Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Cohen, Ronald D

Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism, and the US. Peace Movement, 1945-1963. By Robbie Lieberman. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Pp. 272. Illustrations, index. Cloth, $34.95. A volume in the Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution series.

Robbie Lieberman, associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University and author of the award winning "My Song Is My Weapon": People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture (1989), has long been involved in promoting and studying peace movements. Combining her various academic interests, she now directs her attention to the convoluted connection between the always controversial Communist Party and the struggle to promote peace from the 1930s into the 1960s. As a fitting touch, the book's title and each chapter title are drawn from a song dealing with matters of war, peace, and social change.

Using a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, including a number of stimulating interviews, Lieberman begins with the ups and downs of the peace movement during the depression years, when lingering memories of World War I propelled many college students to support pacifism. The Communist Party dropped this position with the outbreak of civil war in Spain in mid-decade and increasing fears of escalating fascism in Europe. Others on the left became increasingly suspicious of communists, however, particularly after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet peace pact in 1939 and the party's turn towards non-intervention as Germany launched World War II. Then, two years later, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, soon followed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, pacifists were in short supply as the vast majority of Americans, particularly communists, became pro-war.

Following the war, Lieberman makes a distinction between the Soviet Union's vocal struggle for peace and the U.S.'s preference for freedom, with the two goals increasingly clashing and diverging. Part of the early controversy centered on the use and future of the atom bomb, with perhaps international control, although the author does not explore this topic in depth. She does detail the Henry Wallace presidential campaign in 1948, on the Progressive Party ticket, which, for some, clarified the split between the Communist left and its supporters opting for negotiations versus the Truman administration's increasing emphasis on a Cold War confrontational style (which the Republican Party thoroughly supported). Anticommunism fueled the attack on Wallace and the peace movement, which fared poorly in the election, as communism and liberalism permanently parted company. The following year two events drove home the message. A peace conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, attracting a range of prominent individuals, faced a firestorm of criticism, as it coincided with the opening trials of the Communist Party leadership also in New York City - although the conference ended with eighteen thousand attending a rally at Madison Square Garden. Then, a few months later, a concert for peace and civil rights at Peekskill, New York, featuring Paul Robeson, became a battleground as thousands of concert-goers were viciously attacked by screaming "patriots" as they left the grounds. As the fifties dawned, Lieberman notes, "peaceful coexistence became an extreme and isolated position, associated exclusively with the Communist Left. Pressure to accept the cold war consensus came from government agencies and private citizens alike." (p. 65)

The outbreak of war in Korea in 1950, opposed by Communists and pacifists, ushered in a decade that witnessed extreme anticommunism and patriotism, although there were some exceptions. The Stockholm Peace Petition to ban atomic weapons, strongly supported by the Communist Party, and despite massive criticism, attracted over a million signatures. The anti-bomb movement struggled through the decade, connected to increasing fears in England and Europe, with the shriveled Communist Party quite isolated even as the Cold War began to experience somewhat of a thaw. New peace groups began to spring up, however, first with the maledominated Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957, then Women Strike for Peace (WSP) in 1961; while the former struggled with the communist issue, WSP tried to ignore the matter, with some success. Even President John Kennedy began to support a nuclear test ban treaty, denoting the growing popularity of the cause.

"The anti-Communist crusade of the early cold war years defined the way 'peace' would be understood from then on," Lieberman concludes. This unfortunate connection of peace and Communist subversion was more the product of cold war fears than any reality of internal Communist power or threats. The author parts company with much of the recent literature that focuses on a worldwide Communist conspiracy, with a rigid hierarchical structure, that included domestic spying, at least up to the mid-1940s. Lieberman does not excuse the party for its often devious conduct and unswerving support for the Soviet Union, but tends to criticize the more extreme views of the anticommunists, who undermined meaningful attempts to promote peace in the name of patriotism and national security, with the Vietnam War as the ultimate sorry result. Skipping to the present, the author thoughtfully, and darkly, concludes: "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." (p. 191)