In White Collar Radicals, Purcell examines the political actions of fifteen individuals during their time with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and how their brief period together continued to affect their lives in the proceeding decades. The ‘Knoxville Fifteen,’ as Purcell labels them, were young, politically and socially like-minded entry-level employees who happened to work together at the TVA during its nascent years of the mid-1930s.[1] Their shared interests and societal views—as well as their close proximity as professional colleagues—led to their involvement with one another as activists, friends, roommates, and sometimes lovers. The Knoxville Fifteen’s flirtation, and eventual membership for most, with the local Communist Party and their encouragement of social movements attracted the attention of the federal government and law enforcement agencies. Together, they supported the anti-fascist forces of the Spanish Civil War, advocated civil rights for African Americans, and participated in local labor issues, strikes, and movements as leaders of the TVA’s white-collar union. Although the Knoxville Fifteen avoided national notoriety and legal prosecution during their employment with TVA, the political climate ushered in by World War II and the subsequent Cold War facilitated multiple federal inquiries into their past that adversely affected their lives decades later.
Purcell’s exploration into the lives and experiences of the Knoxville Fifteen illuminates the pervasiveness of anti-communism hysteria, and the extent of federal intrusion and policing of the lives of American citizens. Purcell argues that the story of Knoxville Fifteen provides a cautionary tale “into modern-day investigations of those suspected of un-American activities.”[2] According to Purcell, the Knoxville Fifteen was “a small group of largely harmless ‘New Dealers.’”[3] Except for a few of the fifteen, their political actions and rhetoric proved limited to the Knoxville area and their time with the TVA. In comparison, as Purcell illustrates, the federal response wildly exaggerated their influence and threat to America resulting in an asymmetrical and repeated assault on their civil liberties.
Purcell effectively employs a wide array of primary and secondary sources to weave his narrative together. His sources include FBI and government files and documents, transcripts of public hearings, Howard Bridgman’s diary, personal interviews with two of the Knoxville Fifteen—Henry Hart and Mabel Abercrombie, national and local newspapers, and political periodicals, newsletters, and pamphlets. Coupled with his vast secondary literature, his extensive source material adequately reinforces his approach of placing the story of the Knoxville Fifteen within the broader history and context of the political climate of the TVA and the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. Purcell’s ability to continuously shift the camera of focus from actor to actor and frequently oscillate between vantage points is the strength of his work. It is only possible because of his thorough research and use of the source material. This approach underscores the hysteria of anti-communism in American society and institutions. The Red Scare enabled gross government overreach and provided the justification for the development of a perpetual cycle of allegations—often based on dubious evidence and unfounded rumors—and hearings against the Knoxville Fifteen.
However, this approach also creates a weakness due to the presentation and formatting of the book, and the magnitude of its scope. Purcell structures his narrative chronologically in three parts, each touching on a specific period of their lives. Problems of formatting and presentation appear most prevalent and concerning in “Part One: Visions”. While Purcell excels at describing the early years of the TVA, the New Deal, and the political climate of the 1930s, he inserts the biographical information and actions of the Knoxville Fifteen as distinct and separately written sections. This style choice detaches their stories from one another and from the broader history. Although it should be noted, such a presentation of the Knoxville Fifteen works well in “Part Three: Aftermath” when Purcell traces their respective lives following the conviction and murder of one of their own, William Remington. In “Part Two: Realities”, Purcell avoids this problem by wonderfully weaving the narrative between the voices and actions of the Knoxville Fifteen with other actors and within multiple settings.
Purcell simply tackles too many themes and topics with his focus on fifteen individuals. From the TVA and New Deal to the FBI’s investigation into the Knoxville Fifteen’s affiliations with the local Communist Party during the 1930s to Dies Committee hearings to the Senate confirmation hearings of David Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp to Remington’s trial and conviction, Purcell illustrates the pervasiveness and vindictiveness of politicians and law enforcement agencies in their enforcement of anti-communist policies. In general, Purcell is successful in his broader aims of highlighting the causes and effects of anti-communism hysteria on the minor characters of history while situating the voices and lives of these folks within the context of the changing political culture and climate of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. However, Purcell’s work would have benefitted from a narrower cast of individuals. If Purcell chose to only focus only on Remington and Hart, much of the book would have remained the same sans the constant need to stress the roles of the others. Furthermore, Purcell’s specific use of Lilienthal to elaborate on the political and cultural environment of the TVA and as a catalyst for 1940s Dies Committee hearings on the Knoxville Fifteen belies the significance of his role to the aims of his book. Although the Knoxville Fifteen all have interesting and deserving stories, this work would have offered more with less.
Purcell’s White Collar Radicals opens new avenues of historical inquiry to explore. Knoxville Fifteen member Pat Todd offers historians of Cold War culture and the Red Scare a case study on the adverse psychological effects of allegations and accusations of un-American sympathies and communist ties. Purcell’s work also suggests that a historical comparison and analyses of USSR and American state intrusion and policing of their citizens during the Cold War could prove potentially rewarding. Moreover, his approach is an ideal template for historians interested in writing holistic narratives that fluidly knit the lives of minor actors together within the context of the broader social, cultural, and political environments at the local, national, and international levels to demonstrate how profoundly society is interwoven with a myriad of influences.
[1] Aaron Purcell coined the nomenclature the Knoxville Fifteen specifically for the purposes of this work. In his own words, “I titled this core group the ‘Knoxville Fifteen.’ I did not set out to create the Knoxville Fifteen or any numbered group; instead, countless official reports, testimony, and interview transcripts guided me to a collection of like-minded individuals with similar experiences. Their identity as the Knoxville Fifteen is driven by available evidence and is a reliable way to describe their collective experiences while with TVA and beyond.” The Fifteen include Mabel Abercrombie, Forrest Benson, Bernard ‘Buck’ Borah, Howard Bridgman, Katherine ‘Kit’ Buckles, Christine Eversole, John Frantz, Howard Frazier, Henry Hart, David Stone Martin, William Remington, Muriel Speare, Merwin ‘Pat’ Todd, Elizabeth Winston, and Burton Zien. See Purcell, White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2009), xxiii-xxiv.
Comments Off on Historiographical Essay: A Review of the Interrelationship between White Supremacy, Anticommunism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South
In this historiographical essay, The Life of a Historian surveys the scholarship of the Cold War civil rights historiography. In particular, this review primarily focuses on the following historians and their respective books:
A Historiographical Review of the Interrelationship between White Supremacy, Anticommunism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South
Introduction to Cold War Civil Rights Historiography:
Connecting the Histories of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement
Over the past three decades, scholars of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, respectively, have made a concerted effort to converge the two historiographical conversations. What has developed is the recognition of a fascinating interrelationship between the Cold War and the civil rights movement. Although known by the contemporaries of the time, historians are now finally illuminating on the myriad of ways African Americans understood the Cold War climate and adapted their grassroots strategies accordingly to yield desired outcomes. In general, historians of this relatively new field of study and historiography—Cold War civil rights—have produced articles and monographs that more or less seek to internationalize American history by examining domestic affairs within the context of Cold War geopolitical climate. In short, histories that explore the impact of United States foreign policy on the civil rights movement and vice versa.[1]
Consequently, many scholars of the Cold War civil rights historiography employ a rather top-down approach that emphasizes the role of the federal government, specifically the executive branch, and almost exclusively the State and the Justice Departments. However, it should be noted, historian Mary L. Dudziak and others do claim that without the activism and grassroots movements of African Americans the more positive effects of the Cold War on domestic policies regarding civil rights may never have come to fruition. Furthermore, historians like Gerald Horne, Penny Von Eschen, and Brenda Gayle Plummer acknowledge the agency of African Americans as the driver of their narratives.[2] Even still, figuring prominently as main actors in these narratives are individuals like Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, and Earl Warren. Executive Orders, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional hearings and legislations serve as both the focal point and fulcrum of the historical trajectory of the civil rights movement. In the background, the Cold War climate serves as the setting, similar to adverse weather conditions, guiding and influencing the decision-making of the actors.
An Example of a Narrative from the Cold War Civil Rights Historiography
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union witnessed two opposing ideological forces confront one another on the international stage. The implications not only affected foreign policies and political decisions at the federal and state levels but also reverberated throughout American society and culture. As the leader of the self-proclaimed free world, the United States came under international pressure to fulfill and reflect its democratic and egalitarian rhetoric. The pressure from foreign nations resulted from an emerging, and observant, international audience that became increasingly critical of America’s racial practices and policies. Furthermore, the Soviet Union found America’s treatment of its black citizens to be a convenient propaganda tool, and one they made use of with regularity. Cognizant of the emerging global audience, African American leaders and organizations sought avenues to internationalize the oppressive nature of American racism to coerce the federal government, specifically the executive branch, to exert its power and authority to end racially discriminatory practices.[3]
Within the nascent Cold War political climate, African Americans seemingly had leverage, and President Harry Truman was resigned to abide by their legitimate concerns and demands. In 1946, Truman appointed the President’s Committee on Civil Rights to investigate the civil rights violations and propose resolutions. In consultation with the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the following year the committee released its report, To Secure These Rights, detailing its findings and recommendations. In “determining that racial segregation was ‘inconsistent with the fundamental equalitarianism of the American way of life,’ the committee listed a total of thirty-five recommendations for both congressional and administrative actions in its report…to protect the civil rights of black Americans and to begin eliminating racial segregation from American life.”[4] The proposals outlined in To Secure These Rights led Truman to issue Executive Order 9981, which abolished racial segregation in the military; and encouraged the Democratic National Convention of 1948 to adopt “its strongest and most forthright civil rights plank ever.”[5]
Inspired by these responses from the executive branch and the national Democratic Party, African Americans continued to harness the Cold War climate for the benefit of racial equality. As activism for civil rights mounted, and with coaxing from the executive branch, concern for international criticism suffused and seeped into our other facets of governance. Of particular significance, the judicial branch and court system proved an asset to the civil rights movement. For Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Justice Department filed an amicus curia—a friend of the court—brief in 1952. Loaded with references to foreign policy and concern for international reception of American racism, the brief seemed less focused on civil rights and more worried about the ruling’s effect on geopolitics.[6] Regardless of the Justice Department’s motive, the objective was the same. In 1954, the Supreme Court delivered its unanimous ruling that state laws of racial segregation in public schools violated the constitution. At the behest of African Americans, the Truman Administration began the process toward a national civil rights agenda and, in turn, empowering the grassroots civil rights movement that would characterize the 1950s and 1960s.
The implications of the Cold War climate entangled domestic affairs like civil rights with foreign policy concerns. As a result, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson all followed a similar path as Truman. African Americans understood that this peculiar and possibly finite political environment offered opportunities for gains in civil rights. They responded accordingly and seized the moment. Consequently, the civil rights movement amassed political and legal victories including Brown, armed federal support for desegregation in Little Rock, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In short, the Cold War ushered in a rare, albeit brief, political climate and opportunity for African Americans to aggressively pressure the federal government to address their grievances and calls for civil rights and racial equality.
Identifying and Addressing Gaps in the Scholarship:
How Historians Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri Broaden the Cold War Civil Rights Historiography
However, what this narrative, and the Cold War civil rights historiography in general, ignores is the agency of those who resisted the civil rights movement and fought to preserve segregation. Regretfully, this is not a mere omission due to ignorance or source material. In her 1988 article “Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism,” Cold War historian Ellen W. Schrecker notes that this topic is deserving of analysis. She claims, “that an ‘important and largely unstudied aspect of McCarthyism is its impact’ in the South. ‘I know of no recent work specifically in this area, yet…there should be a major story here.’”[7] Additionally, “historians of anticommunism have tended to neglect the use of the weapon as a…southern phenomenon” as well.[8] Even when they do, however, they tend “to oversimplify the uses and abuses of anticommunism in particular, as practiced by southern segregationists.”[9] Fortunately, historians Jeff Woods, George Lewis, and Yasuhiro Katagiri follow Schrecker’s suggestion.
By exploring these topics in their respective works, Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri increase the range and purview of the Cold War civil rights historiography. Within the analytical framework of the Cold War, they survey southern white resistance to the civil rights movement. Relying on similar temporal and spatial boundaries—the South during the 1950s and the 1960s—all three examine how and why white segregationists used anticommunism and Cold War rhetoric to thwart desegregation and, more broadly, the civil rights movement. For white segregationists, anticommunism proved a valuable and effective weapon to confront integration and to discredit civil rights activists and organizations. Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri concur—albeit to varying degrees—that white segregationists held a distinct interpretation of anticommunism that was inseparable from southern heritage and traditions of antiradicalism and white supremacy. In contrary to the national perspective at the time, the South did not perceive communism as the primary threat to the preservation of its values and democracy. Rather, the fear of racial integration and the political agency of African Americans haunted the minds of many white southerners. Southern anticommunism, therefore, concerned itself more with race than Marx.
Changing the Actors, Changing the Perspective:
How Historians Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri Explore Familiar Ground Differently to Discover New Historical Truths
Treading a familiar timeline of the civil rights era, Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri all—loosely—bookend their narratives with major events that characterized the movement: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Oddly enough, and although the South, as Lewis suggests, had “a rich tradition of…antiradicalism and anticommunism,” the southern red scare began in earnest as “the rest of the nation was struggling to move away from the fanatical Red Scare,” or McCarthyism, of the 1940s and 1950s that culminated with its namesake and top promoter Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political downfall and censure in the Senate.[10] According to Woods, “while its defensive, regional, and ethnic brand of nationalism made the southern red scare unique….the South’s segregationist, anti-Communist reaction developed out of a set of preconditions that were common to red scares nationally.”[11] However, “the region lacked a final, crucial ingredient in those years—political and social turmoil.”[12]Brown provided that final, crucial ingredient. However, like Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri note, the “South’s segregationist, anti-Communist reaction” to that final ingredient was years in the making.[13]
Although Woods entitles his work Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968, the years 1948-1968 belie the timeframe of his work. For Woods, the 1948 Dixiecrat movement was essential to the development of the southern red scare. He argues, “the southern reaction to Truman’s racial policies was a clear indication that red and black fears had become a defining element of the region’s ideology; the southern red scare was underway.”[14] However, central to the framing of his argument and as an impetus to the southern red scare is Woods’s notion of southern nationalism. For Woods, “southern nationalism embodied a set of shared values and traditions: a concern for personal and national honor, a suspicion of centralized power and belief in states’ right, a fundamentalist faith in Protestant Christianity, and a view of history shaped by the region’s experiences of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.”[15] To explicate the southern red scare as a manifestation of southern nationalism, Woods spends a chapter highlighting certain aspects of southern history regarding slavery, white supremacy, and “fears of black conspiracies…and black.”[16]
Likewise, the years Lewis includes in the title of his work, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945-1965, misrepresent the temporal scope of his work. To elucidate on the southern ‘rich tradition of antiradicalism and anticommunism,’ Lewis expounds on the South’s response to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Lewis, “because the party was well-known for its advocacy of black self-determination, and because it had placed so much emphasis on mobilizing blacks, southern segregationists realized that they could potentially dismiss any agitation for greater black civil rights as communist-inspired.”[17] Regarding the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), “Georgia governor ascribed CIO efforts to court black workers to part of a wider effort to form an effective African American voting bloc, through which subversive forces could bring pressure to bear on national politics.”[18] Even during the 1920s and 1930s, race defined anticommunism of the South during this period, much like it would in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Unlike Woods and Lewis, Katagiri does not predicate his narrative or central arguments on the idea of a distinctively southern form of anticommunism. Instead, he simply acknowledges it as such; “In the South, McCarthyism most often took on a racial—and racist—form and southern segregationists perpetuated its legacy in their response to the civil rights movement.”[19] Although Katagiri does not need to re-trace the origins of southern anticommunism, like Woods, he does found the 1948 Dixiecrat movement of importance. He asserts that it “laid a solid foundation for the germination of a peculiar ideology in the Democratic ‘Solid South’—an ideology that combined segregationist and racist views, the proposition of states’ rights and state sovereignty, and anti-Communist consensus.”[20] Furthermore, Katagiri insists that “this popular ideology became the basis for white southerners’ organized and all-out massive resistance to the civil rights movement.”[21] So like Woods and Lewis, at least in acknowledgment, Katagiri places anticommunism within the context of the southern heritage and traditions, particularly those of antiradicalism, anticommunism, and white supremacy.
According to Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown embodied the fears and anxieties of the South. In turn, albeit in fits and starts, it sparked the southern red scare even as McCarthyism on the national level was beginning to fade. As Lewis notes, “the White South’s lingering fears of a second Reconstruction were brought sharply into focus on Monday, May 17, 1954. On ‘Black Monday,” as it became known, the U.S. Supreme Court pronounced…that school segregation was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.”[22] Furthermore, Lewis argues that “its seminal importance rested upon its dismantling of the separate-but-equal premise: the South was left with no constitutional basis from which to protect any form of social, political, or economic segregation.”[23] Initially, and as it was stated in the Southern Manifesto, southerners pledged “to resist segregation by ‘all lawful means.’”[24]
However, as both Lewis and Katagiri contend, after the Little Rock crisis in 1957, southerners realized they had no legal recourse to resist desegregation. With the ‘Southern way of life’ under threat, white segregationists turned to anticommunism with more regularity and frequency to oppose integration. “To be sure,” writes Katagiri, “the white South’s equating the region’s civil rights struggle with the worldwide ‘Communist conspiracy’ arose from a strong sense of powerlessness felt by ordinary white citizens. They perceived the federal government’s attempts to regulate time-honored race relations…represented a ‘dangerous slide toward communism.’”[25] Consequently, Woods suggests that “the southern red scare was…a byproduct of the region’s massive resistance to integration. Its proponents’ main goal was to discredit the civil rights movement by associating it with the nation’s greatest, enemy Communism.”[26] In short, southern reaction to Brown was a manifestation of traditional regional fears and anxieties of racial insecurity and desire for white supremacy. For white segregationists, anticommunism meant anti-black.
At the other end of their timelines, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 introduce the final acts. Although segregationists had some success in deploying anticommunism to discredit the push for both pieces of legislation, their decision to do so ultimately weakened the validity and effectiveness of anticommunism as a weapon against the civil rights movement. As Woods wryly states, “it was ironic that segregationist southerners labeled ‘Communist’ the premier symbol of democracy, voting….Few outside of the right-wing circles were convinced that Communist influence in the movement was the driving force behind the voting rights bill.”[27] With the use of an apt historical analogy, Katagiri suggests that with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “white South’s massive resisters met their waterloo.”[28] For Katagiri, the end of massive resistance and southern anticommunism, followed shortly afterward with the deaths of Katagiri’s “northern messiahs,” Joseph Brown ‘J.B.’ Matthews and Myers Lowman; two northern, professional anticommunists and consultants who, together, helped various southern states and individuals establish anti-communist committees and organizations to effective surveillance and harass individuals with suspected connections to communists or civil rights groups.[29] Between their respective deaths in 1966 and 1973, “virtually all of the standing commissions and committees established by Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi to wage their officially sanctioned and publicly supported massive resistance to the civil rights movement either had become defunct or were on their deathbeds.”[30] Nevertheless, as Katagiri illustrates, much of that “peculiar ideology in the Democratic ‘Solid South’” lived on in the rhetoric and actions of southern Republicans like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms who opposed the bill to establish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday on the grounds of King’s alleged communist connections.
However, as Lewis argues, “Massive Resistance did not conveniently disappear after the federal intervention in Little Rock in 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Instead, Massive Resistance metamorphosed….Resistance methods had been transformed and now offered subtler, often masked forms of desegregation.”[31] Cold War rhetoric and anticommunism “were largely replaced by a new generation of refined, restrictive voting measures, gerrymandering, and economic intimidation” as the new weapons of choice for white segregationists.[32] Although, as Lewis acknowledges, red-baiting and anticommunism ultimately failed to stop racial integration, it did provide southerners with an effective weapon to discredit civil rights activists and organizations, and to impede the overall progress of the movement. Furthermore, Lewis argues that “many…southern conservatives who, like [George] Wallace, had striven so hard to resist racial change in the 1950s in direct conflict with successive presidential administrations, now found themselves recast in the late 1960s and 1970s as an integral part of a mainstream political movement with national, rather than regional, support.”[33] In effect, the ideology of the massive resistance did not fade away, rather it diffused across the nation.
According to Woods, the southern red scare begin to dissipate in 1968 as “America’s ‘silent majority’ no longer needed southerners to tell it that blacks and reds were taking advantage of the civil unrest in the United States.”[34] As a result, Richard Nixon won the presidency that year on a promise of law and order. Even George Wallace, running on an “opposition to black civil rights” as a third-party candidate, won 13 percent of the electorate in the general presidential election.[35] In concurrence with Lewis, Woods suggests that “by the fall of 1968, a ‘Southernization’ of American politics…had occurred.”[36] Additionally, “with many of its legal and legislative objectives won in the South, the movement turned northward,” thus, “red and black hunting became obsolete.”[37]However, in contrast to Lewis, Woods sees no small victories for white segregationists nor a transcending massive resistance. Bluntly, he states, “southern nationalists had failed in their primary purpose, the preservation of segregation as a fundamental part of the ‘southern way of life.’”[38] Furthermore, and despite the continuation of de facto segregation and the rise of southern conservatism in national politics, “the federal government remain committed to black civil rights…continued to grow with the institution of affirmative-action and busing programs design to integrate the nation’s schools and federal offices. As for the security side of the southern red scare, Congress abolished HUAC in 1975, while the states began the process of disbanding their “little HUACs” and “little FBI’s” during the 1960s and 1970s.[39]
Conclusion:
Strengths, Limitations, and Moving the Cold War Civil Rights Historiographical Conversation Forward
Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri succeed in addressing the more glaring gaps in the Cold War civil rights historiography. However, their works are not flawless. Although both Woods and Katagiri mention ‘black struggle’ and ‘black freedom,’ respectively, in their titles—Black Struggle, Red Scare and Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, neither one truly incorporates African Americans into their histories. Rather, both seemingly use African Americans as a foil to white segregationists. In fairness to Woods, he does offer insightful descriptions and analysis of a few black civil rights groups and leaders including the NAACP, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stockley Carmichael. Nonetheless, Woods does not necessarily portray African Americans as makers or actors of their own history. An in-depth analysis of how African Americans understood anticommunism concerning their own identity as southerners may have helped give context to their reactions and responses to white segregationists.
Both Woods and Lewis suffer from inadequate definitions and analysis of their key terms. Regarding Woods, he introduces the notion of southern nationalism and does give a concise definition. However, even though he suggests that the primacy of this history is southern nationalism Woods does not directly connect southerners to his definition. Specifically, the ideas of religion and personal honor rarely appear in the pages of the work. A fuller analysis of this term with anecdotal evidence would have strengthened his argument of a distinct southern interpretation of anticommunism characterized by the history and values of the region. Lewis offers a shallow analysis of anticommunism. Although he does sufficiently make the case for a distinct southern version of anticommunism, a deeper intellectual and philosophical conversation may have produced a more abstract as well as concrete understanding. Instead, and while it serves his argument well, Lewis serves us an almost undefinable anticommunism; other than southern traditions of antiradicalism and anticommunism, the term is untethered.
In a similar vein to A. James McAdams interpretive understanding of the communist party as an idea, all three historians, but Lewis and Woods especially, present anticommunism as an idea that is adaptable and flexible enough to apply to a myriad of social and political conditions.[40] Therefore, their interpretations of anticommunism, specifically Lewis’s use of it as a frame of analysis for The White South and the Red Menace, offers a template to explore the role of anticommunism in other areas and possibly inspire comparative histories. It would be interesting to apply Lewis’s methodological approach to southerners’ use of anticommunism during the 1920s and 1930s. Although he does comment on these decades in The White South and the Red Menace, he does so briefly and with a precise purpose. His quick observation delivers just enough historical evidence and analysis to support his claim of a tradition of antiradicalism and anticommunism in the South. A more in-depth survey may offer new insights on labor and civil rights movements in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. Also, it would further explore and strengthen his notion of a southern tradition of antiradicalism and anticommunism by illuminating potential new historical patterns and trends. Despite his continuous use of regional characteristics and traits, Lewis argues that it is “too simplistic to see the region as a single unified whole.”[41] His comparative analysis of North Carolina and Virginia highlighting the nuance and diversity of how southerners understood and why they employed anticommunism confirms this sentiment. Therefore, a temporally and spatially more expansive comparative analysis may facilitate a process of discerning distinct political subcultures within the broader regional South.
With his description and analysis of Matthews and Lowman, Katagiri teases the potential of a North and South comparative history. This would help discern the differences between earlier national red scares, McCarthyism, and the southern red scare as outlined in Black Struggle, Red Scare and The White South and the Red Menace. Furthermore, it would illuminate the development of regional differences and similarities over the twentieth century. Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri occasionally offer glimpses of individuals who contradict predictable historical stereotypes. In Lewis’s work, for example, he provides a brief analysis of a southern, African American reverend who favors the use of anticommunism as a necessary political weapon and who is also highly critical of the NAACP. Within the Cold War civil rights historiography, scholars have shown how both black civil rights activists and white segregationists have navigated the Cold War climate to achieve certain political and cultural aims. Introducing new actors with less defined or more permeable political, cultural, and socio-economic categories would add a new dynamic to a field of study that seems content with histories of simple dichotomies. To Lewis’s credit, more than the others, he does attempt this through his study on anticommunism and how and why certain southerners employ its services.
The works of Woods, Lewis, and Katagiri are a welcome addition to the Cold War civil rights historiography. Their examinations of white segregationists and the role of anticommunism expand the field and open new avenues for historical inquiry. Furthermore, their studies illustrate the complexity and diversity of the White South. Thus, they offer a more nuanced understanding of the actions and rhetoric of white segregationists than previous scholarship. The field is still relatively small and many interpretive questions still have yet to be asked. And more vantage points beg for our viewing. Expanding the temporal and spatial framework of their narratives seems to offer an easy and quick opportunity to illuminate more historical developments and patterns. It will be interesting to see how other historians build on their research. For now, though, their works serve well for students—undergraduate and graduate—and historians of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the South, and anticommunism and communism.
[4] Some of these recommendations included “the enactment of an anti-poll tax law, the prohibition of segregation in interstate transportation facilities, and the renewal of the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC)” and to establish a Civil Rights Commission, Joint Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, and a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice; See Yasuhiro Katagiri, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), location 471, Kindle.
As with most works of scholarship, seemingly, Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rightsgerminated from another process of intellectual inquiry. During law school, Dudziak spent a summer working for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For an ongoing school desegregation litigation, the ACLU needed her to construct a history of segregation in Topeka, Kansas. This project engendered Dudziak’s interest in understanding how Topeka felt about its role in the broader civil rights movement.
Initially, Dudziak intended “to write a community-centered study” on this topic to serve as her Ph.D. dissertation. 2 However, her curiosity in a school board member’s use of ‘American practice’ when discussing desegregation guided her to investigate why. This scholarly exploration led to connections between the Cold War, foreign and domestic policies, and the civil rights movement.
Eventually, and years later, Dudziak compiled her research and thoughts on this topic to produce Cold War Civil Rights, a work that internationalizes and reframes the civil rights movement within the Cold War.
Purpose & Argument
Purpose
Dudziak’s “Cold War Civil Rights traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy by setting a U.S. history topic within the context of Cold War world history.” 3
By reframing the civil rights movement within the broader Cold War history, Dudziak internationalizes a seemingly domestic topic to illuminate on the interconnections of national and global affairs. Thus, her approach adds another layer of analysis to understanding both the civil rights movement and the Cold War.
Arguments
In her introduction, Dudziak states “World War II marked a transition point in American foreign relations, American politics, and American.” 4 Her arguments throughout Cold War Civil Rightsemerge from this starting point. Even though she does not detail why–as it is out of the scope of this work–Dudziak does make clear the period of history that followed World War II offered a strikingly different relationship for America at home and abroad. America, unlike before, stood as one of the world powers in the newly established bi-polar world. This led to a conscientious effort to define ‘American’ as unique and wholly superior to the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR).
As a result, politicians and citizens alike placed American democracy on a moral pedestal above the tyrannical and oppressive system of communism. According to Dudziak, this simultaneously had a positive and negative effect on social movements within the United States. The Cold War climate led to restrictions on “discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class.” 5 Also, it facilitated the denial of discourse on the relationship between racism and colonialism.
However, the politics of the Cold War, even with its constrictions, created a narrow avenue that enabled the passing of selected civil rights reforms and legislations. Dudziak’s arguments rest on this foundation. She illustrates how racism at home undermined America’s international leadership and claim as leader of the free world. USSR, and even allies, routinely publicized events that displayed America’s hypocrisy through its treatment of its African American citizens. In doing so, Dudziak claims that much of the federal government’s receptive response to grass-roots efforts for civil rights during this time derived from an international policy perspective.
Methodology
Dudziak examines the civil rights movement through the reactions of the international community and the responses of the US federal government. As a result, she takes a top-down approach, bringing national and international leaders to the forefront. Specifically, she addresses the actions and rhetoric of presidents and members of the US Department of State.
Although Dudziak’s narrative seemingly ignores the agency and determination of everyday African Americans and grassroots activists, she addresses this concern early. She states that “this focus on particular events and often on prominent leaders should not be seen as an effort to privilege a top-down focus as ‘the’ story of civil rights history. The international perspective is not a substitute for the rich body of civil rights scholarship but another dimension that sheds light on those important and well-told stories.” 6 Furthermore, throughout her work, Dudziak repeatedly emphasizes the fact that international criticism and US response would not have occurred without African Americans actively fighting for racial equality.
Sources
Dudziak utilizes a variety of sources including foreign and domestic newspapers, State Department records, publications from the United States Information Agency (USIA), diplomatic correspondences, and Supreme Court briefs. As noted before, her sources reflect her ‘top-down’ approach. However, it also enables a thorough analysis of the federal government’s assessment and response to the international reaction and reception of the American civil rights movement within the geopolitical context of the Cold War.
According to Rediker, the purpose of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is to “recover the experiences of the common seaman in the first half of the eighteenth century, to continue and extend the path-breaking work of Jesse Lemisch, and to do so in the spirit of ‘history from the bottom up.'” 8
Additionally, his work is “part of a larger current effort to transform ‘labor history’ into ‘working-class history.'” 9 That is to say, labor history should be more than the political and economic conflicts between capital and labor. It should include the cultural background and social relations that defined and bounded individual and collective groups of workers.
Therefore, his narrative is more inclusive than traditional labor history and expands on the historiography by continuing its trajectory toward a working-class history.
Arguments
Rediker’s contribution to historiography is the expansion of the theoretical framework for the relationship of capital and labor to include seafarers of the pre-industrial period. His work is founded on the central idea that “the seaman was central to the changing history and political economy of the North Atlantic world.” 10 According to Rediker, early eighteenth-century seaman accomplished such a feat by entering “new relations both to capital–as one of the first generations of free waged labors–and to each other–as collective laborers.” 11
Rediker argues that not only did the merchant ship engender a sense of collectivity among the entire ship in “confrontation with nature and by the need for survival,” but also a collectivity among the common tars. 12 The latter led to a pre-industrial class of workers delineated by shared language, culture, and characteristics of anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperation for the common good of all seamen.
The free wage laborers nineteenth-century and twentieth-century–the field hands, the factory workers, the skilled and unskilled laborers–descended the eighteenth-century seamen. The conflicts over pay and working conditions and the negotiating tactics and strategies seaman employed not only represented a shared experience for later laborers but also marked the beginning of collectivism among workers against capital. In essence, the merchant ship was the precursor to the factory.
Methodology
For Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Rediker uses an interdisciplinary approach to construct his working-class history. He draws upon recent scholarship in history, linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and ethnography. Such an approach allows Rediker to elaborate on the work of eighteenth-century seafarers. More importantly, it enables Rediker to explore and illuminate the cultural and social identity and consciousness of these seamen.
The necessity of employing an interdisciplinary approach stems from Rediker’s view of history. He believes “that the history of seafaring people can and must be more than a chronicle of admirals, captains, and military battles at sea: It must be made to speak to larger historical problems and processes. The seaman’s life and labor require an international history, linking the pasts of Britain and America to broad intercultural histories of continental Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the East and West Indies.” 13
Furthermore, and in a similar vein to E.P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman, and Eugene D. Genovese, Rediker approached and conducted his interpretation of source material in a way to present history from the bottom up.
Sources
Rediker relies seemingly equally upon, both, primary and secondary sources. As mentioned above, his choice of secondary sources derived from an array of historical fields and academic disciplines. This is required for two reasons. First, to build his theoretical framework that includes expanding characteristics associated with nineteenth-century global industrial capitalism to a pre-industrial period. And second, to detail how early-eighteenth century seamen formed a collective identity and consciousness. One that was acknowledged even among the general populous in port towns of the British Empire.
Although Rediker employs newspapers, ship logs, an assortment of governmental documents, and personal correspondences, journals, and diaries, “the records produced by the admiralty courts–documents on more than 2,200 cases between 1700-1750–have served as a foundation for this study.” 14 The records of the admiralty court records provide a variety of perspectives from those aboard the merchant ship. Thus, offering invaluable insights into the daily life and relationships of seamen and their captains.
However, as Rediker notes, these sources are not without their “problems and inconsistencies.” 15 Namely, the admiralty courts favored merchants and captains over seamen and final court decisions are often unknown due to appeals and settlements outside the court.
Originally published in 1983, Changes in the Landdeveloped from a seminar paper Cronon wrote during his first year of graduate school at Yale University. Although his professor, Edmund Morgan, hoped he would publish his work, Cronon seemed reluctant at first. As he puts it, “I had come to Yale not to write about colonial New England, to study Chicago and its hinterland in the nineteenth-century Middle West.” 16
Thus, the writing and research that would become a foundational pillar to the field of environmental history resided in the purgatory of Cronon’s filing cabinet for two years.
Luckily, as life happens so often, a series of serendipitous events and introductions over a few week period led to Cronon expanding on his original seminar paper and publishing it as the book Changes in the Land.
Purpose & Argument
In the preface, Cronon explicitly and clearly states both his thesis and purpose for writing Changes in the Land. Additionally, and although he attributes much of the ecological changes to European views on property and capitalism, Cronon is adamant that his work is “not a human history.” 17
Purpose
According to Cronon, his “purpose throughout is to explain why New England habitats changed as they did during the colonial period. It is not my intention to rewrite the human history of the region: this is not a history of New England Indians, or of Indian-colonial relations, of the transformation of English colonists from Puritans to Yankees.” 18
Thesis
Cronon writes, “my thesis is simple: the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes–well known to historians–in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations–less well-known historians–in the region’s plants and animal communities.” 19
Arguments
The primacy of Cronon’s argument is the different and conflicting views of land and property held by Indians and colonists, and their effects on the ecology of New England. Whereas Indians perceived the land as something to be used, colonists understood land as property to be owned and to produce commodities.
Before European settlement, New England was the home of a mobile human population that relocated villages from habitat to habitat and viewed property rights according to ecological use and need. Afterward, New England was the home to a human population that believed in fixity and property rights as owners of the land itself. Land and natural resources were now a commodity to be sold, bought, and profited off of in pursuit of more property and material wealth.
This transition in way of perceiving and using the land led to large populations of livestock and other non-native animals, large-scale deforestation and grazing, wide-spread hunting, fishing, and fur trapping, removal of native flora and fauna that proved invaluable as market goods, and the bounding of land with fences and other markers of ownership.
As Cronon illustrates throughout, the effects of such a transition were vast and immense. The fusion of European views of property and land, the global market, and the abundant natural resources of New England forever transformed the ecological landscape of the region.
Methodology
Cronon constructed his narrative and argument, both, thematically and chronologically. He begins by contrasting the precolonial ecosystems of New England with those at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He follows with a comparison of the ecological relationships of pre-colonial Indians and the Europeans arriving in New England. His work then continues on to describe the process of ecological change following European arrival.
Sources
Cronon relied on a variety of sources that range from ones common to the practice of history (e.g. contemporary accounts and records) and ones a bit more unorthodox but no less, and arguably more, important to his particular historical narrative.
The writings and descriptions of travelers and early naturalists, both during the nascent years of English settlement and later towards the end of the eighteenth-century, do much of the heavy lifting. But as Cronon argues, although they provide contemporary observations of New England landscapes and the changes that occurred over the course of colonial settlement, they also require proper evaluation of the individual’s skills as a naturalist. Additionally, what purpose did the individual have to write their account? How much of the land did they explore and detail? These questions shaped much of Cronon’s decision to use and how to interpret these sources.
Although less personal, colonial town, court, and legislative records offered more detailed data and specifics on deforestation, livestock and predators, property boundaries, conflicts between Indians and colonists, and the composition of forests. Furthermore, this information helped assess and corroborate individual accounts.
Cronon also used less traditional sources in the form of relict old-growth timber, fossil pollen in pond and bog sediments, and microscopic changes in soil flora and fauna. Admittedly, he discusses his intellectual limitations in using such sources but argues such sources are needed to illustrate the ecological changes of colonial New England.
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