Red Scares and Anti-Communist Demagogues : History of U.S. Redbaiting

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38088923

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38088845

Using anti-communism as a ploy to suppress marginalized people’s progress is well understood as a recent phenomenon, but rarely explained as a long-term problem throughout American history. We need a more complete history of redbaiting, which is what I hope this episode will provide by combining several works together. There's been this perennial question among labor historians, which is: Why is there no substantial American left? Our politics are so warped that we often call liberals “leftists,” which they are not. The answer to why leftism is so weak here is redbaiting, as in scare-mongering about some leftist cabal destroying our country. ――――――――― Bibliography Brian Brown, Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness (New York: Twelve, 2019), audible. https://amzn.to/3mt6vfp

Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007). https://amzn.to/2NHIcaT

M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (Baltimore, Mar.: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). https://amzn.to/3hvXro3

David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), audiobook. https://amzn.to/3Eea9pY

Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011). https://amzn.to/4bQHbZJ

D.J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), ebook. https://amzn.to/3cQKene

Kathryn Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009). https://amzn.to/2unDgjI

Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2005). https://amzn.to/4j8EtBM

Larry Tye, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe Mccarthy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). https://amzn.to/4lnTfWJ