Loyalty and Liberty

Loyalty and Liberty
Author: Alex Goodall
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2013-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0252095316

Loyalty and Liberty offers the first comprehensive account of the politics of countersubversion in the United States prior to the McCarthy era. Beginning with the loyalty politics of World War I, Alex Goodall traces the course of American countersubversion as it ebbed and flowed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This sweeping study explores how antisubversive fervor was dampened in the 1920s in response to the excesses of World War I, transformed by the politics of antifascism in the Depression era, and rekindled in opposition to Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal policies in the later 1930s and 1940s. Identifying varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats, Goodall demonstrates how countersubversive politics was far from unified: groups often pursued clashing aims while struggling to balance the competing pulls of loyalty to the nation and liberty of thought, speech, and action. Meanwhile, the federal government pursued its own course, which alternately converged with and diverged from the paths followed by private organizations. By the end of World War II, alliances on the left and right had largely consolidated into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Anticommunists on the right worked to rein in the supposedly dictatorial ambitions of the Roosevelt administration, while New Deal liberals divided into several camps: the Popular Front, civil liberties activists, and embryonic Cold Warriors who struggled with how to respond to communist espionage in Washington and communist influence in politics more broadly. Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, Goodall's masterful study shows how opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.

Liberty and the News

Liberty and the News
Author: Walter Lippmann
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2012-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0486136361

Written in the aftermath of World War I, this essay by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist remains relevant in its denunciation of media bias, particularly in terms of wartime propaganda.

Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion

Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion
Author: Carl R. Weinberg
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2005-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780809388424

On April 5, 1918, as American troops fought German forces on the Western Front, German American coal miner Robert Prager was hanged from a tree outside Collinsville, Illinois, having been accused of disloyal utterances about the United States and chased out of town by a mob. In Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I, Carl R. Weinberg offers a new perspective on the Prager lynching and confronts the widely accepted belief among labor historians that workers benefited from demonstrating loyalty to the nation. The first published study of wartime strikes in southwestern Illinois is a powerful look at a group of people whose labor was essential to the war economy but whose instincts for class solidarity spawned a rebellion against mine owners both during and after the war. At the same time, their patriotism wreaked violent working-class disunity that crested in the brutal murder of an immigrant worker. Weinberg argues that the heightened patriotism of the Prager lynching masked deep class tensions within the mining communities of southwestern Illinois that exploded after the Great War ended.

Freedom Incorporated

Freedom Incorporated
Author: Colleen Woods
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501749145

Freedom Incorporated demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. In this broad historical account, Colleen Woods demonstrates how, in the mid-twentieth century Philippines, US policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Officials at Malacañang Palace and the White House touted the 1946 signing of the liberating Treaty of Manila as a testament to the US commitment to the liberation of colonized people and celebrated it under the moniker of Philippine–American Friendship Day. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted US hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order. Woods finds that in order to justify US intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources, like the Hukbalahap Rebellion in central Luzon, to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, in Freedom Incorporated Woods illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.