not wanting to contribute to the growing anti-Soviet sentiment in the United States, Robeson suppressed his own doubts and publicly defended the Soviet Union’s record. For example, he defended the existence of concentration camps in “a young, growing state like Russia,” because the inmates were probably “fascists” who belonged in them.*®° He said nothing when Jewish writers and artists whom he had befriended in the Soviet Union disappeared. Many Communists and fellow travelers refused to believe anything the capitalist press said about the Soviet Union. Their unwillingness to acknowledge the horrors of the Soviet system may not have made them a danger to national security, but it made them suspicious in the eyes of the American government and public. American Communists were clearly on the defensive by 1949, and the at-

tacks on their civil liberties —and the liberties of others suspected of having any association with communism — were far out of proportion to the threat they posed to peace, freedom, and national security. Both Communists and peace activists steadily lost ground. The Communists demonstrated bravado but not strength. Communist leaders tried to finesse the gap between their hard line on the cold war and their desire to reach a broad audience. The leaders had pushed through the innocuous resolution on world peace at the Waldorf conference, and the leaders had wanted to avoid the confrontation they

knew would result from a second Robeson concert. The rank and file wanted a stronger resolution, and they insisted on rescheduling Robeson’s concert after the first one was prevented. Neither the Communists nor the vets wanted to leave the impression that they had been intimidated. The cold war had come home. When young Robeson sympathizers heard about what was happening after the concert, some of them went home to get their baseball bats in order to fight back. Robeson himself argued that “from now on out we take the offensive. We take it!”8! But the CP leadership was underground, the

attacks became more numerous and intense, and people bailed out in large numbers. Party membership in 1953 was only half of what it had been in 1949.

In the years to come, the association of peace with communism made the audience for peace organizations small, defensive, and marginal. The international peace offensive put American organizations in a bind, trying to promote peace without appearing to be “Communist dupes.” Attacks on Communist peace efforts led to attacks on any peace efforts, including the

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activities of the FOR, the WRL, the WILPE, SANE, and so on. Even the United

World Federalists, which supported the policy of nuclear deterrence, was attacked as Communist. As the FOR commented sardonically: “From being mad at the Communists for telling everybody they were only interested in maintaining peace in spite of the warmongering Americans, it was only an easy step to being mad at anybody who talks about peace because he might be a Communist. From there it’s only a shuffle to disowning anybody, Communist or not, who ever said a good word for peace, and it will need only a slight sidestep more to the proud announcement that we wouldn’t have peace on a silver platter.”8? In the early 1950s, as the Korean War dragged on, the U.S. government worried about conveying precisely this impression.®? But this did not prevent the Justice Department from indicting W. E. B. Du Bois and his associates for circulating a petition calling for the abolition of atomic weapons; nor the Subversive Activities Control Board from hounding the American Peace Crusade out of existence; nor the State Department from denying the right to international travel to Robeson, Linus Pauling, and other outspoken opponents of the cold war; nor the FBI from harassing the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Attempts to limit the rights of those citizens who spoke out for peaceful coexistence continued unabated.

“Put My Name Down’ Responses to the Communist Peace Offensive

I’ve got a brother in Stalingrad, I thought you knowed I’ve got a brother in Stalingrad, way down the road On many things we can agree, and he wants peace just like me I’m gonna put my name down. — Woody Guthrie and Irwin Silber, 1950

he music for “Put My Name Down” comes from Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Travelin,’ and indeed promoters of peaceful coexistence did some “hard travelin’” in the early 1950s. Pacifists were attacked for serving Communist interests; attempts by pacifists to distinguish their efforts from those of the Communists failed to strengthen the peace movement. The government sought to destroy “Communist-front” organizations such as the Peace Information Center (PIC) and the American Peace Crusade (APC) by infiltrating,

investigating, and incriminating their leaders. Communists became increasingly secretive and paranoid as the attacks mounted—thus, they alienated some of the few allies they had left. All these contradictions—pacifists warning people away from certain peace efforts, the government that claimed to stand for “freedom” restricting the rights of those who spoke out for peace, the Communists’ openness about peace issues and secrecy about their identities— were highlighted in the controversy over the Stockholm Peace Petition. Given the political climate of the early 1950s, it is striking that many Americans were willing to “put their names down” on a petition that demanded the outlawing of atomic weapons. Just a year after the Peekskill riots, Howard Fast commented on the legal means being employed by the “fascists” to destroy “progressives”:

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Dream The Strangesteee 82 ee e OF Since then [Peekskill] the McCarran Act has legalized the police state in America, and the creeping, rot of fascism is infesting the country. Since then, the Korean war —and the immense war propaganda which accompanies it—has put severe penalties upon any form of protest or dissent, and thousands of “liberals” and “progressives” have run for cover. At the time of Peekskill, there was almost no political prisoner in American jails; today there are a great many. At the time of Peekskill, the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were on trial; since then they have been found guilty and the Communist Party has been placed under indictment by the McCarran Act. At the time of Peekskill, mass deportation of aliens had not yet begun nor was the concentration camp at Ellis Island in operation as it is today. At the time of Peekskill, this was not wholly a land of loyalty oaths, witch hunts, and terror for all who might hate war and love peace and democracy.! Fast’s rhetoric may have been overblown, but it was true that the risks of

speaking out for peace had increased. The difficulty of speaking out against the Korean War is illustrated in the little stories. For example, not long after she and her family had moved to Denver in 1950, while her husband, Clifford,

was in the hospital recovering from an operation, Virginia Durr recalls that she signed a card sent out by Linus Pauling and others opposing bombing above the Yalu River (which would have risked war with China). Soon after

Clifford Durr’s return to work, he was fired from his job as general counsel for the Farmers’ Union Insurance Corporation, the job that had brought them to Denver in the first place. The government’s efforts to destroy the Communist Party and its “front” groups had picked up since Peekskill, and the anti-Communist hysteria had become more intense and widespread. The McCarran Act, passed by Congress in 1950, required all Communist and Communist-front groups to register with the government or face criminal sanction. Repressive legislation (on the state and local level as well) combined with the Korean War and the deci-

sion to develop the hydrogen bomb made it more difficult to speak for peace. And McCarthyism had yet to reach its height. It was not only Communists who felt fearful about the future at this point. Other activists were prepared to take desperate measures to ensure a more peaceful world. Bayard Rustin, a pacifist who wanted nothing to do with Communists, wrote to A. J. Muste in February 1950 proposing that Peacemakers (an organization that sought to unite people of both blocs) take drastic

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action to call attention to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Rustin was disturbed that church and labor people seemed “little prepared to question the H-bomb. . . . I find even fairly liberal pacifists questioning our right to raise the question.”? Rustin wrote that church and labor groups refused to sponsor meetings on “The Quaker Plan for Peace with the Soviet Union.” Ministers reported, “Our people will not support talk about peace with Russia.” “Labor leaders are afraid, reported Rustin. “They admit it is bad but give in.”3 Rustin concluded from this situation that it was time to up the ante: I believe that people, including the churchmen and labor leaders of goodwill described above, are in so fearful and demoralized a position that they are prepared to give in on anything to stop the Russians that the government calls for. The authorities know this. I believe our chances are not, then, to proceed only with letters and telegrams and public statements but through direct action by men who are prepared to make terrible sacrifices now, to look mad now, to give up all now ifnecessary. ... We must find some way to let people know that now we are prepared to go to jail or even to give up all—to get shot down if necessary— but to cry out.4

But pacifists were no more effective than Communists in promoting a kind of peace that was out of step with the cold war consensus. Opposing development of the H-bomb, speaking out against the Korean War, calling for dialogue with the Soviet Union—such ideas had become “un-American.” Thus, both government agencies and private citizens began to link pacifism with communism. The FBI worked to discover whether the War Resisters League had been infiltrated by Communists, and HUAC called the Fellowship of Reconciliation “allegedly a strictly pacifist organization” that maintains “that class war is necessary.” Actor Robert Montgomery spoke about the “Communist Fifth Column” in a coast-to-coast television broadcast, accusing FOR members of “aiding directly in the Communist conspiracy against the United States.” Herbert Philbrick reported in the New York Herald Tribune that Communists had been ordered to infiltrate the FOR.° Attempts to point out the difference between pacifism and communism were few and far between. One rare example was journalist Frederick Woltman’s defense of the FOR and the National Council Against Conscription, directed by John Swomley. In October 1951 Woltman reported that the presi-

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dent of Ohio State University had banned a pacifist (a Quaker and FOR member) from speaking on campus, an incident he termed symptomatic. In other parts of the country, “charges of communism have been raised against anti-Communist pacifist forces.” Woltman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for “his initiative and resourcefulness in exposing Communist subversive activities,” was disturbed that these mistaken attacks on pacifists diverted attention from the “real menace, the pro-Soviet ‘peace’ movement.”6 These distinctions were lost on many people, especially as pacifists often received the same treatment as Communists, and membership in pacifist organizations dwindled in the 1950s. In 1962 in an attack on Martin Luther King, Jr.,

the American Council of Christian Laymen called the FOR a “radical-pacifist group using Christian terms to spread Communist propaganda.”” Even peace efforts that supported the basic ideas of the cold war consensus were subject to attack. Many advocates of world government were antiSoviet, agreeing that Western military power based on nuclear deterrence was necessary for the time being. But this did not prevent a Bridgeport, Connecticut, newspaper from running a story in 1952 headlined “World Government Means Communism.” Representative Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin told a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that world government was “just as dangerous as the communism we are fighting.” Newsweek reported in February 1953 that loyalty investigators were asking would-be government employees if they had ever been members of the United World Federalists. In May of that year a special state agent worked with two plainclothes city police detectives to take down the license plate numbers and names of people in the audience at a public meeting of the United World Federalists in Baltimore. Maryland’s Subversive Activities Act, adopted in 1949, authorized the mainte-

nance of secret files on seditious persons and acts. Needless to say, such tactics contributed to the devastation of an already declining movement.® The Socialist Party declined during this period as well, despite the fact that its leader, Norman Thomas, continued to edge closer to the position of the Truman administration. One SP supporter told Thomas that it was getting harder and harder to collect signatures to place the party’s name on the ballot “as people get more and more scared to sign anything for fear of being thought subversive.”? One result of all this fear and intimidation was a stifling of public discussion of peace-related issues. But the narrowing of political and cultural activity also touched on civil rights, as CORE’s social action was attacked as Communist inspired. It affected scientific work, as discussion with scientists

in the Eastern bloc was cut off. And it affected the arts, most dramatically per-

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haps the movies. In December 1950 Common Cause reported that Monogram Studios had abandoned plans to film the life of Onondaga Indian chief Hiawatha, “for fear that a picture about Hiawatha’s peace efforts might be regarded as Red propaganda.”!0 The increasingly common association of peace with communism was a source of great concern for established peace groups. A Fellowship of Reconciliation recruiting leaflet, circa 1950, explicitly challenged this association: “[T]he Communists, here and around the world, are waging what the papers call a ‘peace offensive, ’. . . trying to convince the people of the world that Russia and Communism stand for peace and that the United States stands for war. Most Americans reject that propaganda and oppose the so-called ‘peace efforts’ of the Communists. But does that make pEacg a bad word? Because the Communists misuse the word, are Americans going to agree that they prefer war?”!! This question was asked many times in the early 1950s. One way that the FOR addressed this problem was to try to make people aware of the difference between its own efforts and the Communists. But attempts to criticize peace activity supported by Communists may have simply contributed to the damage already being suffered by the peace movement. Although the FOR could argue that peace is a good word, the organization’s attempts to warn people away from the Mid-Century Conference for Peace, held in Chicago in May 1950, in fact created a rift within the FOR itself.

The FOR Executive Committee and National Council were disturbed about the fact that the Chicago conference, sponsored by the National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives, seemed to be in the control of Communists

(although they did not bother to present evidence of such control at their meetings, other than an impression gained from talking with Willard Uphaus, executive director of the conference). FOR officials agreed that A. J.

Muste should send a letter to National Council members and pacifist sponsors of the conference, setting forth some facts about the conference and its

sponsorship and how the Communists might use this opportunity to penetrate pacifist organizations. The National Council took pains to point out that “the FOR has not initiated a campaign against the conference, but because of questions asked, the Executive Committee in April asked A. J. to send out his factual letter on it, feeling that members should have factual information and

insights, but that we should not get drawn into controversy. Organizationally, the FOR has kept clear of collaboration.” Muste’s letter laid out the case for Communist control over the Chicago conference, including the fact that the Labor Youth League (an organization

Dream 86 at 2 Strangest No The el a eR r n of young Communists) actively supported it and that “Beanie” Baldwin and Henry Wallace had shown him a list that had been used to get sponsors for —a list that excluded anyone with party or front affiliations. the conference Although HUAC had condemned the Waldorf conference because of the Communist-front affiliations of its sponsors, in this case Muste claimed that

the lack of such associations was evidence of Communist sponsorship. Muste explained that the conference was an outgrowth of the Conference Against the Atlantic Pact held in Washington the previous year and that the Progressive Party and the NCASP were probably the real forces behind the conference. Muste also expressed misgivings about Willard Uphaus’s role, which was “significant and troublesome. . . . Willard is a swell guy personally, and I haven't the slightest reason to think that he is or ever has been C.P. But I also know that he will work with C.P. people, and in my opinion has no judgment when it comes to that.”!5 Muste went on to discuss the danger of Communist infiltration. Although claiming that people had the right to hold such a conference and that pacifists did not want to contribute to anti-Communist hysteria, Muste emphasized the great importance of maintaining the integrity of the pacifist forces. “God knows that the peace and pacifist forces are weak enough as it is. Put them in the position where they can be plausibly lumped with organizations and movements which admittedly include Communists, and I think the effect may be disastrous.”!4 This sentiment was shared by many peace proponents. Muste’s letter caused at least one FOR member to resign from the organization in anger. Albert Barnett of the Garrett Biblical Institute wrote to Muste that pacifist “fly-specking” had nearly deprived the Mid-Century Conference for Peace of the use of a local church, that the pastor had been put to needless trouble, and that “the whole cause of peace was embarrassed by this unwarranted meddling.” Barnett claimed that John Swomley had waged a similar campaign against the Methodist Federation for Social Action, spreading misinformation that he finally retracted two years later. “The censoriousness and egocentricity” of such leaders caused Barnett to sever his association with the FOR. He concluded his letter to Muste with a comment that says much about the politics of peace during this period: I believe I have been a member of the Fellowship longer than you yourself have been. I never had to take a detour into Communism and the Communist Party to discover the errors of Communism. I am doubly wearied, therefore, by “reformed Communists” lecturing liberal Christians and condescendingly regarding them as “naive kids.” Better learn that paci-

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fism is not the whole Peace Movement. Better learn too that “freedom” is a Christian prerogative and that Christians need no spoon-feeding by you and your kind. I shall continue to believe in pacifism without refusing to cooperate with peace loving people who are not pacifists.!5

FOR leader John Swomley later reported that a group of pacifists had indeed ignored A. J. Muste’s warning and participated in the Mid-Century Conference for Peace. They had been able to ensure that the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives had no Communists among its officers. As Swomley noted, “Their partial success seems to have been achieved as a result of the desire on the part of the Communist Party to keep a peace movement going.”!6 Swomley’s surmise was correct. By the time he published his tract “The Peace Offensive and the Cold War” in 1954, American Communists were committed

to working for peace on the broadest possible fronts, whether it meant joining organizations where Communists did have influence, such as the American Peace Crusade, or working through local groups, such as the PTA or the church. But people like Swomley could never overcome their mistrust of Communists, even when they were no longer dominant among the peace forces. Their mistrust continued, and in some ways deepened, during the McCarthy era, when Communists were more secretive than ever about their affiliations. As Swomley put it, “One of the reasons Muste and I took the position we took was that C.P. fronts were usually trying to infiltrate peace and pacifist groups either to control them or to profit from them in one way or another. But they | were never open about it.”!7 Swomley pointed to the Mid-Century Conference for Peace as an example of the Communists’ deception. According to Swomley, the conference was only nominally headed by Willard Uphaus, an FOR member. When Uphaus sought to build alliances with other groups, “key names had been omitted from the Mid-Century Conference letterhead. ... [H]e had wanted to list all in leadership positions but had been overruled

and ... although he was listed as the director, he did not make the decisions.”!8 Just how the Communists intended to “profit” from such arrangements Swomley neglected to explain. Communists viewed their secrecy during the McCarthy era in a very different way. Those party members who did not go underground avoided formal leadership roles in order to avoid tainting the organizations with which they worked. Because of the political climate, many activists who sympathized with the Communist Party did not actually join because they were

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convinced doing so would make them less effective. Others had drifted away from the party but continued*to work on the issues.!? And what about those people who had supposedly been duped? Willard Uphaus went on to become codirector of the American Peace Crusade, still willing to work with anyone who wanted to work for peace. When he ran a summer interfaith program called World Fellowship in 1953, he found himself being attacked as a Communist, called before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and investigated by the State of New Hampshire. He was cited for contempt after refusing to turn over the guest list of the World Fellowship to state authorities. After years of legal appeals, going all the way to the Supreme Court, Uphaus lost his case and served a year in jail in 1959, the

year he turned seventy. The tragedy of such cases seems to be the punishing of those people sincerely working for peace, rather than the fact that they were “duped” by the Communists. Similar stories obtain with regard to the Stockholm Peace Petition. In its origins, the petition clearly was a central aspect of the Communist “peace offensive”; this fact made it different from other peace efforts at the time that involved Communists or that were similar to the party line, but did not emanate directly from the international Communist movement (such as the Waldorf conference and the American Peace Crusade). But even the Stock-

holm appeal took on a life of its own in the sense that those people who agreed with its sentiments rarely questioned its origins; some people even wrote their own version of the petition and circulated it. Many people who circulated or signed the petition did not know or care where it came from.?! The April 1949 World Peace Congress in Paris designated a Permanent

World Peace Committee to continue its work. The third meeting of this committee, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in March 1950, proclaimed a new cam-

paign for signatures on a petition to ban the atomic bomb. For several months the pro-Communist international peace movement concentrated on a mass signature campaign, seeking to mobilize public opinion against the use of atomic weapons and thereby neutralize the form of military power in which the West had an advantage. The Stockholm Peace Petition read: “We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples. We demand strict international control to enforce

The petition initiated by the international Communist movement reflected a strong popular desire for peace. Records of the Peace Information Center, Swarthmore College Peace Collection (opposite)

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this measure. We believe that any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war criminal. We call on all men and women of good will throughout the world to sign this appeal.” A broad array of groups and individuals in Europe and the United States immediately denounced the Stockholm peace appeal. The Swedish premier declared himself disgusted by the use of “Stockholm” in the petition, while a meeting of Europe’s socialist parties adopted a resolution criticizing the petition. The Commission of the Churches on International Affairs sent a letter to 350 religious leaders in seventy countries warning against association with the Stockholm appeal. The Austrian government went so far as to warn against “peace-mongering.”” The official reaction of the U.S. government was expressed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who denounced the resolution as “a propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union.” Acheson made it clear that the United States would not refrain from using atomic weapons simply because it would be called a war criminal if it did use them.”4 HUAC argued that anyone who signed was proposing that the United States commit national suicide. Representatives Bernard Kearney, a Republican from New York, and Harold Velde, a Republican from Illinois, blasted the

petition as an entering wedge for a campaign of civil disobedience and defiance of the government. Kearney claimed the objective was “to confuse and divide the American people and paralyze their resistance to Communist aggression.” Democratic representative Peter Rodino of New Jersey called on clergymen to make God-fearing Americans aware of “the insidious danger of atheistic communism as exemplified by the so-called Stockholm peace petition.”*5 Rodino said he would ask the State and Justice Departments to cooperate in turning over lists of Communist-front organizations to schools and churches. Government officials were not alone in attacking the Stockholm Peace Petition. The New York Times compared the Communists’ tactics to Hitler’s: “Moscow’s aim is a Communist mastery of the world, already one-third accomplished, and . . . in the pursuit of its final goal the Kremlin has not only repudiated as a matter of doctrine all Western standards of morality but has made a science of mendacity and is using, in Lenin’s words, ‘any ruse, cunning, unlawful method, evasion and concealment of the truth’ to gain its ends.”26 James Burnham, speaking to the International Congress for Cultural Freedom in June 1950, claimed that the petition was “not a genuine move toward

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peace, but part of the preparation for—and conduct of—the war of the Soviet power for world conquest.” Burnham was not against all atomic bombs. He was opposed only to those bombs controlled by the Soviet Union, which, he believed, were designed for the destruction of Western civilization. He was “for those bombs made in Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge,” which in his view provided the sole defense of the liberties of Western Europe.?7 Burnham charged that the petition was a tremendous example of Communist hypocrisy. This conclusion was obvious, he said, because the petition was not permitted to be circulated in the Soviet Union. Less than a month later, the Daily Worker announced that nearly 100 million Soviet citizens had signed the petition since June 30, a figure received skeptically in the West, where people assumed that Soviet citizens had been forced to sign it. It seems that whether the Soviets circulated the petition or not, it was evidence of Communist treachery.”® The executive council of the All-American Conference to Combat Communism, claiming to represent national organizations with a total membership of 80 million people, issued a statement claiming that circulation of the peace petition was a means of infiltrating and paralyzing the nation as prelude to an invasion. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters deemed the petition “a colossal hoax and fraud” but pointed out that it showed that people all over the world were “hungry for peace.”?° Certainly, the millions of signatures were a better measure of the broad desire for peace than of Communist duplicity. Criticism of those people who gathered signatures went beyond rhetoric to arrests, physical attacks, and firing from jobs. A policeman who arrested two young women in Los Angeles for circulating the petition told them they were “too cute to be Commies,” and asked, “Don’t you know your'e being used as dupes?” Three workers were forced to quit under pressure from fellow union members at a Milwaukee factory. One man who returned to work suffered a broken back when he was literally thrown out in the street by four coworkers.?! Police officers broke up a mass meeting in Union Square Park in New York City, planned by the New York Labor Conference for Peace, beating demonstrators badly; mounted police charged them, riding their horses onto crowded sidewalks. The Reverend Robert M. Muir, interim rector of two Protestant Episcopal churches in Quincy, Massachusetts, was dismissed because of his support of the petition. A number of maritime workers were removed as “bad security risks” for signing the appeal. Joseph Curran, president of the National Maritime Union, said he doubted that four thousand seamen

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had signed the petition. At any rate, he added, they had the right to appeal their dismissals.*? W. E. B. Du Bois, whom HUAC had attacked by name in its report on the Communist peace offensive, became a particular target of harassment by the government. On August 11, 1950, the Justice Department directed the Peace Information Center, of which Du Bois was chairman, to register “as an agent

of a foreign principal . .. under the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”33 The department failed to specify which foreign principal the PIC was supposedly serving, nor did it specify which acts it suspected the center of having performed. As one observer explained, “It is a fair assumption that the action is a part of the government’s campaign to suppress circulation of the Stockholm Peace Petition, which the Peace Information Center has distributed along with scores of other tracts from native and foreign sources relating to peace.”34 The PIC dissolved in October, but four months later the Justice

Department indicted Du Bois and four of his associates for failure to register as foreign agents. Conviction would carry a charge of up to five years in prison and a fine of ten thousand dollars. Du Bois and many others were appalled at the charge. “It is a curious thing that I am called upon to defend myself against criminal charges for openly advocating the one thing all people want—pgaceg.”*5 Du Bois had been ousted from the NAACP in 1948 because of his prominent role in the Wallace

campaign and his attempts to bring the issue of racism in the United States before the United Nations. In 1949 he had served as a sponsor for the Waldorf

conference, a vice president for the American Continental Congress for World Peace in Mexico City, and a U.S. delegate to the World Congress for Peace in Paris, out of which he had become a member of the executive committee of the Defenders of Peace. In June 1949 he gave a speech at a welcome-

home rally for Paul Robeson, held under the auspices of the Council on African Affairs, in which he said it was time to take “a firm stand for peace. No more war. Least of all, war with Russia, the one nation which has curbed wealth, outlawed race prejudice, and refused to own colonies. Russia is not

perfect; neither are we; but there is nothing wrong with either that war can cure and we will do scant service to our country if we let our greedy leaders lie us into an unjust war.”3¢ In 1950 Du Bois ran for Senate in New York on the American Labor Party ticket in order to raise the issues of “Peace and Civil Rights.” In fact, he believed an electoral campaign was one of the only ways to raise such issues. At a rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom in October 1950, Du Bois discussed how

difficult it was to be openly progressive: “It is possible today that an honest

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American, without committing a crime or an illegal act, can be jailed and impoverished if he talks peace, higher wage or civil rights; this may be done even without trial or hearing; and any public discussion of the case can be absolutely stopped.”>7 Du Bois was nearly eighty-three years old when the Justice Department indicted him. He had contributed much to his country, and many people rallied around him because of his reputation as a scholar and a champion of human rights. He insisted on fighting the indictment on the grounds of free speech, as he wrote to counsel Judge Cobb: “I regard this case as a great opportunity to vindicate the right of free speech and advocacy of peace. On this line I want the case fought and under no circumstances will I curry favor or ask leniency if that involves declaring that I have ever acted as an agent for any foreign person, organization or government. I would prefer to rot to death in jail than utter that lie. I have refused too many offers to sell out in America to be bribed in my old age.”38 Though the NAACP and the ACLU refused to participate in defending Du Bois, supporters mounted a significant campaign, and he and his associates were all acquitted. Nevertheless, the experience left Du Bois feeling bitter toward some of his former colleagues, the peace movement, and his country. Du Bois believed the NAACP leadership wanted to see him in jail, and was quite perturbed when the organization cut his pension in half without notice after the indictment. The government’s star witness was O. John Rogge, with whom Du Bois had worked in the international peace movement; from then

on Communists considered Rogge a renegade. Rogge, who had clearly become disillusioned with the pro-Soviet peace movement, went on to defend the Greenglasses in the Rosenberg case.*? Even after the indictment was dismissed, Du Bois’s problems continued. The cost of fighting the indictment had been significant, as Du Bois wrote to Thomas Richardson, codirector of the American Peace Crusade: “nine months of work, worry, and vicious attack, but also $35,000 in cash.” Du Bois registered other complaints about how the APC handled its finances, and

nearly resigned as honorary cochair over the issue in 1953. It was a sign of the times that when Du Bois offered to speak to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom on “[p]eace and its connection with the problems of Africa,” administrative

secretary Mildred

Scott Olmsted

said no,

thank you.” The State Department denied Du Bois a passport to attend international peace conferences, beginning in 1952, deeming it “contrary to the best interests of the United States.” In 1955 the State Department said he could get a

— W.E. B. Du Bois Following the indictment of W. E. B. Du Bois as head of the Peace Information Center, his defenders published this strong statement on the right to work for peace. Records of the Peace Information Center, Swarthmore College Peace Collection

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passport if he would sign an affidavit saying he was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party. Du Bois responded, “I simply refuse to beg, crawl and sign affidavits for the inalienable right to travel.”4! Du Bois continued to work with the pro-Soviet peace movement. When the American Peace Crusade dissolved in 1955, under attack by the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), Du Bois floated a proposal to form an American arm of the Communist-led World Peace Council, registering with the government if necessary, so that the United States would not be “the only civilized nation without a real organized peace movement in cooperation with the greatest peace movement of our day, the World Peace Council.”42 Although Du Bois received some positive responses to his proposal, some of his associates were appalled by his suggestion. Rockwell Kent wrote Du Bois arguing that not only would nothing be gained by registering with the government but also “our entire efficacy as American exponents of peace would be destroyed. We are not the agents of any foreign power and, to be effective in America, we must never be so branded. . . It is as ‘agents’ of the American government that Americans should take action toward the furtherance of peace.”43 Howard Fast made a similar argument, which provides further insight into how American Communists viewed their work for peace: “Under no circumstances conceivable can I think of myself, a World Peace Council

member, as an agent of any foreign power or principal. .. . Whatever small services I have been able to contribute toward the cause of peace were services for my country, the United States of America, for my friends and associates and of course, for my family and my children. I cannot accept even the slightest implication that any form or direction of the struggle for peace is a service to a foreign power.’4 Du Bois’s proposal never came to fruition, but the association of peace with communism was furthered nevertheless by the attacks on Du Bois, the Peace Information Center, and the Stockholm Peace Petition. Leaflets defending Du Bois asked, “Is Peace American?” and “Is Peace a Crime?” while newspaper editorials asked “Is ‘Peace’ Becoming a Bad Word?”*> Du Bois wrote in his account of these events a few years later: “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.”* But the paradox that seemed more evident to many people was the suppression of opinions by a government that claimed to stand for freedom.

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The New York Daily Compass hastened to point out that the Justice Department’s actions were a threat to democratic freedoms, an attempt to suppress a distasteful opinion that was more a hallmark of a police state than of “the democracy we preach and that many of us are determined to attempt to preserve.”47 The ACLU released a statement criticizing attempts to check Communist activities —such as circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition —by curbing the rights of expression. “To fight totalitarianism abroad and adopt its methods at home only increases the Communist propaganda power and risks the loss of our own freedom. ... We can and must deal with the Communist menace by constitutional means without hysterical restrictions on our freedom, or we shall be unable to say that there is room in America for the ‘thought we hate, ’ and we shall have lost an important battle in the fight for the minds of men now being waged throughout the world.”48 Once again, as in the cases of the Waldorf conference and the Peekskill riots, the discussion was about how best to defeat the Communists, not whether they had any legitimate points to make about the issues. Gen. Telford Taylor, who had been chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg

trials, pointed out that official criticism of the Stockholm appeal was based chiefly on its Communist support. “Reasoned analysis of the proposal’s shortcomings has been notably lacking,” Taylor pointed out. “Unless liberal democrats espouse a more positive critique, there is grave danger that the Communists will force us into the seeming posture of approving mass annihilation.”*? Given the uproar over the Stockholm Peace Petition, why did more than a million Americans sign it? There is little question that people circulated and

signed the appeal out of a genuine desire for peace. Even HUAC believed that most of the signers were loyal Americans who thought they were expressing a desire for peace. Public-opinion samplers thought the signers were “idealistic people who are horrified by the thought of atomic war.” Emily Greene Balch likely spoke for many when she denied having signed the petition out of a desire to strengthen the Soviet military position. Indeed, she hoped for the petition to be amended to a call to end aggression. Balch was among those who withdrew endorsement of the appeal when its origins became an issue.5° Another observer, who rejected the petition as a Soviet maneuver, argued that it was easy to see how people in the West could be taken in by it. He wrote to the New York Times, “Many people who reject communism may nevertheless be strongly inclined to sign it, as a tangible and telling means of

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registering their protest against the non-moral militarism that reigns in our American defense counsels.” He pointed out that the United States had inaugurated the use of the atom bomb against noncombatants and that people all over the world had every reason to believe that “on any occasion we would do exactly the same at our own sole discretion, with the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, or any other weapon well adapted to mass destruction.” The problem, said this observer, was “American national disrespect for the

transcendence of the moral order, in war and in peace. That ought to be the first line of our defense. It is not the Communists, it is we ourselves who have

breached it wide open.”>! One churchman who signed the petition affirmed this analysis, stating defiantly: “If I signed a thing sponsored by a subversive group, that is too bad. But I would rather find myself shoulder to shoulder with a group working for peace than in a camp of warmongers who think we can settle the present world difficulties only by bloodshed. ... Americans seem to be dominated by a group of militarists whose only aim is to bring us into war... . I deplore the present tendency to call everyone a Communist who is making a plea for peace.”52 Many people were, in the words of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, “hungry for peace.” One religious leader argued that even if he became convinced that the petition was Communist sponsored, he would sign it anyway. He was so desperately anxious to achieve peace that he would work for it through any channel. The confusion and hysteria surrounding the Stockholm Peace Petition reached the height of absurdity when, under pressure from New York’s Joint Committee Against Communism, RCA Victor and Columbia Records withdrew recordings of “Old Man Atom” from public distribution. Protesters insisted that the song, written by Vern Partlow in 1945, parroted the Communist

line on peace and reflected the propaganda for the Stockholm Peace Petition. The song, written with a sense of humor, condemned the atomic bomb and called for “peace in the world or the world in pieces.” In a letter to the New York Times, pacifist James Peck expressed the dilemma with which the peace

petition confronted Americans: “Just because the Communists use opposition to the A-bomb

for their own ends in the Stockholm pledge, should

Americans pretend they are jubilant over the prospect of an atomic war which would destroy a large portion of the world?”*4 The Times followed Peck’s letter with a strong editorial criticizing the withdrawal of the record, first of all because such censorship was a threat to freedom. The editors also pointed out that, as a practical matter, the fear of

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promoting any thought or action that might happen to parallel one of Moscow’s various propaganda lines was utterly self-defeating. “We of the Western world know that we are for peace and against war, and we know that

the one threat to the world today lies in the aggressive force of Communist imperialism. Why should we not use every means at our disposal to stress the fact that it is we, not they, who are for peace, security, prosperity, freedom? That should be our line, not theirs, because with us it is truth and with them a lie. If the song that caused all the furor . . . is propaganda at all, it is by rights American, not Russian, propaganda.” The Times concluded with a query that echoed Peck and the FOR: “Because the Communists mouth the word peace, are we to be stopped from using it? Because the Stockholm petition stresses the destructive power of the atomic bomb, can only Communists think the bomb destructive?”°® Clearly, there were others concerned about the same issues, but many of

them had decided it was unwise to work with Communists. Those few activists who persisted were subject to attack—Du Bois and Linus Pauling prominent among them —and the organizations they worked with were weak and ineffective. The relentless attacks meant that the major effort went to the defense of free speech rather than the fight for peace. But they continued their efforts, convinced that the United States was preparing for war against the Soviet Union. Communists were aware of the broad desire for peace; the issue was a good one for organizing around, for making links with other issues, and, they hoped, for recruiting people to the broader cause of communism. A Sunday Worker article of June 11, 1950, proclaimed the Communist emphasis on peace in bold letters. According to the Worker, while Wall Street and the government prepared for war, American Communists were part of a world movement helping to mobilize popular sentiment for peace. The Communist party therefore calls on every single one of its members to turn his and her entire activity to this single, gigantic peace effort: to change the whole atmosphere of this country and counter the war hysteria by reaching and organizing millions of our fellow-Americans. Our people are moving into struggle, defending their living standards, fighting for democratic rights. PEACE is the key link in the success of this manifold battle. Upon us Communists rests the responsibility of promoting the leading role of the working class, giving leadership in the Negro peo-

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ple’s movement, achieving the widest unity of the people. This can bring a BIG BREAKTHROUGH for peace.>”

The immediate goal was to get every Communist to fulfill her or his duty by gathering millions of signatures on the Stockholm Peace Petition, based on an understanding of “a full estimate of the war danger, a conviction that war

is not inevitable, that peaceful coexistence and competition between the 2 systems is possible.” The broader point was to link the struggle for peace with other issues. The Worker argued that trade unions could not defend the conditions of workers without placing the fight for peace in the forefront and that the fight against discrimination, Jim Crow, lynching, and police brutality both exposed the pretense of “defending democracy by the cold war” and showed the tremendous potential of the Negro people’s liberation struggle. If Communists understood these links, they could bring into the party “thousands of the best fighters for peace and security and Socialism.” Partybuilding objectives could be realized “in the very course of the Stockholm Pledge campaign.”>* New people could be won over by an appeal to peace. Linking issues and recruiting new people were important, but so was working for peace in and of itself. The Worker exhorted: “We have the fullest confidence that if every leader, branch and member is imbued with the spirit and letter of these proposals, the spirit of William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, our Party can, not only transform itself, but make its vital, historic contribution to saving the peace of our people and winning the Peace for all humanity.”%? Clearly, the Workers confidence was misplaced — its talk of “the spirit of William Z. Foster” sounds ridiculous today —but this article was cited frequently at the time in order to demonstrate the Communists’ plans to “manipulate” the cause of peace for their own ends.“ Yet, clearly, in spite of the overblown rhetoric, the Communists’ ends did include peace as they under-

stood it: preventing war with the Soviet Union and placing the extension of democracy at home as a higher priority than the pursuit of a dangerous nuclear arms race. (Non-Communists, including atomic scientists, WILPF members, and other pacifists, were concerned about these issues as well.) Al-

though it is doubtful that many people were inspired to collect signatures on the Stockholm Peace Petition because of the promise of an emblem —five hundred signatures, Heroes and Heroines of Peace; two hundred signatures, Sentinels of Peace; one hundred signatures, Peace Stewards— many Commu-

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nists did circulate the petition at great personal risk. They faced jail, physical attacks, and loss of their jobs. Certainly, they believed they were doing this on behalf of peace, as well as for the defense of the Soviet Union.

In fact, from the Wallace campaign on, Communists were willing to work with anyone who shared their views on the issues (though, of course, this was not reciprocal in most cases). They did not have the strength to dominate organizations as they had in the 1930s, but they hoped to influence the direction of peace groups. Recruiting new members for the CP does not seem to have been a priority, but even if it had been, that activity was legitimate. The Communist Party was not an illegal organization, and it was not until April 1953 that the Subversive Activities Control Board ordered the CP to register with the government. In any case, Communists did not seek leadership positions in peace groups precisely because they feared that doing so would make it too easy for such organizations to be smeared and discredited. The National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives is a good example of the Communists’ approach to peace organizing. The committee formed in the spring of 1949 in opposition to the North Atlantic Alliance. Communists and pacifists agreed on a program of action coming out of the Mid-Century Conference for Peace, even if they disagreed on some issues. The committee explicitly refused to adopt a statement denouncing totalitarianism or limiting membership. Instead, it claimed to follow “the democratic principles of oldfashioned liberalism, believing in the values of free discussion, the rights of minorities to be heard, and the triumph of democratic ideas in such a forum.” The program of action ended with the statement, “We are beholden to none—except the conscience of our people.”®! The National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives was unusual in that it openly admitted that there were disagreements within the organization on certain issues. For instance, in its 1950 statement of policy the committee ac-

knowledged that there was internal disagreement on the use of military intervention by the United Nations in Korea. “We represent various approaches to the moral, religious, and political questions of the use of military force, as well as different interpretations of the origins of the Korean conflict. But we are all united on the all-important principle that peace can be won and maintained with justice through persistent work with peaceful alternatives, such as those proposed in the Committee’s program” (emphasis in original).® The committee’s recommendations included ending the war in Korea, a full-scale program of economic aid to underdeveloped countries launched through the United Nations, mutual reduction of weapons of all types

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through a general disarmament conference under the United Nations, pursuit of top-level negotiations of all outstanding differences with Russia and China, recognition of the new government of China and accepting it into the United Nations, free communications, travel and exchanges between East and

West, and opposition to the McCarran Internal Security Act, because “[t]he protection of civil liberties is obviously intertwined with a frank and full discussion of the problems of peace and the restoration of the people of the right to criticize the basic foreign and domestic policies of our nation.” The National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives also distinguished itself from other so-called front groups by criticizing both Soviet and U.S. policies. But it concerned itself “chiefly with the policy of our own American government, for the simple reason that it is the only government that we can realistically hope to influence.’®+ Many pacifists took the latter position while trying to argue that criticizing their own government did not make them “unAmerican.” Statements about internal disagreements and criticism of the Soviet Union were lacking in other peace efforts in which Communists and fellow travelers played a major role. The Peace Information Center proclaimed itself “an independent agency not affiliated with any other group,” but it was no secret that it was founded in early 1950 to coordinate efforts to circulate the Stock-

holm Peace Petition. Although the PIC claimed to have the broad aim of serving as a clearinghouse for information about “peace endeavors of all sorts in America and throughout the rest of the world” and providing “media for the interchange of ideas for the promotion of peace and amity among the nations,” its positions clearly were compatible with Communist aims.® During its brief existence, the PIC published Peacegram, summarizing international peace developments, organizational letters mainly concerned with the petition campaign, and a series of leaflets. When it closed in 1951 after the attacks by the Justice Department, W. E. B. Du Bois and others started the American Peace Crusade (APC).

An initiating committee that included Du Bois, Linus Pauling, and Cornell nuclear physicist Philip Morrison sent out a letter in February 1951 calling for support for a crusade that would carry out a “people’s referendum for peace,” a “people’s lobby” in Washington, D.C., and a peace congress in the Midwest. The peace pilgrimage to Washington, planned for March 1951, was to focus on ending the war in Korea, opposing the rearmament of Germany, ending discrimination against Negroes (in the army and in all areas of life), defending civil liberties (especially the right to advocate peace), opposing Universal Mil-

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itary Training, and improving the American standard of living through a curb on profits, an end to inflation, and creation of a peacetime economy. The overriding objective, however, was preventing war, presumably war against the Soviet Union. The APC claimed the purpose of the pilgrimage was “profoundly patriotic: It is America that we are trying to save from war. We believe that PEACE is the best defense our country can have, for only in peace can our people defend their living standards, maintain and increase their civil liberties, preserve ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’—the American dream.” The American Peace Crusade, like other peace organizations influenced by Communists and fellow travelers, stressed that Americans had to lay aside their differences in order to save the country from war. At the Chicago Peace Congress, held June 29- July 1, 1951, actress Gale Sondergaard asked, “Who are

we? We are the men and women of peace from all these United States — of all nationalities and origins —the lovers of mankind. We are the chosen ones— chosen to speak of progress—of fraternity —of peace. We are Americans.”® Yet, by that time many Americans had concluded that this sort of talk about “peace” was subversive and un-American. This impression was reaffirmed by the Subversive Activities Control Board’s efforts to hound the American Peace Crusade out of existence. By 1953 the attorney general had placed the APC on the list of subversive organizations, the FBI infiltrated and monitored its activities, and in August 1955 the

SACB ordered the APC to register itself as a Communist front. The hearings that followed this order revealed much about anti-Communist paranoia and the beleaguered state of the CP and its “front” organizations. The government pursued its case against the APC even though the organization had dissolved soon after the SACB filed its original petition. Communists and others involved lacked the resources and support to defend the organization. At the opening of the 1955 hearings, APC counsel Royal France argued that the organization could not register because it had already dissolved. “If the board should require this organization to register, there is no one who could act for it and there is nothing that could be said in the registration. Question: Who are the officers? None. What is the address? It has none. From where are its funds received? It does not receive any. This would be a perfectly meaningless operation.”®* France argued that in other cases in which organizations had been dissolved, the proceedings had been dismissed. But in this case, the motion to dismiss the case was denied. The government argued that “Communist-front” organizations such as

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the APC presented a great danger, because they cloaked themselves with respectability and then proceeded “to prey upon innocent and well-meaning Americans.” The SACB set out to show that the American Peace Crusade was a creation of the Communist Party, aimed at luring “innocent, unsuspecting people” into the organization in order to “separate these people from their signatures and their dollars and thus have them unwittingly and unknowingly become another cog in the advancement of the world-Communist movement.” The “lying hypocracy [sic]” that the SACB set out to demonstrate was the Communist Party’s position on peace, “to keep the United States lulled into a sense of complacency until such time as the Soviet Union is ready to strike and be able to conquer this country.” The Communist definition of peace differed from the view of the “loyal American,” according to the SACB: “To a loyal American peace means one thing. It means such things as brotherly love, friendship with your neighbors, live and let live. To a loyal Communist peace means something entirely different. It means a Soviet dominated world, where there can be no one except the Soviets to fight.”® The government’s case, as with most such hearings, depended on the testimony of FBI informers who had been recruited to infiltrate Communistfront organizations. Though one of the stated aims of the hearings was to reveal how the Communist

Party had infiltrated the churches, PTAs, scout

groups, and other organizations that would give the Communists a “mantle of respectability,” the hearings actually revealed just as much about FBI techniques of recruiting informers and infiltrating organizations. The FBI went after people who had been involved in the Communist Party or a “front” organization at one time, and then asked them to join again for the purpose of keeping the FBI informed. In other words, it was a sort of blackmail: becoming an informant protected one from being punished for his or her subversive past.”° The testimony of informers also revealed some important points about Communist organizing strategy, such as the fact that Communists tried not to take the leadership positions in such groups as the APC, fearing that doing so would discourage people from joining and make it too easy to smear the organization. For example, Anita Bell Schneider named names of Communist

Party people who had urged her to chair the San Diego Peace Forum because she was not known as a Communist in San Diego. She had PTA connections at San Diego State College and could therefore bring in “broad people.” A number of informers reported on the change in Communist strategy in 1953, in which people were supposed to work through other organizations,

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taking as broad an approach as possible. Schneider reported that orders came down in the spring of 1953 that the APC was to work through other organiza-

tions. Because Communist-front organizations “were becoming less effective,” the point was “to go where the people were.”7! Clearly, this policy was a result of the party’s weakness, not its strength, and it did not achieve the desired results. The CP was not doing a good job of reaching the masses, and the party and its front organizations were on the defensive. Another change in 1953 was the merging of both the National Labor Con-

ference for Peace and the American Women for Peace into the American Peace Crusade. Most likely, the purpose was to pool scarce resources, but it also meant that women who sought to work with other women on peace issues had nowhere to go except into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization that was beginning to tear itself apart over the issue of Communist infiltration. American Women for Peace, an outgrowth of the Congress of American Women, organized around the idea that women had a special responsibility to work for peace.72 The AWP published the Peacemaker, reporting on peace issues thought to be of special concern to women, such as atomic air-raid drills in schools or the New York City Board of Education’s issuing of identification tags to elementary school children. (“In case my face is burned away, people will know who I am,” explained a seven-year-old girl.)”5 The AWP held a spirited workshop at the 1951 Chicago conference, at which women delegates reported on their activities around the country, including work among women in PTAs to oppose A-bomb drills and organizing consumer councils to fight high prices—in other words, issues where families and children were the focus. In a revealing report the workshop claimed its most important conclusion was “the need for unbreakable unity between Negro and white women as we move to win greater sections of American Women to unite for peace. White women must realize that they have much to learn from Negro women, and that there is very little they can teach them.””4 Such comments reflected the racial unity that had always been a priority for the Communist Party, but also the “white chauvinism” campaign in which Communists went out of their way to prove there was no racism tolerated within their movement. Although peace organizations with a contingent sympathetic to communism could be criticized for being doctrinaire, this fact did not make them evil. But the FBI informers who testified before the SACB told some stories that reaffirmed the stereotype of Communists

as evil, inhuman, and un-

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American. One informer explained that the Southern California Peace Crusade (SCPC) did not want to send clothing to Korean children because doing

so would aid the U.S. government, enabling it to spend money on war material rather than clothing.’> Such stories supported the idea that Communists were unfeeling automatons. At times, however, the prosecution’s questions went too far in trying to make the APC’s work seem sinister. For example, Joseph Wysolmerski questioned informer Anzelm Czarnowski about a 1954 season’s greeting card issued by the Illinois Council of the American Peace Crusade. The card, which said “Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men,” was admitted into evidence.”6

Furthermore, the testimony of informers was often contradictory. Anita Bell Schneider testified that the Communist Party ran the San Diego Peace Forum and that non-Communist members of the executive board “dropped out one by one” because “they didn’t seem to be able to reconcile their decisions with my activity.” The suggestion was that people perhaps were not so innocent and unsuspecting after all, but this point was not of interest to the government. What mattered to the prosecution was that every informer name names of those people with whom they had worked in the American Peace Crusade and the Communist Party. The point was to link the two organizations together and, as in other government hearings, to expose people.”’ Thus, there were questions familiar to anyone who paid attention to HUAC hearings. Oliver Butler asked Betty Haufrecht, former administrative secretary of the American Peace Crusade, if she was a CP member at the time she was elected as an officer of the APC. Was she a member now? Her lawyer’s objections to such questions were overruled.’® She was asked about names of people with whom she had worked, where she went camping on her vacation, whether she had been a CP member in the 1940s — before the APC existed or the Subversive Activities Control Act was even passed. She, along with coun-

sel, consistently argued that the organization had dissolved as of September 25, 1955; the office had closed, no more meetings had been held, and what money there was went to pay debts. The organization no longer existed;

therefore, it was impossible to register. Haufrecht did name the people who served on the Resident Board, but she refused to answer whether they were

members of the Communist Party. The hearings went into 1957, as the government continued to argue that

the burden of proof was on the intervenor to show that the organization was out of existence. In fact, the government concluded that the organization still existed “for the purpose of registration.” The hearings were revived once

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more in 1962. Haufrecht was asked if anything had changed and, again, whether she was a CP member. Robert S. Brady expressed the government’s concern that if the order to register was not forthcoming, “then we see the possibility of the organization starting up again.”” Though such concerns seem laughable in retrospect, the government was correct in its surmise that some of the local groups outlived the dissolution of the national organization of the American Peace Crusade. But the local branches were not to last long, and their ties with the national organization were not always close. The problem with local and regional organizations, as far as the government was concerned, was that they were vocal in their opposition to the cold war consensus, calling attention to issues that the govern-

ment would just as soon not have debated in public. For example, in 1954 the Southern California Peace Crusade pointed out the dangers of U.S. involvement in Indochina, asking: “Are you willing to risk World War? Do you want American boys to fight and die in Indo-China jungles? Die to save French colonialism? To destroy a people who are fighting for their country’s freedom? To protect American investments?”®° In April 1956 the SCPC called on people to act immediately to get the U.S. government to refrain from holding new H-bomb tests in the Pacific.®! Atomic testing was the issue around which the peace movement rejuvenated itself just months later, and, of course, U.S. involvement in Indochina became the consuming issue of the peace movement in the latter half of the 1960s. Although the SACB had a point to make when it claimed that local branches of the APC continued to exist after the date when the national organization had dissolved (the Southern California Peace Crusade, for example, continued for another year before officially dissolving), the work of such organizations was “subversive” only if one insisted that working for peace precluded criticism of U.S. foreign policy. The Southern California Peace Crusade, the New England Citizens Concerned for Peace, the Philadelphia Women for Peace, and the Northern California Peace Council —all attacked as subversive — worked to end the Korean War, promoted a Big Five conference on disarmament and peaceful settlement of differences, and challenged what they viewed as war propaganda. What the government, and sometimes the media and the public, viewed as subversive activity was, to the Communists, activity aimed at keeping important issues before the public, as suggested in the July 1956 Statement on the Dissolution of the Southern California Peace Crusade:

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We are proud of the part we have played in championing the noble cause of peace at a time when we were in the minority. It is now the cause of millions of our countrymen. Never has the hope for peace and the opportunity of people to achieve it been brighter. We therefore urge everyone who has supported the work of the Southern California Peace Crusade to continue working in those organizations to which he belongs. We will work individually and with others for peace—to replace misunderstanding between peoples with trust, fear with confidence, and hatred with friendship. We know of no greater endeavor.®2 Supporters of the Southern California Peace Crusade and other such groups believed they were working for peace, as well as for the defense of the Soviet Union. But one reason other opponents of the cold war would not trust such people was because Communists were rarely open about their affiliations and allegiances during this period. Some activists were advised not to join the party because they were more useful outside than inside. Lillian Rubin, for example, did not join the Communist Party, but a suspicious person called the FBI anyway to report that she was a Communist — it was her mother, who disapproved of her activities. People who were close to the Communist movement did not advertise the fact for fear of jeopardizing themselves or the organizations with which they worked, or both. Then, it seemed that no matter what approach they took, their efforts were attacked anyway. The cycle of Communist secrecy and government attacks led to increasing paranoia and suspicion on all sides. Communists continued to lose allies who accused them of being manipulative and duplicitous. For example, in February 1951 Thomas Mann, who had endorsed the Waldorf conference and the Stockholm peace appeal, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times publicly withdrawing his sponsor-

ship of the American Peace Crusade, and, further, announcing that he would not sponsor any more such causes or movements. Mann was responding to a New York Times article of February 2 that had linked his name with Paul Robeson (“Robeson, Mann Join New Peace Crusade”), a combination that he

claimed dragged him “into a political neighbourhood and comradeship not within my province and which I have repeatedly repudiated in public.” Mann reported how a few weeks prior to this article, “a respected American” (Professor Philip Morrison) had submitted to him a plan aimed at mobilizing the American people’s desire for peace. Mann found the statement of principles of the American Peace Crusade that Morrison sent him “in complete accord”

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with his own political convictions, and, “the more readily did I put my name at his disposal, since the members of the Initiating Committee failed to bear the slightest resemblance to the list of sponsors now released.” Mann listed the seven initiators “who had been defined with rare and particular diligence,” arguing that their names seemed fully to guarantee that the proposed movement would be free from communistic influence, let alone control—and, evi-

dently, they were meant to do just that: for once you were to rest assured that party line politics were not involved. The list of sponsors, on the contrary, now published by the T1mEs, is rich in names generally identified with communistic leanings—names from among which you chose to single out that of Mr. Paul Robeson which—in a way most damaging to me—you link with my own. No doubt, Mr. Robeson is a fine singer and actor, but he has seen fit to demonstrate and agitate against his country and mine; he has done so abroad ... a course of action utterly alien to me,

however heavily America’s present foreign policy may weigh on my mind.§4

Mann went on to criticize “these people” for joining efforts that were compromised by their very presence, as well as those individuals who initiated an American peace movement without keeping it free from such sponsorship and thus protecting it against “the ever ready accusation of communistic derivation.” Mann’s letter concluded, “My signature figuring under any manifesto, protest, petition, appeal, etc. must henceforth be considered a forgery.’85 Philip Morrison responded with a thoughtful letter characterizing their correspondence as “a mirror of our disturbed times and fearful countrymen.” Although the Times did not lie, said Morrison, “it distorted by omission and selection to a point beyond mendacity.” It mentioned only ten names out of sixty-five from the APC’s press release, leaving out the names of the “carefully identified initiators” and mentioning the ones “as you said ‘generally identified with communistic leanings, ” along with “a few others known for partisan political activity,” and Mann and Morrison. “This story could have been no accident,” wrote Morrison. “Its purpose was not to inform, or even honestly to criticize and expose. It was to distort and to mislead. How well it worked we only now will begin to see.” Morrison went on to make a strong case for working for peace along with Communists and their sympathizers. His letter is worth quoting at length because it is such a rare articulation of this position:

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Can we who initiate such a movement as the Peace Crusade somehow be more careful, somehow exclude the Robesons and the Fasts and the Golds? I think in simple honesty we cannot; we cannot honestly seek an agreed settlement with the Soviet [sic] if we deny even the right of advocacy to those Americans who claim explicitly to be the friends of the Soviet government, while the enemies of that state proclaim atomic war in every headline. Let me be personal: I know and admire Mr. Paul Robeson as a man, an artist, and an American; I disagree with and have stubbornly opposed some of his most cherished political ideas in principle and in practice. When he subscribes to the statement of principles which not he but I and my colleagues wrote I am pleased, for if association with him can make difficult for me the task in these bitter days of convincing my friends, university people, I know that he nevertheless commands a large audience in communities to which otherwise our principles for peace would have no access. He has a legitimate place in the work for peace; and certainly we cannot set up a test of political principles, and yet save the idea that all Americans must cooperate in the overwhelming national interest of saving the peace. Resoluteness in carrying out our program is the only answer; Mr. Robeson will not influence or control our policies, as in-

deed will no one else except as we mutually agree to carry out those limited and explicit tasks for which we united, and no others, either public or covert. I do not know any other way, both on the widest moral grounds, and the narrowest ones of expediency, in which a coalition can be formed. To accept the witch-burners dictation is to begin a losing battle of attrition and defense.*°

Morrison concluded that he was by no means satisfied with the peace movement as it was, but that it was important to continue to be vocal about the is-

sues. “[O]ur movement ... is far too small, far too narrow. But it is beginning to change. I believe that we must bravely raise the cry, and wait for the great

shout which will come in answer.”®” Linus Pauling had a similar approach to working for peace, one for which he paid dearly. Pauling faced constant attacks in the press, was called in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and was denied the right to travel at the height of his professional career. But he persisted. Like Philip Morrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a handful of others, Pauling was open about his willingness to work with anyone who shared his concerns, Communist or not. In a statement made in April 1951 in response to HUAC’s listing him as a participant in the “Communist peace offensive,’ he pointed out that since

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1945 he had associated himself with every peace movement that came to his

attention, ranging from supporting Republican senator Robert Taft’s peace proposals to cosponsoring the American Peace Crusade. By this time Pauling, in fact, did have some doubts about the American Peace Crusade. He did not raise them publicly but wrote to a colleague: I myself have felt that the American Peace Crusade has not turned out as I had expected it to, from the tenor of the discussion of the original meeting of the initiating sponsors in New York. I feel sure that the organization has been handicapped in effective operation, as you suggest in your letter, through accepting support of individuals who are avowed Communists. I do not know how to answer your question as to whether denial of such support involves such discrimination as to deny the principles that we wish to defend. In general, my feeling has been that it is wrong to refuse to allow anyone to come to the support of a good cause. Nevertheless, the practical problem remains, and I am fearful of the apparent dangerous possibility that our people will be forced into a division between an extreme right and an extreme left.*®

Pauling’s level of political activity decreased for the next few years, as his scientific work took priority. But he had not given up. He continued to “bravely raise the cry” and wait until “the great shout which will come in answer.” Eventually, his persistence paid off. His central role in building public opinion against nuclear testing, which culminated in the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed by President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev in 1963, won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is easy to answer the question of why so few people took a position similar to that of Linus Pauling, Philip Morrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The forces arrayed against them, and the risks, were great. But there were many reasons that people who were willing to work with Communists at some point changed their minds: Thomas Mann blamed American Communists for manipulating him; O. John Rogge became disillusioned with the international Communist peace movement for its refusal to admit that the Soviet Union shared some responsibility for the cold war; and for others, such as Henry Wallace, the Korean War was a turning point in their hopes for peaceful coexistence. It was not simply the machinations of American Communists that drove such people away from the peace movement. And the pressure against participating in a movement that involved Communists became more intense in the early 1950s. Many people paid a price for their involvement with Com-

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munists, and there were likely many others who might have participated had they not been intimidated. Communist secrecy and anti-Communist attacks posed a dilemma for non-Communist peace organizations that tried to promote peace while dissociating themselves from communism. Such efforts ended up weakening the peace movement and further isolating the Communists. More than ever, Communists concealed their identity within organizations, a measure that may have been necessary and justified but one that also increased suspicion. Finally, protecting the civil liberties of Communists also became confused with promoting their message. Thus, at the height of the McCarthy era, few people would allow that Communists ought to have the same rights of free speech as anyone else, especially where the issue of peace was concerned. Whether the Soviet peace offensive was intended primarily to undermine American power and influence in the world or to build a more peaceful international order (or both), it was greeted with much skepticism in the United States. A critical New York Times article, “Story of the Stockholm Petition,” was accompanied by a cartoon that showed Stalin holding the petition in one hand and stirring a pot labeled “Korean War” with the other. The caption, “Not fooling anyone,” summed up much of the American response to the peace offensive.*? Yet, there were other responses as well, suggesting that the United States call the Soviets’ bluff and questioning whether the U.S. approach to peace was any more legitimate than the Soviet offensive. Critics of the cold war pointed out the contradictions in the U.S. government’s policies: military preparedness, nuclear weapons, and military bases and alliances did not seem to suggest an interest in peaceful coexistence. Indeed, one reason for the U.S. disarmament proposals before the United Nations, and for the establishment of the Psychological Strategy Board in 1951, was to counteract the impression that the United States wanted war and the Soviet Union wanted peace.” Intimidation, arrests, and violence toward peace activists demonstrated

an intolerance and lack of faith in democracy that belied American claims to freedom. University of Chicago chancellor Robert Hutchins pointed out the danger such suppression posed to the United States: The heart of Americanism is independent thought. The cloak-andstiletto work that is now going on will not merely mean that many persons will suffer for acts they did not commit, or for acts that were legal when committed, or for no acts at all. Far worse is the end result, which

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Stupidity and injustice will go unchallenged because no one will dare to speak against them. To persecute people into conformity by the non-legal methods popular today is little better than doing it by purges and pogroms.?! Some of the suspicion toward American Communists was justified, given their record on peace issues, their failure to criticize the Soviet Union, their

secrecy, and their shrill claims that the United States was on the verge of fascism. They were not above duplicity and hypocrisy. Using a quote from United Nations Secretary General Trygvie Lie on the Stockholm Peace Petition did make it appear that he had endorsed the petition, as the critics charged. Yet, the Communists clearly tapped into, and attempted to encourage, the popular desire for peace. Perhaps the legacy of American Communist participation in the international peace offensive goes beyond making peace efforts appear suspect and subversive. It is worth noting that the issues taken up by pro-Communist peace organizations merited public discussion: banning the atomic bomb, questioning the aims of the Atlantic Pact, opposing the Korean War, keeping Germany disarmed, admitting China to the United Nations, and holding negotiations among the Big Five powers. It is also worth noting American Communists’ early opposition to U.S. involvement in Indochina, nuclear testing, and civil defense drills, as well as their commitment to civil rights— causes and ideas that did become popular and that for many people had little to do with being pro-Soviet or not. Supporters of peaceful coexistence packed the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace and gathered more than a million signatures of Americans on the Stockholm Peace Petition. Many of these people were not Communists, but whether they were or not, the point is that they were genuinely fearful of another war and doing what they could to try to prevent it. Independent journalist I. F Stone attended the Waldorf conference because he believed that “the machinery of American Government is set for war.” Other professionals supported it because the conference was “called in the best American tradition of free exchange of ideas on the most vital question which faces all people and nations.”92 There were probably others—how many is impossible to know—who shared the desire to see atomic weapons banned and peaceful coexistence promoted. As people on all sides acknowledged, there was a great popular de-

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sire for peace at the time. The millions of signatures on the Stockholm Peace Petition were a reflection of that desire. When relations between the United States and the Soviet Union began to improve and the anti-Communist hysteria began to die down later in the decade, the American peace movement immediately began to gain momentum in its organizing to protest the

arms race. People who rejected the approaches of both the United States and the Soviet Union had their own vision. A cartoon in the New York Times called “A Cartoonist’s ‘Summer Day Dream” seems an apt summation of the situation. In the cartoon two people, one labeled “Common Man,’ are presenting a petition for a skeptical Truman and Stalin to sign. A rectangle at the top states in bold letters: SIGN LOW’S PEACE PETITION 1. Reduce all armies to size of ours. 2. Ban atom bomb and have inspectors to see it stays banned. 3. Stop censorship and calling other people dirty names. 4. Scrap iron curtains and let people meet and be friendly.” Naive as it may have sounded, it suggested the possibility for promoting peace and freedom, preventing atomic war, and opening up the opportunity for peaceful coexistence. But it was risky to promote such positions during the McCarthy era. Many individuals were discouraged from taking a stand, and many organizations were distracted from their work for peace by the issues of Communist participation in and anti-Communist attacks on the peace movement. Conflicts within the WILPF and SANE in particular reached crisis proportions.

“The Strangest Dream” McCarthyism in the Peace Movement

Last night I had the strangest dream, I never dreamed before I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. —Ed McCurdy, 1950

n 1950 “A Cartoonist’s ‘Summer Day Dream” included smaller armies and Ian end to atom bombs, censorship, and iron curtains. In 1953, as the Korean

War finally came to an end, “strange dreams” abounded in the peace movement, ranging from hopes for peaceful coexistence and an end to colonialism to a “third-camp” position that would favor neither the United States nor the Soviet Union. But perhaps the “strangest dream” of all was the fear from within the peace movement that Communists were taking over. By all accounts the early 1950s were difficult years for peace organizations in the United States. Civil liberties became an important issue as peace groups had to assert the freedom to talk about and organize around peace issues as they saw them. Organizations responded in different ways, but they all faced similar problems— including people’s fears about signing anything or even talking about peace, and the issue of Communist participation —and they all experienced internal dissension. Two of the central issues were what to do about anti-Communist attacks and how to deal with the presence of alleged Communists. Often these issues were difficult to separate; some activists were concerned mainly with how the organization functioned, others with what it looked like from outside. Unavoidably, one concern impinged upon another; that is, attempts from outside to smear an organization because of its “Communist” members led to suspicions within, and to fear and resignations. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom took a some-

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what unusual stance in this atmosphere. At the height of the McCarthy period, the organization tried to remain open to anyone who shared its beliefs and goals. This position caused problems for the WILPF, but those groups with strong anti-Communist stands fared no better. Membership in other pacifist organizations — the FOR, the WRL, and the Peacemakers — dwindled as the cold war gained strength. (The UWF lost ground as well.) Whether or not an organization had a written policy regarding Communists, individuals argued about whether their particular organization—the FOR, the WRL, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), or the ACLU — was too strong

or not strong enough in its anti-Communist stance. And all were subject to anti-Communist attacks from without.! The FOR and the ACLU had taken strong stands against working with Communists in 1940, and these positions were reaffirmed in the 1950s. The

FOR pledged not to make united fronts with Communists on the grounds that they could not be trusted, but to defend their civil liberties at the same time.* The difficulty in carrying out this sort of policy consistently has been illustrated already: the FOR’s warning people away from the Mid-Century Conference for Peace, and its decision not to cosponsor a Paul Robeson con-

cert in 1950. FOR leaders were concerned mainly with preventing the Communists from playing the sort of influential role that they had in the peace movement of the 1930s. The major statement on the subject was John Swomley’s 1954 pamphlet, “The Peace Offensive and the Cold War,” which analyzed the Communist approach to peace and spelled out the case for noncooperation. Swomley focused most of his attention on the international peace movement, astutely explaining the assumptions on which the Communist peace offensive was based: peace was identical with the interests of the Soviet Union, the opponents of communism were warmongers, and Communist forces were the forces of peace even when engaged in war (as in Korea). He also pointed out that those people who spoke for the Communist peace forces never criticized the war preparations or wars of Communist countries, but laid full blame on the United States for war preparations and war. Swomley called for the building of a “genuine” peace movement, which would oppose militarism regardless of its source, an “international movement whose loyalty is to God rather than to nations or parties.” Swomiley was also concerned with the danger posed by Communist-front groups at home, arguing, “The purpose and techniques of peace organizations that unite Communists and non-Communists in a common front originate in the disciplined political circles of the Communist Party. Those who

Dream Strangest Thes 116 rele ance Su i support them, for whatever motives, are therefore to some extent supporting the military and political strategy of the Soviet Union.”* Swomley was among those pacifists who never recovered from their bad experiences with Communists and who seemed unable to grasp that the Communists were no longer in the relatively powerful position they had commanded in the 1930s. By the 1950s Communists were joining peace organizations as individuals; the “disciplined political circles of the Communist Party” barely existed by that point. Nevertheless, along with Norman Thomas, Homer Jack, and a handful of others, Swomley pressured peace organizations in the 1950s, including the WILPE, to take a strong anti-Communist stand.

It is significant that many progressive organizations in the 1950s experienced anticommunism as a top-down phenomenon. Although rank-and-file members were frequently willing to work with anyone who shared their goals—a peaceful world, an end to racial discrimination, and protection of basic civil liberties—the leadership of various. organizations often imposed anti-Communist statements and policies from above. In this regard, the ACLU’s approach was similar to that of the FOR. Like the FOR, the ACLU took a strong stand on some civil liberties issues during the cold war, fighting loyalty oaths, blacklisting, and other antiCommunist measures; opposing the Smith Act trials; and calling for the abolition of HUAC. At the same time, it took pains to separate itself from the taint of communism. Beginning in 1948, after the Smith Act trials of the top Communist Party leaders, the ACLU began including a disclaimer in its briefs, stating that the organization “is opposed to any governmental or economic system which denies fundamental civil liberties and human rights. It is therefore opposed to any form of the police state or the single-party state, or any movement in support of them whether fascist, Communist, or known by any other name.”> In addition, the ACLU adopted a policy of not allowing other organizations to join its briefs, a move that infuriated some of its tradi-

tional allies, such as the NAACP. Controversy over the issue of communism reached its peak in 1953-1954

when Norman Thomas proposed that the ACLU adopt a statement deeming the CPUSA a danger to civil liberties. Three issues were eventually put to a vote: One proposition condemned the Communist Party as antidemocratic and subservient to the Soviet Union, and stated that an employer was not vi-

olating the civil liberties of an employee (or prospective employee) by taking Communist Party membership into account. The second recommendation watered down the ACLU’s traditional firm stand on academic freedom and

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endorsed a loyalty and security program for United Nations employees. The third proposal in essence said that a person could be fired for taking the Fifth Amendment, that is, for refusing to answer an employer’s questions about Communist associations. Angry protests from longtime ACLU members greeted these proposals. The referendum was the first under a new ACLU constitution that gave affiliates a vote, and the result was that all three statements were rejected. Votes from below made the difference, as the affiliates outvoted the board and the

national committee. Following a series of moves and countermoves, the antiCommunists persuaded the board to adopt the original statements anyway. They did so by invoking a clause in the bylaws that allowed the board not to accept referendum results when “it believes there are vitally important reasons for not doing so.” To avoid being smeared as a Communist front (a charge often leveled at the ACLU), the leadership of the ACLU acted in undemocratic ways. As Samuel Walker states in his history of the ACLU, “They apparently felt no embarrassment about using the very undemocratic methods they always attributed to Communists.”® Internal warfare continued for several months, including threats of resignation from Norman Thomas and his allies, until a compromise statement

was adopted and the anti-Communists gave up the fight. Thomas did not resign, but he became less active. He went on to play a central role in trying to rid the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy of Communists a few years later. Pacifist organizations struggled with the same issues, concerned about how their stand on communism would affect their groups’ image and ability to carry on their work. The War Resisters League, founded in 1923 as the secular counterpart to the FOR, had long been subjected to anti-Communist attacks and FBI investigations of its “red activities,” despite its consistent pacifist stance and its focus on conscientious objection to war.’ But it was not until the McCarthy era that the organization experienced serious internal battles over its view of communism. In 1950 and 1951 the WRL lost several

prominent members who were upset that the executive committee had voted to send an observer to a Communist-organized peace meeting in Sheffield, England. Abraham Kaufman, who had served as executive secretary of the WRL from 1929 to 1947, resigned, complaining that “the group in control of the executive committee has destroyed the League’s usefulness as a genuine anti-war group, clearly opposed to all totalitarians. ... As long as the League continues its present effort to be more than an educational organization and tries to enter the area of politics, it will find itself torn forever between sup-

The Strangest Dream 118 9 ee e TO port of anarchistic impossibilists and alliance with Leninist communists. In either case, its main purpose has been destroyed.”® Attempts to convince Kaufman to stay did not address the issue of the difference between an educational and a political organization. In any case, it seemed impossible to stay out of “politics” if one was interested in peace. The American Friends Service Committee, an activist offshoot of the Soci_ ety of Friends, feared being tainted by having positions that were similar to the Communists’ because it would lose support from Friends. Because peace and race relations were two of its major issues, the AFSC had cause for concern. The organization had expanded its domestic and international programs considerably since its founding during World War I. Along with a British Friends group, the AFSC received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. In the

1950s the organization expressed a concern for defending civil liberties; at the same time, it sought to distinguish its position from the Communists in order to ward off attacks. For example, in 1950 the AFSC warned people against signing the Stockholm peace appeal. Significantly, its statement “On the Signing of Petitions” was originally called “Cooperation in Peace Movements,” but the title was changed because the phrase “‘peace movements’ may cause confusion to some people.” In 1953 the AFSC board directed the staff to draw up

a statement of the religious principles of the organization in order to make clear the distinction between its approach and the Communists’? Anticommunism was not just a top-down concern in the AFSC, however. In 1954 the Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York refused membership to

Priscilla Hiss (wife of Alger Hiss, who had been convicted in 1951 of perjury in regard to accusations that he had been a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s). Although the majority wanted to accept her, complete unity was lacking because a few people feared “accusation that Friends were partisans of subversives and that their good name might be threatened.”!° At the same time, other local branches of the organization took a strong civil liberties stance. The two AFSC offices in California gave up their tax exemption rather than sign a declaration saying that they did not advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. The California groups were protesting against the attempt to test loyalty by words instead of deeds, arguing that such declarations only engendered fear and restricted the freedom of loyal individuals to think independently and search for truth. The national executive board expressed some concern about how this action would reflect on Friends in California and across the country. The executive board’s caution was evident in its refusal to sign a petition for amnesty for

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the Smith Act victims initiated by A. J. Muste in 1956, and its concern about

sending a representative to join a group of observers to the 1957 Communist Party convention.!! Despite clear differences between communism and the pacifism of the AFSC, and the lack of attention to the AFSC from the federal government, the organization was occasionally subjected to smear tactics. In 1957 Herbert Philbrick’s New York Herald Tribune article on the American Forum for Socialist Education referred to the AFSC’s peace program in quotation marks and mentioned AFSC peace secretary Russell Johnson’s name alongside the names of known Communists. Charging that Philbrick had purposely mischaracterized the conference and selectively listed participants in order to give a one-sided impression, Johnson wrote, “[T]he Communists are not the

only persons, as they are reputed to be, who are willing to use devious means to accomplish their purposes. ... I can only believe that that handful of villified [sic] Communists in this country who have suffered from this kind of treatment do indeed need the hand of fellowship from those who, while hav-

ing publically [sic] stated their disagreements with the principles of Communism, nevertheless look upon Communists as their fellow human beings.”!2

In response to attacks from without and concerns of Friends from within, the AFSC leadership was still advising affiliates about the differences between Communists and Quakers in the early 1960s. Written guidelines about the use

of Communist speakers in AFSC programs evinced a continuing concern about public relations. The recommended policy was that Communist speakers should be used infrequently, that an AFSC speaker who would challenge the Communist viewpoint should be part of such a program, and that approval had to be granted by the appropriate regional committee, the Information Services secretary, and the national office. The AFSC defended itself against charges that it was subversive or naive about communism, insisting, “We cannot remain silent because others misuse our views.”3 The controversy about sponsoring speakers had reached a boiling point in 1955 when the AFSC in Greensboro, North Carolina, organized a panel discussion called “Which Way to Peace?” One of the invited speakers was Junius Scales, a Greensboro native and a Communist who had been convicted of vi-

olating the Smith Act. The organizers pointed out that what they had in mind was distinguishing the pacifist position, which was to be presented by AFSC chairman Stephen Cary, from the others on the panel. But this intention was unacceptable to the “Friends” in the area, who were very upset about the program. The issue was first raised by one of the invited speakers, attorney R. D.

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Douglas, Jr., who had been asked to represent the conservative point of view. Douglas argued that providing Scales a platform from which to speak made the AFSC “highly suspicious.” He refused to appear on a panel with Scales, who belonged to an organization that was “simply biding its time until we might be weak enough for a violent revolution.”4Douglas’s charges threw the local Quaker community into a tizzy, and because the local Friends were so

upset about the plans for the forum — and because the county commissioners rescinded the building permit as the controversy heated up—the program was canceled. The Central Committee of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting wrote a letter to “all clerks and pastors” in the region stating its concerns about the work of the regional office, specifically the poor judgment of a few local staff members, and reaffirming the integrity of the AFSC, “which is now,

and always has been, absolutely and solidly opposed to communism and its godless materialism, both at home and abroad.”!5 The AFSC had one problem that the FOR, the WRL, and the ACLU did not

share. It had to please the “Friends,” who spanned the political spectrum. For example, Friends in Greensboro and the surrounding area were “quite strong for national defense and military force,’ and opposed to integration of | schools.!¢ Similar problems plagued the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), an organization with unofficial status within the Methodist Church, founded in 1907 to promote the social gospel. The MFSA was clearly more left wing than the church that served as its base. The MFSA endured attacks from without, including the appearance of some of its leaders before HUAC. It also had problems from within, in particular an executive secretary who, according to the MFSA board, followed the Communist Party line. MFSA

executive secretary since 1944, Jack McMichael

had chaired the

American Youth Congress from 1939 to 1941, and supported or signed statements of such groups as the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and the American Peace Mobilization. McMichael and the MFSA had been smeared by the mainstream press as early as 1947; by the 1950s the attacks from without and within had heated up to the point that the controversy threatened to tear the organization apart. McMichael was eventually asked to resign his position, despite much support from the rank and file of the MFSA. Statements of confidence in McMichael were issued by his church, his district superintendent, and his bishop (as well as his mother). MFSA officers and members organized a defense fund for McMichael prior to his appearance before HUAC. The vice president of the MFSA wrote, “These attacks upon Protestant ministers and

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Protestant organizations are meant to intimidate and silence all religious voices that speak out for peace and civil rights. All decent causes are to be considered ‘subversive. ’” Several MFSA board members disagreed with colleagues who retained their faith in McMichael, and, using a tactic reminiscent

of the struggle within the ACLU, they threatened to resign if they did not get their way on the issue. When McMichael was nominated to succeed himself, several board members did resign.!7 One of the people who took a strong stand on this issue was the Reverend Walter Muelder, dean of the Boston University School of Theology. Muelder, like John Swomley, continued to defend his position many years later. According to Muelder, the officers of the MFSA board asked McMichael to “write an editorial for the Bulletin making a critical appraisal of Soviet Communism from a Christian perspective. We wanted this, in part, because we wished to show the conservative critics of the MFSA that he was not a ‘fellow traveller. ’ He said he would, but never did. I think he was emotionally incapable of

doing such an essay.”!8 Not long after the McMichael controversy, Muelder spoke to a number of women from the WILPF on the dangers of Communist infiltration. But the problem in the MFSA, as in the AFSC and other organizations, was

not so much infiltration as public relations. In the midst of the controversy over McMichael, HUAC

came

out with its report called “100 Things You

Should Know about Communism and Religion,” which included an attack on the MFSA as a tool of the Communist Party. Reader’s Digest printed an inflammatory article called “Methodism’s Pink Fringe,” representing the MFSA as a left-wing minority officially tolerated by the church. Pressure from HUAC combined with negative articles in the press—both of which dated back to the 1940s— made many Methodists nervous about the MFSA. The

Reverend G. Bromley Oxnam’s voluntary appearance before HUAC and the forcing out of Jack McMichael became symbols of the organization’s cleansing.!° The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom never performed these sorts of symbolic acts. The WILPF tried to strike the same balance as many other non-Communist peace organizations, avoiding united fronts with Communists while defending their civil liberties. But the WILPF tried to do so without issuing a formal statement excluding Communists from membership in the organization. Other factors distinguished the WILPF’s approach to the issues of communism and peace in the 1950s: concerns about infiltration and attack came more often from below than from

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the leadership. The organization was not based in any one religious denomination. And its leadership wa’ female, and tended to be more inclusive.

The WILPF’s position on many issues sounded much like the Communists’, and the similarities were obvious to friend and foe alike. The FBI had investigated the WILPF in 1922 due to its “unpatriotic” doctrines and activities, such as urging the government to recognize the Soviet Union. In 1942 the FBI reported on ties between the WILPF and the AFSC, concluding that “the A.ES.C. is a fine humanitarian organization,” while “W.I.L. is more militant and dangerous.””° In the 1950s the FBI looked for evidence that the WILPF

was being infiltrated by Communists and that it was implementing the CP line by, for example, working to end the Korean War and opposing the McCarran Act, the development of atomic weapons, and Eisenhower’s run for the presidency. In July 1954 the St. Louis branch came under suspicion because it had sent letters to President Eisenhower urging nonintervention in Indochina and a ban on H-bomb tests. (The agent concluded that the St. Louis WILPF was not controlled by Communists, and that no investigation was needed.) In 1955 a Cincinnati agent noted that the WILPE, like the

Communist Party, was concerned about the Mississippi lynching of fourteenyear-old Emmett Till. For many years the FBI frequently cited such shared concerns as evidence of Communist influence.?! The FBI gathered much information on WILPF chapters and members in the course of its “Cominfil” investigations. Accounts of the past and present affiliations and activities of officers and members make up much of the bulk of the FBI files on the WILPF. Assuming this information was entirely accurate, and that a number of WILPF officers and members were associated with organizations that the attorney general had deemed as “Communist fronts,” it is striking that the FBI was never able to prove Communist infiltration or domination. J. Edgar Hoover doggedly pursued these investigations even when the Justice Department and his own special agents in the field suggested there were no grounds for suspicion. Some WILPF members were aware of and concerned about the similarity between WILPF and CP stands on many issues. Marjorie Matson wrote the WILPF’s administrative secretary, Mildred Scott Olmsted, pointing out that the WILPF’s positions were sometimes similar to the Communists, and therefore the WILPF should be aware of the party line and make clear that they “approach the problem from a completely different point of view.”22 It is highly likely that many Communist-oriented individuals did join the WILPF in the 1950s. American Women for Peace, which succeeded the Con-

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gress of American Women, merged with the American Peace Crusade in 1953,

but none of these organizations was strong. Women who wanted to work in a women’s peace organization had no better place to go than the WILPE. In New York, Philadelphia, and Miami, many women seemed to have gone from AWP branches into the WILPE, causing concern among some WILPF activists about where their new members were coming from. The FBI cited many women in these and other cities who had previous or concurrent experience in Communist-front organizations, and often these women had played an active role in their WILPF branches.?3 Such women were not open about their other affiliations. It was unspoken policy in the WILPF not to ask, and besides, during the McCarthy era, what was to be gained by being open about one’s left-wing credentials? In any case, the presence of alleged Communists, former Communists, and others associated with subversive organizations in the WILPF in the early to mid-1950s caused much confusion and dissension within the organization. Branches in Miami, Louisville, Denver, Boston, Providence, Chicago, and

elsewhere tore themselves apart over the issue of whether to allow such women to be members or officers. Unlike many other organizations, in which the concern came from the top down, in the WILPF it seemed to come just as often from the bottom up. Members of particular branches begged the National Board to take a clearer, more aggressive stand on the issue. The board took the position, which seems accurate with hindsight, that hysterical suspicions within were more likely to defeat the WILPF than Communist infiltration.*4 In response to pleas for help from the branches, the National Board of the WILPF set up a Special Committee on Infiltration and Attack, the name of which was quickly changed to the Committee on the Special Problems of Branches. In addition, the board put together a packet of materials on how to deal with the problems of Communist infiltration and anti-Communist attacks. The National Board consistently urged the branches to be as inclusive as possible, going out of its way to avoid contributing to anti-Communist hysteria. Indeed, the Packet on Infiltration and Attack included the statement

that Communists might make excellent WILPF members: While WILPF must be informed about Communism, we must keep a balanced and sane understanding that some former or even current socalled fellow travellers may have been attracted to Communist or to “Front” organizations because these organizations seemed to them to be the only ones doing anything about certain social evils. Such people may

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The Strangest Dream be ready and willing to accept WILPF principles and program as a genuinely better way to deal with social evils and may make excellent WILPF members. ... It is of the utmost importance that at this time when hysteria is rampant we should deal justly and kindly with one another and not scatter suspicion.”°

The common response from the WILPF’s national leadership to concerns raised at the local level was that adherence to WILPF principles and policies and nonviolent methods should be the only standard for membership, and that the use of democratic methods was the best way to prevent infiltration. The Packet on Infiltration and Attack stated, “We in the WIL believe that the constant practice of democracy both within and without our branches is the best defense of democracy. If we adhere to our whole program and to advocacy of non-violent methods the Wil [sic] is in no danger” (emphasis in origi-

nal).26 In October 1954 the National Board approved a statement with similar language written by president Ruth Freeman: “The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom includes among its members women of many differing beliefs, united only by their conviction that a world in which peace and freedom prevail affords the only hope for our civilization. The standard for membership is that members must be committed to WILPF principles and policies, and agree to promote them by WILPF non-violent methods.”?7 Although national leaders resisted setting up any exclusive standards for membership, they were careful about working with other organizations. The board advised branches to cooperate with other organizations “only on projects which clearly fall within WIL program and which are in harmony with both Wil [sic] principles and methods. .. . 1f IN DOUBT AS TO THE WISDOM OF COOPERATION, BE CAUTIOUS.”28 Although the latter policy was not difficult to follow, the issue of membership caused much agony for a number of branches. One of the more confusing cases was in Denver. In a letter to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, dated February 12, 1954, the Reverend and Mrs. Robert Gemmer expressed concern

about the local treasurer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. They had heard that she was a member of Arts, Sciences, and Pro-

fessions. “Are we correct in assuming,” asked the Gemmers, “that no one

could be a member of that group who is not either dumb, ignorant, naive, or a Communist or fellow-traveller?” The couple went on to say that the person in question had not tried to use the WILPF for Communist ends, “at least as

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yet,” but she should not be an officer. Other WILPF members were concerned, they claimed, “but since she has been a willing worker have hated not to use her.”29 The Denver WILPF’s concerns about its treasurer, Eunice Dolan, symbolize the fear and suspicion that undermined the peace movement during the McCarthy era. Yet, this case was unusual in its origins. Shortly after joining the Denver branch of the WILPF, William Fogarty published an article in Memos—a small publication reporting on peace activity in the area— charging that branch treasurer Eunice Dolan had been a Communist in the 1940s. The

Denver Post had made similar charges a few weeks earlier. A number of women resigned from the organization. Fogarty’s main supporter, Mary Lindsey, wrote to WILPF headquarters calling for the dissolution of the Denver branch because the weight of public opinion was so strongly against it. She claimed that an “undesirable crowd” was taking control, while “all the real workers for peace from the churches, FOR, WRL, and other groups [are] staying well away from us.”3° The unusual aspects of the Denver controversy were that it originated with a male member who stirred things up using very un-WILPF-like methods. It seems likely that this was a case of FBI infiltration, not Communist. The FBI

knew a lot of details about the Denver branch, as Wilma Nissley pointed out to Mildred Scott Olmsted. FBI agents had visited her three times, and they knew all about the “evening study group where we use the kit prepared by the National office,” who had attended public meetings, and other activities of Denver-branch members.?! Mary Lindsey, who supported Fogarty’s claims of Communist infiltration in the Denver WILPF, clearly was working with the FBI.*2

Many local women were unsure what to do in this situation, and they turned to the WILPF’s Special Committee on the Problems of Branches for help. The officers of the Denver branch reported to the committee that “Mrs. Dolan has done everything within the branch she is charged with doing, and she has done them very efficiently and wholly ‘within the framework’ of the WIL and so far as we know everyone has considered her a very valuable member.”33 Bertha McNeill, chair of the special committee, wrote to Fogarty deploring his methods as unrepresentative of the WILPF. The National Board sent its own representative, Kitty Arnett, to try to calm the situation. Fogarty made no more noise, and there was no unfavorable publicity from that point on, but the damage had been done. Resignations, suspicion, loss of jobs, and

a focus on Communist infiltration that distracted the branches from their

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work for peace and that brought them negative publicity: all these themes recurred in WILPF branches around the country. It is noteworthy that the women who were attacked in no case had done anything to violate the principles and policies of the organization. In Eunice Dolan’s case, even as a cloud of suspicion began to surround her, everyone

agreed that she had been a good worker who had always adhered to WILPF policies. No one had ever suspected her of being a Communist. Indeed, she was such a hard and efficient worker that she would be difficult to replace.*4 In the case of Frances Olrich in Massachusetts, a similar situation obtained. As in Denver, concerns about Olrich’s political beliefs were raised first

from outside, in this case by a state investigating commission. Olrich openly acknowledged her sympathy with the Communist Party, stating that if it were legal she would be a member, and that the WILPF and the CP were working for the same things. She resigned her position as legislative chair of the Boston branch of the WILPF in the midst of. great controversy. The state board of the WILPF passed a resolution stating that Communists could not hold office in the organization. Oddly, the vote on the board was tied when the motion read: “Any member of the WILPF who is a proven or admitted Communist or Fascist is ineligible for membership on the Massachusetts Board.” When the motion was changed to eliminate the word fascist, a majority voted for it. The Boston branch board refused to accept Mrs. Olrich’s resignation and the judgment of the state board, instead reaffirming “the Principles and Policies of WIL and mak|[ing] no restrictions on the holding of any type of office for which a member has the capacity as long as the duties of that office are carried out within the framework of WIL Principles and Policies and by WIL methods.”35 Margaret Moseley wrote to Mildred Scott Olmsted about Mrs. Olrich: “No one questions the excellent contributions of conscientious work she has done for WIL or the methods she has used to achieve them. Yet the philosophical concept of the inability of persons with certain ideas and associations to be good members of WIL has so confused the issue that, according to my judgment, we have built this molehill up to such a tremendous mountain that in trying to climb it we may have casualties.”3° Casualties there were, based in large part on fear of what might happen. A meeting of the state board in September prompted this discussion: “Mrs. Olrich’s methods in her work as legislative chairman of the Mass. WIL is [sic] generally considered by the board as having been irreproachable and not at all what could be expected of a ‘good

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communist. ’ Mrs. Emerson however pointed out that though Mrs. Olrich may never have departed for a moment up to now from the principles, policies, and methods of WILPF her connection with Communism would inevitably draw her into the discipline of the Communist party.”37 Moseley argued that a person should be judged on the basis of her actions rather than associations, a position that she claimed caused the group to lose respect for her. One board member expressed suspicion that Moseley herself was a Communist, prompting Moseley to despair, “[W]ith this kind of thinking and treatment of our own members, are we going to be able to give vigorous, courageous, wise leadership in the areas of Peace and Freedom?”38 Other women were upset about the waste of time and energy caused by the focus on the personal political beliefs and associations of individual members. “We have nurtured methods we abhor—where differences are now heresy,” Leah Goldstein wrote to Mildred Scott Olmsted. “How can honest,

decent, forthright members work to carry forward our splendid programs without spending all our energies looking under the bed for reds? That is the crux of the problem.”? The response of the Boston board in defending Frances Olrich was more in keeping with the spirit of the recommendations from the WILPF’s national leadership than was the Massachusetts state board’s attempts to remove her from a position of leadership. Despite the hopes of some Boston women that other branches would learn from their experience “how not to do it,” more such incidents occurred around the country.*° The details were somewhat different in each case, yet every one seemed to prove the National Board’s claim that suspicion and hysteria within were more likely to defeat the organization than Communist infiltration or anti-Communist attacks. In Providence, for example, some longtime WILPF members resigned because of suspicions that had been raised about each other’s political affiliations. Frieda Epstein wrote to Kitty Arnett about the problem, which began with suspicion being cast on one member: “Since Mrs. B. has done nothing to influence any of us against the principles and policies of the WILPF, I think we do not have any right to ask her political beliefs or ask where she stands. ... There is a lot of bad feeling in our group now and there has been a split in our working together for the same aims.” Mounting fears and suspicions wreaked havoc within the organization. In Louisville WILPF members were implicated in a sedition trial that independent journalist I. F. Stone characterized as “as palpable a fake as anything

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in the annals of American radical prosecution.” In this case, two WILPF members lost their jobs, and the local WILPF chapter was afraid to meet. Ruth Freeman, president of the U.S. Section of the WILPF, wrote a letter to

the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal pointing out that the WILPF was not a Communist-front organization, contrary to the newspaper’s charge, and it had never been cited as subversive by the attorney general. The defense in the trial opened testimony by denying any links between the WILPF and Communist activities. In another case, this one in Miami, the national leadership foresaw trouble and tried to head it off. National administrative secretary Mildred Scott Olmsted, concerned about possible infiltration of the local branch, sent “a call for help” to Miami branch chair Bernice Ullrich in December 1953. Olmsted suggested that the two representatives from Miami who had attended the annual meeting the previous summer “were pretty close to the communist line, if not actually involved in it. We know from our experience in other places and in other organizations that it is the habit of such to take over one office after another until they control a branch, because they are always ready and willing to initiate activities and to carry on work when others say they are too busy to handle it.’44 Olmsted went on to explain why it was so difficult to address these problems, including the National Board’s reluctance to take a position opposing Communist membership. “We certainly do not want to add our voices to those of the witchhunters abroad in the land. In addition to that we feel that we are not equipped to determine the fact or falsehood of the reports which come to us. Nevertheless, we must watch very carefully on the local level which is the point at which infiltration starts. Certainly we can see to it that the members about whom there is any question are not put in positions of leadership.”45 Olmsted asked Ullrich to take the presidency of the Miami branch “for at least one year to insure its development of the real and true WIL spirit.”46 When hearings on local Communist activity in Miami resulted in contempt charges for dozens of activists, including several women active in the WILPF, the issue of Communist infiltration could no longer be avoided. It is telling that discussion in the local WILPF branch centered around how best to help the women who had been subpoenaed (many of whom had left town to avoid being served). Bernice Ullrich remained convinced that all the women cited, many of whom had been active in Southern Women for Peace, were sincere members of the WILPFE. She reported to Mildred Scott Olmsted

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that she had never viewed any of the women as “suspicious” or “subversive.” The WILPF board in Miami agreed that the local chapter should not take a stand on the issue, but that as individuals they would try “to help people in trouble, with children, etc., and to write letters to the Editor in an endeavor to

change the climate of opinion.”4” With the exception of Olmsted’s warnings about Miami, the WILPF National Board tended to come down on the side of being inclusive. WILPF members who found this position unsatisfactory claimed that the leadership had failed them. It is noteworthy, however, that in the face of much suspicion

within and numerous investigations by the FBI, in no case did anyone present evidence of Communists trying to use the WILPF for their own purposes. Nevertheless, the National Board’s approach was problematic from some people’s point of view. The WILPF faced pressure from male leaders of other peace organizations to make a clear anti-Communist statement, but the women believed they had a better way of handling the problem. (John Swomley and Homer Jack were among those critics who disapproved of the WILPF’s unwillingness to make anti-Communist statements.) Mildred Scott Olmsted, in particular, steered

clear of making an issue out of the difference between the approach of the WILPF and that of other organizations, even though the difference was clear.*8 But she could not ignore the pressure from her own ranks demanding that the national organization take a strong anti-Communist stand. Women around the country raised their concerns in a variety of ways. One area where dissatisfied women had cause for concern was the secrecy of some WILPF members about their Communist sympathies or affiliations. For example, the women who sought Frances Olrich’s resignation in Massachusetts and wanted to keep Communists off the state board were upset that she had not been open with them from the start. Evelyn Johnson complained that Olrich had failed to fulfill her moral responsibility and expressed hope that others would not follow her lead: “I believe it is a moral obligation for any other members identifying themselves as Communists to reveal their identification. They have a complete right to their choice of loyalties but should accept the sacrifices involved, and play openly with this organization. We are too intimate a group to be dealing in deceptions.”*? Because of the potential effects on the organization, perhaps members had a right to know if their colleagues came from the Massachusetts Minute Women for Peace, the Southern Women for Peace, the Philadelphia Women for Peace, or some

The Strangest Dream 130 ee e 50 other organization that had been listed as subversive by the attorney general. Still, it is hard to see that Communist-oriented women had much choice, given the climate of fear. As the government crackdown intensified and party leaders went underground, few Communists could see much to be gained, for themselves or for organizations with which they worked, by being open about their affiliations. Also, it was clearly unfair to hold someone’s past affiliations and activities against them in such cases. If the attorney general, HUAC, or other government agents did so, this did not make it right. Yet, many peace activists continued to hold Communist abuses of the past against them. As one disgruntled WILPF member from Chicago expressed it, it was wrong to expect people who had been Communists to “see the light.”>° The Chicago chapter issued the strongest critique of the WILPF’s approach to the issue of communism. There was a split in Chicago between women who accepted the more inclusive approach recommended by the National Board and women who took a strong anti-Communist stance. The latter group, which included all the local officers, repeatedly asked the National Board to clarify its position on communism, both internally and in terms of global issues. These women sent a list of questions to the National Board that harshly criticized the inclusive approach. For instance, they pointedly asked whether the board would support any precautionary measures in the form of membership policies, “or is your position that if there are enough Stalinists in an area to join and take over a branch, they should be freely permitted to do so?” The board responded: “Do not believe in locally imposed restrictions upon joining WIL. No loyalty oaths.”>! Although such a response does not thoroughly answer the question, the point remains that in order for a group of “Stalinists” to take over a WILPF branch, they would have to have been infiltrating with the intent to take over, and there is little evidence to support this claim. The FBI reported in a few instances that Communist-front groups had folded and their members had joined local WILPF chapters, but in every case the bureau concluded that there was no significant Communist influence.*2 The Chicago situation, at least in part, appears to have been a case of leftwing infighting; the use of the word Stalinist suggests that at least some of the concerned women were Trotskyists. This probability is also suggested by their focus on criticism of the Soviet Union. (Trotskyists believed that the Soviet Union was a perversion of communism and was as much a threat to peace and freedom as the United States.)

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Elsie Wik Johnson, president of the Chicago branch, resigned from the International WILPF in May 1953, citing the WILPPF’s refusal to speak out

about human-rights violations in the Soviet Union.53 Johnson also signed a letter in June from fifteen officers and board members in Chicago to WILPF

members around the country criticizing the International WILPF for its silence on “the imperialism of the USSR, its dictatorial and terroristic methods with its satellites, [and] its domestic policies of slave labor. We hold that

all these matters have a vital connection with the problem of securing and maintaining peace and freedom throughout the world.” The women also criticized the National Board for failing to follow the example of the FOR and the ACLU, organizations that had long since adopted a clear policy on the issue of communism.™ These Chicago women who believed the WILPF was too sympathetic to the Soviet Union were determined to purge their organization of “Stalinist” elements. The officers of the Chicago WILPF wrote to the National Board suggesting that the problem of “Stalinist infiltration” was an “immediate and serious problem — both from the point of efforts to take over policy direction and of making others less willing to participate in the work of WIL here.” Elsie Johnson wrote to the FBI for help, and a group of women from the Chicago branch met with a group of male peace movement leaders, including Homer Jack and Robert Pickus, who suggested that the WILPF needed to make a strong anti-Communist statement. Five Chicago women threatened to resign if the WILPF National Board did not take action immediately.* By the end of the year the Chicago branch was reorganized, as the Chicago board suspended the South Side group, which they believed to be Communist. But the South Side group felt “quite outraged, and are very desirous of continuing as young mothers, most of them, to work actively for peace through WIL as they consider it the best peace organization they know,’ wrote May Jones. Feeling caught in the middle, Jones appealed to WILPF president Ruth Freeman for help. “These women are all new in WIL work, and need your help. Their main thought, I think, is for their children, to give them a warless world.”*¢ Jones investigated the charges against the South Side women without finding any proof of Communist affiliations. Nevertheless, she changed her mind about holding a meeting at her apartment at which a national representative could discuss the problem with the South Side group. Although her sympathies were with the South Side group, and she harbored no suspicions of any of the women, she was afraid holding a meeting for them would give the wrong message. May Jones expressed much anguish about the

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divisions in Chicago: she believed both sides were sincere and trying to do what was best for the organization.*” Splits like the one in Chicago left many women deeply troubled. But it was not just the women under attack, or those people who sympathized with them, who feared for the future of the WILPF. The anti-Communist women were disgusted with the National Board’s refusal to take a stronger stand on the issue and blamed the leadership for what was happening to the organization. Frances Hurie of Springfield, Illinois, wrote the National Board in anger and frustration, commenting on events in Denver and Chicago: Will you look at the record for a minute: In these two cities, who are the women who are “riding high, wide and handsome” — working with a free hand, with national sanction, and with full confidence? The infiltrators and those they influence. In these two cities, who are the women who are sick at heart, disillusioned in an organization they don’t really want to be disillusioned in, exhausted and weary, disappointed, with shattered faith, feeling alienated from National? The staunch pacifists who have for years given time, money, energy and spiritual leadership to the WIL. This doesn’t make sense to me. (emphasis in original)** Aside from its lack of clarity about international communism,

the Na-

tional Board could have been taken to task for its overall approach to preventing Communist infiltration. First of all, making a commitment to nonviolence and democracy the test for membership was not likely to be an effective means of keeping Communists out, as the board must have known (hence the passage in the Packet on Infiltration and Attack claiming that Communists might make excellent WILPF members). Smith Act convictions notwithstanding, Communists

were not on the whole interested in over-

throwing the government by force and violence; in fact, the WILPF’s much vaunted methods were not all that different from the methods of many rankand-file Communists, or former Communists, in the 1950s. Many Commu-

nists who came of age during the Popular Front believed in democracy; they believed people had a right to make changes in the electoral arena. Violence might come into play only when the people in power resisted that change. Few Communists had a vision of just how socialism would come to the United States, even if they believed it was inevitable.°? In any case, the party was in a weakened position and unable to play the kind of dominant and unscrupulous role it had played in the peace movement of the 1930s. Many

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women close to or involved in the Communist Party could sincerely have seen their goals and methods as being highly compatible with the WILPF’s. This belief appears to have been true in the case of all the women whose affiliations had caused suspicion to be cast upon them and that set off the process of disruption —in Denver, Louisville, Miami, Boston, and so on. The leader-

ship’s claim that Communists (or former Communists) might make excellent WILPF members may well have been correct. Although the National Board seemed to recognize and accept this fact, staunch anti-Communists and those women who feared attack could not do so. Women joined the WILPF because of shared beliefs and because they found it a hospitable organization for working on issues. The WILPF saw links between issues (civil rights, peace, and civil liberties), was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy, and defended the civil liberties of people with unpopular opinions, all of which would have made it a comfortable place for women with CP backgrounds—not to mention the sort of camaraderie women found in such organizations. Communists might have hoped to influence the WILPF’s stand on particular issues, or they might have hoped that the WILPF would be a good recruiting ground for the CP, but again there is little evidence. At most, women sympathetic to communism might have hoped to “influence [the] organization in a more progressive direction.”® In the case of the WILPF, however, the organization was already going in a direction that matched the concerns of the CP—the main reason for the attacks from without. The WILPF’s democratic, inclusive approach might well have worked if given a chance; but given the tenor of the times, adhering to WILPF principles, policies, and methods was not enough to allay suspicions and prevent damage to the organization. As the FBI and the broader society suspected people who deviated from social norms of being subversive, the WILPF did, too. The FBI viewed affiliation with the Progressive Party or attending a Paul Robeson concert or a rally in behalf of the Rosenbergs as subversive. One woman was cited for being “active in the work of the Cleveland Jewish Folk

Chorus.” Some WILPF members suspected one woman of being a Communist because, among other reasons, she continued to have a telephone in her maiden name after she got married. In fact, there is as much, if not more, evidence of FBI as CP infiltration in the WILPF. According to a 1961 FBI report, “(T]he WILPF has been a useful vehicle for promoting our informants [sic] efforts to get into the Communist party.’®!

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The WILPP’s experience implicitly raised important questions about the future of peace organizations. Were members to be judged by their actions or their affiliations, past or present? Did excluding Communists strengthen peace organizations by heightening their credibility, or did it weaken them by keeping out skilled organizers and making the civil liberties battles more difficult to fight? These questions challenged new peace organizations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. SANE and Women questions in very different ways.

Strike for Peace answered these

“The H-Bomb’s Thunder’ Communism and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy

Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder, echo like the crack of doom? While they rend the skies asunder, fall-out makes the world a tomb — Words by John Brunner, a London teenager who participated in the early Aldermaston marches (to the tune of “Miners’ Lifeguard,” an old gospel hymn)

I’ 1956 Nikita Khrushchev gave his speech at the twentieth party congress about the crimes of Stalin, and the steady stream away from the Communist Party U.S.A. turned into a flood. If there had been any question about the CP’s strength before that point, there was no longer; by 1958 the CPUSA had three thousand members. Former Communists interested in peace went looking for new organizational homes just as a new antinuclear group, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, better known as SANE, came into

existence. SANE’s leadership included several active and outspoken antiCommunists: the stage was set for a conflict. By the time of SANE’s founding in 1957, McCarthyism was losing its grip on the domestic population. McCarthy himself was censured by the Senate in December 1954, and the defense of civil liberties became more respectable.! The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the

Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 began to reshape the national political agenda, focusing public attention on the rights of minorities and the use of nonviolent direct action. Still, the government continued to hound the American Peace Crusade and other “Communist-front” groups; the FBI instituted its counterintelligence

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program (COINTELPRO) in order to disrupt the CPUSA in 1956. The CPUSA had lost half its membership between 1949 and 1953, and pro-Communist

peace groups did not fare well during this period. For a variety of reasons— including government attacks and the lack of a base of support — American Communists began to support and work with existing groups that worked for peace, rather than forming their own. They also became cautious about accepting leadership positions in an effort to prevent organizations from being tainted. This position was different from the immediate postwar years when Communist influence (or Communist perceptions of their potential influence) was strong enough that infiltrating the American Veterans Committee or even the American Legion seemed a viable strategy. By the late 1940s the relative government tolerance and public goodwill that existed during the war years was gone. By the mid-1950s the CP leadership was underground, meaning chains of command had broken down; known or even suspected Communist presence in an organization could be the organization’s undoing. Still, the threat posed by the arms race affected people who were Communists as well, and the Soviet Union was interested in a nuclear test ban. Thus, it is

not surprising that Communists and former Communists joined SANE. SANE’s view coincided with that of Communists (and former Communists) to the extent that both feared “the H-Bomb’s Thunder,” and, more im-

mediately, the fallout from nuclear testing. But though Communists still clung to the idea that the Soviet Union was the major force for peace in the world, SANE leaders believed that the United States was a far better represen-

tative of “peace and democracy.” In some ways SANE faced similar problems of “infiltration and attack” as the WILPF had confronted, but there were important differences as well. First, by the time of SANE’s founding, the CPUSA was a shell of its former

self, and many former Communists were looking for a new organizational home. Second, at its inception SANE was a single-issue organization focused on nuclear testing. Though this mission soon expanded to a broader focus on disarmament, one did not have to be a pacifist to support the organization’s goals. Finally, a core of SANE’s male leadership was strongly anti-Communist and concerned from the start with keeping the organization free of any Communist taint. Unlike the WILPF, where the concern about communism was often expressed at the grassroots level, in SANE the concern clearly came from the top down. The American peace movement reached a low point in the early to mid19508, symbolized by the divisions within the WILPF and other organizations. Yet, a few years later the peace movement was on an upswing. When the

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Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy made its first public declaration in 1957,

grassroots groups were already there, poised to respond. Stewart Meacham wrote in the Nation about the character of the developing peace movement, arguing that nuclear weapons had added a new dimension to disillusionment with war; that pacifists were more willing than in the past to accept political responsibility, seeing coalition with nonpacifists as necessary; and that “the peace movement meets an inner need of people,” helping them to regain a sense of meaning and worth in a world of automation, boredom, and alien-

ation. Traditional pacifists such as Meacham were the main force behind the founding of SANE, joining with proponents of world government to raise

awareness about the harmful effects of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. The rapid growth of SANE was remarkable. The group originally saw itself as an ad hoc committee to inform the public and influence national policy on the issue of nuclear testing, rather than a membership organization that would take direct action. Its work was intended to complement that of the newly formed Committee for Nonviolent Action and more-established peace organizations such as the WILPF and the AFSC. But this stance changed after SANE published an advertisement in the New York Times in November 1957

stating, “We are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed,” and explaining the harmful effects of nuclear testing. The response was overwhelming, quickly turning SANE from an ad hoc educational committee into a membership organization with hundreds of local chapters. During the 1958-1959 disarmament talks in Geneva, SANE gathered thousands of signa-

tures on a petition urging a test ban, sponsored peace demonstrations modeled on Britain’s Aldermaston march (a protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which had become an annual event),

and worked in support of a Senate resolution endorsing a test ban treaty. What accounted for the seemingly sudden revival of a moribund movement? Even as the WILPF, the ACLU, and other organizations were struggling with the issue of communism, cracks in the cold war began to appear. With

the death of Stalin in 1953, the world Communist line began to change. Communists sought detente, or peaceful coexistence, and hoped to appeal to a broader constituency.* Khrushchev and Eisenhower were more willing to negotiate than their predecessors had been, and their “summit meeting” in Geneva in. August 1955 raised many people’s hopes that the two superpowers might yet find a way to negotiate an end to the arms race, beginning with a nuclear test ban. Though no substantive agreements came out of the meeting, the “spirit of Geneva” could be invoked to suggest that further negotiations were possible.

Dream The Strangest 138 eee ee e OOO The conference of nonaligned nations at Bandung, Indonesia, that same

year signified that there was a significant force opposed to the cold war. The meeting suggested that there was indeed a “third camp” opposed to imperialism, nuclear war, and the arms race no matter which side was promoting them. The conference ended with an appeal for a moratorium on nuclear testing, an issue the Soviet Union took up from that point on. The issue of nuclear testing had captured public attention the year before, when the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb over the Bikini atoll in the Pacific. The Atomic Energy Commission had insisted that radioactive fallout posed no danger. The public might not have thought any differently except for the fate of the crew of the Lucky Dragon. When the twenty-three Japanese fishermen, who had been about eighty-five miles away from Bikini, became ill with radiation sickness, the story made headlines in the United States and stimulated public debate about the dangers of nuclear testing. This reaction was the beginning of a grassroots movement to “ban-the-bomb.”> Pressure for a test ban continued to build through the rest of the decade, spurred by the claims of some scientists about the harmful effects of nuclear testing. Linus Pauling, who predicted widespread cancer and genetic damage as a result of nuclear tests, was central to this effort. Pauling followed the example of the Einstein-Russell appeal of 1955, which led to the first of a series of conferences in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, at which Soviet and American scien-

tists met to discuss nuclear weapons. (Joseph Rotblat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, forty years later, for his role in the Pugwash conferences.) In 1957; shortly after Albert Schweitzer broadcast an appeal to stop nuclear testing, Pauling initiated a petition, eventually signed by eleven thousand scientists in forty-nine countries, calling for an international agreement to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. Pauling presented the petition to secretarygeneral of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjéld in January 1958. As a result of these efforts, Pauling was called to testify in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which argued that the petition sounded like Communist propaganda. The committee wanted Pauling to name names of the people who had helped him circulate the petition, which he refused to do on the grounds that they might face reprisals. He willingly answered all other questions, in spite of the fact that he resented the committee’s entire investigation as an invasion of privacy. The implications for legislation were never clear, but the subcommittee concluded, “[S]tudy should be given to the

possibility of legislation which will make it more difficult for the Communists, and those who collaborate with the Communists, to abuse the right of petition by utilizing it for their own subversive ends.”6

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Pauling paid a personal price for his actions, yet he was gratified by the fact that much of the American public seemed to be on his side. The attacks were balanced by the numerous letters he received from “average citizens” thanking him for his efforts. Mrs. Janet Larsen wrote from Los Angeles, “The world, its people and the generations to come owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude that perhaps will never be paid. Regardless of what may happen now, (Senate Investigations) history will surely prove your greatness.”” Mrs. Tessie Thixton, who identified herself as a housewife and mother, wrote Pauling that the issue of nuclear testing was constantly on her mind: “I am not a Communist and know you are not—we love our country and our people—that is why we want the tests stopped—to give our children’s children a chance to be normal—not crippled. ... This is suppose [sic] to be a free country and because you dare to speak the truth—they subpaeny [sic] you and I pray you represent enough of the small people—and tell the truth and if enough people hear the truth—something will be done as I for one—would like to have some healthy grandchildren.”8 Linus Pauling had always been willing to work with anyone who claimed to be interested in peace. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he had sponsored

numerous organizations and events considered “subversive” by the government, including the Waldorf conference and the American Peace Crusade.

For a short time in 1951 he begged off from his peace activity, writing to Abbott Simon (Du Bois’s associate in the Peace Information Center): “Dear Mr.

Simon. I’m sorry not to be doing anything. I can’t. Two weeks ago I made a discovery (scientific) that seems so wonderful to me that I can’t do anything but work on it night and day. Please excuse me. Linus Pauling.”? Pauling was undoubtedly referring to the problem of chemical bonding that led to his winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954. Because of his

peace activism, the State Department had denied Pauling a passport to attend an important scientific conference in England in 1952 on the grounds that his

travel would not be in the best interests of the United States. (One biography of Pauling claims that as a result he missed the opportunity to be the first to unravel the structure of the DNA molecule.)!° Pauling appealed to President Eisenhower and sent the State Department a statement, made under oath, declaring that he was not and never had been a Communist. The State Department continued to deny him a passport on the grounds that his antiCommunist statements were not strong enough. His vigorous protests (and the protests of others) were to no avail. He received his passport barely in time to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in 1954. Although Pauling had been consistent in his willingness to work with

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Communists, it came as a surprise in the mid-1950s when A. J. Muste began to reconsider his attitude toward them. Muste had written the FOR’s antiCommunist resolution in 1940, opposed the Communist peace offensive and warned people against participating in it, and continued to write about the problem of united fronts with Communists into the 1950s. Yet, more than any longtime peace activist, he seemed to be aware that important changes were taking place in the mid-1950s— on the international scene (such as the meet-

ings in Geneva and Bandung) and in the United States (such as the events in Montgomery, the decline of the CPUSA, and the emergence of a new sort of peace movement) — changes that made dialogue both possible and important in a way that it had not been before. He knew he would be attacked, yet he was willing to take that chance because of the possible gains for the cause of peace. In 1956 the National Guardian reported on an “icebreaker”: a meeting at

Carnegie Hall in which Muste, Norman Thomas, W. E. B. Du Bois, and CPUSA general-secretary Eugene Dennis presented their views on “America’s Road to Democracy and World Peace.” The discussion, sponsored by the FOR and moderated by Roger Baldwin, drew more than two thousand people of varying left-wing views. Eugene Dennis commented on “the recent revelations by Soviet leaders about harmful violations of the Constitution of the USSR,” acknowledging that American Communists had been wrong to deny “certain charges regarding various excesses and violations of socialist justice.” But he suggested that Communists were heartened by “the deep-going process of self-correction that is taking place in the Socialist countries.”!! Dennis’s remarks indicated that the CPUSA leadership was as blind as ever to the nature of the Soviet system. But the point was not so much what was said in the course of this debate as the fact that it took place at all. The Guardian captured the real significance of the event: “For years each group had talked to itself and won an easy ovation from those who came prepared to cheer. Last week’s meeting was an icebreaker, a declaration that no one on the left was an untouchable. That was its biggest achievement.”!2 The “icebreaker” at Carnegie Hall was foreshadowed by a debate between A. J. Muste and Albert Blumberg of the CPUSA in 1955, sponsored by the Philadelphia FOR. Muste criticized the Communists for their failure to communicate with peace forces outside of the international Communist movement. Blumberg insisted that the CPUSA’s support for peace proposals advanced by the Soviet Union was in the best interests of the American people. He also emphasized that Communists did not advocate war as a means of solving international problems, nor did they advocate the use of force and

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violence “as means for effecting social change. On the contrary, what we do advocate is, first, peaceful negotiations and peaceful coexistence and competition of social systems; and second, the effecting of social changes through constitutional and democratic processes.”!3Since the late 1930s the CP consti-

tution had called for expelling party members who advocated violence as a method of party procedure, but many people, for good reason, continued to question the Communists’ commitment to “democratic processes.” If Blumberg’s speech, like Dennis’s, reflected the Communists’ inability to level serious criticism at the Soviet Union or their own movement, it was still significant that the debate took place at all. Following Khrushchev’s speech to the twentieth party congress and the subsequent turmoil in the CPUSA, Muste became more determined to continue the dialogue with Communists and, increasingly, former Communists. In 1957 he initiated the American Forum for Socialist Education as a means of

encouraging discussion among various factions on the Left. The American Forum was not intended to be an action group, but rather an opportunity to assess the possibilities for building a broad left-wing movement. Just after the Carnegie Hall forum, Muste had written that it was time “to begin talking seriously about the possibility of working toward the formation of a democratic socialist ‘party’ or ‘movement’ and about steps which might be taken toward this end.”!4 The goal of the American Forum was to begin the discussion. The press, however, characterized the American Forum as something else

entirely. The New York Times called it “a new political alliance between Communists” and non-Communist radicals, implying that united action, rather than discussion and study, was the goal. The Saturday Evening Post commented editorially on the “united front alliance” with the Communists, and

suggested that Communists were the “strongest element” in the group.!> In fact, there were two Communists on the forty-person national committee, but it was enough to attract the attention of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, whose chair, Sen. James Eastland,

a Democrat from Missis-

sippi, sent Muste a questionnaire about Communist influence in the American Forum. Muste publicly refused to answer, arguing that Eastland’s activities in opposition to racial integration were an aid to Communist prop-

aganda, but no government agency was investigating him.'° The attacks on the American Forum, combined with their own antiCommunist sentiments, made pacifists cautious about participating. The FOR kept its distance, pointing out that Muste had initiated this activity on his own, not as a representative of the organization. Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin urged John Swomley to try to prevent Muste from establish-

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ing too close a relationship with the Communists, but Swomley needed no encouragement; he shared their view that the American Forum would serve to strengthen the Communist Party.!” Bayard Rustin resigned from the American Forum because he was worried that his involvement would compromise his work in the emerging civil rights movement. Rustin blamed the press for creating “the distortion that the Forum’s purpose was to provide a new political action group for the Communist Party.” Rustin well knew that the American Forum was for purposes of discussion and explicitly excluded united political action. Yet, he resigned anyway: “In the present climate of fear and political conformity, this distortion has done grave injury to work I am doing in another area.”!® Dave McReynolds was also sympathetic to the goals of the American Forum, but he resigned from the national committee after a few months because of his ties with the Socialist Party, which opposed the forum. McReynolds was not concerned about Communist participation. He was bothered by the attacks on the American Forum, which meant “you must spend so much time defending your right to discuss that you cannot actually do the discussing.”!° Nevertheless, there was some interest on the Left, especially among peace activists, in whether the Communists were changing their outlook. Several of these people attended the 1957 Communist Party convention as observers and

reported that meetings were conducted democratically and showed evidence of the ferment in the Communist movement at home and abroad. The observers —including A. J. Muste and Alfred Hassler of the FOR, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, and Bayard Rustin and Roy Finch of the WRL—suspended judgment on the extent to which the CP had achieved independence from the Soviet Union and moved toward democratic socialism. Their report ended with a statement protesting the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s “inquisition” into the political opinions and activities of Communists and others: “That the security of this country is actually threatened by anything that may have happened at the convention of the drastically weakened Communist Party is an idea which it is not possible to take seriously,”2° Even so, the AFSC was concerned that it be clear that Lyle Tatum, peace secretary for the Middle Atlantic Region of the AFSC, who signed the observers’ report, was attending as an individual, not as an AFSC representative.*! Because the AFSC was the major political base for SANE initially, and because the attacks on the American Forum made it clear that working with Communists was still fraught with difficulty, it is no wonder that SANE lead-

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ers were concerned about the issue of what to do about Communists right from the start. There was no question that Communists would be interested in SANE, and its founders had enough experience with Communists to know they wanted nothing to do with such people. Above all, they did not want the organization tainted by any alleged associations with Communists. In April 1957, when SANE was still in the planning stages, Lawrence Scott, the AFSC peace education director in Chicago, raised the Communist

issue in a memo. Scott argued that “a morally sound program is impervious to either villification [sic] or infiltration.”2? Although other AFSC leaders

who helped found SANE took a position similar to Scott’s, other founders— Norman Cousins, Norman Thomas, and Homer Jack—were hard-line anti-

Communists who believed “a morally sound program” was not enough to prevent infiltration and attack. SANE’s founders were aware of Communist presence in the organization early on. By April 1958 concern about Communist infiltration had already arisen in New York, Oregon, and Missouri, serving as “stern warning that we must have both the policy and the means to deal effectively with the problem,” according to SANE cochair Norman Cousins. Indeed, it appears that SANE may have been concerned about some of the same people who had supposedly infiltrated the WILPF. UWF activists in Portland decided to keep their distance from the local SANE branch because of their suspicions about the organizers, one of whom “had moved to Portland under the duress of

pressures arising from her and her husband’s Communist Party activities in Denver.” Norman Cousins wrote to executive secretary Trevor Thomas in June 1958 stating that the organization needed to “develop a razor-sharp vigilance against the danger of Communist infiltration or control. The issue of nuclear testing . . . provides an attractive sphere of action for Communism. Naturally, the Communist Party would like to recoup some of its prodigious losses in recent years by exploiting an issue with such dramatic import and impact.” Cousins was so concerned that he approached the FBI for help in identifying subversives who might be trying to infiltrate SANE.” Trevor Thomas responded to Cousins by suggesting that SANE’s strength and potential was that it could reach thousands of people that no existing group could involve, that it had mobility and action on a broad front. Thomas expressed the choice as being a “closely-controlled structure, with uniform pre-conditions set down for beginning a local SANE group, or [relying] on the integrity and good sense of most people, recognizing that the batting average will be less than 100%. In full awareness of the implications of

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taint, I prefer the latter, with of course, some method of

seeking out reliable leadership.” By this time SANE had already been attacked publicly as being proCommunist.

A Time magazine article of April 1958 asked “How Sane the

SANE?” and accused many of the organization’s prominent sponsors of being dupes or fellow travelers. The article featured pictures of such “well-heeled and influential supporters” as Norman Cousins, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., and sociologist David Riesman, with a caption that asked: “Defenders of the unborn ... or dupes of the enemies of liberty?” Linus Pauling was singled out for attack in the article, which quoted a HUAC report from 1951 that said, “Professor Pauling has not deviated a hairsbreadth from this pattern

of loyalty to the Communist cause since 1946.” The article ended by explaining that SANE and others concerned about nuclear testing and the effects of nuclear weapons were “all stepping up the pressure as the crucial Eniwetok tests drew nigh. It seemed to matter not at all that this was precisely what the sworn enemies of religion, liberty and peace itself were telling them to do.”?5 The Time article contained a number of omissions and distortions about SANE’s position and sponsors, but despite such attempts to smear the organization, SANE grew rapidly. By that summer it had more than one hundred locals representing approximately twenty-five thousand people. Its initial advertisement had been met with dozens of positive newspaper editorials, including one in the Denver Post that expressed great hopes for SANE’s future.”° Although Cousins publicly defended SANE in the pages of the Saturday Review, he was gravely concerned about the issue of Communist infiltration. So were others who had experience with Communists in the peace movement. On January 11, 1960, Norman Thomas wrote to Norman Cousins expressing concern that Henry Abrams, allegedly a Communist, had been elected to the New York committee. “Suppose we grant what isn’t warranted by the Communists’ past; namely that they will work with us in complete good faith.” SANE'’s position on the importance of working patiently with the Russian government would be undermined, argued Thomas. If SANE were “interpenetrated by Communists,” the public would necessarily see it as a Communist front or completely deluded by American Communists. “We have to be able to speak from what is very clearly not a Communist position.”27 Cousins immediately wrote to executive director Donald Keys, saying that Thomas's letter should lead to specific action. “What we say to the field can be fairly explicit,” said Cousins. “We are trying to build an effective peace movement in the United States. There have been peace movements before; almost

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all have failed, many because they were infiltrated or governed by just a few Communists. We are confronted with an operational problem of the first magnitude.” Cousins called attention to the United World Federalists’ antiCommunist statement, which he thought was effective. But he added that no single statement would resolve the problem entirely. “We have to meet the problem on an individual basis with crispness and openness.”28 By this time SANE leaders were working to develop a policy to deal with Communist infiltration. Homer Jack proposed a statement in January 1960

that said, “SANE desires as supporters and workers persons who are free from any totalitarian ties.” But agreement on an official policy statement was slow in coming. In a March 23 memo Norman Thomas warned that SANE was heading for “a most hurtful storm” because it had not yet adopted a membership policy that excluded Communists. “From a good many quarters that I cannot dismiss, I have heard attacks on the Committee as being already badly interpenetrated by Communist Party members or Party-liners, several of whom are chairmen of locals in New York and doing apparently good work. ‘ One of our troubles is that these people have more zeal than run-of-the-mill liberals or lovers of peace.” Thomas urged that the committee produce a clear-cut statement that would be called to the attention of every branch and to the public, in addition to seeing what could be done privately to get those people vulnerable to anti-Communist attack out of prominent positions. “I must remind you ...,” wrote Thomas, “bad as witch-hunting has been in the United States, it was definitely the Communists who, by their tactics, invited it. Some of my most painful memories have to do with what Communists did or tried to do to organizations in which I was interested. They acted with complete bad faith, which to them is good faith because it is ‘socialist realism’ —the end so completely justifies the means.”?? But SANE leaders were not all in agreement about the need for an antiCommunist statement, nor even about the need to exclude Communists from the organization. On April 20 board member Stewart Meacham of the AFSC wrote a letter to “Friends of the SANE Board” arguing strongly against the National Board adopting a statement disavowing Communist affiliations. Meacham argued that such a statement would suggest that there is something suspect about being against nuclear war and nuclear arms, that it would suggest a political test as a qualification for opposition to nuclear war, that it would be an ineffective way of maintaining non-Communist control of SANE, and that it would expose the organization to McCarthyite attack. Meacham suggested that the only way to cope with the problem was:

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1. Be clear what we stand for and state it openly and precisely. (This we do.)

2. Reject out of hand any approaches from the communist party, if any should come. (I know of none but if they should occur I assume this would be done.)

3. State that we do not allow caucuses, and that we do not accept members who are operating within SANE under the discipline of any other organization. (If there should appear to be evidence of such practices the persons involved should be dealt with in a disciplinary way immediately. ) 4. Brand as smear efforts all general red-baiting attacks on SANE and refuse to pay any attention to them whatever.*°

Meacham concluded by saying, “We have moved out of the McCarthy nightmare. Why invite it back? SANE has developed into a far stronger organization than any of us dared hope it could. . . . Will it add to SANE’s strength to do what it grew strong without doing?”?! Norman Thomas took issue with Meacham, arguing that what was still needed was a positive statement about SANE’s independence that disavowed the influence of the isolationist Right or the Communist Left. In response to Meacham’s suggestions, Thomas argued that a statement about caucuses would be even harder to frame than the statement he wanted, and that he in

fact would not reject out-of-hand any approaches from the Communist Party. “I would, frankly, prefer to deal openly with the Communist Party than to deal continually with Party-liners within.” Part of the problem, said Thomas, was that SANE had already delayed too long in making a statement. “The longer we delay in stating our position, the more ground there will be to say that it was forced on us by fear of Congressman Walter and others. This is not the case.” By the middle of May, using a tactic reminiscent of the battle in the ACLU, Thomas was threatening to resign unless the SANE board took action.*? These exchanges make clear that SANE’s leaders were concerned about two related problems: the organization’s susceptibility to attack from without and to a Communist takeover from within. In some cases these concerns were the result of personal experiences dating back to the 1930s. Norman Thomas, in particular, frequently referred to his “bitter experiences of the past” as a good reason to be concerned about the role of Communists in SANE; their presence posed a danger from within and made others suspicious of the organization. In his letter to Meacham, Thomas pointed out, “I know what the

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Communists did to the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and the League Against War and Fascism. I grant that circumstances are now somewhat different and I should not anticipate any such extreme calamity. But short of that a lot of harm can be done to the cause which | want to serve.” Cousins echoed Thomas, repeatedly referring to how the CP had hurt important causes in the past by trying to take over. In a letter to Meacham in April, Cousins argued that SANE could meet the problem openly and honestly, and work out an effective and honorable position “without loyalty oaths or internal thrashing.”33 He would soon be proved wrong on all counts. Norman Thomas proved right about one thing: when SANE’s leaders did get around to stating their position, it looked as if they had been forced to do so by a congressional committee. Just before a mass rally at Madison Square Garden in May 1960, Sen. Thomas J. Dodd of the Senate Internal Security

Subcommittee began to hold hearings on Communist infiltration in the nuclear test ban movement. Dodd subpoenaed Henry Abrams, whose job had ' been to promote the rally, and accused SANE of harboring Communists. Norman Cousins, cochair of SANE and a neighbor of Senator Dodd in Connecticut, asked Dodd to refrain from public attack until after the rally, which

he did. Cousins assured Dodd that SANE’s leaders were aware of the problem of Communist infiltration and that they would take care of it. This assurance did not stop Dodd from making a speech before Congress accusing Henry Abrams of being a Communist, suggesting that there was evidence of “serious Communist infiltration at chapter level,” and admonishing SANE to “purge itself ruthlessly” of Communists.34 Nor did Cousins’s cooperation prevent Dodd from issuing subpoenas to several other members of the New York committee and to Linus Pauling. Henry Abrams assured Cousins that he was not under the discipline of any other organization, but refused to say whether he was a member of the Com-

munist Party. Abrams had been involved with numerous left-wing causes and organizations in New York, such as the Wallace campaign and the American Labor Party. He may well have been a Communist at one time, though his leadership of the United Independent Socialist Committee, which the Communist Party attacked, suggested that he had left the CP by 1958. In any case, everyone concerned agreed he had done a great job of promoting the Madison Square Garden rally, which drew twenty thousand people to hear distinguished speakers talk about the human right to live without the fear and danger of nuclear fallout and disaster. (The rally was scheduled to coincide

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with a planned summit conference between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev. Though*the summit meeting was canceled, the rally was a success anyway.) It is worth noting that the rally featured such speakers as Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph—all staunch

anti-Communists. One concerned SANE member wrote to Cousins: “Who cares whether Abrams was a red; he organized a terrific meeting with a marvelous American diversity rarely seen.”3> For Cousins, however, the issue

was not Abrams’s performance, but his affiliations. When Abrams refused to tell Cousins whether he was a Communist Party member, Cousins suspended him. SANE’s leadership reacted to Dodd’s accusations with ambivalence. The National Board issued a statement saying it resented the intrusion of a congressional committee in the internal affairs of the organization. At the same time, however, the board instituted a new policy designed to purge the organization of Communists. The most controversial aspect of the so-called May 26 resolution that set forth “Standards for SANE Leadership” was a paragraph stating: “[M]embers of the Communist Party or individuals who are not free because of party discipline or political allegiance to apply to the actions of the Soviet or Chinese government the same standard by which they challenge others are barred from any voice in deciding the Committee’s policies or programs.”%6 In their follow-up memo on implementation of the policy statement, issued in July, Norman Cousins and Clarence Pickett pointed out that the statement was in the present tense: “We do not aim at persons who may have made a mistake in the past.”>” But the treatment of Abrams and the casting of prior affiliations with Communist or Communist-front organizations as a “mistake” suggested that this statement was, at best, incomplete. (In fact, Pickett wanted that sentence left out of the implementation memo, but his objections were not heard until after it had been sent.)38

Executive director Donald Keys was more forthcoming. Keys pointed out that SANE had started with an awareness of the dangers of infiltration and attack, and therefore the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy created a deliberately autocratic organization in which the ultimate power of decision and policy making resides in the members of the corporation, a small number of the national leadership. At the same time, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy began a process of chartering its local groups. If a local group deviates from the declared policy of the organization, it is

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subject to disaffiliation and deprival of the use of the name. Cooperative action between the local units and the national organization has been provided for by electing a minority of the National Board members from the local committees.39

Keys’s account is somewhat misleading because of the implication that SANE locals were creations of the National Committee. In fact, in their ori-

gins local chapters frequently were of a grassroots, autonomous nature. Yet, the point about the leadership’s point of view still holds: in contrast to the WILPF’s commitment to using democratic methods to minimize Communist influence, SANE’s founders deliberately created an undemocratic structure to accomplish the same end. Although some SANE leaders claimed the new policy was intended to keep Communists out of leadership positions, Cousins assured Dodd that Communists were not welcome in SANE “on any level” (emphasis in original).*° The intent of the policy was clear to all concerned. Before the May 26 resolution was adopted, AFSC members Clarence Pick._ ett, Stewart Meacham, and Robert Gilmore had proposed an alternative statement declaring that, first, SANE would not trim its sails to suit opponents of a sane nuclear policy, and, second, SANE was not controlled by the Commu-

nist Party nor by any other organization; it was led “by men and women of experience and achievement who are committed to democratic principles and practices,” and was capable of managing its own affairs. They went on to argue that SANE faced little danger of Communist control. “The Communist Party, discredited as it is in American life, is scarcely capable of controlling itself, much less another organization.” SANE had only to be clear about its

goals and stick to them. The far greater danger, they claimed, came from “the threat of false and irrelevant accusations which the opponents of sane nuclear policies and the opponents of democratic dissent from present government policies use in an effort to discredit us. This we expect and are prepared to meet. But the greatest danger of all is the nuclear arms race itself. This must be stopped. We have made some headway toward slowing it down, but the job is far from finished.”4! This statement had been voted down by the board in favor of the policy that excluded Communists. The board disregarded strenuous objections from a number of locals, instituted the new policy, and reorganized Greater New York SANE in order to eliminate local affiliates that the board considered Communist dominated. (SANE’s counsel, William J. Butler, had threatened to quit if the New York committee charter was not revoked.)42 The new locals were required to take out a charter with the national organization that included the May 26 resolu-

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tion. About half the chapters in the New York metropolitan area, which made

up half the chapters in the ‘nation, refused to take out new charters. Several

letters from New York members argued that each individual should be judged on the basis of his or her honesty, commitment, and performance rather than affiliations. One man wrote to the chairman of the Long Island Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy: “For me, either one trusts people or one doesn't. And I think people called Communists are people. And if they want to work with me to put pressure on our government (I can’t put it on the Russian government) to get ... disarmament with effective controls, then I will work

with them.” Norman Cousins defended his position, arguing that in the case of the Communist Party, affiliations had to be considered. He responded to several correspondents with the same few lines: “The idea that you judge a man by what he does, not by what he is supposed to believe, is sound. But a man who is a Communist has done certain things. Being part of the Communist Party is doing something. One thing that is most certainly being done is acting under a commitment other than the one at hand. I believe it is possible to oppose communism and still be a liberal. Indeed, I would say, perhaps pompously, that I could not take a liberal position without opposing Communism.”44 Robert Gilmore, who had been chairman of New York SANE, objected so strongly to SANEF’s actions that he resigned from the National Board, arguing that the organization had missed a golden opportunity to challenge “the cold war stratagem of discredit and divide, with a clear affirmation of the right of everyone to debate and dissent. ... The fact that SANE turned down this opportunity is, to my mind, a great tragedy.” Many pacifists and grassroots activists agreed with Gilmore’s assessment. On the other hand, John Swomley thought the entire incident was in fact Gilmore’s fault, because he had not been willing to exclude Communists from the organization in the first place.45 But Gilmore was not alone in taking a more inclusive approach to organizing. Another AFSC member on SANE’s National Board, Stewart Meacham, vigorously attacked the idea of the organization trying to purge itself of Communists.

To my mind the declaration of purity which Norman Thomas and others sought is so patently self-serving as to be meaningless. The only purpose it serves is to give the opposition a club with which to beat us over the head. I know few people in public life for whom I have a more profound

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and affectionate respect than I have for Norman Thomas, but even he can

be wrong, and he is dead wrong (and the whole history of liberal causes during the past 15 years is proof of it) when he suggests that we can defend ourselves or inconvenience the opposition by putting ourselves under a primary obligation to prove our own freedom from communism.“ Meacham criticized Norman Cousins for subjecting Henry Abrams to a “kangaroo proceeding” in which there had been no clear charge against him and no proof that Abrams was “inspired by any loyalty other than that to the policies and purposes of SANE.” Meacham resigned from the SANE board, citing the difference in tone between SANE and the AFSC peace-education program.”

Linus Pauling was more harsh in his criticism of Cousins. In June 1961 Pauling wrote to the sponsors and directors of SANE criticizing the organization’s “McCarthyite” tactics, and pointing out that the controversial fourth paragraph of the May 26 policy could have been applied to him. “I was not . and am not willing that Norman Cousins or any other officer of SANE require me to answer questions about my beliefs.” Pauling said he was especially unwilling to be questioned by Cousins because of the latter’s close cooperation with Senator Dodd, including an offer “to open the books of the organization to the Subcommittee and to cooperate with it in every way.’48 Pauling had turned down an invitation to become a member of SANE’s board of directors and resigned as a sponsor of the organization. Now he was calling on the sponsors and directors of SANE to revoke the July 29 implementation statement, and “to change the character of the Committee in such a way as to enable it to take a truly leading and effective part in the great struggle for peace and sanity in the world” Pauling suspected Cousins of spreading the word that Pauling was being used by the Communists. Cousins in turn accused Pauling of making irresponsible charges of McCarthyism in SANE and broke off the correspondence, which he found “unsatisfactory and displeasing,” in the fall of 1961.°° Critics of SANE’s new policy shared Pauling’s concerns about Norman Cousins’s cooperation with Senator Dodd. It was clear, as they pointed out, that Dodd was not acting out of any concern for SANE, but out of a desire to undermine the peace movement. Dodd’s commitment to continuing nuclear testing was on record: on May 12 he had given a speech to the Senate on “Eight Fallacies of the Nuclear Test Ban Movement.”>! As Henry Abrams pointed out in testimony before the Dodd committee, the hearings were clearly intended to stifle public discussion of nuclear disarmament.

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In January 1960, months before Dodd’s attack on SANE, longtime pacifist John Nevin Sayre had decided to put his energies into organizations other than SANE, citing Cousins’s close relationship with Senator Dodd. After the May incident Stewart Meacham claimed that the ambivalence about whether to emphasize action or affiliations had “delivered SANE into the hands of Senator Dodd ...and thrown us into impotent confusion at the very moment of emerging strength.” Meacham urged Cousins to make explicit and public the fact that Senator Dodd was attacking SANE, not just Henry Abrams,

pointing out that Dodd had identified SANE’s position on inspection with the Kremlin’s and implied that espousing such views was in itself evidence of Communist control. A. J. Muste was the most outspoken and persistent critic of Norman Cousins’s role in “The Crisis in SANE,” the title of Muste’s series of articles in Liberation magazine. Muste’s analysis focused on SANE’s cooperation with the Dodd committee, and he characterized the upheaval as “tragic” because of the missed opportunity to challenge such political inquisitions while concentrating on building a powerful peace movement. Muste wrote directly to Cousins about his concerns before going public with them, offering Cousins an opportunity to write an article for Liberation responding to his own. Cousins never wrote the article, but instead sent a letter defending SANE’s position and denying that SANE had made any commitments to aid Senator Dodd in his investigation. Yet, by that time even Norman Thomas had expressed concern about “the apparent evidence that the [Dodd] Committee has access to files of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy thru [sic] some secret source.”>2 In his writings on the crisis in SANE, Muste commented perceptively on the broader issue of communism in the peace movement. He pointed out that the situation was different from what it had been in the 1930s when the Communist Party had been a major force; pacifists and others willing to work with them were “the controlling element now. If there are people in SANE who are thinking of bringing people around to a pro-Soviet or pro-Communist line, I don’t know where in the world they would take them! Any peace movement in the U.S. today with such a line, would be dead before it was born.”53 Muste was more open than many longtime peace activists were to Communists leaving the party who were looking for other ways to participate in the pacifist and socialist movements. He argued that the most effective way to bring such people to “sounder views” was to expose them to such views. The peace movement should work with former Communists, not hold their past against them and deprive the peace movement of “the work such people can

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do.” Muste suggested that if former Communists, Progressives, and others claimed to want to work loyally in a genuine antiwar movement, “then the only way to verify this is to give them a chance. In fact, SANE did that and apparently it worked out perfectly.” If SANE had stood up to the Dodd committee, Muste suggested, “a peace movement such as we have never seen before in this country might have emerged.” Muste also argued that those people who saw the Abrams issue as simply a civil liberties question were wrong; the cause of peace was also at stake. The practices of the Dodd committee were, he claimed, “part of the mechanism by which the Cold War is carried on. A peace organization which does not maintain an absolutely clear position of opposition to them is abetting the Cold War and stultifying itself” Muste had a long history of anticommunism and still believed that united fronts with Communists were a mistake. Yet, he concluded that Communists

in SANE were doing their job for SANE, that they were not under CP discipline and not working with ulterior motives. Abrams was not under CP discipline (“I’ve heard they’re having trouble disciplining their members these days,’ Muste wrote to John Swomley). Indeed, according to Muste, attracting

such people to a “sufficiently radical and clear anti-war movement” was a good way to keep the CPUSA weak.*® Some members of SANE shared Muste’s position that Communists could be loyal SANE members. Indeed, from the West Coast, the uproar seemed to be an East Coast affair. Several West Coast activists believed the antiCommunists in SANE were “bastards” who had created an unnecessary crisis. Gerald Fried says that SANE in California was welcoming to Communists: “We pretended we didn’t know who was what.” Other locals appeared not to care about the political affiliations of their members. But SANE’s leadership was clearly not satisfied with this approach. Like U.S. intelligence agencies— which instituted COINTELPRO in 1956— SANE leaders refused to recognize the CP’s weakness. Homer Jack, whom Cousins convinced to take the job of

executive director in order to “clean up the mess,” said he was not sure what the Communists might have done or why they might have done it had the problem gone unchecked.*” Even Cousins later acknowledged that he may not have done the right thing.** Of course, many Communists and former Communists liked what SANE was doing. “Exhibit No. 7” in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s hearing with Arnold Johnson was an article Johnson had written for Party Voice, a publication of the New York state committee of the Communist

Party, called “Halt the Tests! — For a Summit Meeting for Peace!” The article

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praised SANE for “doing an effective job of uniting pacifists, non-pacifists and prominent people in every walk of life in specific activity to end bomb testing and for peace.”5° Many people who had left the Communist Party did indeed end up working with SANE. Though the circumstances and context differ from the situation of the WILPE, some of the conclusions about the role of Communists are not all

that different. Communists were in no position to take over the organization, even if they had wanted to. They joined because they supported the goals of the organization, and the evidence supports the claims of Muste and others that such people worked loyally for SANE. Communists and former Communists seemed to play an important role in New York and Boston and to have had a presence elsewhere. In Boston the local affiliate placed much emphasis on tolerance and inclusiveness from the start. In a bulletin issued in January 1958, the Greater Boston committee ar-

gued that it was important to be tolerant of differences of opinion, and that “our organization must be a permissive and enabling organization: we must say yes whenever we possibly can.” The point was that everyone agreed that “the first order of business is to bring ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs under control.”® Following the implementation of the May 26 policy statement, the Boston chapter split. The dissenters formed the Boston Committee for Disarmament and Peace—with the support of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling —an organization that differed from SANE in only one important way: it invited “the cooperation and support of everyone who believes in these objectives.” The split in Boston concerned some observers who thought the Paulings were too welcoming to Communists. FOR leader Al Hassler wrote to A. J. Muste that Mrs. Pauling failed “to distinguish between people or groups who are called communist because they work for peace and those who are called communist because they are communist.”¢! Norman Cousins claimed that a majority in SANE supported the new anti-Communist policy, but the opposition was strenuous and vocal. SANE locals in various parts of New York, but also in Washington, D.C., Boston,

Cleveland, Skokie, and elsewhere wrote to the National Board to protest the May 26 resolution and the July implementation statement. The Raritan Valley, New Jersey, committee passed a resolution that commended Henry Abrams for his work on the Madison Square Garden rally, deplored such investigations as the Dodd subcommittee’s, supported those people who were called to testify before it, and welcomed “everyone to active membership who is willing to accept the stated goals of our organization.”® The Brooklyn Stu-

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dents’ committee wrote: “The only criterion for judgement of a person’s contribution to Sane is consideration for the actual work that person has done in furthering the peaceful aims of Sane. Past membership in a subversive organization does not guarantee immunity from radioactivity. Everyone has an interest in survival, which transcends even what might have been formerly the deepest political considerations.”® Many students left the organization in protest, foreshadowing the split between anti-Communist liberals and antianti-Communist young people that would affect the protest movements of the early 1960s. A majority group from the board of Washington, D.C., SANE wrote to the National Board suggesting that performance should be the only test for SANE members. This group included several women who would be among the founders of Women Strike for Peace a few months later, an organization determined to be inclusive and nonhierarchical. It is revealing of the gender gap of the times that one of the opponents of the majority group in Washington called its opposition “a bunch of emotional women.” One letter addressed to the National Committee and the local committees for a Sane Nuclear Policy supported the new policy and extended a vote of confidence to the National Committee. The letter came from the SANE board in Chicago. Consistent with the WILPF’s experience, this act suggests that anticommunism remained a powerful force in the peace movement there.® But how was one to judge the affiliations and attitudes of SANE members? Edmund Berkeley, who led the group in Boston that was opposed to the May 26 policy, wrote to Norman Cousins to underscore how complicated it was to make these judgments. Berkeley sent Cousins a list of profiles of SANE activists, each of which ended with the question, “Can he stay in SANE?” For

example: Bernard Brown says he has never been a member of the Communist Party, but admits that he has signed Communist Party nominating petitions, and he has been on the letterhead of the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship, and several similar organizations. He has

never treated Communists as pariahs. Senator Robinson of the United States Senate presents information at a public hearing in which several informers say that Bernard Brown was and is a member of the Communist Party. He has worked well for SANE and he has shown that he can independently criticize all departures from a Sane Nuclear Policy. Can he stay in Sane?®

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Sanford Gottlieb spelled out the problem in a different way. Gottlieb believed that there had been ro Communist caucus in SANE, but that one had been created as a result of the new policy. According to Gottlieb’s analysis, the former Communists in SANE, many of whom had left the CP years ago, felt the new “Standards of SANE Leadership” were directed at them. Gottlieb suggested that no proof existed of Communist efforts to take over or subvert SANE. Not only had the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee provided no proof of Communist infiltration, but there were also former party members “on our side who are solid, dependable people .. . [who] have done some checking and some analyzing, and are unable to uncover any evidence that the Party ordered or encouraged its members to join SANE.” HUAC and the FBI reached the same conclusion.®” Sociologist David Riesman thought that the best solution might be for SANE to simply “disestablish” its local groups, which, he believed, were “limited in their understanding and really in many ways quite stupid.” Cousins had written to Dodd in July 1960 suggesting that this option might be best for SANE. Such people likely agreed with Nathan Glazer’s analysis that SANE’s alienation of many radical pacifists, young people, grassroots activists, and Communists was all for the best, allowing the organization to become more politically sophisticated and realistic in its approach to organizing. But others saw the ideological position of the anti-Communists in SANE not as a solution but as a significant problem that the peace movement had to overcome. As A. J. Muste pointed out, “In large measure, the liberals on whom SANE seeks to build still think in nationalistic terms and cling to the ‘deterrence’ concept with all that this implies.” In other words, they placed primary blame on the Soviet Union for the threat of nuclear war. “Even if they agree intellectually, they are in a sense incapable of ‘feeling’ that the ‘enemy is equally in the Congressional committees, the Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission, and other agencies of the Cold War and nuclear politics over here.”®8 Muste perhaps overstated the effect that a strong challenge to the Dodd committee might have had. He could not prove that it would “have led to the development of a more radical movement against nuclear war and war preparation” that “might have altered the course of events” in the United States and around the world. Nevertheless, the controversy, which clearly had a lasting legacy for both SANE and the broader peace movement, seems unnecessary in retrospect.

There was never any evidence that Communists in SANE tried to use the organization for their own purposes. Indeed, as Norman Thomas, A. J. Muste,

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and others pointed out, Communists and former Communists were often the most zealous and willing workers on SANE’s behalf. Still, SANE liberals wondered whether Communists could really be trusted. Secrecy about Communist affiliations still made many people uncomfortable and suspicious. Though the situation was different from what it had been in the 1930s, the bitterness of a Norman Thomas was difficult for many liberals to dismiss. When

John Darr argued, for example, that responsible peace leaders in the United States should be willing to credit Communists with a sincerity in the work for peace equal to their own, many people with lengthy experience in the peace movement believed they had good reason to doubt him.”° In fact, the number of Communist Party members in SANE was relatively small; the greater number were former Communists. Nathan Glazer argued then, as Guenter Lewy argues now, that such people “had not really changed their political outlook.” Sanford Gottlieb says that the former members were much more difficult, holding on to their uncritical view of the Soviet Union and often taking hard-line positions that seemed to defeat their own purposes. New York City Councilman Stanley Isaacs wrote to Margaret Halsey (who resigned from the local affiliate in White Plains, New York) acknowledging that conditions were different from the 1930s and 1940s —Communists were not a “menace” to the country— “but their point of view, their loyalties, make them

thoroughly undesirable as members” of SANE. It is noteworthy that even some former Communists who remained politically active found it a relief not to work with hard-line Communists.7! Still, as Stewart Meacham and others pointed out, the distinction between

past and present Communist affiliations was significant, as was the difference between cooperating with the Communist Party versus working with individuals who may have been Communists. There was no justification for excluding people because of past affiliations and activities, as even Norman Cousins acknowledged. And the reason for not working with individual Communists clearly had less to do with their performance than with the organization's public image. As Muste argued, if Communists and former Communists were never given a chance to prove that they had changed their ideas and their ways, the peace movement would not be able to take advantage of their skills and willingness to work. SANE was potentially in a stronger position than the WILPF had been a few years earlier to challenge McCarthyism and to judge its members on the basis of their practice rather than their ideology or affiliations. By refusing to do so, SANE enabled fear and suspicion of Communists to con-

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tinue to undermine the peace movement. Although SANE itself may have “weathered the crisis quite well,””2 in terms of its long-term survival and in-

fluence, the issue of communism in the peace movement was left unsettled. One legacy of these years that lingered into the 1960s was that many people were still afraid to sign anything. In 1961, when Linus Pauling circulated “An Appeal to Stop the Spread of Nuclear Weapons,” aimed at getting NATO to stop distributing such weapons, he found that fear remained a significant inhibiting factor. The appeal garnered a large number of signatures initially, including the endorsements of thirty-eight Nobel Prize winners. But letters to Pauling reveal the gap between actual and potential signers. One person reported, “For every signature shown here there is another person who was in favor of the petition but was afraid to sign petitions.” A fourteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn wrote that she could not get too many signatures because people were “afraid to sign for fear they might be persecuted since New York Sane was declared Communist.” Others commented on “so much fear,” a “social climate around here quite depressing,” “more resistance than I expected,” and people’s fear of “being labeled ‘red’””3 Government agencies continued to express concern about the role of Communists in the peace movement. The Subversive Activities Control Board maintained an investigation of the defunct American Peace Crusade, suggesting that it might reappear at any moment, while the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee subpoenaed Linus Pauling in order to question him about his peace activities and his allies. The problem, as one member of HUAC expressed it, was that many Americans continued to demonstrate an “excessive concern with peace.””4 One such group of Americans was Women Strike for Peace, which the FBI had under surveillance from its inception.

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Women Strike for Peace and the Early Sixties

Where have all the young men gone? Gone for soldiers, every one. When will they ever learn? — Pete Seeger, 1961

Bs the fear and intimidation that continued after SANE’s failure to challenge the Dodd committee, it was clear by 1960 that there was more room to speak for peace and to stand up to congressional committees that sought to limit the rights of activists. When Linus Pauling was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, he received much support from individuals and organizations who believed it was well within the bounds of reasonable political discourse to talk about a nuclear test ban.! The political climate was changing, and hopes for peace were high. The Soviet Union and the Soviet-led peace movement no longer focused on the threat of war but rather on the possibility for peaceful coexistence. There was widespread recognition that the dangers of nuclear testing crossed national boundaries. The halting of nuclear tests on both sides in late 1958 had given

many people hope that a breakthrough in the cold war was imminent. In the fall of 1959 I. EF Stone reported, “Quite suddenly peace has become a respectable word again.”? One year later Adlai Stevenson argued forcefully that it was time for the United States to make peace the highest priority: “The plain facts are that we have lost the peace initiative. The United States has failed to persuade the world that it is a nation intent on peace. The inconceivable fact is, indeed, that through large parts of the world, the United States is today regarded as a greater threat to world peace than the Soviet Union.”> By that time Stevenson was not the only politician running for office on a peace platform. A Rand Corporation study noted that at least twenty such

159

sam |Ohe New Pork Times. #

neg the reapors bility vo make his own feelings known and tele tien jamin Spock, Af. D

Dr, Spock has become a sponsor

of ‘The

By the time this ad appeared in the New York Times in April 1962, there was broad concern about the effects of nuclear fallout and growing support for a test ban. Records of SANE, Inc., Swarthmore College Peace Collection

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people ran for Congress in 1962, including H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard history professor who gathered more than one hundred thousand signatures in order to qualify as a candidate. The same study suggested that the peace movement “deserves serious consideration and it cannot be dismissed merely as one more lunatic-fringe group. ... The Peace Movement is finding new advocates for its ideas while retaining its initial supporters. . . . [I]ts support is spreading among different groups of the society... and... it is beginning to influence influential people.”4 President Kennedy, committed to taking a tough stance in the cold war, at the same time brought some hope to those citizens who wished for peaceful coexistence. His promise to get the country moving again and his emphasis on the need for courage and sacrifice were interpreted by many people, especially young activists, as a call to action to set things right. His call for a “peace race,” in particular, struck a chord in those people who had worked for years to reverse the arms race, as well as in nonactivists who were concerned about the effects of nuclear fallout. Public opinion was strongly behind Kennedy’s efforts to negotiate a test ban with the Soviet Union. Aside from one anonymous letter accusing a senator who supported the test ban treaty of being a “vile, filthy and dirty dog,” letters responding to Kennedy’s efforts, and to the signing of the limited test ban treaty in 1963, were overwhelmingly positive.® Grassroots activity had increased considerably since the dark days of the McCarthy era, much of it aimed at pressuring President Kennedy on the issue of a test ban. In addition to recommendations from the WILPF and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, JFK received petitions from students at Columbia University and Barnard College in 1962 urging that the United States not resume nuclear testing. Petitions and resolutions also came from Citizens Against Testing in Los Angeles, Voters for Peace in Chicago, and the Student Peace Union at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Anne Eaton wrote to the Kennedy administration, asking for support for Women Strike for Peace: “There are hundreds of thousands, many new, willing to work

hard, especially since this work supports the Administration’s position.”® Women Strike for Peace played an important role in promoting a nuclear test ban, and, as the peace movement’s focus shifted, in preventing their sons from being “gone for soldiers” in the jungles of Vietnam. WSP women had a different way of organizing— more personal, more inclusive, less hierarchical. Sometimes more-established, male-led peace organizations had trouble comprehending or condoning these differences, especially in regard to the issue of Communist participation. WSP burst onto the scene with a one-day “strike for peace” on November

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1, 1961, demanding that President Kennedy “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race.” An estimated fifty thousand women in more than sixty communities boycotted their regular duties at home and at work in order to participate in the peace protest. The white, middle-class women in their thirties and forties who thereby initiated Women Strike for Peace identified themselves as “ordinary people” who were moved to take action because of the dangers of nuclear testing and the threat of nuclear war. The Soviet Union had resumed nuclear testing in the atmosphere in September, breaking a three-year moratorium, and the United States announced that it would follow suit. At the same time, a confrontation was brewing

about the Berlin Wall, which the Soviets had constructed in August. These events heightened fears of nuclear war, and increased the peace movement’s determination to pressure the president to decrease the risks of the cold war. Women Strike for Peace was at the heart of these efforts. One writer analyzing the “New Peace Movement” claimed, “The most phenomenal occurrence among nuclear pacifists has been the emergence of Women Strike for Peace, which almost overnight enlisted the support of some 50,000 women (and some estimates put the figure even higher), many of whom are now active in holding demonstrations and meetings throughout the country.”” Women Strike for Peace treated the issues of Communist infiltration and attack differently than had SANE. As was the case in SANE, Communists and

former Communists were clearly involved in Women Strike for Peace from the beginning. They may have even brought some of the internecine battles of the Old Left with them.’ But WSP women had learned, some of them directly, from SANE’s experience, and they were determined to avoid divisiveness. Dagmar Wilson and several other WSP founders had been on the board of Washington, D.C., SANE and had signed a letter to the National Board in June 1960 arguing that the only test for members in SANE should be performance: Any other criteria such as Communist Party membership, is impossible to carry out in practice and opens the door to the possibility of such evils as loyalty oaths, witch hunts and purges. Furthermore it will never satisfy elements like the Senate Internal Security Committee, who can always claim that we have not really cleaned up enough. As long as we grow and put up an effective fight for a ban on nuclear tests and for disarmament, we can expect continued attacks from this Committee, which is really only interested in crushing us. A second problem that is troubling many is that of the suspension of

Women Strike for Peace and the Sixties

Henry Abrams. case, it appears this to become using the Fifth suspension??

163

Although we are not aware of all the information in this to be the result of his pleading the Fifth Amendment. Is standard procedure? Are you asking us to assume that Amendment makes a person guilty and subjects him to

From the start WSP women determined not to ask each other about their affiliations. For the most part they did not know nor care about each other’s political views. They were self-consciously different from male-led organizations such as SANE; WSP would be inclusive and nonhierarchical— no membership lists, no officers—a sort of “unorganization.” Dagmar Wilson’s comments on WSP’s international work applied to the group’s overall philosophy: “In the words of our President, we want to ‘explore the problems that unite us, rather than belaboring the problems that separate us. ””! Nevertheless, tension remained within the peace movement, including WSP, over the issue of communism. The difference was that in the early 1960s,

peace proponents acted with an awareness of what had happened in SANE; new organizations crafted their statements of purpose and philosophy with a consciousness of the Abrams case and the purge in SANE. For example, Turn Toward Peace (TTP), a highly structured umbrella organization, denied having a formal exclusion policy and criticized cold war policies of both East and West. At the same time, Turn Toward Peace avoided any Communist taint and made it clear that Communists were not welcome in the organization. A selfdescription of the organization explained: “Our integrity can best be maintained by 1) clarifying and emphasizing our adherence to democratic values and our rejection of any so-called ‘peace position’ which actually is a partisan apology for either side’s Cold War maneuvers; 2) explicitly rejecting any united-front activities; 3) maintaining an atmosphere which encourages open discussion of political viewpoints and positions.”!! TTP’s national coordinators, Robert Pickus and Sanford Gottlieb, had both supported the purge in SANE and continued to believe that Communists should not be part of the peace movement. Young activists, in particular, were determined to get beyond the McCarthy era, and many of them rejected both communism and anticommunism. Many students who left SANE in protest, especially in New York, joined the Student Peace Union (SPU). The SPU, founded by a group of students at the University of Chicago in 1959, grew rapidly into a national organization with more than one hundred chapters. The SPU welcomed anyone as a member who agreed with its purposes and declared that the only grounds for ex-

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pulsion or suspension of a member or group was violation of its constitution. The SPU, which held both East and West responsible for the cold war, boasted

that it was the only independent national student peace organization not tied to any adult group (this while the Student League for Industrial Democracy was struggling with its parent organization, in part over the issue of communism). Yet, the Student Peace Union had close ties to the Socialist Party, which had a long history of anticommunism, as did many “adult” peace activists who served on its advisory board (Homer Jack, David McReynolds, Sidney Lens, and others).!2 Both organizations, TTP and the SPU, were highly critical of WSP’s inclusive approach on the question of Communist participation. By the early 1960s the CPUSA was clearly in a weak position. Official pronouncements of CP leaders were optimistic, consistent with the tone of the times. But, as always, they overstated the potential role of the Communist Party in leading “the peace forces.” In 1958 Eugene Dennis was still suggesting that Communists should work to “coordinate;” “clarify,” and “broaden” the existing peace movement. This task included paying more attention to “the problem of how to activize [sic] and involve ... labor ... and the Negro people” in the fight for peace. Yet, at the same time, he suggested that the CP should tap into “the area of widest agreement among all peace forces,” namely, activity aimed at halting nuclear weapons tests. By 1960, Gus Hall explained, the peace movement operated in a different context than it had in the 1950s when the threat of war was paramount. Now the struggle for peace took place “in the context of a new analysis—again fundamentally correct —that lasting peace, total disarmament, and peaceful coexistence are in the cards, that they are realizable goals.” The CP still sought to maintain an independent political position, but its strategy in terms of the all-important issue of peace was to encourage every activity and organization that coincided with its goals, especially an end to nuclear testing. The weakness and isolation of the CPUSA meant that there was no threat of Communists infiltrating and taking over organizations. In fact, it became difficult to distinguish some of the CPUSA’s rhetoric

from that of President Kennedy: “It is important ... to encourage the widest possible discussion of . . . disarmament questions—in church groups, in parent-teacher associations, in women’s organizations of all kinds. You can contribute to the cause of peace by stimulating these groups to discuss the issues involved and to express their views.”! It was not long before young radicals began to reject the CPUSA, along with organizations such as SANE, as too “liberal,” that is, too willing to compromise and cooperate with the establishment.!5

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Longtime peace activists continued to disagree about what stance they should take toward Communists at home and abroad. Robert Gilmore had resigned from the SANE leadership, criticizing the board for its cooperation with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, but he refused to participate in meetings of the Communist-led World Peace Council. On the other hand, Homer Jack, who had taken Norman Cousins’s side in the purge of SANE and

continued to pressure other organizations to follow SANE’s example, thought it was time to talk to the Communists on an international level. The founders of WSP dismissed such concerns as manifestations of the rigid, hierarchical, exclusive nature of the male-led peace movement. Yet, they

were also concerned with the image that WSP projected, and with holding on to the many new people whose imaginations they had reached. Though the founders cultivated the image of a movement of “housewives” new to the world of political affairs, many of WSP’s key members were, in fact, career women with a history of activism. They were not as naive as they appeared. And despite their inclusive approach —and just as often because of it—the group did have to address the issues of communism and anticommunism. The original founders of WSP had all been members of the SANE chapter in Washington, D.C., and were concerned about what women

could do, as

women, to reverse the nuclear arms race. They were not and never had been

Communists; they were just “really good people, full of creative energy,” as one woman explained.!© The idea of a one-day strike for peace, organized by calling women from personal telephone books and Christmas-card lists, caught the imaginations of women across the country. Women who found offensive SANE’s exclusionary policies and its lack of interest in women’s issues—such as milk that was contaminated due to nuclear fallout — or who found the WILPF

too intimidating, bureaucratic, and cautious, flocked to

WSP. They also came from the Quakers, the Democratic Party, and pacifist organizations. In addition, WSP attracted many women who had never participated in any political activity beyond voting. Mary Clarke, an organizer of WSP in Los Angeles, estimated that 90 percent of the women attracted to its chapter were newcomers.’”

There were many newcomers in other parts of the country as well. One was

Ethel Taylor, a Philadelphia

housewife

and mother

who

had been

shocked by the dropping of the bomb over Hiroshima but who had never participated in a protest where she had risked being arrested. She later explained how being part of WSP changed many women’s lives: “So many women in the movement did things that they never thought would be possible to do because of the deep feelings they had against war.” Taylor became a

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symbol of the young, white, middle-class women who made up WSP, the “rebels in white gloves.”!8 Profiles of some of the other key women in WSP indicate that the image they cultivated of concerned middle-class housewives new to peace activism masked the actual diversity in political outlook and experience. At the same time, it was WSP’s purposeful inclusiveness that made some women very comfortable, even while it caused controversy within the peace movement. WSP appealed to a number of former Communists, especially those women who had left the party because of its lack of internal democracy and its rigidity and hierarchy. For instance, Mary Clarke had lasted less than a year in the CP just after the war. She quit after a lengthy meeting in which she was forced to admit that she had been wrong to characterize the Soviet Union as an imperialist state. Clarke was affected deeply by reading John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima, and also by the red-baiting that went on in other organizations with which she worked. She was active in SANE when she received a letter from Washington calling for a one-day strike for peace. “That’s where I found my niche,” she says, “because in the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy the men ran the show and we did all the dirty work, and they made the decisions, so Women

Strike [for Peace] was just made to order for me.” Los

Angeles held the largest demonstration in the country. Forty-five hundred people turned out, having been sparked by a group of six or eight women who had about six weeks to organize the November 1 strike. Mary Clarke stayed with WSP until it dissolved in 1990.9 Other former Communists who ended up playing key roles in WSP especially appreciated the sort of openness they found in working with other women. Barbara Bick had drifted away from the CP by the early 1950s. She was raising her children and not involved in any political activity when she heard about Women Strike for Peace. “I had small children and the world was getting scarier again; there was all this nuclear testing and the arms race. So I read about the fact that there were some women who were planning to protest nuclear testing in the atmosphere and I joined them.” Bick found it exciting to be part of a grassroots movement, and she worked hard to keep it that way. “That same year, SNCC, SDS, and Women

Strike for Peace began,

women, students, and young Black people, and without any contact essentially, but within the context of the period, we all came up with the same thing. We all wanted to be grass-roots, not ideological, and to operate with participatory democracy.” Bick did not know or care about who the CP people were in WSP, but she was concerned that the organization avoid the

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stigma of being dominated or influenced by Communists. For this reason she took a cautious position on certain issues. For instance, she did not think it

appropriate to allow the Soviets to pay for WSP women to visit their country. She lost this battle, among others, but the point was that the former Communists were often more cautious than the other women. Amy Swerdlow explains: “What struck me about people who had been in the Communist party, many of them, was that they were very frightened. They were very cautious. ... 1 found it was the people who had no Communist connection who could think most freely, could think past McCarthyism.”2! Swerdlow claims that CP people stayed away from WSP initially in order to avoid tainting the organization. But, she adds, they could never have taken over anyway: “It was just too disorganized and too ad hoc.” She and Bick agree, however, that Communists and former Communists were certainly part of WSP from the start, but no one asked about nor cared about anyone else’s other political affiliations. As Bick expresses it, the policy was always that “[i]t didn’t make a damn bit of difference.”22

Amy Swerdlow herself came from a left-wing family and became an activist at a young age, participating in the Oxford-oath peace strikes of the 1930s and serving as the national high school secretary of the American Student Union. Her activities were always centered around peace, but by the late 1940s (when her husband was expelled from the Communist Party) she had

“gone totally nonpolitical.” She was inactive until 1961 when she spoke at a meeting to oppose the building of an air-raid shelter in Great Neck, New York. Her speech was effective, and the proposal for a fallout shelter was defeated. Swerdlow began to feel as if “I could do something to change some things,” and participated in the founding of Women Strike for Peace, becoming one of the key women in the organization. What Swerdlow liked about Women Strike for Peace, “having come from a left-wing background, was that it... was not ideological. It was moral.” She also “loved the inclusiveness. | was working very, very hard against the exclusion of Communists. I loved the evenhanded condemnation of the Soviet Union and the United States. I loved the fact that we invented our own strategies and we weren't in any way connected to any male group. That was very, very important. It was fun. It was really fun.” It was the inclusiveness, the looseness, and the fun that differentiated WSP

from the older women’s peace organization, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. WSP had a different style and constituency from the WILPFE, as well as a different approach to the issue of communism.

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Many women in the WILPF never recovered from the trauma of the McCarthy era, and refuse to this day to discuss those times. Under the leadership of Orlie Pell, the WILPF had become so cautious that some of the key women

in WSP believed that the WILPF in fact viewed the new organization as some sort of Communist conspiracy and warned other women not to participate in it. Mary Clarke says that one WILPF member came up to her during the first WSP demonstration in Los Angeles to say, “Well, I’m here anyway.” Amy Swerdlow says, “I think the fact that the women were not cautious about redbaiting made them think they were Communists.” Whether critical or supportive of the new organization, everyone recognized that WSP was something different. One activist sent a poem written by a Chinese woman in 600 B.c. to Ava Helen Pauling, a poem suggestive of WSP’s self-consciousness about its difference from previous organizations such as SANE. The elder statesmen sit on the mats And wrangle thru half the day But I, being woman, had other thoughts And I had a different way: I would have gone by the field and streams and gathered the people round.”°

Alabama activist Virginia Durr wrote to Ava Helen Pauling bemoaning the fact that there was no WSP to join in the South. Critical of the WILPF and SANE for their red-baiting and their hierarchical style, Durr believed WSP was “much more effective.” Though Durr admired the WILPF for having taken a prointegrationist stand in the South, she thought some of the WILPF’s leaders had succumbed to the “stupidity” and “vicious nonsense” that were rampant during the McCarthy era. She wrote to Pauling that “it was ridiculous and absurd to be making Peace with people and at the same time refusing to meet with them and refusing to allow them to be part of the Peace movement. I think the WILPF has been very ambiguous on this and go one way and then another.” For her part, Ava Helen Pauling thought WSP was “a splendid idea,” and expressed concern that “our Los Angeles WIL is quite reactionary and we do not believe that they will help very much.”26 By the early 1960s the WILPF had some staunch anti-Communists in its leadership. Orlie Pell, who had fought to keep the New York WILPF free of Communist influence and stigma, was now national president. Ava Helen Pauling, who corresponded with Virginia Durr about “the awful Orlie,” stayed

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in the organization and ran for office to fight this tendency. Along with some other longtime peace activists, Pauling worked with both the WILPF and WSP.

Others

chose between

the two organizations.

For instance, Evelyn

Alloy’s concerns about SANE’s red-baiting and the WILPF’s restrictiveness led her to choose to put her efforts into WSP. “WIL too carefully controls the composition of its national board—they want Quakers or pacifists and genteel souls.” She also felt discouraged by the “hatchetmen” who opposed efforts at true international cooperation, indicting WILPF leader Orlie Pell as the “WILPF’s counterpart to Homer Jack.”?”? To comprehend what a damning statement this is, one must understand that by then Homer Jack had become

the symbol of an extremely anti-Communist peace activist who tried to push his ideas onto others.?8 A group from Los Angeles put forth a statement at the WSP National Conference in Ann Arbor, held June 9-10, 1962, addressing the issue of commu-

nism in a forthright manner: “The future of WSP will, in our opinion, depend on the open and honest discussion of the issue (or really the non-issue) of Communist influence in WSP and on the conclusions to which we come.” The statement criticized the actions of SANE and Turn Toward Peace in excluding Communists as self-defeating. “We . . . believe that WSP must not make the error of initiating its own ‘purge.’ We must ask ourselves this question: If there are Communists or former Communists working in WSP what difference does it make?” The answer, they argued, was “None.”29 WSP activists appealed to both American and Soviet women to protect their children by working to end nuclear tests. They wrote identical letters to Jacqueline Kennedy and Nina Khrushchev, asking that they pressure their husbands on behalf of a nuclear test ban. The responses they received from both women were published in newspapers across the country. Although WSP valued its relationship with women in the Soviet Union, some WSP women did not want the group to accept the invitation to participate in the world disarmament congress planned for the summer of 1962 in Moscow. They argued that taking part would make the organization appear to be proCommunist or “an unknowing instrument of Soviet propaganda.”*° The issue was resolved, after a heated debate, when the women

reached a consensus

around a resolution proposed by the Los Angeles women: “If fear, distrust and hatred are ever to be lessened, it will only by [sic] courageous individuals who do not hate and fear and can get together to work out tolerable compromises. This is a role women should be particularly equipped to play.”3! The women agreed that WSP activists should be free to attend any and all interna-

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tional meetings of peace groups, because doing so was the only way to influence decisions and policies. Barbara Bick recalls that the Soviets ended up paying for the trip, as was the custom, which really made no difference in the long run.*2 On another potentially divisive issue, WSP’s position was clear from the start: WSP women supported the individual’s right to take the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about CP membership. The CPUSA gave WSP’s work for peace high praise. All of this might have been expected to make the group vulnerable to attack. Indeed, the FBI investigated WSP groups around the country, detailing past and present associations of members, reporting on meetings and other activities, and supplying addresses of individual activists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But FBI agents concluded in case after case that Communists, even in locations where they were active in WSP, had no intention of taking over the organization. For instance, the San Francisco group’s situation was revealing. The special agent in charge reported in April 1963 that an informant had advised that “the CP has learned the hard way that too much help from the CP results in an organization being labeled ‘red. ’” The party did not want to overload Women for Peace (as some branches of WSP called themselves) with CP members. “In

the first place, there are not enough CP members to accomplish this and in the second place, the CP does not want WFP to feel that the CP is taking over.

said the CP desires such an organization to develop its own program and to bring to the people a left-wing philosophy. The CP would like such an organization to be successful enough to reach a point where the organization would accept equal action with the CP and eventually accept CP leadership on policy matters.” The informant advised that, according to another informant, the great majority of Women Strike for Peace members were “non-Marxist oriented,” and that the Marxists who supported the movement stayed on the sidelines. “Where CP members have been urged to participate in activities of Women for Peace, they have been cautioned to be active on an individual basis only and not conduct themselves in anyway [sic] to cause the organization to be considered a communist group.” The agent concluded that no investigation was warranted. J. Edgar Hoover responded by ordering a “cominfil investigation” to be instituted immediately.*4 FBI agents in New York and Chicago echoed the conclusions of the agent in San Francisco. Communists did not want to be visible or take over the organization; they deliberately avoided leadership roles in order to try to pre-

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vent anti-Communist attacks. They shared the goals of the organization, and at most hoped for cooperation between WSP and the CP at some point in the future.*> According to the FBI, some members of the Southern California

District CP were assigned to work within the Los Angeles chapter of WSP in 1962. The Centinela CP Club in Los Angeles was reported to be concerned about the anti-Soviet line of certain local women peace activists. “It was agreed that regardless of this fact, CP members must continue to work with women engaged in the peace movement and attempt to change this line to a more constructive line.”3¢ WSP in fact won its greatest public relations victory by challenging the government’s and the peace movement’s anticommunism. If the 1961 strike was a success, WSP’s “greatest triumph,” according to founder Dagmar Wilson, was its confrontation with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” In December 1962 HUAC summoned fourteen women to a hearing aimed at determining the extent of Communist infiltration into “the socalled ‘peace movement’ in a manner and to a degree affecting the national security.’38 There were, of course, former Communists, and perhaps some current ones, in WSP, the West Side Peace Committee, and the Greenwich Vil-

lage Peace Center (all included in the hearings), but those people called to testify failed to see that fact as something about which they should be on the defensive. Indeed, at an emergency meeting just prior to the hearings, WSP women reaffirmed the principle of nonexclusion. They agreed to support every woman summoned before HUAC, regardless of her past or present affiliations, as long as she supported the movement’s campaign against both Russian and American nuclear policies. They refused to be divided over the question of their affiliations or for the way they chose to conduct themselves at the hearings. WSP issued a strong statement that garnered much publicity even before the hearings began. “With the fate of humanity resting on a push button, the quest for peace has become the highest form of patriotism.” The test of “Americanism, according to WSP, was the extent of one’s dedication to sav-

ing America’s children from extinction. The statement also addressed the issue of communism in the movement, declaring that “differences of politics, economics or social belief disappear when we recognize man’s common peril. ... [W]e do not ask an oath of loyalty to any set of beliefs. Instead we ask loyalty to the race of man. The time is long past when a small group of censors can silence the voice of peace.”39 The women lived up to their promise at the hearings, refusing to be silenced and supporting whatever strategy each indi-

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vidual woman chose to employ. In a similar manner, the Greenwich Village Peace Center supported its chairman, John Darr, in his appearance before HUAC, reaffirming both “its commitment to the development of the nonviolent and democratic processes essential to the achievement of a peaceful world” and its contempt for HUAC’s proceedings.” In his opening remarks subcommittee chairman Clyde Doyle quoted CP leader Gus Hall on the current strategy of the Communist Party: “It is necessary to widen the struggle for peace, to raise its level, to involve far greater numbers, to make it an issue in every community, every people’s organization, every labor union, every church, every house, every street, every point of gathering of our people... . Above all, Communists will intensify their work for peace, and their efforts to build up peace organizations.” Doyle then explained that the purpose of the hearings was to determine the extent of Communist infiltration in peace organizations, “particularly in the Metropolitan New York area and with special reference to the Women Strike for Peace— and also to determine the degree to which Communists have responded to the previously quoted directives that they engage in such activity.”4! Witnesses were asked about Communist Party membership and directives, signatures on CP independent nominating petitions, links with Henry Abrams, and WSP’s structure and actions. The women challenged forthrightly the committee’s linking of peace activism with Communist subversion, lecturing HUAC on the dangers of nuclear holocaust and women’s rights and responsibilities to work for peace, and refusing to ask each other or respond to HUAC about their political affiliations. Blanche Posner, the first WSP witness, explained to her interrogator that he did not understand the nature of this movement that was inspired by mothers’ love for their children. “When they were putting their breakfast on the table, they saw not only wheaties and milk, but they also saw strontium 90 and iodine 131.” Confronted with a document titled “Structure for Women Strike for

Peace — Metropolitan NY, New Jersey, Conn.,” and asked whether she chaired the Office Committee of this organization, Posner took the Fifth Amendment. She went on to declare, “We do not ask our members whether they are or are not this, that, or the other thing. . . . If they want to work for peace, we love them.”42 Amy Swerdlow says that at the sight of the document on the structure of Women Strike for Peace, the audience burst out laughing, “relieved to know that the committee was hopelessly and haplessly on the wrong track.” But the committee remained convinced that WSP was a highly organized

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group dominated by the CPUSA. Ruth Meyers was asked if she engaged in WSP activities in order to carry out Communist directives. She replied that the question was an insult. “Anything I have done for Women Strike for Peace is public record, and that question can only be done to intimidate my neighbor or my friend who has come along with me.”44 Although other women took the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about Communist Party membership, Lyla Hoffman agreed to answer questions about her own past. She acknowledged that she had been a member of the Communist Party, but had left the party years before WSP came along. At the same time, she argued in front of the committee that the question of past membership was not pertinent. “I am working for a climate of peace today and I am doing this under no discipline or direction other than that of my own conscience.”45 Iris Freed explained to the committee that WSP was not an organization with members; it was a movement. When asked how it functioned, she responded, “Well, it is quite remarkable. Sometimes I wonder, myself.”4¢ Dagmar Wilson took this image of nonexclusion and nonorganization to its extreme, confounding her interrogator and scoring a public opinion victory, while upsetting the anti-Communist element in the peace movement. Congressman Nittle asked her whether she would knowingly permit or encourage a CP member to hold a leadership position in Women Strike for Peace, prompting the following exchange: Mrs. Wilson: Well, my dear sir, I have absolutely no way of controlling, do not desire to control, who wishes to join in the demonstrations and the efforts that the women strikers have made for peace. In fact I would also like to go even further. I would like to say that unless everybody in the whole world joins us in this fight, then God help us. Mr. Nittle: Am I correct, then, in assuming that you plan to take no action designed to prevent Communists from assuming positions of leadership in the movement or to eliminate Communists who may have already obtained such positions?

Mrs. Wilson: Certainly not.4”

This dialogue prompted criticism from some factions of the peace movement. United in its condemnation of HUAC, the peace movement was divided in its response to WSP’s strategy and rhetoric. Both the National

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Committee and the Greater New York Council of SANE joined the many organizations and individuals who called on HUAC to cancel the hearings, while several peace groups in Washington, D.C., organized a panel discussion called “Is Peace Un-American?” Lawrence Scott wrote to Francis E. Walter of HUAC inviting him to be a member of the panel. At the same time, however,

Scott took WSP to task for its “fuzzy” position on the issue of Communist participation in the peace movement.*® Homer Jack gave a talk on radio station WBAI in New York criticizing Dagmar Wilson’s statement before HUAC and WSP’s inclusiveness. Jack suggested that there was another position on the issue of Communist participation that most other American peace organizations shared, namely, that Communists were not welcome. “Recent Ameri-

can history is full of the corpses of voluntary organizations—and their disillusioned members . . . organizations which succumbed because, first, of Communist infiltration, then, because of Communist domination, and fi-

nally, because of cynical Communist demise. Examples abound.” Jack mentioned the American League Against War and Fascism and the American Peace Mobilization, examples that went back more than twenty years. He went on to acknowledge that the situation in 1962 was somewhat different because there were only “a handful of Communists—and half of these .. . are in the pay of the FBI.” But, he insisted, Communist infiltration was still a problem. In addition, he argued, keeping Communists out of American peace organizations actually made it easier for those groups to negotiate with the Russians. Thus, he concluded, “[T]here can be meaningful discussions, even

informal negotiations, between the peace organizations of the West and the Communists— but this is quite a separate point from whether we ought to welcome Communists to join and eventually manipulate our American peace organizations. Thus some of us would answer the question put to Dagmar Wilson in a manner quite different than she did, but we would agree with her that that question, put by any governmental inquisitor, is impertinent. But put by a friendly peace organization, it is acutely relevant politically. At least, that is my opinion.”4? The national steering committee of the Student Peace Union issued a statement expressing its opposition to the HUAC investigations of WSP and other peace organizations. At the same time, the SPU leadership criticized WSP for its loose national structure and for its statement that “differences of politics, economics or social belief disappear when we recognize man’s common peril.” The SPU argued that peace was indeed a political issue. In the SPU’s February 1963 Bulletin, the organization’s national secretary took Dagmar Wilson to task, claiming that her testimony before HUAC had done great

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harm to the peace movement. Gail Paradise’s article complained that Wilson’s comments indicating that Communists could be a legitimate part of the peace movement only confirmed HUAC’s claim that peace activists were dupes. According to Paradise, Wilson’s statements demonstrated a naiveté

and ignorance about the cold war, and her willingness to answer questions at all about WSP activists and activities “aided and assisted a witch hunt.” Robert Pickus, one of the national coordinators of Turn Toward Peace, ar-

gued more succinctly that it was important both to resist HUAC and to challenge what he saw as a dangerous and mistaken attitude within the peace movement, namely, WSP’s refusal “to face the facts of Communist power, ide-

ology and political organization.” Pickus wrote to a number of government officials asking them to oppose HUAC’s investigation of WSP, not only because such investigations “block free discussion and undermine the essential functioning of voluntary organizations in a free society” but also because he was certain the hearings would “strengthen the hold that a Communist propaganda approach to peace has on some politically inexperienced people active in peace groups.” Pickus offered to substantiate his claims on the basis of his considerable experience in the peace movement.°! Some of the critics from outside the peace movement made claims similar to Pickus’s that WSP (if not the HUAC hearings themselves) provided opportunities for Communists to increase their influence in the American peace movement. Shortly after the HUAC hearings, Midge Decter published an article called “The Peace Ladies” in Harper’s, characterizing WSP’s activities as a combination of “energetic determination to act, political vagueness, and ma-

ternal emotionalism.” An experienced anti-Communist, Decter focused her criticism mainly on WSP activists’ lack of political sophistication, which, she argued, made them vulnerable to “the dissemination of someone else’s rather crude propaganda.” In other words, they were Soviet dupes. But most of the reactions to WSP’s appearance before HUAC were positive, including the response of the mainstream press. The Chicago Daily News declared: “It’s Ladies Day at Capitol: Hoots, Howls—and Charm; Congressmen Meet Match.” A Detroit Free Press story was called “Headhunters Decapitated.” A Herblock cartoon that ran in several newspapers showed three aged and baffled committee members seated at the hearing table, with one turning

to another to say, “I Came in Late, Which Was It That Was Un-American— Women or Peace?” Syndicated New York Times columnist Russell Baker captured the flavor of the hearings in a humorous column that proclaimed the women victorious: “When . .. the audience began sending bouquets to each witness taking the chair, there was nothing for the committee to do but smile.

“J Came In Late. Which Was It That Was Un-American — Women Or Peace?” !

One

He

WA st ino

This cartoon captured the waning power of the House Un-American Activities Committee, symbolized by WSP’s successful challenge to its practice of linking peace activism with Communist subversion. Simon and Schuster, 1964

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The three luckless politicians watched the procession of gardenias, carnations, and roses with the resigned look of men aware that they were already liable to charges of being against housewives, children and peace, determined not to get caught coming out against flowers.”>3 In addition to the favorable press coverage, the women received messages of support from individuals and organizations all over the United States as well as from around the world. In contrast to the effect of Senator Dodd’s attack on SANE, HUAC’s attack

on Women Strike for Peace served to strengthen the organization and the women’s commitment to it. Barbara Deming expressed this conviction soon after the hearings in an article in Liberation magazine: “There is little question that at this moment WSP is stronger than it was before the hearings. A move intended to make us doubt ourselves and each other served in fact to sharpen our sense of why we are acting and to bind us more closely together.”>4 Another WSP activist claimed that the hearings had forced the women to face the issues more clearly: “Never again can the peace movement back away from the issues of Communism

and anti-Communism in its ranks, or any-

where—on the false grounds that we are apolitical. We are smack in the middle of the political arena, and we shall have to clarify our thinking and then state our stand loudly and clearly.”55 Beyond the impact of the HUAC hearings on WSP itself, the overwhelmingly positive response from the press and the public seemed to signal the end of an era. The atmosphere had changed: the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiating on the terms of a nuclear test ban; the peace movement was gaining strength and respect; McCarthy had been discredited, and HUAC was losing power; and the Communist Party was no longer much of a factor. In Charles DeBenedetti’s words, “WSP activists challenged for the first time the House Un-American Activities Committee’s practice of identifying citizen peace seeking with Communist subversion. . . The open disdain of the WSP for HUAC did not end the Congress’s preference for treating private peace actions as subversive. But it did help break the petrified anti-Communism of Cold War American politics and gave heart to those reformers who conceived peace as more than military preparedness.”5° President Kennedy himself wrote letters of thanks to some of the people who had worked for the limited nuclear test ban treaty, including one to Norman Cousins claiming that the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban, which had formed to support the treaty’s ratification, “made a real contribution” in developing the public’s understanding of the purpose of the treaty. Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Weisner, singled out Women Strike for Peace for mention in an article about how the test ban treaty came about.*”

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The response both to WSP’s triumph over HUAC and to the partial nuclear test ban treaty clearly indicated that public opinion had changed. Sen. Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania had written JFK in June 1962 suggesting that the issues of “world peace, total and permanent disarmament and the rule of law” were not only essential to survival but also “popular.” Kennedy’s American University speech a year later announced that the United States would refrain from conducting nuclear tests in the atmosphere as a step toward a test ban treaty, and that high-level negotiations would begin shortly in Moscow looking toward such a treaty. This speech seemed to indicate that Kennedy was now determined to break some of the habits of the cold war. Proclaiming that peace was the “most urgent task,” he called on Americans to reexamine their

attitudes — toward peace, toward the Soviet Union, and toward the cold war itself. It was time, Kennedy said, to focus on a “practical” and “attainable”

peace, beginning with “a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.” World peace, Kennedy argued, did not require “that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance.” Although the speech brought fewer than a thousand letters to the White House, they were overwhelmingly positive.>® When the limited test ban treaty had been signed but not yet ratified, JFK received numerous letters of support from religious groups, unions, scientists, and others, including Pope Paul VI and many others abroad. Professor Ernest Hocking wrote from Harvard: “Speaking for my own New England neighborhood, I judge that 90 out of a hundred are feeling that a historic turn has been made, welcome beyond expression, and indicative of further important steps toward eliminating nuclear war. The relief is measureless, even prior to the Senate’s action.”*? Another typical letter, from Rev. Robert D. Bulkley, claimed that the risks of the treaty were nothing compared to the certainty of nuclear war if the arms race were not reversed. “This is not a partisan or political issue. It is an issue which involves the destiny of the human race on the face of the earth!” Another correspondent reported that as a result of the successful negotiation of the test ban treaty, “our prestige abroad has risen to a point where it is higher than it has been at any time since the creation of the Marshall Plan” (emphasis in original). U.S. prestige abroad would soon decline due to the war in Vietnam. As young people took up the antiwar banner, the issue of Communist participation once again threatened to tear apart the peace movement.

Epilogue “The Times They Are A-Changing”?

There’s a battle outside raging It will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls For the times they are a-changing. — Bob Dylan, 1963

BY Dylan’s song prophesied the turmoil of the 1960s. The battle over civil rights was in full swing by the time Dylan wrote “The Times They Are AChanging,” but the other battles— especially over countercultural lifestyles and the war in Vietnam — had not yet begun in earnest. On the surface the issues of peace and freedom looked different by the early 1960s. The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 brought home the danger of nuclear war. In its wake the Kennedy administration successfully negotiated a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, which was ratified by the Senate in 1963. The extreme violations of civil liberties that we

conveniently call “McCarthyism” were all but over; the Communist Party was no longer much of a factor in American politics. And the American people were being forced by the civil rights movement to face squarely the issue of freedom. Underneath, however, many aspects of the American political scene had

not changed. In particular, the cold war consensus held sway. The limited success that the United States achieved in Korea in the 1950s —and perhaps the lack of dissent— encouraged its later commitment in Vietnam. Even though the specifics of the two countries were distinctly different, the differences were glossed over as U.S. policy makers presented both actions (actually undeclared wars) as responses to international Communist aggression, efforts to “contain” communism in Asia and prevent other “dominoes” from falling.

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On the home front, the effects of the McCarthy era lingered, despite WSP’s successful challenge to HUAC. Fear and intimidation continued to haunt the peace movement and prospective activists. Many pacifists and liberals remained determined to keep their distance from Communists, still cognizant of the CP’s behavior in the peace movement of the 1930s and of their own

marginalization in the postwar years. New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society would, like Women Strike for Peace, find themselves attacked for their refusal to exclude Communists. The anti-Communist crusade of the early cold war years defined the way “peace” would be understood from then on. The association of peace with Communist interests lived on until the end of the cold war, and the view that

grassroots peace activism is subversive continues in some quarters to this day. Yet, before a brief perusal of the period from the 1960s to the present, it is worth summarizing the major issues raised thus far. The few years right after World War II constituted a crucial period in the thinking about peace and freedom. After a brief period of optimism about the future, especially about U.S.-Soviet cooperation, hard lines were taken on all sides. The official American view that peace and freedom depended on containing communism clashed with the convictions of American Communists and Progressives who sympathized with the Soviet Union and opposed the cold war. The latter view was decisively defeated in the course of the 1948

presidential campaign, and thereafter both the Communist movement and the peace movement declined, as the link between “peace” and Communist interests was cemented in the public mind. The Waldorf conference was a desperate attempt by cold war opponents to bring an alternative view of peace before the public. Both at the Waldorf and at Peekskill a few months later, the bravado and isolation of American Communists and their few remaining allies were evident. The multifaceted attacks on the Waldorf conference, the violence at Peekskill, and the attempts to counter the Communist “peace offensive” by harassing and punishing its proponents all highlighted a waning commitment to civil liberties, causing many observers to question the U.S. claim to represent “freedom” in the cold war. The treatment of peace activists as subversives and traitors also brought home the point that the cold war was a war: the denial of basic rights and the marginalization of the peace movement were developments not just of the Korean War but of the cold war itself. McCarthyism meant not only attacks on the peace movement from without but also dissension from within. Many organizations, notably the

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Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, had to deal with fear and suspicion raised at the grassroots level, and for several years found that the issue of Communist participation was a major distraction from their main tasks. Even after the CP was decimated by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin in 1956, peace movement leaders continued to be concerned about Commu-

nist infiltration and anti-Communist attacks. In many cases their obsession with these issues dated back to the 1930s when organizations in which they

had been involved were undermined by Communists intent on pursuing their own agenda at all costs. Some of the leaders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy were so concerned about these issues that in 1960 they agreed to work with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to purge their organization of Communists. Many women

who had been active in SANE shared the feelings of A. J.

Muste, Robert Gilmore, Linus Pauling, and others who believed that SANE

had passed up a golden opportunity to challenge congressional committees that treated peace activists as Communists and subversives. The founders of Women Strike for Peace took a different approach, creating a more inclusive, less hierarchical “unorganization.” They refused to concern themselves with each other’s political affiliations, and denied HUAC the satisfaction of discrediting them on that account. For all this, analyzing the divisions within the peace movement over the issue of Communist participation, and the role of Communists themselves, is

still a difficult task. We can understand the reasons that many activists, given their experiences in the 1930s peace movement, were suspicious of Communist motives. And we can also understand why peace organizations concerned about their image tried to steer clear of Communists as cold war politics cemented the link between peace and Communist subversion. Nevertheless, it

seems clear in retrospect that exclusionary policies undermined the peace movement, distracting it from its main tasks and contributing to making “peace” itself seem suspicious. In the 1930s pacifist Kirby Page warned against working with Communists. His warnings went unheeded, and the peace movement suffered as a result. In the late 1940s pacifists, Socialists, and liberals issued similar warnings. This time around the warnings were heeded, but without positive consequences.

With or without

Communists,

that is, it

seems that the peace movement was doomed in the early years of the cold war; it was defeated by the anti-Communist consensus to which it, sometimes unwittingly, contributed.

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But what shall we conclude about the role of Communists in the peace movement? Communists believed that socialism was a more humane way of organizing society. They were concerned with problems of poverty, exploitation, and racism in the United States, convinced that capitalism was the cause

and socialism the cure. They believed that war was a product of international capitalism and that a socialist world would be a peaceful world. The logic of these beliefs led to exonerating the Soviet Union—a “socialist” country—and blaming the United States for the cold war. This position caused Communists to become as much a burden as a help to the peace movement, because it enabled cold warriors, in and out of government, to paint peace as subversive

and peacemakers as traitors or dupes. Although Communists believed they were making a contribution by speaking out for peace, other peacemakers believed that Communists caused unnecessary damage to the peace movement, undermining what existing peace sentiment there was by making it easier to link the cause of peace with the cause of communism. Both positions have some merit. We can appreciate the courage of Communists who spoke out under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances, while at the same time condemning them for their persistent faith in the Soviet Union despite mounting evidence of its unpeaceful, antidemocratic actions in the world. It is difficult to document Communist

contributions to the cause of peace; there are no victories to

point to, and the contradictions are glaring. Communist talk about peace sounded hollow in the face of Soviet imperialism. Yet, for all that, American

Communists did have a genuine interest in peace, and they deserved to have their say. They raised momentous issues— about preventing war, reducing the threat of atomic weapons, and keeping the military budget under control— issues that merited public discussion and debate. A number of Communists went on to work in other peace organizations as they left the Communist movement. The WILPF, SANE, and WSP benefited from the experience of skilled organizers. The American Communist Party barely exists today, but many former Communists have not changed their ideals, and they remain active in efforts to build what they believe would be a more just and peaceful world. Marge Frantz helped organize Elders for Survival in the 1980s and remains active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Howard Fast became a pacifist and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the 1960s. Betty Rottger took up civil disobedience and was still arguing the merits of war-tax resistance in the 1980s. The legacy of American communism is ambiguous,

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and will continue to be contested, but one cannot argue today that these people are not interested in peace. In the early years of the cold war, as we have seen, both established and new peace organizations went to great lengths to separate themselves from Communist peace efforts. The issue caused painful and destructive rifts in a number of organizations. At the same time, harassment of peace activists, Communist or not, made the U.S. position untenable, as numerous observers

pointed out at the time. If peace was a bad word, used mainly by Communists and their dupes, did that mean that Americans preferred war and atomic annihilation? The hypocrisy of both the U.S. and Soviet governments made it difficult for the public to grasp the issues, while the suppression of dissent discouraged political participation. Even though the peace offensive clearly served the interests of the Soviet Union, rethinking cold war foreign policies was ultimately in the interests of the United States as well. After all, these policies led to the creation of a powerful military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address as well as to America’s tragic involvement in Vietnam. At the very least, organizations and activists promoting peace issues— however they defined those issues—deserved a fair hearing rather than a denial of basic freedoms. These issues did not go away in the 1960s. Liberal peace activists took the signing of the limited nuclear test ban treaty as a sign that working for peace had become more respectable. But even as the times were “a-changing,” government agencies, independent citizens groups, the press, and peace activists and organizations continued to express concerns about Communist influence in the peace movement. For instance, when the Nobel Peace Prize committee conferred its award on Linus Pauling in 1963, Life magazine called it “an extraordinary insult to America,” criticized Pauling’s participation in “virtually every major activity of the Communist peace offensive in this country,’ and questioned why the Nobel Prize committee had been so “taken in” and so “rude.” The following year Dagmar Wilson and Donna Allen of WSP were cited for contempt of Congress, along with Russ Nixon, general manager of the National Guardian, for refusing to appear in a closed session before HUAC. In 1963 the three activists had worked to bring Japanese peace leader Professor Kaoru Yasui to the United States for a lecture tour. They had visited the State Department to request a visa for Professor Yasui, which was granted. When they were served subpoenas by HUAC a year later, despite the fact that there

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had clearly been no crime committed, some women wanted Wilson and Allen to put up a separate defense because Russ Nixon’s left-wing politics might “taint” WSP. They ended up mounting a joint defense, without any obvious negative consequences. Though they were convicted on contempt charges, the convictions were overturned in federal court in 1966.2

This case was not the last time WSP women experienced harassment by the government. In 1975 they found out that the CIA, suspecting that WSP was being funded by the Soviets, had carried out surveillance, opened people’s mail, and infiltrated the organization. The CIA had paid women informants one hundred dollars per week to attend meetings and show an interest in the purpose of the organization. The women were instructed to make modest financial contributions but not to exercise any leadership. As Ethel Taylor recalled, “[I]t was a perfect cover; that describes half our membership—they don’t want leadership roles, and they don’t give too much money.” In this case WSP filed a lawsuit, and eventually won an out-of-court settlement.

The same concerns about Communist influence haunted the civil rights movement as it came to the forefront in the 1950s and 1960s. Left-wing lawyer John McTernan, who had been involved in the Smith Act trials, decided by 1954 (prior to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education) that the most

pressing constitutional issue was securing social justice for black people. He applied for membership in the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, sending in his dues and offering to serve on the organization’s litigation committee. He never received any response, and his check was never returned or cashed. He learned through friends that his application was regarded as “the red invasion.”4 Other civil rights organizations also steered clear of communism. A 1959

pamphlet of the Congress of Racial Equality included the following statement on the issue: “Are we Communists? No. We oppose all forms of violence as used by Communists. We carefully investigate prospective members before they are accepted. National CORE forbids the membership of Communists.”5 From its inception the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee faced pressure to keep Communist elements out, and one reason the organization eventually lost political and financial support was because of its insistence on being inclusive. And, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the object of FBI surveillance throughout his career as a civil rights leader. That surveillance, aimed in part at establishing King’s ties with Communists, was stepped up when King began to speak out against the Vietnam War. When King gave a strong speech against the war in Riverside Church in the spring of 1967, the NAACP condemned his stand, calling it a “serious tactical mistake” to merge

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civil rights and peace. Concerns about King’s Communist ties were still being expressed in the 1990s when his birthday had become a national holiday.®

The peace movement lost steam after the signing of the limited nuclear test ban treaty. SANE and WSP declined, and the Student Peace Union dissolved.

The more established pacifist groups—the FOR, the WRL, and the WILPF —

fared somewhat better, but they, too, lost momentum. In 1964 SANE-USA suggested that it was time for the peace movement to shift focus and pay more attention to the increasing involvement of the United States in Vietnam. (This shift was already taking place in several organizations.) But anticommunism and the peace movement’s image immediately became issues as SANE boycotted the April 1965 rally organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and began to plan its own demonstration. SANE had already stated strong opposition to the U.S. government’s policy in Vietnam, but its leaders wanted to keep “kooks, Communists, or draft-dodgers out of the Washington demonstration.”” SANE was not alone in looking askance at the New Left’s failure to exclude Communists from its organizations and activities. A group of longtime peace activists held a special meeting to discuss a statement that would dissociate them from the SDS march in 1965 because of the inclusion of a Communist

youth group, the Du Bois Club. (Indicative of the view of SDS leaders toward such remnants of the Old Left, they mocked them as “Da Boys.”) A. J. Muste was among the twenty-two prominent peace leaders who signed, as were Homer Jack and Norman Cousins (SANE), Norman Thomas (SP), Robert

Gilmore

(AFSC), Al Hassler

(FOR), Robert

Pickus, and Bayard Rustin.

Though intended as a private communication to SDS, the statement was leaked to the New York Post.’ Dave McReynolds refused to sign the statement because the group failed to take a clear position opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “But I would have signed it,” he adds, “if it had carried that one little waiver. I would have

been just as guilty as A. J. So, we’re talking about quite late in the game, that the feelings were very deep.”® Muste later agreed that his action, which alienated the younger New Left, had been a big mistake. It clearly “reduced the healthy influence he could have had on them,” says Dave Dellinger. Muste went on to play an important role in holding together various factions of the antiwar movement, but his 1965 action was not forgotten. In any case, Muste’s

relative lack of influence on the New Left was only one small part of a larger tragedy, which was that SDS had no historical precedents to enlighten them about how to build a mass American peace movement.!? Beyond all expectations, the April 1965 rally turned out to be the largest

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peace demonstration that had ever taken place in the United States, drawing between twenty and twenty-five thousand people. The highlight of the event was the closing speech given by SDS president Paul Potter, in which he talked about the system that had made it possible for “good men” to work the sort of evil that was going on in Vietnam. Although Potter suggested, “We must name that system ... describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it,” he

never did name the system because SDS leaders feared that using the word capitalism would only provoke more red-baiting.!! Youthful activists in SNCC and SDS took a position similar to Women Strike for Peace, emphasizing decentralized, nonexclusionary methods of organizing. As a result, they were subjected to the same sort of criticism as WSP had received from anti-Communist liberals and old-line pacifists and Socialists. The story of the attempts to discredit the anti-Vietnam War movement with red-baiting in many ways follows the story told here, but with several important new twists distinctive to the political climate of the 1960s, which will be touched on only briefly. Activists who had been through the McCarthy era felt a ray of hope by 1965. Economics professor Doug Dowd describes the feeling: All of a sudden it seemed to me that what I had always thought would be impossible— namely, a large-scale movement against a war that your country was in—began obviously to take hold. It seemed to me that that was absolutely amazing. . . . |was teaching at Berkeley during the Korean War. Jesus Christ, you couldn't get anybody to say anything against the Korean War. ... Everybody was scared shitless to identify themselves with being against that war because it meant, quite obviously, that you must be a ranking member of the Communist Party. In fact, I was accused of exactly that. So to me, ten, twelve years later and the anti-Vietnam thing, all of a sudden it just seemed obvious that something was happening that was absolutely brand-new. ... And I began to feel very different about the possibilities of politics in the mid-1960s. I really can remember that. It was as though spring had arrived after a very, very long fucking winter.!2

It was the energy and enthusiasm of young people that helped revive the peace movement and spark its challenge to government policy in Vietnam. Dowd was among those activists who found the spirit and energy of young people infectious. Other experienced activists harbored suspicions about young people, in regard to their style and the substance of their politics. The more liberal, establishment-oriented groups such as SANE were concerned with maintain-

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ing a middle-class, anti-Communist image. The gap between those people who sought “respectable” ways of making their views known and the more confrontational style of the New Left (including long hair and other countercultural symbols) grew rapidly over the course of the decade. The irony was that in this particular division, SANE and the CP were on the same side. Both had a preference for a more conservative style that included nonconfrontational tactics, nonoffensive slogans, an emphasis on patriotism, and playing down the impact of the counterculture on the antiwar movement. Young radicals lumped Communists and SANE members together as “liberals,” too willing to compromise and cooperate with the establishment. SDS leaders in particular found the CP far too mild, especially the latter’s concern with “respectable” tactics. When a broad national antiwar coalition had been formed —the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe) — liberals criticized it

because one of the 115 names on its sponsor list was Arnold Johnson, public relations director of the CP. Dave Dellinger says he used to laugh; Johnson always advocated the most conservative, cautious, law-abiding positions, and

he was completely without influence in discussions and debates. “Ironically, both the Communists and the anti-Communist liberals tried to influence the anti-Vietnam War movement to adopt the same moderate stance. They had opposing views of both the Soviet Union and the United States and mostly they despised each other. But they were united in trying to keep the antiwar movement law-abiding and respectable.”'4 Beyond the issues of public relations and tactics was the question of the ability to function effectively in organizations that included factions from the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), and other sectarian

groups. This job was not so much a question of “infiltration” as it was of keeping focused on the main task at hand —ending the war—while not scaring off people who were unfamiliar with left-wing political style and jargon. Sectarian arguments between the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (a Trotskyist organization) over such things as antiwar slogans as well as broader tactical questions sapped a lot of energy from the early antiwar movement. The fights meant nasty discussions, “agonizingly long meetings ... frayed nerves, stalled planning, and disillusionment with antiwar organizing.” The movement was hurt badly, as both CP and SWP activists later admitted. As Tom Wells expresses it in his history of the antiwar movement, “Most activists found it distasteful to work with people more intent on pummeling each other than on stopping the war.”!5 Given the sorts of divisions

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that cropped up in the antiwar movement, it is doubly impressive how many people spoke up against the.war and participated in the antiwar movement in one way or another. Looking back on this period, many antiwar leaders now say that they could work with the old-line Communists, but that the. Trotskyists and Maoists were much more difficult. Dave McReynolds, with a socialist, pacifist, antiCommunist history, soon found that the Communists had much to contribute to the antiwar movement because of their contacts in the labor movement and the black community, and because they were good, determined organizers. “They were invaluable,” he says. “When you are trying to organize [a demonstration] and you've got some old lady of 85 who is going to start calling people on the phone . . . these people are fighters, and they want to fight until the end.”!¢ By the end of the war McReynolds was reporting regularly to Gil Green, a Communist, keeping Green up-to-date on what was happening in the pacifist coalition, keeping the lines of communication open. Other activists report that working with Communists in the antiwar movement did not present a problem; they were not a radical or disruptive element. In fact, several Communists and former Communists played important roles as respected and accepted leaders of the antiwar movement. One issue that Dave McReynolds alludes to in his comments on the Communists as “fighters” had come up in the peace movement of the 1930s, 40s,

and ’50s: Communists brought an enormous amount of energy and commitment to whatever issue they were working on. They had the ability to build organizations, as well as, in some periods, to destroy them. But one could not make use of their talent and zeal without also taking the risk of having organizations self-destruct over sectarian battles about the correct line. Such battles were, in part, responsible for sealing the fate of SDS, only it was not the Communist Party per se but various other radical sects fighting over definitions and strategies for revolution that finally tore the organization apart. Looking back on this era, most of the fierce arguments over slogans, tactics, and methods of organizing seem a tremendous waste of time and energy. The U.S. government and much of the American public lumped all protesters together as traitors, and remained convinced that the movement against the Vietnam War was controlled by foreign Communists. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon authorized a steady program of surveillance and harassment of antiwar forces. In the summer of 1965 J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to investigate SDS’s links with communism, and the FBI began infiltrating SDS chapters. The Johnson administration was particularly interested in information that might link protest organizers to communism. When Democratic

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Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright held nationally televised hearings on the war in early 1966, President Johnson directed the FBI to monitor the hear-

ings in order to document similarities between the statements of senators and “the Communist Party line.”!” In the fall of 1965 Attorney General Katzenbach announced that there were Communists in the peace movement, that it was going in a treasonous direction, and that some prosecutions might be forthcoming. But neither the FBI nor the CIA could come up with evidence of foreign Communist influence in the peace movement, despite heavy pressure from President Johnson to find such documentation. CIA director Richard Helms recalls that Johnson was

“after us all the time.” The topic “came up almost daily.” In the fall of 1967 the CIA submitted a lengthy report to the White House titled “International Connections of the U.S. Peace Movement.” Johnson was disappointed with the content. Although the CIA reported “extensive” contacts by peace activists with Hanoi, it concluded that the American peace movement was simply “too big and too amorphous to be controlled by any one political faction. ... The most striking single characteristic of the peace front is its diversity.” The report claimed that “most of the Vietnam protest activity would be there with or without the Communist element,” and that, indeed, American Commu-

nists “seem more concerned about countering each other than about countering the non-Communists.” Finally, “We see no significant evidence that would prove Communist control or direction of the U.S. peace movement or its leaders.”18Nonetheless, lack of evidence failed to change Johnson’s mind,

or Nixon’s a few years later. Anti—Vietnam War protesters were treated as subversives and traitors by many of their fellow citizens as well. A well-known slogan of the time, “Amer-

ica— Love It or Leave It,” tacitly questioned the right to dissent from government policy. The slogan was based on the assumption that anyone who questioned U.S. policy in Vietnam was “un-American,” and it carried the implication that peace advocates did not deserve basic civil liberties. This position seemed to bear out A. J. Muste’s warning from the early sixties: “[A]mid the perils of the nuclear age, to inhibit any real thinking about peace in advance by making the word itself obscene is nothing short of treason to our own people and to all mankind. This is what will actually come about if the label ‘Communist’ and the label ‘peace’ are made synonymous in the thinking of the American people.” Muste’s words continued to have meaning throughout the cold war era. Although public debate about the legitimacy of U.S. involvement in Vietnam presented a serious challenge to the cold war consensus, in general

190

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government officials and security services, along with many private citizens, continued to view oppositian to the cold war as subversive and threatening— inspired and controlled by Communists — right to the end. Despite the popular sentiment in favor of a mutual, verifiable freeze on the development, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, for example, President Reagan accused the nuclear freeze movement of being inspired and manipulated by “some who want the weakening of America.” His statement was reported in the New York Times as “President Says Foes of U.S. Have Duped Arms Freeze Group.”?° In the wake of the Vietnam War, the American public became suspicious about military intervention in the name of the cold war, opposing the sending of U.S. troops to Central America, for example. But through the 1970s and 1980s the cold war continued by other means— economic pressure, lowintensity warfare, and covert action—its ideas still generally accepted and promoted by political elites. Government security services illegally spied on thousands of American citizens who opposed U.S. policy in Central America.?! If one comprehends the fact that the cold war was really and truly a war, then the denunciation of peace efforts by those people who believed the only goal should be total victory is understandable. But, one might ask, what is the legacy of this attitude today, now that the cold war is long since over? Today we take for granted that we live in “one world,” united for better or worse by a global economy, a system of telecommunications, and environmental problems that touch us all. Yet, many people continue to be suspicious of those citizens who demonstrate an “excessive concern with peace.” In that sense the political culture has not changed significantly. Though the majority of Americans did not favor going to war against Iraq, for example, those people who remained opposed to the war after President Bush declared war in 1991 were made to feel isolated and alienated, their patriotism called into question on all sides.?2 In 1995 the Center for Defense Information, staffed by retired military

leaders, questioned why Washington had declared the military budget “off the table” in efforts to balance the federal budget, arguing that Republicans and Democrats continued to compete with each other by “throwing more money at the military.” It is a significant statement about American culture after the cold war that the Center for Defense Information, which “believes that strong social, economic, political, and military components and a healthy environment contribute equally to the nation’s security,?> is far from the mainstream of public policy, if not public opinion. For many people peace continues to be

Epilogue

191

defined in terms of military preparedness, while dissent still seems subversive. Muste’s warning has not been heeded widely. Still, the end of the cold war affords us a unique opportunity to be more imaginative in addressing difficult questions about how to build a world of peace, freedom, and justice. In 1988 it would have been unthinkable for a majority of U.S. senators to vote to spend $28.9 million to advance the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as they did in September 1998. At the same time, the Senate has not ratified the treaty because of lawmakers who argue that it would force the United States to relinquish too much of its nuclear deterrent.”4 The global cold war might be over, but domestic arguments continue, not just about the legacy of the Communist Party but also about the meaning of peace, the need for a nuclear arsenal, what sort of world order is desirable,

and what the U.S. role in that order should be. We have not yet shaken off the effects of the cold war, nor taken full advantage of the opportunities that its end has provided.

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Notes Primary Sources Suggested Reading Index

Notes

Abbreviations

ACLU ADA AFSC ALWF ALPD

HUAC ICCASP NCASP NCPAC PCA PIC SACB SANE SDS SPU UWF WILPF WRL WSP

American Civil Liberties Union Americans for Democratic Action American Friends Service Committee American League Against War and Fascism American League for Peace and Democracy American Peace Crusade American Student Union American Women for Peace Congress of Racial Equality Communist Party U.S.A. Federal Bureau of Investigation Fellowship of Reconciliation House Un-American Activities Committee Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences

and Professions National Council for the Arts, Sciences and Professions National Citizens Political Action Committee Progressive Citizens of America Peace Information Center Subversive Activities Control Board Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy Students for a Democratic Society Student Peace Union United World Federalists Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

War Resisters League Women Strike for Peace 195

196

Notes to Pages 2-5

Introduction: “Study War No More”? 1. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, is a

thoughtful look at the impact of the cold war. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, is one of several recent books that leave the impression that American Communists were first and foremost Soviet agents. For an earlier critical history of the CPUSA, see Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party. 2. Communists do not appear in the American Historical Association pamphlet by Charles F. Howlett and Glen Zeitzer, The American Peace Movement: History and Historiography (Washington, D.C.: AHA, 1985), nor in Charles F. Howlett, The American Peace Movement: References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991). They receive little attention in Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform

in American History, and Lawrence Wittner, Rebels Against War, and the treatment in Guenter Lewy’s work is not a balanced one (Peace and Revolution). Communists do not appear in Catherine Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Harriet Hyman Alonso deals with the subject in a forthright and balanced manner in Peace as a Women’s Issue. Histories of the American Communist Party focus on peace only to demonstrate how Communists sought to manipulate the issue. See, for example, David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism. Maurice Isserman concludes

that the major political consequence of Communist agitation for peace was to make anyone using the word suspect as a subversive (If IHad a Hammer, 138). 3. Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,

1977), 225. 4. Letter to author from Betty Rottger, Aug. 15, 1992. 5. Author interview with Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992. 6. Author interview with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992. 7. Letters to author from Lillian Rubin, Mar. 22, 1992, and Lyla Hoffman, June 18, 1992. Author interview with Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992. 8. Author interview with Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995. See also Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 128-31.

9. Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers. Author interview with Dorothy Healey, July 14, 1992. Gil Green, who was in the Communist Party for decades and spent much time working on peace issues, also focuses his memoirs on the experience of going underground (Cold War Fugitive). 10. Author interview with Howard Fast, June 25, 1992. The other person

quoted here asked me not to use his name. u. Author interview with Alice Powell, Dec. 28, 1992. Letter to author from Dan Bessie, Mar. 17, 1992. Author interviews with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992, and Donald Shaffer, June 29, 1992.

Notes to Pages 6-19

197

12. Author interview with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992. Dorothy Healey, Marge Frantz, and several others commented on the problem of the CPUSA’s unwillingness to criticize the Soviet Union. 13. See, for example, Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, and some of the essays in Michael E. Brown, ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Commu-

nism, in particular Mark Naison, “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front.” 14. Author interview with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992. 15. “AFSC Peace Education Program,” Jan. 26, 1949, p. 17, AFSC Minutes, Exec-

utive Board Minutes, AFSC Archives. 16. Paul Deats lost his job at the University of Texas in 1951 because of his pacifism (letter to author from Paul Deats, May 13, 1992). 17. Letter to author from Robert Lees, June 18, 1992. 18. American Friends Service Committee, Speak Truth to Power:

A Quaker

Search for an Alternative to Violence, 14. 19. Dorothy Healey argues that the term infiltration was always used selectively: other people “join” organizations; only Communists are said to “infiltrate” (letter to author from Dorothy Healey, May 15, 1992). Author interviews with Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995; and Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992. Letter to author from Dan Bessie, Mar. 17, 1992.

20. The person who told me this story asked that I not use his name. His concern that the story might get back to some former Marines with whom he works illustrates the lingering effects of the cold war. 21. Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936, 8.

1.“The Spring Song”: Communism and the Decline of the 1930s Peace Movement

1. In the pages of Fellowship magazine, FOR vice-chair Kirby Page argued that “pacifist revolutionists” concerned with preserving civil liberties and promoting social justice “must sharply dissociate their non-warlike strategy from the violent strategy of communists,” because cooperation would only make fascism or civil war more likely. Page suggested that Communists were insistent upon a united front because “it affords them maximum opportunities for boring from within and of making converts for their cause” (“The United Front,” Fellowship [Mar.

1935]: 6-7). 2. Letter to author from Hank Rubin, Mar. 17, 1992. Rubin was kind enough to

share a portion of his unpublished memoirs with me. His recently published book is Spain’s Cause Was Mine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press,

1997). See also Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. 3. Thomas’s position caused a number of pacifists to leave the Socialist Party. Communist repression of other Loyalist forces in Spain, especially anarchists,

198

Notes to Pages 20-26

created much dissension on the American Left. See Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism, 185-88. 4. “Manifesto and Program of the American League Against War and Fascism,

adopted at U.S. Congress Against War, New York City, Sept. 29— Oct. 1, 1933,” American League Against War and Fascism Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 5. James Humphrey Sheldon to Mr. Johnson, Dec. 21, 1933, ALWF Papers.

6. Ibid. 7. Norman Thomas, “Your World and Mine,” Socialist Call (Dec. 16, 1939),

in The Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn by the American Civil Liberties Union, ed. Corliss Lamont (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 145-50. Roger Baldwin, “Russia, Communism, and the United Fronts, 1920-1940,” pt. 2 of “Recollections of a Life in Civil Liberties,” Civil Liberties Review 2, no. 4 (1979): 33-34. 8. James Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion (New York: Random House, 1953),

84-85. Robert Cohen provides a thorough and balanced account of the conflicts that developed in the ASU in When the Old Left Was Young. See also Al Hamilton and Alvaine Hollester, “Left Jingoism on the Campus,” Socialist Review (Jan.— Feb. 1938): 9-19; Hal Draper, “The Student Movement of the Thirties”; and Eileen Eagan, Class, Culture, and the Classroom: The Student Peace Movement of the 1930s. 9. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 145-52. 10. Ibid., 171-87. 11. Ibid., 304. 12. Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue, 130-34. “Open Letter to the A.C.L.U. from

Seventeen Liberals,” Mar. 18, 1940, appendix 3 of Lamont, The Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 187-90. 13. Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion, 70. In our interview David McReynolds explained that it was much easier to deal with Leninists when you understood their way of thinking and operating (author interview with David McReynolds, July 3, 1992). 14. ERW to Clarence Picket, 1936, ALWF Papers. The document referred to

is Hillman M. Bishop, “The American League Against War and Fascism.” 15. John Haynes Holmes, quoted in “A New Executive Secretary for a More Effective Methodist Federation for Social Action,” 1950, Papers of G. Bromley Oxnam, Box 49, Library of Congress. 16. Baldwin, “Recollections of a Life in Civil Liberties,” 38-39. 17. The John Haynes Holmes Papers at the Library of Congress include many invitations to join pro-Soviet peace efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and

all of them have a resounding “No!” handwritten across the top, presumably by Holmes himself. Swomley wrote me two separate letters about this incident, indicating that it was an important turning point for him (letters to author, Aug. 18, 1992, and Aug. 29, 1995).

Notes to Pages 27-33

199

18. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 205; excerpts in Theodore Draper Research Files, Box 15, Emory Univ. 19. Baldwin, “Recollections of a Life in Civil Liberties,” 37; Cohen, “The Popular Front on Campus,” chap. 6 in When the Old Left Was Young; W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist, 151; Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson, Abraham Went

Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste, 58-59. 20. David Dellinger’s remarks about attempts to keep Communists out of the movement against the Vietnam War may perhaps be applicable to earlier periods: “Strange as it may seem, those most concerned with keeping Communists out of peace organizations are often those who, in one respect, are most like them —leaders who are most interested in selling a line to the public than in stimulating individuals to develop their own independent thoughts and actions in the interests of peace” (From Yale to Jail, 469).

21. Peter Brock points out that the international pacifist movement always suffered from exclusiveness. He suggests that the International FOR, because of its Christ-centeredness, would have had to refuse membership to Mahatma Gandhi, and the War Resisters International could not ally itself fully with such pacifist organizations as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom because the latter did not require an individual pledge of war resistance from its members (Twentieth-Century Pacifism). 22. Ibid., 110-12. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Why I Leave the E.O.R.,” Christian Century (Jan. 3, 1934), reprinted in D. B. Robertson, ed., Love and Justice (Gloucester,

Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976), 254-59. 23. Author interview with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992. 24. Author interview with Dorothy Healey, July 14, 1992. Her view is echoed by Leon Wofsy, Marge Frantz, and many other former Communists. 25. Author interview with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992. Letter to author from Robert Lees, June 18, 1992. Many others have commented on the difficult time

they had during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact. 26. Author interview with Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992. Author interview with

Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995. Both ended up having successful academic careers later in life. On the 1939-1940 red scare, see Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? 67-73.

2. “Friendly Henry Wallace”: The Progressive Party Loses the “Fight for Peace” 1. E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War, 158-60. 2. Author interviews with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992; Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995; and David McReynolds, July 3, 1992. See also George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).

200

Notes to Pages 34—41

3. “Special Issue U.S.S.R.” Life (Mar. 29, 1943): 20, 23, 38.

4. “If War Comes,” Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 11, 1948. “Preview of the War We Do Not Want,” Collier’s (Oct. 27, 1951). 5. Letter to author from Elmer Bernstein, Nov. 7, 1992.

6. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 102, 190.

7. “Challenge to Humanity,” Daily Worker (Aug. 8, 1945): 6. Mike Gold, “Change the World!” Daily Worker (Dec. 21, 1946): 6.

8. Author interview with Dorothy Healey, June 18, 1992. 9. “Germany—the Tip-Off, Daily Worker (Sept. 7, 1947): 6. An advertisement for a protest meeting for Howard Fast was headlined “THE BOOKS ARE BURNING.” See Daily Worker (Oct. 4, 1947): 5. See also a telegram from William Z. Foster,

chairman, and Eugene Dennis, general secretary of the Communist Party, to President Harry Truman, Mar. 7, 1949, Harry S. Truman Papers, Box 881. The telegram asks pointedly, “Is the advocacy of peace treason?” 10. M. Wheeler to President Harry S. Truman, Oct. 9, 1948, Harry S. Truman Papers, Official File, Box 1075.

u. Jerry Sullivan to President Harry S. Truman, Mar. 26, 1947, Harry S. Truman Papers, Official File, Box 880. 12. Norman Cousins, Modern Man Is Obsolete (New York: Viking Press, 1945),

9-10. 13. Samuel Sillen, “Cousins’ World Gov't Plea Sounds Good —but It Menaces Real Unity,” Daily Worker (Dec. 22, 1945): 11. J. P., “World Federalism vs. Communism,’ Common Cause (July 1949): 444. 14. Walter Gellhorn, Security, Loyalty, and Science (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,

1950), 152-53. 15. See Wittner, “Organizing for a New World, 1945-1948,” chap. 6 in Rebels Against War. 16. Dwight Macdonald, “I Choose the West,” in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957). 17. Reinhold Niebuhr, “For Peace, We Must Risk War,” Life (Sept. 20, 1948): 38-39. See Leffler, A Preponderance of Power. 18. President Truman said in an interview that he “had come to the conclusion early in January 1946 that they could not be dealt with” (Harry S. Truman Papers, Post-Presidential Files— “Memoirs” File— Interviews, Box 4). Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State,

241-42. Melvyn Leffler concludes that “in view of the overwhelming power of the United States and in view of the relative restraint exhibited by the Kremlin outside its immediate periphery, U.S. officials might have displayed more tolerance for risk” (A Preponderance of Power, 99).

19. Oral history interview with Tom C. Clark, 1977, Harry S. Truman Papers, Oral History 240, p. 189.

Notes to Pages 41-47

201

20. “Statement by the President,” May 22, 1947, Harry S. Truman Papers, PostPresidential Files, Box 175. See also Yergin, Shattered Peace, 282-85; and Richard

M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism, 7-8. 21. William Z. Foster, “Organized Labor and the Marshall Plan,” Political Affairs (Feb. 1948): 99. 22. “The Arms We Need,” Fortune (Dec. 1948): 209. 23. Robert A. Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” 96. See also Michael Sherry, Preparing for the Next War (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977).

The FBI report included the claim of one informant that “practically every Russian child is . . . trained in the art of paratrooping” (“Present International Situation and the Role of American Communists in the Event of War, Harry S. Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, FBI Subject File: Communist Party, Box 167, p. 11). 24. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, 9-10.

Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism. 25. J. A.Emerson Vermaat and Hans Bax, “The Soviet Concept of “Peace,” Atlantic Community Quarterly 21 (winter 1983-1984): 327. The New Masses ex-

pressed it this way in 1935: “All Communists know that permanent world peace is possible only through world revolution and the establishment of a world federation of proletarian republics” (“The Peace Policies of Moscow,” New Masses [Aug. 13, 1935]: 6). 26. “Press Release: International Arms Reduction,” Nov. 7, 1951, Harry S. Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, Historical Files, Box 228, p. 2.

DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History, xv. 27. “Win-the-Peace Conference,” speech of Idaho senator Glen H. Taylor, opening session, Apr. 5, 1946, Harry S. Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 168. 28. Letter to President Harry S. Truman from Wallace, July 23, 1946, Harry S. Truman Library, Clark M. Clifford Papers, Box 20. 29. David McCullough, Truman, 514-15. The conversation about Truman’s fail-

ure to “appreciate things” took place between Tom Corcoran and Lowell Mellett, Sept. 15, 1946. See Harry S. Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, Summaries of Conversations (Thomas G. Corcoran), Box 338.

30. Henry Wallace, “The Way to Peace,” Sept. 12, 1946, Harry S. Truman Library, Clark M. Clifford Papers, Box 20. 31. Henry Wallace to Joseph Stalin, New York Times, May 12, 1948, 14. 32. “Memo Re: Wallace Situation,” June 2, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library, Clark

M. Clifford Papers, Box 20. 33. Discussions of Clifford’s approach to the campaign include those in Yergin, Shattered Peace, 383; Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” 92-93; and Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism, 236, 298-306.

202

Notes to Pages 48-56

34. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism, 169-73. 35. Author interview with Leon Wofsy, Aug. 14, 1992. 36. Letter to author from Elmer Bernstein, Nov. 7, 1992. 37. “Green Hits Russia at AFL Convention,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 1946,

Harry S. Truman Papers, Official File, Box 880. 38. Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, 176-79.

39. Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 209, 129, 214, 121-22.

40. It is worth noting that at first the ADA withheld its endorsement of Truman, signaling liberal disappointment with his departure from Roosevelt’s policies. They failed to find another candidate, however, and the hardening of the cold war led them to choose the Democrats and attack the Progressives. 41. Glen Taylor is quoted in Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War, 197.

42. Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 219. Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” 339. 43. Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion, 218. A. J. Muste, “A Vote for Wallace Will Be—a Vote for the Communists,” Fellowship (July 1948): 7-9. Dwight Macdonald, Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (New York: Vanguard Press, 1947), 175. Barton J. Bernstein, “America in War and Peace: The Test of Liberalism,” in Towards a New Past, 309. See also Wittner, Rebels Against War, 193, 196. 44. Max Lerner, “Wallace’s Decision,” PM (Dec. 30, 1947), in Harry S. Truman

Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 61. 45. Clifford Durr, for example, believed Truman had a fighting chance, and “the important thing was to do the best we could to keep Dewey out.” See Virginia Foster Durr, Oral History Research Office, Columbia Univ., 1976, p. 147; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. 46. Lerner, “Wallace’s Decision.”

47. Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., The Cold War as Rhetoric, 215. 48. Virginia Durr oral history, 144, 146. 49. I. F. Stone, “Confessions of a Dupe: Why I Was for Wallace,” in I. FE. Stone’s Weekly (New York: Random House, 1972), 66—68.

50. See Wittner, Rebels Against War, 188, 166. 51. Ruth Frank to President Harry S. Truman, Dec. 22, 1948, Harry S. Truman Papers, Official File, Box 881. 52. Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 131.

53. It is worth noting that the leadership of the pacifist, socialist, and labor movements were more strongly opposed to Wallace than the rank and file. It is also worth noting that there was a left-wing critique of Wallace’s point of view.

Notes to Pages 56-64

203

In any case, Wallace’s poor showing was demoralizing for those people who shared his hopes for peaceful coexistence. 54. Morris Milgram, “Beware the Common Front!” Fellowship (Sept. 1948):

9-10. 3. “Hold the Line”: The Waldorf Conference and the Peekskill Riots

1. Howard Fast, Peekskill U.S.A., 106. 2. Marshall D. Shulman, Stalin’s Foreign Policy Reappraised (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 85-103. 3. Sidney Hook, “The Communist Peace Offensive,” Partisan Review 51 (fall

1984): 697. 4. Author interview with Howard Fast, June 25, 1992. 5. Ibid.

6. Harlow Shapley to P. M. S. Blackett, Feb. 18, 1949, Shapley Papers, Box 10c. Shapley went on to say, “Of course much of press, and some of our Government, will look on this whole matter as peace ‘offensive, ’ or some political trick. But the hell with them!” 7. Virginia Durr oral history, 192-98. 8. Ibid., 202-3.

9. Harlow Shapley to Emil Lengyel, Mar. 12, 1949, Shapley Papers, Box 10c. On the issue of being a Communist dupe, see Harlow Shapley to Roger Baldwin, Mar. 23, 1948, Box 1oa.

10. Harlow Shapley to Hannah Dorner, Feb. 11, 1949, Shapley Papers, Box 10b. 11. “Peace: Everybody Wars Over It,” Newsweek (Apr. 4, 1949): 19.

12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,” Life (Apr. 4, 1949): 43. 15. Eugene Rabinowitch, “The Three Points of Professor Joliot-Curie,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1950): 163-65.

16. “Panel Discussions of the Cultural Conference Delegates Cover a Wide Range of Subjects,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1949, 44. 17. Ibid., 45. Dwight Macdonald, “The Waldorf Conference,” Politics 6 (winter

1949): 32-D. 18. A New York newspaper reporter described the atmosphere preceding and surrounding the conference in “Speaking of Peace,” Harlow Shapley Papers, Box 10¢. See also “Those Communist Visitors,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1949, 24. 19. A. J. Liebling, “The Wayward Press,” New Yorker (Apr. 9, 1949): 68.

20. Harlow Shapley to Hannah Dorner, Sept. 22, 1948, Shapley Papers, Box 10b. 21. “Peace: Everybody Wars Over It,” 20. Charles Grutzner, “‘Culturists’ Evade Queries of Press,” New York Times, Mar. 26, 1949, 3.

204

Notes to Pages 64-68

22. “Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace,” n.d., Shapley Papers, Box 10c. 23. Freda Kirchwey, “Battle of the Waldorf,’ Nation (Apr. 2, 1949): 377-78.

24. Richard H. Parke, “Our Way Defended to 2000 Opening ‘Culture’ Meeting,” New York Times, Mar. 26, 1949, 1. Though Cousins denied it, the story persists that the State Department convinced him to take part in the conference in order to counteract the propaganda of the Communists. 25. “Peace: Everybody Wars Over It,” 21. 26. Lewis Wood, “Legion Urges U.S. Deny Reds Entry,” New York Times, Mar. 16, 1949, 17; Bertram D. Hulen, “U.S. to Admit Red Delegates: Scores Aims of Par-

ley Here,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 1949, 1; “Entry of Soviets Opposed,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1949, 15; “Those Communist Visitors,” 24. Shostakovich became a

focal point of the controversy over the Waldorf conference because, to its opponents, he represented the debasement of culture and intellectual freedom in the

Soviet Union. Newsweek’s coverage featured Shostakovich’s speech, in which he denounced “formalism.” 27. Charles Grutzner, “Pickets to Harass Cultural Meeting,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1949, 2. 28. Herbert L. Matthews, “British Delegates Protest Visa Ban,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 1949, 19. 29. Grutzner, ““Culturists’ Evade Queries of Press,” 3.

30. Frederic Cunningham, Jr., to editor, “Asks Confidence in Our Way of Life,” New York Times, Apr. 1, 1949, 24. 31. Edmond G. Thomas to editor, “Alumnus Protests Yale Ban,” New York Times, Apt. 2, 1949, 14. 32. “Parliament and Picasso,” New York Times, Mar. 5, 1950, 8E.

33. Don Brown to editor, “Barring of Group Criticized,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 1950, 22. 34. Joseph Lash, “Weekend at the Waldorf,’ New Republic (Apr. 18, 1949): 11. 35. State Department Held Naive,” New York Times, Mar. 20, 1949, 4. The quotation is from American Legion commander Perry Brown. 36. “Two ‘Peace’ Meetings Jeered by Pickets,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1949, 1. 37. “2000 Pickets Jeer Session at Garden,” New York Times, Mar. 28, 1949, 4. The New Yorker article of Apr. 9, 1949, subtitled “100,000 — Count ’Em—1,000,” sug-

gested that the conference itself was rather dull: “The best way to kill Communism is to give it several full pages in the Times every Sunday. This is also the best way to prevent war. Nobody can fight while he is asleep” (Liebling, “The Wayward Press,” 70).

38. Discussions of the political journey of these intellectuals are numerous. See Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War”; Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals; Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America;

Notes to Pages 68-71

205

Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age; and Mary McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals. David Caute calls them “inverted Stalinists,” suggesting that they were just as hard-line as anti-Communists as they had been in their Communist phase (The Fellow- Travellers [New York: Macmillan, 1973], 327). 39. The telegram to President Truman from the AIF executive secretary, dated Mar. 23, 1949, is in the Harry S. Truman Papers, Box 881. AIF challenges to the

conference are in “Vassar Head Quits ‘Cultural’ Parley,” New York Times, Mar. 20, 1949, 4.

40. “‘Culture’ Pickets Will Be Uncurbed,” New York Times, Mar. 25, 1949, 18.

41. John P. Rossi, “Farewell to Fellow Traveling: The Waldorf Peace Conference of March 1949,” Continuity 10 (spring 1985): 1-31. See also Jumonville, “The View

from the Waldorf,’ chap. 1 of Critical Crossings. “Hook Confronts Shapley In Latter’s Hotel Room,” New York Times, Mar. 26, 1949, 3. “Hook Cites Letters in Shapley Dispute,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1949, 45. William R. Conklin, “Soviet Is Attacked at Counter Rally,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1949, 1. 42. “New Protest Filed on Cultural Visas,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 1949, 15 “200 Sponsors Join Culture Unit Foes,” New York Times, Mar. 25, 1949, 18. 43. Conklin, “Soviet Is Attacked at Counter Rally,” 1. 44. “Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on New ‘Fascists, ” New York Times, Mar. 28, 1949, 1. 45. “New Protest Filed on Cultural Visas,” 1. Thomas Mann soon became disil-

lusioned with Communist efforts toward peace, viewing them as “hopelessly compromised” and “void of meaning.” In 1951 he publicly withdrew his sponsorship of the American Peace Crusade. His letter to the New York Times to that effect is in the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 66. 46. Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 29. W. H. “Ping” Ferry met with a similar reaction when he became head of the Fund for the Republic in the 1950s. Because

he had never been through a Communist phase, some people assumed he could not be sufficiently anti-Communist for the job (author interview with “Ping” Ferry, June 24, 1992). 47. The words are Jerome Nathanson’s, a leader of the New York Society for

Ethical Culture. See “Conference Seen as Red ‘Invasion, ’” New York Times, Mar. 28, 1949, 13.

48. Theodore Brameld to editor, “Conference Defended,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 1949, Sec. 4, 8.

49. Sidney Hook and George S. Counts to editor, “Stand of the Liberals,” New York Times, Apt. 13, 1949, 28. 50. “‘Culture’ Pickets Will Be Uncurbed,” 18. Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 33. 51. Irving Howe, “The Culture Conference,” Partisan Review 16 (May 1949):

505-11.

206

Notes to Pages 71-77

52. Grutzner, “Pickets to Harass Cultural Meeting,” 1; “‘Culture’ Pickets Will Be Uncurbed,” 18. Clifford Durr’s story is in Virginia F. Durr’s oral history, 216. 53. Macdonald, “The Waldorf Conference,” 32-D. 54. Lash, “Weekend at the Waldorf,” 10-14. 55. Macdonald, “The Waldorf Conference,” 32-A. 56. Ibid. 57. ‘Congress in Paris Assails U.S. Policy,” New York Times, Apr. 21, 1949, 6; “Singer’s Peace Stand Wins Approval,” Daily Worker (May 8, 1949): 1, in Paul Robeson Collection, Reel 1. Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson, 343- 44. 58. “Robeson as Speaker for Negroes Denied,” New York Times, Apr. 25, 1949, 16, in Robeson Collection, Reel 1. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 358-59. 59. Quoted in Duberman, Paul Robeson, 360.

60. “Robeson Misquoted? He Says So,” Chicago Defender (May 21, 1949): 12, in Robeson Collection, Reel 1.

61. “Address at Welcome Home Rally,” quoted in Philip S. Foner, ed., Paul Robeson Speaks, 209. 62. Ibid., 211. Robeson made the same points in his appearance before HUAC in 1956. 63. The Peekskill Evening Star is quoted in Violence in Peekskill (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1949), 10—11. This time was neither the first nor the last that antiblack and anti-Jewish sentiments were mixed up with anticommunism. 64. Quoted in ibid., 12. 65. Quoted in ibid., 25. 66. Howard Fast, Peekskill U.S.A., 60. 67. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 368, from his interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Mar. 5, 1985.

68. James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, “The Lessons of the Peekskill Riots,” Commentary (Oct. 1950): 315. 69. Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A. (New York: Westchester Committee for a Fair Inquiry into the Peekskill Violence, 1949), in Robeson Collection, Reel 3. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. Part of District Attorney Fanelli’s report to Governor Dewey was

printed in the New York Times; see “Text of the Report to Governor on Peekskill Affray,” Sept. 8, 1949, 34, Robeson Collection, Reel 1. The full transcript of the

grand-jury report is also in the Robeson Collection. See also Duberman, Paul Robeson, 370-72. 73. Violence in Peekskill, 49. The ACLU concluded that the Westchester County

police had permitted the assault on the concertgoers. 74. Ibid., 2.

Notes to Pages 77-85

207

75- Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 7, 1949, 3D, in Robeson Collection, Reel 3. 76. “Truman Frowns on Peekskill Riots,” Daily Compass (Sept. 9, 1949): 3; in ibid. 77. Rorty and Raushenbush, “The Lessons,” 311. 78. Quoted in Duberman, Paul Robeson, 374. 79. Executive Committee minutes, Oct. 27, 1950, Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers, Box 4, SCPC. 80. “Robeson Defends Soviet Camps,” New York Times, Apr. 22, 1949, 9, in Robeson Collection, Reel 1. Robeson made similar statements in his HUAC testimony in 1956, which appears in Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 786.

81. My father, Ernie Lieberman, was one of those young people, and he told me this story in a way that was meant to suggest that this response was not the most rational. Robeson is quoted in Duberman, Paul Robeson, 367. 82. “Subheads,” Fellowship (Nov. 1950): 1. 83. See, for example, Charles R. Norberg to John Sherman, Oct. 10, 1951, Harry

S. Truman Papers, Psychological Strategy Board, Box 36.

4.“Put My Name Down”: Responses to the Communist Peace Offensive 1. Fast, Peekskill U.S.A., 105.

2. Bayard Rustin to A. J. Muste, Feb. 2, 1950, Bayard Rustin Papers, Box 19, Library of Congress. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. FBI Records, War Resisters League, 1939-1962, Marquette Univ. Wittner,

Rebels Against War, 218. “Robert Montgomery Speaking,” American Broadcasting System, Mar. 15, 1951, transcript in FOR Papers. Herbert Philbrick, “The Red Underground,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 14, 1954, reprint in FOR Papers, Series B, Administrative Files (no box number), SCPC.

6. Frederick Woltman, “Pinning the Red Label on Pacifists Means Patriotic Zeal Gone Wrong,” New York World Telegram, Oct. 6, 1951; reprint in DG 13, FOR, Series B, Administrative Files (no box number), SCPC. 7. “From King’s Record,” American Eagle (Jan. 1962): 8; reprint in DG 13, FOR, Series B, Administrative Files (no box number), SCPC. 8. Wittner, Rebels Against War, 221-23. 9. Ibid., 217.

10. “Negro Leaders’ Activities Subversive,” May 19, 1960, Grass Roots League, Inc., Charleston, S.C.; reprint in DG 13, FOR, Series B, Administrative Files (no box number), SCPC. “Subheads,” 1.

208

Notes to Pages 85-91

u1. “Is PEACE a Bad Word?” FOR leaflet, n.d., Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers, Box 4, SCPC. 12. Executive Committee minutes, Apr. 26, 1950; National Council minutes,

May 18-20, 1950; FOR, Box 4, SCPC. 13. Letter from A. J. Muste to “Dear friend,” May 1, 1950, FOR, Box 24, SCPC. 14. Ibid. 15. Albert Barnett to A. J. Muste, June 6, 1950, FOR, Box 4, SCPC. Swomley says

Barnett’s letter is misleading because his campaign was “solely to expose Jack McMichael,” not the MFSA itself, of which Swomley was a member (John Swom-

ley letter to author, Aug. 18, 1992). 16. Swomley, “The Peace Offensive and the Cold War,” 25. 17. Letter to author from John Swomley, Aug. 18, 1992. 18. Ibid. 19. Author interviews with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992; and Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995. Letters to author from Lillian Rubin, Mar. 17, 1992; Betty Rottger, June 10, 1992; and Dan Bessie, Mar. 17, 1992. 20. Willard Uphaus, Commitment (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).

21. Author interview with Alice Powell, Dec. 28, 1992. I have had colleagues tell me stories about circulating the petition and being harassed; one told me he wrote a similar peace petition of his own in high school in the early 1950s. 22. “The People of the World Want Peace,” n.d., Peace Information Center Files, SCPC.

23. ““Peace’ Proponent Asks Atom Pledge,” New York Times, July 17, 1950, 5; “Socialists Assail Reds’ Atomic Plea,” New York Times, June 4, 1950, 20; George Dugan, “Protestants Told to Shun Atom Plea,” New York Times, July 6, 1950, 19; “Vienna Red Rally Draws Slim Crowd,” New York Times, June 11, 1950, 28.

24. Walter Waggoner, “Acheson Derides Soviet ‘Peace’ Bids,” New York Times, July 13, 1950, 1.

25. Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives (Interim Statement), “The Communist ‘Peace Petition’ Campaign,” July 13, 1950, p. 3. “Peace Plea Pinned to ‘Red Chicanery, ’” New York Times, July 14, 1950, 7.

“Fight on Reds Urged,” New York Times, July 16, 1950, 38. 26. “A Soviet ‘Peace’ Maneuver,” New York Times, June 23, 1950, 24. 27. James Burnham, “Rhetoric and Peace,” Partisan Review 17 (Nov.—Dec. 1950): 866.

28. “Student at Berlin Cultural Parley Tells of Struggle in Soviet Zone Universities,” New York Times, June 29, 1950, 18; “Moscow Decrees ‘Peace’ Sabotage,” New York Times, July 22, 1950, 4; “115,275,940 Russians Sign,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 1950, 3; Allan Taylor, “Story of the Stockholm Petition,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 1950, sec. 4, 6. 29. “Stockholm Peace Declared ‘Phony, ” New York Times, July 16, 1950, 24.

Notes to Pages 91-95

209

“Sell? Democracy, Porters Urge U.S.,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1950, 18. 30. Author interview with Alice Powell, Dec. 28, 1992. 31. “4 Seized in ‘Peace’ Drive,” New York Times, July 15, 1950, 5; “Row on ‘Peace Petition,” New York Times, July 25, 1950, 5; “Workers Break Back of Peace Plea

Signer,” New York Times, July 26, 1950, 20. “Subheads,” 1. 32. Russell Porter, “Red ‘Peace’ Rally Defies Court; Routed By Police; 14 Held, 3 Hurt,” New York Times, Aug. 3, 1950, 1; “Peace Pleaders Menaced,” New York Times, Aug. 8, 1950, 13; “Two Churches Dismiss Pastor as a Leftist?’ New York Times, Aug. 25, 1950, 5; “Shipping News and Notes: Curran Doubts that 4,000

Seamen Signed So-Called Stockholm Peace Appeal,” New York Times, Aug. 31, 1950, 47.

33. Albert Kahn, Agents of Peace, xiv, n.d., the Hour Publishers, American Peace Crusade Files, SCPC. 34. Daily Compass editorial, Aug. 24, 1950; reprint in American Peace Crusade Files, SCPC. 35. W. E. B. Du Bois, I Take My Stand for Peace (New York: National Committee to Defend Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center, 1950); American Peace Crusade file, SCPC. 36. “Welcome Home Rally,” June 19, 1949, p. 5, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, Univ. of Massachusetts—Amherst, Series 1, Reel 63. 37. Speech at American Labor Party rally, Golden Gate Ballroom, Oct. 5, 1950,

p. 3, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 64. See also Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1953, 137. 38. W. E. B. Du Bois to Judge James A. Cobb, Apr. 10, 1951, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 66. 39. W.E. B. Du Bois to Judge Hubert T. Delany, Dec. 21, 1951, Du Bois Papers,

in ibid. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Oh! John Rogge,” chap. 11 in In Battle for Peace. Albert Kahn to W. E. B. Du Bois, 1952, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 68. The New York

Times reported that Rogge, vice president of the Progressive Party, and Henry Wallace supported U.N. and U.S. actions in Korea; see “Communist Press Turns on Wallace,” July 18, 1950, 2. 40. W. E. B. Du Bois to Thomas Richardson, n.d., Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 66. W. E. B. Du Bois, Memorandum to Thomas Richardson et al., Dec. 1952,

Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 67. W. E. B. Du Bois to Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Jan. 6, 1953; Mildred Scott Olmsted to W. E. B. Du Bois, Feb. 5, 1953, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 70.

41. R. B. Shipley, chief, Passport Division, Department of State, to W. E. B. Du Bois, Feb. 12, 1952, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 69. W. E. B. Du Bois to Judge James A. Cobb, June 27, 1955, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 71. 42. W.E. B. Du Bois to Holland Roberts, Nov. 29, 1955, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 71.

210 to Pages 95-100 cs ec ec ee aNotes SS Ne 43. Rockwell Kent to W. E. B. Du Bois, Dec. 3, 1955, in ibid. 44. Howard Fast to W. E. B. Du Bois, Dec. 19, 1955, in ibid. 45. Right to Speak for Peace Committee, “Is Peace American?” n.d., Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 65; “Is Peace a Crime?” n.d., Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 67; “A Grave Threat,” Sun Reporter, Oct. 6, 1951, reprint in Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 67.

46. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace, 160. 47. Ted O. Thackrey, “Foreign Agent — Who?” Daily Compass editorial, Aug. 24, 1950, reprint in American Peace Crusade file, SCPC. 48. “Statement by the American Civil Liberties Union,” Organization Letter no. 6, Aug. 18, 1950, p. 2, American Peace Crusade file, SCPC.

49. “Not the A-Bomb Alone but All Armaments,” excerpts from Telford Taylor’s article in the New York Times Magazine Section, Aug. 27, 1950, reprinted in Organization Letter no. 8, Aug. 31, 1950, American Peace Crusade file, SCPC.

50. “Peace Plea Pinned to ‘Red Chicanery, ’” 7; Taylor, “Story of the Stockholm Petition,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 1950, sec. 4, 6; “Amended Peace Petition Favored,” New York Times, Aug. 24, 1950, 26. The Times reported that the Peace Partisans claimed 273,470,566 signatures worldwide and 11,350,000 in the United States (“Peace Partisans Listed,” Aug. 10, 1950, 3). Perhaps the latter was a mis-

print, because the figure was reported as 1,350,000 a few days later (Aug. 13). The latter figure is the one that has been widely cited, and even it is assumed to be exaggerated. Balch’s retraction is reported in Wittner, One World or None, 203. 51. New York Times, July 18, 1950, 12.

52. Right Reverend Benjamin D. Dagwell, “Signers Reaffirm Support of World Peace Appeal,” n.d., Organization Letter no. 8, Aug. 31, 1950, American Peace Crusade file, SCPC.

53. Dr. Edward A. Wolfe, “Signers Reaffirm Support,” Organization Letter no. 8, Aug. 31, 1950, American Peace Crusade file, SCPC.

54. “Ban Is Put on Song about the Atom,” New York Times, Sept. 1, 1950, 4; “James Peck to Editor, “Song Censorship Questioned,” Sept. 6, 1950, 28. 55. Old Man Atom,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 1950, 16. 56. Ibid. 57. ‘How America’s Communists Work for Peace,” Sunday Worker (June 11,

1950): 4-5. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. See, for example, A. J. Muste to FOR Executive Committee members, June 16, 1950, FOR Papers, Box 4, SCPC. Swomley, “The Peace Offensive and the Cold War,” 27-28.

61. “Background and Present Policy of the National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives,” adopted by the Executive Board, Apr. 1951; “Program of Action”

Notes to Pages 100-106

211

issued from Mid-Century Conference for Peace, Chicago, May 29-30, 1950,

National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives file, SCPC. 62. “Statement of Policy,” Committee for Peaceful Alternatives, Dec. 1950, National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives file, SCPC. 63. Ibid. See also, “Committee for Peaceful Alternatives: What It Is, What It Does,’ Committee for Peaceful Alternatives, July 1951, National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives file, SCPC. 64. “What It Is, What It Does,” National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives file, SCPC.

65. See masthead of Peace-Gram, published by Peace Information Center beginning in May 1950; Kahn, Agents of Peace, American Peace Crusade file, SCPC. 66. Initiating Committee, American Peace Crusade to “Dear Friend,” Feb. 1951;

“American Peace Crusade Guide for Delegates to the Peace Pilgrimage, Washington, D.C., Mar. 15, 1951,’ American Peace Crusade file, SCPC.

67. Gale Sondergaard, “We Speak of Peace,” Jewish Life (Aug. 1951); reprint in American Peace Crusade file, SCPC. 68. Records of the Subversive Activities Control Board, 1950-1972, Reel 64, Docket #117-56, American Peace Crusade.

69. Ibid., 47, 49, 53) 54. 70. One couple who received such an offer from the FBI in the early 1950s had already rejoined the CP; they turned down the invitation to become informers. These people asked that I not use their names. 71. Similar comments from other informers can be found in Records of the Subversive Activities Control Board, 1950-1972, Reel 64, Docket #117—-56, American Peace Crusade, 61, 127—28, 236, 416. 72. “Declaration of Principles,” Peacemaker (Oct. 1950): 1, in American Women for Peace file, SCPC.

73. “Parents Protest,” in ibid. “Dog Tags for New York Children,” Peacemaker (Nov. 1951): 1, in American Women for Peace file, SCPC. 74. “Women’s Activities at the Chicago Peace Congress,” n.d., 4, in American Women for Peace file, SCPC. 75. Records of the Subversive Activities Control Board, 1950-1972, Reel 64, Docket #117-56, American Peace Crusade, 132, 135. 76. Ibid., 289.

77. Ibid., 68-70. As in HUAC hearings, every person questioned was asked to name names. 78. Ibid., 638. 79. Ibid., 783, 1227.

80. The Southern California Peace Crusade was describing a leaflet put out by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in Cambridge, Mass. See “For a Sane Policy,” Peace Notes (Apr.—May 1954): 1, in Southern California Peace Crusade

file, SCPC.

212

Notes to Pages 106—17

81. “Stop the Bomb Test!” Peace Action Letter, Apr. 1, 1956, Southern California Peace Crusade file, SCPC. 82. “Statement on the Dissolution of the Southern California Peace Crusade,” July 20, 1956, Southern California Peace Crusade file, SCPC. 83. Letter to author from Lillian Rubin, Mar. 17, 1992. 84. Thomas Mann to editor of the New York Times, Feb. 4, 1951; typescript in

Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 66. 85. Ibid.

86. Philip Morrison to Dr. Mann, Feb. 13, 1951, Du Bois Papers, Series 1, Reel 66. 87. Ibid.

88. “Statement by Linus Pauling,” Apr. 5, 1951, Linus Pauling Papers, Oregon State Univ., Box 251. Linus Pauling to Dr. Allan M. Butler, Apr. 10, 1951, Linus Pauling Papers, Box 288b. 89. “Story of the Stockholm Peace Petition,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 1950, sec. 4, 6.

go. Government officials often cast the problem in terms of a propaganda battle. For example, they wanted the United States to present its proposal for general disarmament at the United Nations in such a way as to “obtain maximum propaganda benefit and to capture for this government the initiative with regard to the issue of who really wants peace” (Charles R. Norberg to John Sherman, Oct. 10, 1951, Harry S. Truman Papers, SMOF: Psychological Strategy Board Files, Box 36). See also “Russia Is Talking Peace,” Kiplinger Washington Letter, Aug. 11, 1951, Box 18. 91. Hutchins was quoted in Clyde Miller to editor, “Independence of Thought,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1950, 24.

92. “Panel Discussions of the Cultural Conference Delegates . . .” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1949, 44; “Five Leaders Uphold Cultural Parley,” New York Times, Mar. 21, 1949, 4. 93. “A Cartoonist’s ‘Summer Day Dream,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 1950,

SEC. 4, 3. 5. “The Strangest Dream”: McCarthyism in the Peace Movement 1. Wittner, chaps. 7 and 8 in Rebels Against War. 2. See, for example, “The Peace Movement and United Fronts,” July 1950; and “Peace Fronts Today,” May 1951, A. J. Muste Writings, Series B, Box 4, SCPC. 3. Swomley, “The Peace Offensive and the Cold War,” 35. 4. Ibid., 28.

5. Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 186. 6. Ibid., 208-10. It was ironic as well that some of the leaders of the ACLU cooperated with the FBI and spoke positively of its role in society at the same time that the FBI was spying on the ACLU.

Notes to Pages 117-21

213

7. FBI files, War Resisters League, Box 1, Section 4, Marquette Univ. The allusion to the WRL’s “red activities” is in a 1946 memo from New York City. The FBI

also received numerous inquiries from citizens about the WRL’s ties with Communists.

8. Abraham Kaufman to Sidney Aberman, Nov. 10, 1950, WRL, Series A, Box 2, SCPC. See also Frieda Lazarus to Sidney Aberman, Jan. 8, 1951, in ibid. 9. Minutes, Executive Board, Oct. 4, 1950; “On the Signing of Petitions,” Oct. 4, 1950; Minutes, Executive Board, Feb. 4, 1953, p. 3; AFSC, Policy, AFSC Archives. 10. Clarence E. Pickett’s journal, Aug. 31, 1954, AFSC, General Administration,

Individuals: Alger Hiss, AFSC Archives. 11. AFSC News Bulletin, Mar. 19, 1954; Olcutt Sanders to Elinor Ashkenazy, Mar. 24, 1954, General Administration, Issues: Civil Liberties. Minutes, Executive Board, June 6, 1956, AFSC Policy. Colin Bell to A. J. Muste, Feb. 11, 1957, General Administration, Issues: Communism, AFSC Archives. 12. Russell Johnson to Herbert Philbrick, Dec. 10, 1957, American Forum for

Socialist Education, AFSC Archives.

13. “Proposed AFSC Policy of the Use of Communist Speakers in AFSC Programs, AFSC Policy, 1961; “Possible statement for Friends’ papers and to send to critics,” AFSC Policy, Feb. 1962, p. 2, AFSC Archives. 14. R. D. Douglas, Jr., “From Now On... Highly Suspicious,” Nov. 17, 1955, AFSC General Administration, Regional Offices— Southeastern Issues: Communist Speaker Controversy, AFSC Archives. 15. “Quaker Group Hits Scheduling of Convicted Communist Speaker,” Religious News Service, Nov. 18, 1955; “For Immediate Release,” Nov. 21, 1955; “To All Clerks and Pastors,” Nov. 20, 1955, AFSC General Administration, Regional Of-

fices— Southeastern Issues: Communist Speaker Controversy, AFSC Archives. 16. Algie Newlin to Lewis Hoskins and Clarence Pickett, Nov. 22, 1955, AFSC General Administration, Regional Offices— Southeastern Issues: Communist

Speaker Controversy, AFSC Archives. 17. “A New Executive Secretary for a More Effective MF for SA,” 1950;

G. Bromley Oxnam to Loyd F. Worley, June 12, 1953; “From the Study of Lee H. Ball to MFSA members,” 1953, Papers of G. Bromley Oxnam, Box 49, Library of Congress. McMichael’s mother wrote to Oxnam (July 24, 1953) saying that he had ruined Jack’s career, and that Jack was not and never had been a Commu-

nist, “just a Christlike Christian.” Walter Muelder was one of the board members who resigned; letter to author from Muelder, June 16, 1992.

18. Letter to author from Walter Muelder, June 16, 1992. 19. Stanley High, “Methodism’s Pink Fringe,’ Reader’s Digest (Feb. 1950). Letters of concern about this article include Mrs. Dorothy May Parks to Bishop G.

Bromley Oxnam, n.d., and George C. Rogers to Bishop Oxnam, Feb. 20, 1950, Papers of G. Bromley Oxnam, Box 51. Oxnam’s statement before HUAG, July 21, 1953, is in the Oxnam Papers, Box 42.

214

Notes to Pages 122-27

20. Report from Washington, D.C., Apr. 19, 1922; “American Friends Service

Committee and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom,” Aug. 26, 1942, FBI Records, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Series 7, Box 1, Marquette Univ. 21. Report from Miami, Nov. 14, 1952, pp. 31-32, FBI Records, WILPF, Box 2. Report from St. Louis, July 1954; Report from Cincinnati, May 1, 1956, FBI Records, WILPE, Box 3. 22. Marjorie Matson to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Feb. 11, 1954, Records of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Reel 130.87, SCPC. 23. Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Philadelphia, to director, Apr. 28, 1953; SAC, Miami, to director, July 1, 1950, and Aug. 30, 1951, FBI Records, WILPF, Box 2. Hanna G. Barshak to Orlie Pell, Oct. 22, 1953, Records of the WILPF—U.S. Section, 1919-1959, Scholarly Resources Microfilm Edition, Reel 130.90. 24. Committee on Special Problems of Branches, “Packet on Infiltration and Attack,” Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.30. The packet stated, “Remember that infiltration cannot defeat us, but that hysterical suspicions can!” 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid.

27. “Statement Prepared by Ruth Freeman,” n.d., Records of the WILPE, Series AN. bOxM7ay SCL:

28. “Guidance for WIL Branches,’ n.d., Records of the WILPE, Series A, 2, Box IGA AOAC. 29. Rev. and Mrs. Robert Gemmer to J. Edgar Hoover, Feb. 12, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Series C, 1, Box 54, SCPC. 30. Mary Lindsey to National Board, Mar. 3, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.87.

31. Wilma Nissley to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Nov. 26, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.87. 32. Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue, 176-77.

33. Report from Denver branch officers to Committee on Special Branch Problems, Mar. 8, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.87. 34. Clara Lee to Bertha McNeill, Oct. 13, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.87.

35. Minutes, Massachusetts state board meeting, Feb. 17, 1955; “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Boston Branch,” 1955, Records of the WILPFE, Reel 130.89. 36. Margaret Moseley to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Feb. 23, 1955, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.87. 37. Minutes, Massachusetts state board meeting, Sept. 26, 1955, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.89. 38. Margaret Moseley to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Mar. 23, 1955, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.87.

Notes to Pages 127-31 eg

215

39. Leah Goldstein to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Apr. 19, 1955, Records of the WILPE Reel 130.87. See also the minutes of the Boston branch, 1955, Reel 130.89. 40. Caroline S. Davis to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Mar. 21, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.89. 41. Frieda Epstein to Kitty Arnett, June 5, 1955, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.87.

42. “Carl Braden Convicted: The Nightmare at Louisville,” in I. F. Stone’s Weekly (Dec. 20, 1954): 4. Stone’s article appears with other documents on the Louisville case in Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.89. 43. Mrs. Harrop A. Freeman to editor, Courier-Journal, Nov. 24, 1954, Records of the WILPFE, Series B, 5, Box 4. 44. Mildred Scott Olmsted to Bernice Ullrich, Dec. 22, 1953, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.88. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Bernice Ullrich to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Oct. 6, 1954, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.88. See also Frank Donner, “The Miami Formula,” Nation (Jan. 22, 1955): 65-71. Bernice Ullrich reported to Mildred Scott Olmsted on the Miami Daily News’s “campaign to root communists” in a letter, June 30, 1954; Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88. 48. Mildred Scott Olmsted to Bernice Ullrich, Jan. 21, 1954, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88. 49. Evelyn Johnson to WILPF Executive Board, Jan. 19, 1955, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.89. 50. Irene Koch to Winifred Healy, Jan. 2, 1954, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88.

51. Elizabeth McGiffert, Marion Lyttle, Elsie Wik Johnson to the National

Board of WILPE, Jan. 27, 1953; “Suggestions Re Answers to Chicago Questions,” n.d., Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88.

52. A typical memo was this one from SAC, Miami, to director: “Extensive and prolonged investigation of this group [Miami WILPF] has failed to develop any information to indicate that the Communist influence in this organization is strong or that the activities of the local group are influential enough to warrant further investigation” (Mar. 25, 1954, FBI Records, WILPF, Box 2). 53. Elsie Wik Johnson to international membership secretary, May 11, 1953, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.88. 54. Keenie Schauffler, et al., to “Fellow WIL Member,” June 2, 1953, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.88.

55. Elizabeth McGiffert, Marion Lyttle, and Elsie Wik Johnson to the National Board of WILPFE, Jan. 27, 1953, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88. Elsie Johnson’s letter to the FBI of Feb. 4, 1953, is quoted in the FBI report on WILPE, “Communist Infiltration of the Chicago Branch,” Feb. 27, 1959, pp. 13-14, FBI Records,

216

Notes to Pages 131-39

WILPE, Box 3. A summary of the meeting in Chicago with male peace movement leaders, Jan. 11 and 12, 1954, is in Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88. 56. May M. Jones to Mrs. Freeman, Nov. 16, 1953, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88.

57. Ibid. See also May M. Jones to Mrs. Freeman, Nov. 18, 1953. 58. Frances Blane Hurie to Mildred Scott Olmsted and Emily Simon, Sept. 14, 1953, Records of the WILPE, Reel 130.88. 59. Author interview with Donald Shaffer, June 29, 1992. See also Robbie

Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon” (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 47. 60. The phrase comes from Barbara Bick, commenting on the role of Communists in mass organizations (author interview with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992). 61. Report from SAC, Cleveland, Dec. 30, 1959, FBI Records, WILPF, Box 3. May M. Jones to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Oct. 9, 1953, Records of the WILPF, Reel 130.88. SAC, Minneapolis, to director, June 1, 1961, FBI Records, WILPF, Box 4. 6.“The H-Bomb’s Thunder”: Communism and the Committee

for a Sane Nuclear Policy 1. Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 211-14. 2. Stewart Meacham, “The Voice of the People,” Nation (Feb. 21, 1959): 159-62.

Nathan Glazer, “The Peace Movement in America—1961,” Commentary (Apr. 1961): 290-91. 3. “We Are Facing a Danger ... ,” New York Times, Nov. 15, 1957, 54.

4. As Marshall Shulman points out, analysts disagree about the periodization of Soviet policies. Some see the year 1949 as the turning point toward peaceful coexistence. In any case, there is little doubt that by 1953 it was the main emphasis of Soviet policy (Stalin’s Foreign Policy Reappraised, 255-57). 5. Ibid., 213. See also April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945.

6. Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws to the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 87th Cong., 1st sess.; testimony of Dr. Linus Pauling, June 21 and Oct. 11, 1960. 7. Janet Larsen to Dr. Linus Pauling, June 7, 1957, Linus Pauling Papers, Oregon State Univ., Box 259.

8. Tessie Thixton to Dr. Linus Pauling, June 6, 1957, Linus Pauling Papers, Box 259. 9. Pauling’s note was relayed in the postscript of Abbott Simon to W. E. B. Du Bois, Mar. 10, 1951, Du Bois Papers, Reel 66.

Notes to Pages 139—45

217

10. Anthony Serafini, Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 146—49. 11. “Question and Answer and Rebuttal Period,” p. 9, FOR Series C, Box 6, Hassler, 1956-1959, SCPC.

12. Quoted in “Peace Views Aired at Carnegie Hall Forum,” Fellowship (July 1956): 26.

13. Unpublished transcripts of speeches by A. J. Muste and Albert Blumberg, Philadelphia, Oct. 5, 1955, A. J. Muste Writings, Series B, Box 4, SCPC. 14. “Where Are We and What Is Ahead?” July 1956, A. J. Muste Writings, Series B, Box 4, SCPC.

15. “Socialists Call Marxist Forum New Red Front,” New York Times, May 13, 1957, reprint in American Forum for Socialist Education file, A. J. Muste Writ-

ings, Series B, Box 4, SCPC. Alfred Hassler, “The American Forum and the Saturday Evening Post,” 1958, A. J. Muste Writings, Series B, Box 4, SCPC. 16. “Muste Rejects Senate Inquiry,” New York Times, May 27, 1957, 25. 17. Ibid. Alfred Hassler was acting executive secretary of the FOR. John Swomley, “Dialogue with Communist Leaders,” Fellowship (Mar. 1990): 14. 18. Bayard Rustin to A. J. Muste, May 20, 1957, Bayard Rustin Papers, Box 1,

Library of Congress. 19. “Leaves Muste Forum,” New York Times, May 27, 1957; reprint in American Forum for Socialist Education file, A. J. Muste Writings, Series B, Box 4, SCPC.

20. “Statement of Observers,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Convention of the Communist Party U.S.A. (New York: New Century Publishers, 1957), 349-50.

21. Colin Bell to A. J. Muste, Feb. 11, 1957, AFSC Papers, Box: General Administrative Issues: Communism. 22. “Memo One— Shared Thinking,” Apr. 30, 1957, SANE Papers, Series 4, Box AESCRG: 23. Norman Cousins to Trevor Thomas, June 13, 1958; Betsy Dana to Eleanor Colston, Apr. 11, 1958; SANE Papers, Series A, Box 2, SCPC. Milton S. Katz,

Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 1957-1985, 47.

24. Trevor Thomas to Norman Cousins, June 19, 1958, Norman Thomas

Papers, Reel 61, SANE, New York Public Library. 25. “The Atom: How Sane the SANE?” Time (Apr. 21, 1958): 13-14. 26. Ibid. “Distortions and Omissions in Time’s Story,” SANE U.S.A., May 20, 1958, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. 27. Saturday Review (Apr. 22, 1958); Norman Thomas to Norman Cousins, Jan. 11, 1960, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 28. Norman Cousins to Donald Keys, Jan. 25, 1960; Norman Cousins to Homer

218

Notes to Pages 145-50

Jack, Norman Thomas, and Donald Keys, Feb. 2, 1960, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. . 29. Homer A. Jack to Thomas, Cousins, Harrington, and Keys, Jan. 27, 1960,

SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. Norman Thomas to Clarence Pickett, Norman Cousins, Robert Gilmore, Mar. 23, 1960, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 30. Stewart Meacham to “Friends of the SANE Board,” Apr. 20, 1960, Thomas

Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 31. Ibid. 32. Norman Thomas to Stewart Meacham, Apr. 22, 1960; Norman Thomas to Dr. Hugh Wolfe, May 18, 1960, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 33. Norman Thomas to Dr. Hugh Wolfe, May 18, 1960; Norman Cousins to Stewart Meacham, Apr. 22, 1960, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 34. Dodd’s speech to the Senate, May 25, 1960, is printed as appendix 3 in Communist Infiltration in the Nuclear Test Ban Movement, “Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary,” United States Senate, 86th Cong., 2d sess., pt. 1. 35. Lou Gilbert to Norman Cousins, June 1, 1960, Norman Cousins Papers,

Univ. of California—Los Angeles, Box 231. 36. “Standards for SANE Leadership,” Statement of Policy Passed by the Board of Directors of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, May 26, 1960,

SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. 37. Norman Cousins and Clarence Pickett to “All SANE Local Committee

Chairmen,’ “Implementation of the May 26th Policy Statement,” July 29, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. 38. Ed [Berkeley?] to Norman Cousins, July 30, 1960, Cousins Papers, UCLA, Box 230.

39. Donald Keys, executive director, “Statement of Policy,” May 27, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. 40. Norman Cousins to Senator Dodd, July 7, 1960, Cousins Papers, UCLA, Box 230. The phrase “on any level” was used elsewhere; for example, it appears in the minutes of the Administrative Committee, Aug. 30, 1960, Cousins Papers, Box 230.

41. “Proposed Statement for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy,” submitted for discussion at the meeting of the board on Thursday, May 26, 1960, Cousins Papers, UCLA, Box 231. 42. William J. Butler to SANE Board of Directors, Oct. 20, 1960, Thomas

Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 43. John H. Davenport to Robert S. Blanc, Jr., chair of Long Island Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, n.d., Cousins Papers, UCLA, Box 231.

Notes to Pages 150-54

219

44. Norman Cousins to Ed Berkeley, June 1, 1960; Norman Cousins to Irv

Nebenzahl, June 22, 1960. These letters and several others with the same paragraphs are in Cousins Papers, UCLA, Box 230. 45. Robert Gilmore to Board of Directors of SANE, June 27, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20. John Swomley to A. J. Muste, Jan. 25, 1961, A. J. Muste Papers, Reel 89.20, SCPC. 46. Stewart Meacham to Norman Cousins, July 12, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. 47. Ibid. Stewart Meacham to Homer Jack, May 5, 1961, Thomas Papers, Reel

61, SANE. 48. Linus Pauling to the Sponsors and Directors of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, June 15, 1961, Thomas Papers, Reel 40. 49. Ibid.

50. Linus Pauling to Norman Cousins, Sept. 26, 1961; Norman Cousins to Linus Pauling, Oct. 2, 1961, Linus Pauling Papers, Box 15. 51. Dodd made the case for “better dead than red” in this speech, Cousins

Papers, Box 231. 52. John Nevin Sayre to Eugene Exman, Jan. 4, 1960, Muste Papers, Reel 89.20. Stewart Meacham to Norman Cousins, July 12, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20. Norman Thomas to David Martin, May 31, 1960, Thomas Papers, Reel 61,

SANE. 53. A. J. Muste, “Comments on Abrams Case,” June 6, 1960, p. 4, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE.

54. Ibid. A. J. Muste to Tracy Mygatt, Jan. 12, 1961, Muste Papers, Reel 89.20, SGPC, 55. A. J. Muste, “Comments on Abrams Case, “ June 6, 1960, p. 2. 56. A. J. Muste to John Swomley, Jan. 30, 1961, Muste Papers, Reel 89.20, SCPC. 57. Letter to author from Gerald Fried, Apr. 15, 1992. Author interviews with Richard Powell, Dec. 28, 1992; Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992; Joan Levinson, Aug. 15, 1992; and Homer Jack, July 6, 1992. 58. Cousins’s denial is discussed in Katz, Ban the Bomb, 63. 59. Arnold Johnson, “Halt the Tests—for a Summit Meeting for Peace!” Party Voice (Nov. 2, 1958), quoted in Communist Infiltration in the Nuclear Test Ban Movement, pt. 2, p. 45. 60. Greater Boston Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy Bulletin, Jan. 16, 1958,

Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. 61. Gabriel Kolko described the difference between SANE

and the Boston

Committee for Disarmament and Peace in a letter to Homer Jack, May 6, 1961,

Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. Alfred Hassler to A. J. Muste, Dec. 23, 1960, Muste Papers, Reel 89.20, SCPC.

220

Notes to Pages 154-59

62. “The Raritan Valley Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy,” June 22, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC.

63. “The Brooklyn Students’ Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy,” n.d., SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC. 64. Janice Holland to Board of Directors, June 30, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B,

Box 20, SCPC. Dagmar Wilson, who played a leading role in the founding of Women Strike for Peace, signed the letter from the Washington, D.C., group. 65. Chicago Committee to the National Committee and local Committees for a Sane Nuclear Policy, Sept. 19, 1960, Cousins Papers, Box 231. 66. “Memorandum for Norman Cousins from Edmund C. Berkeley,” Aug. 13, 1960, Cousins Papers, Box 231. 67. Sanford Gottlieb to Norman Cousins, Cousins Papers, Box 231. Katz, Ban the Bomb, 54-55. 68. David Riesman to Homer Jack, June 20, 1961, Thomas Papers, Reel 61,

SANE. Norman Cousins to Thomas J. Dodd, July 7, 1960, Cousins Papers, Box 230. Glazer, “The Peace Movement in America—1961,’ 293-94. Muste, “The Crisis in SANE: Act II,” Liberation (Nov. 1960): 7. 69. Muste, “The Crisis in SANE: Act II,” 8. 70. John Darr, memo to SANE Board of Directors, Sept. 8, 1960, p. 6, Thomas Papers, Reel 61, SANE. Rabbi Edward E. Klein to Norman Cousins, July 8, 1960,

Cousins Papers, Box 231. 71. Glazer, “The Peace Movement in America—1961,” 291-92. Guenter Lewy, The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life, 233. Stanley M. Isaacs to Margaret Halsey, Cousins Papers, Box 231. Author interviews with Sanford Gottlieb, Aug. 28, 1992; Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995; Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992; Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992; and Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992. 72. Lewy, The Cause that Failed, 233. 73. J. F. Culverwell to Dr. Pauling, May 22, 1961; Jane Ellen Bayer to Mr. and Mrs. Pauling, May 30, 1961; Alyce Asquith Bolas to Dr. Pauling, June 1, 1961, Linus Pauling Papers, Box 271. 74. Congressman Clyde Doyle’s remarks are in Communist Activities in the Peace Movement, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 87th Cong., 2d sess., Dec. 11-13, 1962 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 2065.

7. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”: Women Strike for Peace

and the Early Sixties 1. See, for example, the letter in support of Linus Pauling from a Maryland housewife, Elizabeth Nichiporuk, to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, July 15, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC.

Notes to Pages 159-64

221

2. I. F. Stone, “From Rigid Hostility to Rigid Friendship,” I. F. Stone’s Weekly (Oct. 5, 1959): 1. 3. Adlai Stevenson, “The Issue Is Peace,” Progressive (Nov. 1960): 10, in White House Central Files, Box 329, John FE. Kennedy Library.

4. A. E. Wessel, The American Peace Movement: A Study of its Themes and Political Potential, iii, 1. 5. Anonymous letter to “Senator,” May 29, 1963, White House Central Files, Box 661, JFK Library. The senator was Jennings Randolph. JFK received hopeful

letters about peaceful coexistence and disarmament throughout his time in office. See White House Central Files, Box 658 and 661. 6. Anne Eaton to Pierre Salinger, Mar. 26, 1963, White House Central Files, Box

660, JFK Library. Other recommendations are also in Box 660. Other grassroots activity is discussed in Meacham, “The Voice of the People.” 7. Leaflet, “Women Strike for Peace,” n.d.; WSP organizing letter, “Who ARE These Women?” n.d., signed by ten Washington, D.C., women, Women Strike for Peace Papers, Series A, 2, Box 1, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Roy Finch, “The New Peace Movement— Part II,” Dissent (spring 1963): 139-40. See also Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace. 8. The FBI reported, for instance, that the CPUSA blamed a Chicago Trotskyist for preventing Women Strike for Peace from becoming effective, due to her personality and her strong anticommunism (report from Chicago, Dec. 18, 1963, FBI files on Women Strike for Peace, in possession of Amy Swerdlow). 9. Washington, D.C., SANE to Board of Directors, June 30, 1960, SANE Papers, Series B, Box 20, SCPC.

10. The commitment to “unorganization” foreshadowed the political culture of the New Left, as Amy Swerdlow points out (Women Strike for Peace, 17). Even WSP’s leaflets declared, “We are not an organization.” Dagmar Wilson to Samuel E. Belk, 1962, WSP Papers, Series A, 3, Box 7.

11. “Descriptive Memorandum,” Nov. 2, 1961, p. 5, Turn Toward Peace Papers, Box 1, SCPC.

12. The SPU might have been referring to the struggle of the Student League for Industrial Democracy to become independent of its parent organization. One reason the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy broke off— to become Students for a Democratic Society — was the early New Left’s rejection of both communism and anticommunism. Older, experienced activists viewed the “anti-anti-communism” of the New Left as naive and dangerous (see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties [New York: Bantam Books, 1987], 109-26). The philosophy of

the Student Peace Union may be gleaned from its early brochures and “Program Statement of the 1961 National Convention of the Student Peace Union,” SPU Pa-

pers, Collection of Underground, Alternative, and Extremist Literature, Box 156, UCLA.

222 ea

Notes to Pages 164-69 ee

13. Eugene Dennis, “The Struggle for Peace,” Political Affairs (Aug. 1958): 34-35. Gus Hall, “Our Sights to the Future,” Political Affairs (Jan. 1960): 7.

14. Kennedy’s statement to Redbook, dated Aug. 6, 1963, was published in several women’s magazines in November of that year (White House Central Files, Box 659, JFK Library). 15. Author interview with Jane Adams, June 3, 1994. See also Gitlin, chaps. 6

and 7 in The Sixties, on the split between radicals and liberals. 16. Author interview with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992.

17. See Swerdlow, “Who Are These Women,” chap. 3 in Women Strike for Peace, which owes much to a survey conducted by Elise Boulding in 1962. Author interview with Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992. 18. Judith Porter Adams, Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists,

125 17; 19. Author 20. Author 21. Author 22. Author

interview with Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992. interview with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992. interview with Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992. interviews with Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992; and Barbara Bick,

June 17, 1992. 23. Author interview with Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992.

24. Harriet Hyman Alonso and I had little success in getting NY WILPF women to talk with us. One New York member described Orlie Pell as “violently anti-Communist” (see Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue, 206). Author interviews with Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992; and Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992.

25. Mrs. Jack Alloy to Mrs. Pauling, 1962, Ava Helen Pauling Papers, Box 16, Oregon State Univ. WSP clearly foreshadowed the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

26. Linus Helen 27.

Virginia Durr to Ava Helen Pauling, July 22, 1961; May 1962; Apr. 12, 1963, Pauling Papers, Box 329. Ava Helen Pauling to Ethel, Oct. 15, 1961, Ava Pauling Papers, Box 19. Evelyn Alloy to Mrs. Pauling, May 25, 1963, Ava Helen Pauling Papers,

Box 16.

28. Virginia Durr to Ava Helen Pauling, May 1962; Apr. 12, 1963, Linus Pauling Papers, Box 329. See also author interviews with Richard Powell, Dec. 28, 1992; and Mary Clarke, Dec. 29, 1992. 29. “Los Angeles WSP Statement at Ann Arbor Conference,” June 9-10, 1962, WSP Papers, Series A, 1, Box 3.

30. Jacqueline Kennedy wrote back that the only route to peace for the United States was “strength” (Jacqueline Kennedy to Mrs. Wilson, Nov. 13, 1961, WSP

Papers, Series A, 3, Box 6). Mrs. Seymour Melman and Mrs. Stephen Sharmat to Mrs. Wilson, May 31, 1962, WSP Papers, Series A, 3, Box 6.

Notes to Pages 169-75

223

31. “Los Angeles WSP Statement at Ann Arbor Conference,” June 9-10, 1962, WSP Papers, Series A, 1, Box 3. 32. Author interview with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992. 33. SAC, San Francisco, to director, Apr. 19, 1963, FBI files on WSP. 34. Ibid., 7-8, 21. Memo from director, FBI, to SAC, San Francisco, May 6, 1963, FBI files on WSP. 35. Report from Chicago on Communist Infiltration of Women Strike for Peace, June 4, 1963, pp. 14-15. Report from New York on Communist Infiltration of Women Strike for Peace, June 7, 1963, FBI files on WSP. 36. Report of SA Raymond B. Howe, Los Angeles— Communist Infiltration, Women Strike for Peace, Apr. 12, 1963, FBI files on WSP. 37. Adams, Peacework, 197. 38. Communist Activities in the Peace Movement, 2057.

39. Quoted in Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies Day at the Capitol,” Feminist Studies 8 (fall 1982): 500. 40. Minutes of the board of directors, Greenwich Village Peace Center, Dec. 5, 1962, Turn Toward Peace Papers, Box 1. 41. Communist Activities in the Peace Movement, 2065-66. 42. Ibid., 2074, 2092.

43. Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, 111. Swerdlow says the proposed structure was never adopted. 44. Communist Activities in the Peace Movement, 2098. 45. Ibid., 2109.

46. Ibid., 2132. 47. Ibid., 2200. 48. National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Peace Papers, Box 1. New York SANE to House tivities, Dec. 13, 1962; “Is Peace Un-American?” sion; Lawrence Scott to Francis E. Walter, Dec.

Policy, Dec. 7, 1962, Turn Toward

Committee on Un-American Ac—announcement of panel discus-

12, 1962, Women Strike for Peace Papers, Series A, 3, Box 7. Lawrence Scott, “The Communist Issue in the Peace

Movement of America,” n.d., Turn Toward Peace Papers, Box 1. 49. Dr. Homer A. Jack, executive director of SANE, “The Will of the WISP versus the humiliation of HUAC,” delivered over station WBAI, New York, Dec. 28,

1962. A transcript of Jack’s talk is in Turn Toward Peace Papers, Box 1. 50. “Civil Liberties Statement of the Student Peace Union,” n.d., Turn Toward

Peace Papers, Box 1. Gail Paradise, “HUAC Attacks Peace,” Student Peace Union Bulletin (Feb. 1963): 12, in Student Peace Union Papers, Box 156, Collection of

Underground, Alternative, and Extremist Literature, UCLA. 51. Robert Pickus, “For Those Concerned,” Dec. 7, 1962, Turn Toward Peace Papers, Box 1.

224

Notes to Pages 174-84

52. Midge Decter, “The Peace Ladies,” Harper’s (Mar. 1963): 48, 52. 53. Baker’s New York Times column of Dec. 15, 1962, was reprinted by Los Angeles WSP as a flier; see Women Strike for Peace Papers, Series A, 4, Box 1.

Other favorable editorials may be found in the same collection. See also Swerdlow, “Ladies Day at the Capitol,” 505. 54. Barbara Deming, “Letter to WISP, in Revolution and Equilibrium (New York: Grossman, 1971), 136. The article first appeared in Liberation (Apr. 1963),

and a reprint is in Women Strike for Peace Papers, Series A, 4, Box 1. 55. Marjory Collins, “WSP vs. HUAC: Reflections of a Prejudiced Spectator,” Minority of One (Feb. 1963): 7, in Women Strike for Peace Papers, Series A, 4, Box 1.

56. DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History, 167-68. 57. John F. Kennedy to Norman Cousins, Oct. 7, 1963, White House Central

Files, Box 659, JFK Library. Jerome Weisner, quoted in Andrew Hamilton, “MIT: March 4 Revisited Amid Political Turmoil,” Science (Mar. 13, 1970): 1476. 58. Sen. Joseph Clark to John F. Kennedy, June 11, 1962, White House Central Files, Box 659, JFK Library. “The Strategy of Peace,” Let the Word Go Forth: The

Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John F. Kennedy, ed. Theodore Sorensen (New York: Delacorte Press, 1988), 282-90. There were 861 favorable letters, and

only 25 hostile ones. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965),.910.

59. Professor Ernest Hocking to President Kennedy, n.d., White House Central Files, Box 659, JFK Library.

60. Reverend Robert D. Bulkley to President Kennedy, Aug. 16, 1963, White House Central Files, Box 659, JFK Library. George J. Feldman to John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House, July 30, 1963, White House Central Files, Box 661, JFK Library.

Epilogue: “The Times They Are A-Changing”? 1. “A Weird Insult from Norway,” Life (Oct. 25, 1963): 4. Although it was true

that Pauling had not been discriminating about whom he worked with on the test ban issue, he had in fact condemned both U.S. and Soviet nuclear policies. 2. Fact sheets put out by “Defenders of Three against HUAC” gave background, excerpted transcripts from the trial, and reprinted press reports attacking HUAC. See “The Facts and Issues in the contempt citations against Dagmar Wilson, Donna Allen, and Russ Nixon” and “Peace Workers Convicted!” Women Strike for Peace Papers, Series A, 4, Box 1. Author interview with Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992.

3. Ethel Taylor is quoted in Adams, Peacework, 14. 4. Oral history, “John T. McTernan of the Los Angeles Bar,” Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society, 210.

Notes to PagesRg 184-90 i

ee

225

5. “CORE Does It This Way!” Nov. 1959, CORE Papers, Folder 20, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, Univ. of Missouri—Columbia. 6. The NAACP’s condemnation of King’s antiwar speech appeared in the New York Times, and is quoted in Dellinger, From Yale to Jail, 280. For more recent

criticisms of King’s “communism,” see “Klan Rally Set Today at Capitol,” Southern Illinoisan (Jan. 16, 1994): 1.

7. Sanford Gottlieb, quoted in Milton S. Katz and Neil H. Katz, “Pragmatists and Visionaries in the Post—World War II American Peace Movement: SANE and

CNVA,” in Doves and Diplomats: Foreign Offices and Peace Movements in Europe and America in the Twentieth Century, ed. Solomon Wank, 272. 8. Todd Gitlin’s view of the planning for the 1965 demonstration includes his comment on “Da Boys” (The Sixties, 179-83). David McReynolds gave me his account in my interview with him, July 3, 1992. g. Author interview with David McReynolds, July 3, 1992. 10. Dellinger, From Yale to Jail, 198; Tom Wells, The War Within (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 44-45. Wells points out that SDS never again initiated a significant national antiwar action. 11. Wells, The War Within, 25. 12. Dowd is quoted in ibid., 36-37. 13. Author interview with Jane Adams, June 3, 1994. See also Gitlin, chaps. 6

and 7 in The Sixties, on the split between radicals and liberals. 14. Dellinger, From Yale to Jail, 195-96. Although there was a pro- Vietnamese, anti-American faction in the antiwar movement (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the

NLF is gonna win”), it was neither dominant nor Communist controlled. 15. Wells, The War Within, 54. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 67-69.

18. Helms and the CIA report are quoted in ibid., 204-8. The report was first uncovered, analyzed, and printed in full by Charles DeBenedetti (“A CIA Analysis of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement: October 1967,” Peace and Change 9 [spring 1983]). 19. A. J. Muste to Hon. Francis Walter, Dec. 6, 1962, Turn Toward Peace Papers, Box 1.

20. “President Says Foes of U.S. Have Duped Arms Freeze Group,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 1982, 22. See also Frank Donner, “But Will They Come?” Nation (Nov. 6, 1982): 456-65. 21. See, for example, “The FBI’s Sorry Story,” Time (Sept. 26, 1988): 31; “Red Squads on the Prowl,” Progressive (Oct. 1988): 18; and Alexander Cockburn, “The Files of Counterrevolution,” Nation (Aug. 7, 1989): 161. 22. John Leo, “Protesting a Complex War,” U.S. News and World Report (Feb. 4, 1991): 20. “Twenty Years On,” Economist (Feb. 2, 1991): 24. Michael T. Klare, “The Peace Movement’s Next Steps,” Nation (Mar. 25, 1991): 361.

226

Notes to Pages 190-191

23. Defense Monitor 24 (July 1995): 1. The end of the cold war was greeted in the West with expressions of concern over the loss of stability that the U.S.Soviet rivalry had provided. See, for example, “After the Cold War,” Newsweek (May 15, 1989): 20-25. Noam Chomsky argues that business has always been

troubled by what the Wall Street Journal calls “the unsettling specter of peace” (“The Dawn, So Far, Is in the East,” Nation [Jan. 29, 1990]: 132). E. P. Thompson

wrote about the possibilities for Europe to put the causes of “peace” and “freedom” back together in “E. N. D. and the Beginning: History Turns on a New Hinge,” Nation (Jan. 29, 1990): 117-22. See also Bernard Wood, “Is Peace Still at War with Security?” Peace and Security 4 (spring 1989): 10. 24. “Rollcall,” Southern Illinoisan (Sept. 6, 1998): 2. Richard Monastersky, “Nations Consent to Ban All Nuclear Tests,” Science News (Sept. 21, 1996): 183.

In fact, the CTBT has an escape clause based on “supreme national interest,” and the United States is designing simulated nuclear tests in the laboratory that may make actual tests unnecessary. See “Bombs Away,” Progressive (Nov. 1996): 8; Brendan Mathews, “No Stopping It Now,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Nov.—Dec. 1997): 28.

Primary Sources

Archives and Manuscript Collections American Friends Service Committee Archives, Philadelphia

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Bayard Rustin Papers John Haynes Holmes Papers

G. Bromley Oxnam Papers Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa.: A. J. Muste Papers

Fellowship of Reconciliation Papers Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers Women Strike for Peace Papers American League Against War and Fascism Papers American Peace Crusade Papers

Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy Papers University of California—Los Angeles: Norman Cousins Papers ACLU of Southern California Papers Collection of Radical, Alternative, and Extremist Literature

Oral History Collection Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis.: FBI files on the War Resisters League, the WILPF, and Catholic Worker

New York Public Library: Norman Thomas Papers Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oreg.: Papers of Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling Presidential Libraries: Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mo. Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kans.

John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. 227,

228

Primary Sources

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.: Papers of Harlow Shapley Microform Collections: Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois Paul Robeson Collection FBI files on Women Strike for Peace, in possession of Amy Swerdlow Interviews

Jane Adams, June 3, 1994 Eleanor Belser, December 29, 1992 Joseph Belser, December 29, 1992 Barbara Bick, June 17, 1992 Mary Clarke, December 29, 1992 Howard Fast, June 25, 1992 W. H. “Ping” Ferry, June 24, 1992 Marge Frantz, July 27, 1995 Sanford Gottlieb, August 28, 1992 Dorothy Healey, June 18, 1992; July 14, 1992 Homer Jack, July 6, 1992 Robert Kempner, June 28, 1992

Shirley Lens, August 15, 1992 Joan Levinson, August 15, 1992 David McReynolds, July 3, 1992 Louise Peck, June 22, 1994 Sid Peck, June 22, 1994 Alice Powell, December 28, 1992 Richard Powell, December 28, 1992 Lillian Rubin, August 13, 1992 Boone Schirmer, June 22, 1994

Peggy Schirmer, June 22, 1994 Donald Shaffer, June 29, 1992 Benjamin Spock, June 10, 1992 Amy Swerdlow, June 29, 1992 Leon Wofsy, August 14, 1992

Primary Sources Correspondence Elmer Bernstein, November 7, 1992 Dan Bessie, March 17, 1992 Paul Deats, May 13, 1992 Gerald Fried, April 15, 1992 Helen Garvy, March 17, 1992 Lucille Gold, April 28, 1992 Dorothy Healey, May 15, 1992 Lyla Hoffman, June 18, 1992 George Houser, May 19, 1992 Robert Lees, June 18, 1992 John McTernan, April 20, 1993 Walter Muelder, June 1, 1992; June 16, 1992 Betty Rottger, August 15, 1992 Hank Rubin, March 17, 1992 Lillian Rubin, March 22, 1992 Sheila Scott, March 28, 1992 John Swomley, August 18, 1992; August 29, 1995

229

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Suggested Reading

1. Peace Movement

General works on the peace movement include a few classics: Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936 (New York: Garland, 1972), was

first published in 1936, yet it continues to be a valuable study, as is Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980). More up-to-date is Charles Chatfield, The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism (New York: Twayne, 1992).

Books on the twentieth century that have become standard are Lawrence Wittner, Rebels Against War (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1984); Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914-1941 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1971); Charles Chatfield, ed., Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken, 1973); and Peter Brock, Twentieth-Century Pacifism (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970).

Two books with a more comparative dimension are Solomon Wank, ed., Doves and Diplomats: Foreign Offices and Peace Movements in Europe and America in the Twentieth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), and April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since

1945 (New York: Longman, 1992). Guenter Lewy indicts pacifists for becoming

too close to the American Left in the 1960s and beyond in Peace and Revolution (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1988). Responses to Lewy appear in Michael Cromartie, ed., Peace Betrayed? Essays on Pacifism and Politics (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1989).

Harriet Hyman Alonso focuses on the role and outlook of women in the peace movement in Peace as a Women’s Issue (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press,

1993). Amy Swerdlow offers significant insight into one women’s peace organization in Women Strike for Peace (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). Organizational studies are more narrowly focused. The student peace movement of the 1930s has received much attention. A solid study is Eileen Eagan, 231

232

Suggested Reading

Class, Culture, and the Classroom: The Student Peace Movement of the 1930s

(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1981). For a more personal account, see Hal Draper, “The Student Movement of the Thirties,” in As We Saw the Thirties, ed. Rita James Simon (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1967). The relationship of the

student movement to American communism is treated thoroughly in Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).

Studies of the organizations discussed in this book include Milton S. Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 1957-1985 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986); Catherine Foster, Women

for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1989); Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for

Peace; Jill Wallis, Valiant for Peace: A History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1914-1989 (London: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1991); and Samuel Walker, In

Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). Foster and Wallis say little about the communist issue, though

Katz, Swerdlow, and Walker address it directly and at some length. Lawrence Wittner’s The Struggle Against the Bomb is a history of the world nuclear-disarmament movement. The first volume, One World or None, ends with 1953 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993). The second, Resisting the Bomb, covers 1954-1970 (1997). A third volume is forthcoming.

Significant documents from this era include the American Friends Service Committee, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1955), and John Swomley’s

pamphlet, “The Peace Offensive and the Cold War” (Washington, D.C.: National Council Against Conscription, 1954). The Rand Corporation study by A. E. Wessel, The American Peace Movement: A Study of Its Themes and Political Potential (Santa Monica: Rand, 1962), and Nathan Glazer’s article, “The Peace Movement in America, 1961,” Commentary (Apr. 1961): 290-91, indicate that the

peace movement was taken more seriously by the early sixties. Biographies, memoirs, and oral histories abound, but one must be careful to balance them against other sorts of sources. Some of those references that give the most insight into individuals and the peace movement are Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson, Abraham Went Out: A Biography ofA. J. Muste (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1981); David Dellinger, From Yale to Jail (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988);

Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); and Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

Invaluable as a biography, as well as for its analysis of African American responses to the Cold War, is Gerald Horne’s book on W. E. B. Du Bois, Black and

Suggested Reading

233

Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1953

(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1986). Other useful biographies and autobiographies include Nat Hentoff, Peace Agitator: The Story ofA. J. Muste (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Ted Goertzel, Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Bayard Rustin, Down the Line (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); George Houser, No One Can Stop the Rain (New York:

Pilgrim Press, 1989); Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); W. A. Swanberg,

Norman

Thomas:

The Last Idealist (New York: Scribner, 1976);

Homer Jack, Homer’s Odyssey: My Quest for Peace and Justice (Becket, Mass.: One Peaceful World Press, 1996). There is as yet no monograph on Norman Cousins.

Oral histories as well as writings and speeches from the period are important sources, ranging from Judith Porter Adams, Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists (Boston: Twayne, 1991), to W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1952); Philip S. Foner, ed., Paul Robeson Speaks (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978); and Linus Pauling, No More War! (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983). 2. American Communism

The literature on American communism is voluminous. Two early works written from an anti-Stalinist point of view remain standard fare: Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957), and Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1957). A more recent study with a similar approach is Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement (New York: Twayne, 1992). Guenter Lewy’s point of view is evident in his book title, The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). These studies have been challenged by numerous scholars. The continu-

ing debates over the nature and impact of American communism are presented in Michael E. Brown, ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).

Other recent works focus on particular periods and on rank-and-file activists, rather than on the party hierarchy and its ties to the Soviet Union. On the 1930s, see Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young; Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina

Press, 1990); and Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994).

4

eee

The World War II and postwar periods are addressed in Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1982); Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); and David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). Joseph Starobin, American Communism in Crists, 1943— 1957 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), offers a thoughtful insider’s

account of this period. Maurice Isserman explores some of the connections between the Old Left and the New Left in a book of essays, If I Had a Hammer (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

Biographies and memoirs are useful, again with the caveat that they must be balanced against other sources. Dorothy Healey’s autobiography, written with Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), is a lively account of “a life in the Communist Party,” as the book is subtitled. Gil Green gives an account of life underground during the McCarthy era in Cold War Fugitive (New York: International Publishers, 1984). Leon Wofsy’s reflective book, Looking for the Future (Oakland, Calif.: |W Rose Press, 1995),

tries to connect his past commitment to his view of the future. Memoirs from abroad include Ilya Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 1945-1954 (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1987), and Ivor Montagu, Plot Against Peace (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952).

The opening of the Soviet archives has been the occasion for further inquiry into the ties between American Communists and the Soviet Union. See, for ex-

ample, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995). The notion that the anticommunism of the 1940s and 1950s was a rational response

to a serious threat to American democracy is put forth in John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), and Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997).

3. The Early Cold War The history of the cold war has an enormous literature as well, which is just beginning to move beyond the “who is to blame” approach. Two thorough general works that focus on understanding the thinking and the policies on the American side are Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance ofPower: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), and Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978). Two useful surveys that look at both sides are John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries

Suggested Reading

235

into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), and Walter La Feber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1992 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993). E. P.Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon,

1982), is both an analysis and a plea for an end to the “habit” of the cold war. John Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997) is a significant attempt to point the way toward a new coldwar history. The domestic impact of the cold war is the subject of several recent, thoughtful studies: Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991); Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); and Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., The Cold War as Rhetoric (New

York: Praeger, 1991). The Truman administration as well as the fragmentation of American liberalism and the Left after World War II have received much attention from scholars in recent years. See Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); David G. McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1994); Mary McAuliffe, Crisis on the

Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1978); Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper and Row, 1985); and Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987). Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings:

The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991), begins with an excellent chapter on the Waldorf con-

ference. Christopher Lasch’s essay, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” appears in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968).

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), is must reading for those who want to understand the

cold-war liberal point of view. An excellent starting point for reading about challenges to the cold war is Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Cold- War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971). Despite the vocifer-

ous opposition to the Wallace campaign in 1948, later accounts tend to be sympathetic, especially Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century (New York: Free Press, 1973). See also Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (New York: Viking Press, 1976); Karl M.

236

Suggested Reading

Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1960); and Robert A. Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History 59 (1972): 90-110.

Biographies and autobiographies offer a variety of useful perspectives on the divisions of the Left during this period. For example, Virginia Durr wrote from a noncommunist, “progressive” point of view in her engaging autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle (University: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1985). Michael

Wreszin’s admiring biography of Dwight Macdonald includes a detailed account of the Waldorf conference: A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

The Peekskill riots are written about by those who tend to emphasize the horror and the attack on civil liberties symbolized by that violence. There are accounts of Peekskill in Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Al-

fred A. Knopf, 1988), and David King Dunaway’s biography of Pete Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Firsthand accounts include Howard Fast, Peekskill U.S.A. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), and Pete Seeger, The Incompleat Folksinger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).

McCarthyism is the subject of many books. A good starting point is Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994). See also her recent study, Many Are the Crimes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). Several older monographs that are still useful include Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doc-

trine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978); Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repres-

sion: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); and Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Origi-

nal Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974). Two volumes that look at anticommunism in American life

over a longer time span are M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combatting the Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990), and America Sees Red: Anticommunism in America, 1970s to 1980s (Claremont, Calif.: Regina Books, 1988).

Other aspects of the politics of the 1950s are addressed in Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981); Jeff Broadwater, Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1960 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).

Scholars are still debating the causes and the impact of the Korean War. Rep-

Suggested Reading

237

resentative of different points of view are William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon, 1988); and I. E Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988). The pub-

lic was not altogether behind the Korean War, as suggested in Edward A. Suchman et al., “Attitudes Toward the Korean War,” Public Opinion Quarterly 17

(1953): 171-84. 4. The 1960s and Beyond The relationship between communism and the peace movement also touches on the issue of civil rights; and, of course, the civil-rights movement itself is central to the history of the 1950s and 1960s. A good starting point is Mark Solomon’s article, “Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,” in Cold War Critics, ed. Thomas G. Paterson, 205-39 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971). Gerald Horne’s work is also important in addressing the connections be-

tween various causes and movements. In addition to his work on W. E. B. Du Bois, his study of Benjamin Davis explores the links between civil rights and McCarthyism: Black Liberation/Red Scare (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press,

1994). Horne explores the use of the term communist front to dismiss legitimate social-protest movements in his Communist Front? The Civil-Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1988). The use of anticommunism to attack the civil-rights movement is also addressed in John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

The Kennedy administration, the Vietnam War, and the protest movements of the 1960s still engender much controversy. Admiring biographies of President Kennedy have given way to more critical studies. Contrast, for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965),

with James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1992), and Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), which portrays

Kennedy in a rather unflattering light. Students interested in the Kennedy presidency might begin with James N. Giglio, John F. Kennedy: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). The Cuban missile crisis, in partic-

ular, has received much attention in recent years. See James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Cri-

sis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), and Robert Smith Thompson, The Missiles of October: The Declassified Story of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

238

Suggested Reading

The Vietnam War has been written about by scholars, journalists, and participants. Two good scholarly introductions to the war are George C. Herring, America’s Longest War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), and Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). Good starting

points for understanding the antiwar movement are Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), and

the more recent, comprehensive treatment of the subject, Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1990).

The impact of the antiwar movement is currently the subject of much debate. The different positions are well represented in the sympathetic account by Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), and the argument that the movement did not stop the war but only

prolonged it, put forth by Adam Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). Another

point of contention is the role of the media, the subject of an insightful book by Melvin Small, Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti— Vietnam War Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994). Other aspects of the antiwar

movement are addressed by Melvin Small and William D. Hoover, eds., Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1992).

Books and articles that raise provocative questions about the cold war and the peace movement in the 1970s and 1980s include E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982); David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen’s Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Frank Don-

ner, “But Will They Come?

The Campaign

to Smear the Nuclear Freeze

Movement,” Nation 235 (1982): 456-65; and Robert Kleidman, Organizing for

Peace: Neutrality, the Test Ban, and the Freeze (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press,

1993).

Index

Abrams, Henry, 144, 147, 151, 153, 154 Acheson, Dean, 90 Addams, Jane, xiv, 8 All-American Conference to Combat Communism, 91

Allen, Donna, 183-84 Alloy, Evelyn, 169 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 8; anticommunism in, 24, 96, 116-17;

and federal loyalty program, 49; and Peekskill riots, 77, 78; and Waldorf conference, 65—66 American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 51 American Council of Christian Laymen,

84 American Forum for Socialist Education,

141 American Friends Service Committee, 6, 8, 14, 118-20, 142

American League Against War and Fascism, 17, 19-21

American League for Peace and Democracy, 21 American Legion, 15, 75 American Peace Crusade (APC), 95, 101—6, 110

American Peace Mobilization, 33 American People’s Mobilization, 33 Americans for Democratic Action, 50 Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF), 68, 69, 70, 71

American Student Union (ASU), 17, 21-24 American Women for Peace, 104, 122-23

American Youth Congress (AYC), 25, 26-27

Arnett, Kitty, 125

Baker, Russell, 175-76 Balch, Emily Greene, 8, 39, 96 Baldwin, Roger, 8, 20, 26, 28

Bandung conference, 138 Barnett, Albert, 86-87

Berkeley, Edmund, 155 Bernstein, Elmer, 13, 48 Bessie, Dan, 5, 13, 15 Bick, Barbara, 3—4, 166—67 Blumberg, Albert, 140—41 Boston Committee for Disarmament and Peace, 154 Brameld, Theodore, 70 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 91

Browder, Earl, 34-35 Bulkley, Robert D., 178 Burnham, James, 90-91 Catholic Worker, 8

Center for Defense Information, 190

Central Intelligence Agency, 184, 189 Civil Rights Congress, 74 Clark, Joseph, 178 Clark, Tom, 41 Clarke, Mary, 4, 165, 166, 168 Clifford, Clark, 47

239

Index

240

collective security, 18, 22, 23 Commentary , 75, 78

Day, Dorothy, 8—9, 142 DeBenedetti, Charles, 43, 177 De Boer, John J., 62 Decter, Midge, 175 Dellinger, David, 185, 187 Deming, Barbara, 177

Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. See

Dennis, Eugene, 140, 164

SANE Committee for Peaceful Alternatives. See National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives

Dewey, Thomas, 77 Dodd, Thomas J., 147, 151, 152 Dolan, Eunice, 125, 126

Communist Party U.S.A., 9, 14-16, 142;

Dowd, Doug, 186

cold war, 137, 180, 190; Communist view of, 35-36; consensus, 56, 179; effects of, xv, 10; end of, xiii, 191; U.S. government

view of, 40-43

Douglas, Jr., R. D., 119-20

approach to peace of, 23, 29, 32, 36, 43,

Doyle, Clyde, 172

79, 87, 98-100, 103-4, 112, 115, 136,

Du Bois Club, 185 Du Bois, W. E. B., 92-95, 101 Durr, Clifford, 53, 60, 71, 82 Durr, Virginia, 54, 60, 82, 168 Dylan, Bob, 179

140—41, 164, 182; decline of, 10-11, 55-56, 79, 135; and Socialists, 9, 21, 22, 28; and Women Strike for Peace, 170, 171. See

also Communists Communist Political Association, 34 Communists: attacks on, 10-11, 27; inter-

est in peace of, 2-6, 112, 135, 159, 182; and party line, 9-10, 22-24, 29, 30, 33, 34-36, 45; and Vietnam War protests, 185-89; and Wallace campaign, 10, 45, 48, 56.

See also Communist Party U.S.A. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 191

Eastland, James, 141 Eaton, Anne, 161

Einstein, Albert, 18 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 137, 183 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 60

Eliot, T. S., 69 Epstein, Frieda, 127

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 39, 84, 184

Fadeyev, A. A., 60, 70

Copland, Aaron, 69 Coser, Lewis, 70

Fanelli, George, 76, 77 Fast, Howard, 5, 57, 59, 75, 81-82, 95, 182

Counts, George, 70-71

Federal Bureau of Investigation: and

Cousins, Norman: and A. J. Muste, 152;

American Peace Crusade, 102; counter-

concerns about Communists in SANE,

intelligence program, 135-36; infiltra-

143, 144-45, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154;

tion, 102, 125, 133, 188; informers, 103;

and Linus Pauling, 151; speech at Wal-

and Jane Addams, xiv; and SANE, 156; and SDS, 188; and WILPF, 122, 125, 130, 133; and WRL, 83; and WSP, 170

dorf conference, 65; and world federalists, 38

Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (Waldorf Conference), 58, 59, 61-72, 112

Curran, Joseph, 91-91 Curti, Merle, 16

Federal Loyalty Program, 49 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR): attacks on, 84; noncooperation with Communists, 8, 24, 85, 115, 141; and Paul Robeson, 78; view of peace, 39, 80

Fogarty, William, 125 Daily Worker, 91, 98-100

Foster, William Z., 35, 42

Darr, John, 157, 172

France, Royal, 102

Index rE

241

Frantz, Marge, 4-5, 13, 29, 182

Jack, Homer, 165; anti-Communist views

Freed, Iris, 173 Fried, Gerald, 153 Freeman, Ruth, 124, 128 Fulbright, J. William, 189

Gold, Lucille, 13 Gold, Michael, 35

of, 129, 131, 169, 174; concerns about Communists in SANE, 145, 153; criticizes WSP, 174; and WILPF, 129, 131 Johnson, Arnold, 153-54, 187 Johnson, Elsie, 131 Johnson, Evelyn, 129 Johnson, Lyndon B., 188-89 Johnson, Russell, 119 Joint Committee Against Communism, 97 Jones, May, 131-32

Goldstein, Leah, 127

Justice Department, 92, 101

Gottlieb, Sanford, 156, 157, 163 Green, Gil, 24, 188 Green, William, 48—49 Greenwich Village Peace Center, 171, 172

Kaufman, Abraham, 117-18 Kazin, Alfred, 70

Gilmore, Robert, 149, 150, 165 Glazer, Nathan, 156, 157 Golding, Louis, 66

Hassler, Al, 142, 154 Haufrecht, Betty, 105, 106 Healey, Dorothy, 5, 29, 36

Kennedy, John FE, 161, 164, 177, 178 Kent, Rockwell, 95 Keys, Donald, 148-49 Khrushchev, Nikita, 12, 135, 137 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 184-85 Kirchwey, Freda, 64, 78 Klehr, Harvey, 55-56

Hellman, Lillian, 65 Hiss, Priscilla, 118 Hocking, Ernest, 178 Hoffman, Lyla, 4, 13, 173 Holmes, John Haynes, 25-26

Lasch, Christopher, 51 Lash, Joseph, 22, 24, 72 Lees, Robert, 14, 29 Lerner, Max, 52, 53

Hall, Gus, 164, 172 Halsey, Margaret, 157

Hook, Sidney, 59, 68, 69, 70-71 Hoover, J. Edgar, 122, 170, 188 House Un-American Activities Commit-

tee (HUAC), 27, 183; attacks FOR, 83; attacks MFSA, 121; hearings with WSP

women, xiii, 171-73; and Paul Robeson, 73; and SANE, 156; and Stockholm Peace Petition, 90, 96 Howe, Irving, 71 Hughes, H. Stuart, 161 Hutchins, Robert, 111-12 Huxley, Julian, 64

Independent Citizens Council for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (IC-

CASP), 59 Isaacs, Stanley, 157

liberals: and cold war, 33, 37-38, 50—51, 156; and Communists, 25, 36—37, 48-51, 78, 157; and New Left, 187; postwar hopes of, 33, 36-37; view of Wallace campaign, 50; and Waldorf conference, 70-71 Life, 34, 61, 183

Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 110, 178 Lindsey, Mary, 125

Lucky Dragon, 138 Macdonald, Dwight, 52, 70, 72 McCarran Act, 11, 82

McCarthy, Joseph, 49, 135 McCarthyism, 11, 179, 180-81; decline of, 135; and SANE, 151, 157 McMichael, Jack, 120-21 McNeill, Bertha, 125 McReynolds, David, 142, 185, 188

Index

242 McTernan, John, 184 Mailer, Norman, 62-63, 71 Mann, Thomas, 69, 107-8, 110

Nixon, Russ, 183-84

Matson, Marjorie, 122

“Old Man Atom,” 97 Olmsted, Mildred Scott, 93, 128, 129

Meacham, Stewart, 137, 157; opposes antiCommunist policy in SANE, 145-46,

149, 150-51; view of Senator Dodd, 152 Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), 86, 120-21 Meyers, Ruth, 172-73 Mid-Century Conference for Peace, 85-87

nuclear testing, 137, 138, 159—61, 162

Olrich, Frances, 126-27, 129

Oxford Pledge, 22 Oxnam, G. Bromley, 121 pacifists, 6, 137, 152; anticommunism of, 7-8; antifascism of, 18; attacks on, 7, 83,

Milgram, Morris, 56

84, 119; and cold war, 39—40; and Com-

Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe), 187 Morrison, Philip, 107, 108-9

munists, 7, 17, 83, 86, 152; nuclear, 38, 162; Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticism of, 28.

Moseley, Margaret, 126, 127 Muelder, Walter, 121 Muir, Robert M., 91 Muste, A. J., 28, 69; and the “crisis in

SANE,” 152-53, 156-157; dialogue with Communists of, 140-41; and Mid-

See also peace; peace movement Page, Kirby, 181 Paradise, Gail, 175 Partisans of Peace, 67 Pauling, Ava Helen, 154, 168, 169 Pauling, Linus, 154, 158, 159; and American

Peace Crusade, 110; attacks on, 138, 144,

Century Conference for Peace, 85-86;

183; criticizes Norman Cousins, 151; op-

and New Left, 185; opposes Henry Wal-

position to nuclear testing, 12, 109-10,

lace, 52; organizes American Forum for

Socialist Education, 141-42; view of communism and peace, xiv, 189

138-39, 159; peace activities of, 138-40 peace: anticommunism and, xiv, xv, xvi, 1, 12, 30-31, 41—42, 53-54, 63, 79-80, 98, 115;

meanings of, xiii, 13-14, 29, 33, 39 43,

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 93, 116, 184—85

National Committee for Peaceful Alternatives, 85, 87, 100-101

National Council for the Arts, Sciences,

44, 60, 61, 103, 190—91; versus freedom, XV, 32-33, 43, 66-70, 96—98, 111-12. See also pacifists; peace movement Peace Information Center (PIC), 92, 101 Peacemakers, 82-83, 115 peace movement, 29, 185; attacks on, 39,

and Professions (NCASP), 59 New Left, 185, 187

189; and cold war, 14; and Communists,

Newsweek, 61, 84

WSP, 173-74; revival of, 39, 113, 136-37.

New York Daily Compass, 96 New York Labor Conference for Peace, 91 New York Times, 67, 97-98, 107, 113; on

American Forum for Socialist Education, 141; attacks Stockholm Peace Petition, 90, 111; reports on Waldorf conference, 65, 68 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 28, 40 Nissley, Wilma, 125

2, 181, 182; decline of, 39; response to See also pacifists; peace peace offensive, 11, 57-58, 88, 115; effects of, 72, 79; responses to, 90, 111 Peck, James, 97 Peekskill, 57, 74-78 Pell, Orlie, 168

People’s Committee for Freedom of Religion, 68 Philbrick, Herbert, 83, 119

Index

V—_——ee.e.e—r—rer

ee

243

ee

Pickett, Clarence, 148, 149 Pickus, Robert, 131, 163, 175 Popular Front, 9, 19 Posner, Blanche, 172 Potter, Paul, 186 Progressive Citizens of America, 50 Progressive Party, 45-54, 56. See also Wallace, Henry

Socialist Workers Party (SWP), 187 Sondergaard, Gale, 102 Southern California Peace Crusade, 105, 106-7

Spanish Civil War, 18, 22 Stapledon, Olaf, 66 State Department, 65, 66, 67, 93, 139

Pugwash conferences, 138

Stevenson, Adlai, 159 Stockholm Peace Petition, 81, 88—92,

Rabinowitch, Eugene, 61-62

Stone, I. F, 54, 112, 127-28, 159

Reader’s Digest, 121 Reagan, Ronald, 190

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-

96—98, 99-100

Richardson, Thomas, 93 Riesman, David, 156 Robeson, Paul, 57, 73-79 Robinson, Jackie, 73 Rodino, Peter, 90 Rogge, O. Johia, 93, 110 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 26-27, 50, 77, 78, 148 Rottger, Betty, 3, 13, 182

Rubin, Hank, 18 Rubin, Lillian, 4, 107 Rustin, Bayard, 82-83, 142 SANE, 12, 163, 185; attacks on, 144, 147; Communists and, 152, 153, 154, 156-573 concerns about Communists in, 136,

mittee (SNCC), 184, 186 Student Peace Union (SPU), 163-64, 174 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 180, 185, 186

Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), 100, 102-6, 158 Swerdlow, Amy, 3, 29, 167, 168, 172 Swomley, John: and American Forum for Socialist Education, 142; and MFSA, 86;

and Mid-Century Conference for Peace, 87; opposes Communists, 26, 87, 115-16, 129, 142, 150; and SANE, 150

Taylor, Ethel, 165-66, 184

143-47, 149-52; “crisis in,” 152-53; Madi-

Taylor, Glen, 43-44, 51 Taylor, Telford, 96 Thomas, Evan, 40

son Square Garden rally of, 147; May 26

Thomas, Norman, 21, 39—40, 84, 147; and

resolution of, 148-50, 154-55; origins of,

136, 137, 149 Sayre, John Nevin, 152 Scales, Junius, 119, 120

Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur, 42, 50, 51 Schneider, Anita Bell, 103, 104, 105 Scott, Lawrence, 143, 174 Scott, Sheila, 13

Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, 138, 141, 153, 158, 159

Shapley, Harlow, 59, 60, 61, 64, 69 Sheldon, James Humphrey, 20-21 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 66, 67, 69 Smith Act, 10, 49, 63 Socialist Party, 9, 21, 84

ACLU, 26, 116, 117; anticommunism of,

26, 145, 146—47; attacks on Wallace cam-

paign, 52; seeks exclusion of Communists from SANE, 144, 145, 146; and

Spanish Civil War, 18-19 Thomas, Trevor, 143-44 Thompson, E. P, xv

Time, 144 Truman, Harry S., 40, 41, 44-45, 77 Turn Toward Peace (TTP), 163, 164 Ullrich, Bernice, 128-29 United World Federalists (UWE), 38, 84 Uphaus, Willard, 85, 86, 87, 88 Urey, Harold, 38-39

244 Vietnam War protest, 179, 185-89

Waldorf conference. See Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace Walker, Samuel, 117 Wallace, Henry, 43-46, 51, 52, 53, 110. See

also Progressive Party War Resisters League (WRL), 8, 117-18 Wechsler, James, 25,50

Weisner, Jerome, 177 Westchester Committee for Law and Order, 75 Wilson, Dagmar, 162, 171, 173, 183-84 Wofsy, Leon, 6, 29, 33, 48 Woltman, Frederick, 83-84

Women’s International League for Peace

Index 125, 133; Louisville branch, 127—28; Miami branch, 128-29; and Packet on Infiltration and Attack, 123-24; Providence branch, 127; view of Commu-

nists, 114-15, 121-33 Women Strike for Peace: and CIA, 184; and Communist Party, 170, 171; Communists and former Communists in, 162, 166—67, 170, 173; compared with other peace organizations, 12, 162, 163, 165, 167-68; and FBI, 170-71; founders of, 155, 162, 165; and HUAC, xiii, 171-77, 183-84; nonexclusion policy of, 163, 169, 171, 173; origins of, 161-62

World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, 58

and Freedom, 8, 12, 24, 104, 168, 169;

World Fellowship, 88

Boston branch, 126-27; Chicago

World Peace Council, 95

branch, 130-32; Committee on the Special Problems of Branches, 123, 125; Denver branch, 124-26; and FBI, 122,

Young Communist League (YCL), 22

Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), 22

Photoco Universit Universi Illinois Southern Carbond at

Robbie Lieberman is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She is the author of “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950, which won the Deems Taylor Award from the American

Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).

Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution

Syracuse University Press

Political Science / American History

“American Communists were both a blessing and a curse for the midcentury peace movement, Robbie Lieberman finds in The Strangest Dream....{They] brought a sorely needed dedication and competence to the fight against the arms race. At the same time, their allegiance to the Soviet Union allowed the peace movement’s enemies to paint the lot of them and the cause itself with a red brush.”— Publishers Weekly

“The definition of Americanism that had anticommunism at its core was promulgated not only by the government but also by private citizens and organizations, from the veterans of the American Legion to the intellectuals of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. But the peace movement suffered due to both attacks from without and dissension from within. Many peace activists took steps to rid their organizations of Communist elements and influences, which frequently raised difficult questions about civil liberties. Some peacemakers were motivated by their own anticommunism, others by fear of drawing attacks from outside. In any event, peace organizations were weakened by internal disagreements over the issue of Communist participation. Even as the peace movement began to revive in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it continued to be haunted by the issue of communism.’—From The Strangest Dream

Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution

St Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5160

ISBN 0-8156-2841-2

9 HL 5° 62841 |