Commonsense Anticommunism

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America''s "first line of defense" against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists'' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL''s "commonsense anticommunism," she argues, steered a m...