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3 books match the query 'Anti - Communism'

cover of Anti-Communism in Britain During the Early Cold War: A Very British Witch-Hunt

Anti-Communism in Britain During the Early Cold War

A Very British Witch-Hunt

Matthew Gerth

University of London Press, 2022

A revisionist history of anti-communism in Britain during the early Cold War.
 
The Cold War produced in many countries a form of political repression and societal paranoia which often infected governmental and civic institutions. In the West, the driving catalyst for the phenomenon was anti-communism. While much has been written on the post-war American red scare commonly known as McCarthyism, the domestic British response to the “red menace” during the early Cold War has until now received little attention. Anti-communism in Britain During the Early Cold War is the first book to examine how British Cold War anti-communism transpired and manifested as McCarthyism raged across the Atlantic.

Drawing from a wealth of archival material, this book demonstrates that while policymakers and politicians in Britain sought to differentiate their anti-communist initiatives from the “witch hunt hysteria” occurring in the United States, they were often keen to conduct—albeit less publicly—their own hunts as well. Through analyzing how domestic anti-communism exhibited itself in state policies, political rhetoric, party politics, and the trade union movement, Matthew Gerth argues that an overreaction to the communist threat occurred. In striking detail, this book describes a nation at war with a specific political ideology and its willingness to use a variety of measures to either disrupt or eradicate its influence.
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cover of Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony

Cold War Puerto Rico

Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony

Steve Howell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence
 
In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence.

In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author César Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and FBI files, Howell tells their stories along with those of other activists who battled indictment in 1954 under the Smith Act, challenged the jurisdiction of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Juan in 1959, and revived the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s, despite the FBI deploying the covert tactics of COINTELPRO against them.

Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in histories of what is generally called McCarthyism, yet anti-communist repression was in many ways more intense there than in the mainland US. Now, with Puerto Rico’s future currently hanging in the balance, Howell’s compelling history demonstrates why we need to understand the long enforcement of its colonial status.
 

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cover of Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism

Painting Paranoia

Cold War Art and Anti-Communism

Julia Tatiana Bailey

University of Illinois Press, 2026

During the interwar years, as the USSR was emerging as a formidable new power and the United States was asserting its final independence from Europe, Russian art began to appear in the United States, supported by the influx of émigrés escaping revolutionary turmoil. While revolutionary Russia was viewed with trepidation from across the Atlantic, the country’s creative output was initially entertained as an exotic oddity. Yet this sense of cultural alienation, based on the classical orientalizing narratives of the period, gave way to the fear of the Soviet Union as a cultural Other, which defined US-Soviet artistic relations throughout the twentieth century.

Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Russia, this manuscript contributes to the political history of twentieth-century American art and the revisionist history of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War by charting the politicization of myths of Soviet art. It reveals how those with control over the reception of art in the United States built and sustained a strategy of othering towards Socialist Realism, presents the rhetoric of Soviet artistic otherness in the context of debates surrounding the concept of American art, and reclaims the post-war history of American Social Realism.
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