Abstract
Since the collapse of Communism in Europe, scholars have begun to reexamine topics once taken for granted. There has been growing interest in American anti-communism. Although American anti-communism is popularly viewed through simplistic and often cartoonish stereotypes, scholars such as Richard Gid Powers have shown that it was a complex phenomenon.1 While some cold war American anti-communists were their own worst enemies and handed their foes the weapons that helped discredit anti-communism in the eyes of most intellectuals, artists, and opinion makers, a grudging consensus has emerged (based on declassified U.S. and Soviet documents) that on the major issues, the anti-communists were fundamentally correct. Communism was a murderous ideology detrimental to human freedom; the Soviet Union, Communist China and its allies murdered and enslaved countless millions; and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was indeed a willing tool of Moscow.2 Powers further shows that American anti-communists emerged from all sides of the political spectrum, and with a variety of motives.
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Notes
See Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Among the most important of the American document collections have been the Venona archives, now available online at www.nsa.gov. See also Herbert Rommerstein and Eric Briendel, Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Chicago: Regnery, 2001).
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003).
Matthew Kaminski, “A Voice for Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2007. Numerous émigré writers and artists, many of considerable talent, performed on the broadcasts. Choirs from the Polish Singer’s Alliance of America gave monthly performances on the Polish broadcasts of RFE. See Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Choral Patriotism: The Polish Singers Alliance of America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 101.
Powers uses the term “ethnic anti-communism” only once in his book. See also Athan G. Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970).
See John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
See Michael Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1972)
Thaddeus C. Radzialowski, “View from a Polish Ghetto: Reflections on the First 100 Years in Detroit,” Ethnicity 1 (1974): 125–50.
See David M. Oshinsky, Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976).
Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Politics and Polonia,” in Polish Americans and their History: Community, Culture, Politics, ed. John J. Bukowczyk (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 144.
See John Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross (New York: Columbia University Press/Eastern European Monographs, 2003).
See Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross, 87–91. See also Arthur Irwin Imhoff, Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996).
See, for example, June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride and American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other New Immigrants in the Interwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 187–89.
Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Bread and Butter Politics or Foreign Policy Concerns? Class versus Ethnicity in the Midwestern Polish-American Community during the 1946 Congressional Elections,” Polish American Studies 51, no. 2 (1994): 5–32.
Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: Cold War Political Culture, Polish-American Politics, the Truman Doctrine, and the Victory Thesis,” Polish Review 51, no. 3–4 (2006): 263–81.
Robert Szymczak, “Hopes and Promises: Arthur Bliss Lane, the Republican Party, and the Slavic-American Vote, 1952,” Polish American Studies 45, no. 1 (1988): 12–28.
There are a couple of valuable works that deal with the political and social tensions among immigrant waves within a single group (as opposed to generational tensions). See Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004)
Mary Patrice Erdmans, Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
See, for example, Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War (New York: International Publishers, 1989)
Fran Koscielski, Divided Loyalties: American Unions and the Vietnam War (New York: Garland, 1999)
Edmund F. Wehrle, Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
See the reports of Lange and Bolesłw Gebert of May 17, 27, and 29, 1944, as well as April 18 and July 29, 1943, available at www.nsa.gov/venona/venon00017.cfm. On Lange, see Robert Szymczak, “Oskar Lange, American Polonia, and the Polish-Soviet Dilemma during World War II: I. The Public Partisan as Private Emissary,” Polish Review 40, no. 1 (1995): 3–27
See, for example, Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Polska Ludowa i Polonia amerykanska (1944–1956),” Przegląd Polonijny 22, no. 1 (1996): 9–41.
Slawomir Cenckiewicz, Oczami bezpieki: Szkice i materiały z dziejów aparatu bezpieczeństwa PRL (Krakow: Arcana, 2006).
Michael Szporer, “The Security Forces and Polish Communism: Reclaiming History from Myth,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 1 (2007): 88–95.
Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Cold War Ethnic Politics: The Polish National Catholic Church, the Polish American Congress, and People’s Poland: 1944–1952,” Polish American Studies 55, no. 2 (1998): 5–24.
Theodore L. Zawistowski, “On the Death of Bishop Padewski in a Communist Prison,” Polish Review 48, no. 3 (2003): 347–65.
See Norta Turlock, Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal, 2nd ed. (New York: Encounter Books, 2004).
On the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989).
Halina Stepan, “Polish Émigré Writers in New York in the Files of the FBI: Lechoń, Wierzyński, Wittlin,” Polish Review 51, no. 1 (2006): 41–53.
E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: John Wiley, 1994), 244–50.
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© 2009 Ieva Zake
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Radzilowski, J. (2009). Introduction Ethnic Anti-Communism in the United States. In: Zake, I. (eds) Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621596_1
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