William P. Jones
Well, there was a lot of variety within the CIO at the time. I think there were two ways in which the question of anti-communism affected things. One was the increasing intensity of the backlash against the Communist Party, pretty much following right on the heels of World War II. During the war, the United States was allied with the Soviet Union. And so communists weren’t seen as a particular threat then. But that shifted very dramatically after the war, as the United States shifted into a more oppositional position in relation to the Soviet Union. So that’s one broader context in which I think it’s important to understand the situation.
The other is the fact that Jim Crow was very well-established in the South. There was a sense that Jim Crow had been challenged both by the rise of organized labor and by the economic and political disruptions of World War II, the rhetoric of anti-fascism and anti-racism that took off after the war. And so the postwar period was one of backlash both against the communists and against racial equality.
Within the CIO, there were people who took a number of different positions on how to respond. Some, particularly those who were close to the Communist Party, felt that it didn’t make sense to give any concessions to that backlash, that any sort of suggestion that communism represented any threat internationally, that any suggestion that the Soviet Union represented a threat to democracy or to the United States, was a concession to this backlash.
That was a minority position within the CIO. But still many within the CIO felt that they needed to defend people’s civil liberties, the rights of people to affiliate with the Communist Party. Many within the CIO who were not allied with the Communist Party continued to have a favorable view of the Soviet Union as a nation that had dramatically…
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Auteur: William P. Jones
