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This digital project explores government surveillance and political action through folklore. The project focuses on the unpublished essay of folklorist Benjamin Botkin titled “Progress: Negroes and Everybody, From Folk Tale to Science Fiction.” Botkin was a prominent academic in his field, and created the theoretical approach to folklore he termed “applied folklore.” Botkin’s approach to folklore gained considerable attention, both positive and negative, due to his unique emphasis on the present time and the ever-changing nature of folklore, and his politicization of folklore as a method for uniting working class citizens. For decades, Botkin was under clandestine surveillance by the F.B.I. for being suspected of communist ties and actions. In January of 1954, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced at Botkin’s home to interview him. The event left Botkin shaken and altered his outlook on American politics and community. Botkin’s daughter Dorothy Botkin reflected on this change in Botkin’s demeanor later in her life and believed that this event caused a major shift in Benjamin Botkin’s activities and intellectual pursuits.

Dwight D. Eisenhower has been criticized as an anti-intellectual by scholars such as Richard Hofstadter. Eisenhower’s tenure as president of Columbia University was one segment of his career he was particularly criticized for because of his non-traditional approach to education there. This paper examines Eisenhower’s time at Columbia to explain how anti-intellectualism played into his university administration. It explains how his personality and general outlook came to clash with the intellectual environment of Columbia especially in the wake of the faculty revolt against former Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler. It argues that Eisenhower utilized the Columbia institution to promote a Cold War educational agenda, which often belittled Columbia intellectuals and their scholarly pursuits. However, this paper also counter-argues that Eisenhower, despite accusations of anti-intellectualism, was an academically interested man who never engaged in true suppression of free thought despite pressure from McCarthyite influences in American government, media and business.

This edition is an annotated selection of the correspondences of two screenwriters, Michael Blankfort and Albert Maltz, who were affected by institutional anti-communism. Both were subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): Maltz refused to answer questions, went to prison for contempt of Congress as a member of the Hollywood Ten, and was blacklisted from the film industry for nearly two decades; Blankfort cooperated with the committee and continued to work in Hollywood. They had been close friends for quite some time, but never spoke again following Blankfort’s HUAC appearance, despite a few attempts by Blankfort at renewing the friendship. The letters span five decades, beginning with the period of radicalization in the 1930s, through the era of blacklisting and all that followed in its wake, and ending with their deaths in the 1980s. Blankfort and Maltz’s encounters with HUAC affected them their entire lives after: Blankfort in his need to defend his actions even decades later, and Maltz in his need to denounce any person who cooperated with the committee. The letters demonstrate humanity through the difficulty of the situation, the struggle of navigating the politics of the times, and are the writers’ attempts to explain and justify their actions.

This study investigates The South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, an art center founded at the end of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. The Art Center was only one of a handful of African-American art centers in the nation, and was one of the only locations that black artists could showcase their work proudly on the South Side. An examination is made into the period of time after federal funds were pulled, focusing on 1942-1959, to examine how exactly the Art Center kept its doors open. An overview of the founding of the SSCAC is presented, alongside theoretical lenses used in the crafting of a specific theoretical framework to analyze the Art Center. This study uses historical interpretation of archive data from the SSCAC from 1942-1959. An investigation of archived information found a noticeable gap in data between 1950-1953, leading to the use of historic imagination surrounding the missing material. Using historical imagination, two hypotheses were put forth to explain the lack of information found in the archive. First, the historic significance of McCarthyism on black individuals is highlighted. Second, the elusive histories of black women which are often missing from traditional archives is brought forth as a possible explanation for why the data does not seem to exist. The research concludes with a reflection on the difficulty of studying small institutions and specifically the histories of oppressed groups.

The purpose of this study is to examine the status of academic freedom and, more specifically, intramural and extramural speech at universities in the U.S. since 2000. Court opinions and briefs from benchmark court cases and the faculty's perspective of current academic freedom issues are analyzed to determine dominant trends and themes that have evolved since 2000. While others have studied the relationship between the First Amendment and academic freedom, this analysis brings current the discourse concerning the effect First Amendment court decisions have on the faculty speech. The central research question is to determine the effect court decisions have on the intramural and extramural speech of faculty and specifically to study how federal, state, and local events since 2000 have affected (a) the academic freedom of faculty in general, (b) the way universities handle faculty intramural speech, (c) the way universities handle faculty extramural speech when they speak both as a citizen and a public university employee, and (d) the ability of faculty to defend their academic freedom. Using post-modern theory, the two-phased mixed methods study deconstructs and analyzes (a) the six First Amendment court opinions and briefs and (b) the 19 interviews of public university faculty members. The first phase identified 11 dominant themes, which were used as the basis for the coding and the 19 interviews of public university faculty members. The interview coding and analysis identified 15 themes. Based on the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, four themes were identified in the court opinions and six in the interviews are discussed. The second phase also included surveys of the faculty interviewed and a quantitative analysis of the responses in order to classify the sample. The study found that public universities have complete control over academic freedom, and that it is a privilege granted to faculty based on their scholarly association with the university, not a right. Public university administrators, general counsels, deans, department chairs, and faculty will benefit from the study as it provides an intensive analysis of post-2000 court case logic and the current perceptions and apprehensions that faculty have concerning their intramural and extramural speech rights.

The following is an investigation of the experience of Roy Marcus Cohn, American lawyer, bureaucrat, federal prosecutor, and celebrity, during his time working as the chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations headed by Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. It argues that Cohn pursued power by actively falsifying a public image of stereotypical masculinity while privately engaging in non-normative sexual behaviors. His upbringing and youthful experiences informed his understanding of mid-century American masculinity, his early professional career allowed him an audience in front of which to perform his version of masculinity, and his entry onto the national stage as an ally of McCarthy’s finally brought this ruse to an end during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. An exploration of this period in American history and Cohn’s life fosters a deeper understanding of themes of masculinity, homosexuality, queerness, public knowledge, gossip, power politics, the lavender scare, the red scare, and McCarthyism.

Eric Bentley is arguably one of the most prominent theatre scholar-critics of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for translating and advocating for Brecht’s plays in English-speaking countries. In books such as The Playwright as Thinker, he makes the case for non-commercial theatre as a political force and valuable form of cultural expression. In his later career, he turned his attention towards playwriting, which he identifies as his most worthwhile pursuit. His transition from critic to playwright is just one of many major shifts in his life and career, which I argue is defined by doubleness. Bentley even describes himself as living several double lives. These shifts involve politics, sexuality, culture, and artistic expression. In this study, I analyze various writings from throughout Bentley’s career in order to examine the sociopolitical energies at play in his work. Early in this study, I establish post-structural analysis as my overarching theoretical frame. I specifically employ the writings and theories of Michael Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt and the new historicists. Leftist politics and Marxism provide another broad arc to my study of Bentley’s work. My theoretical approach allows me to examine his position within a constantly shifting field of power relations as it relates to public and private social, political, cultural, and artistic issues. Specifically, I look at the circular effects of the relations between Bentley and socialism, anticommunism, the New Left, the counterculture movement, and gay liberation. Throughout my analysis, I view artistic and social performance as a vital cultural expression and a valuable way of exercising power. I look to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Vietnam War protests, the Radical Theatre Movement, and gay liberation as examples of how performance was at the foundation of various major social and political conflicts during the twentieth century. I believe that Bentley was very much aware of performance’s role in these struggles and actively used his capacities as critic, playwright, and public intellectual to draw attention to this, despite his tendency to be caught between opposing sides.

Anti-communism in America reached its apex in the 1950s. One element of this crusade focused on preventing suspected communists from working in their chosen profession, a practice called blacklisting. In attempting to assert their legal rights, the blacklisted found an imperfect justice system, cloaked in equality, yet hampered by the existing cultural setting that treated as immoral anything communist. This dissertation deconstructs the interplay between culture and law, between the desire to root out communists and the attempt to maintain a fair legal system. With an emphasis on the entertainment industry, broadly defined, I will trace blacklisting from anti-labor tool to for-profit instrument focusing on how the blacklisted employed the lawsuit to fight for their jobs. I argue that from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, blacklisted plaintiffs continuously found themselves handicapped by their association -- either current or past, real or perceived -- with the Communist Party, and not until a plaintiff with no demonstrable ties to communism came along did the legal system prove a comprehensively effective tool in ending the practice. I show that various members of the blacklisted community, with the aid of a small number of lawyers, tried an assortment of legal theories in their attempt to remedy their pariah status with the results often promising -- the first three jury trials ended in victories for the plaintiffs -- but ultimately hollow as a recalcitrant appellate judiciary dashed these early hopes. Moreover, I show how plaintiff's lawyers, sensitive to a legal system that demanded a successful plaintiff be free of communist ties, adjusted their strategy to accommodate the relationship between cultural setting and legal success.

A thesis presented on the American public opinion of Josef Stalin before and after World War II beginning with how Russia and Stalin was portrayed in the media before the war began, covering how opinions shifted with major events such as the famine, collectivization, the Great Terror, wartime conferences, the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Understanding how anti-Communists in Congress manipulated public opinion through the press is critical in understanding how McCarthyism worked. This study traces the development of press interaction techniques, focusing on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy from 1938 to 1952. HUAC used the print press and radio to maximum advantage to create a discourse of fear and convince the public of the need for further investigations. Their savvy press manipulation allowed them to sidestep opposition attempts to moderate the Committee or shut it down. This study also demonstrates that Senator Joseph McCarthy drew heavily upon these precedents in his own rise to power. Given this evidence, it should not be surprising that television, the medium for which McCarthy had no established precedent, ended his career.

This dissertation focuses on various texts of the early Cold War (1945-1960) to show how several politically left writers engaged gender relations, civil rights, and the labor movement in the context of McCarthyism. This project argues that some cultural producers substituted more overt forms of mass politics and self-expression with literary activism and uses three representatives of different positions on the left, playwright Theodore Ward, novelist Ann Petry and the serial publication Correspondence to demonstrate how they modified their work to depict injustices in the repressive early Cold War. After an introductory chapter exploring scholarship on left culture in the 1950s and defining key terms, in Chapter 2 I turn to Ward's complicated dramatizations of African American women as sites of labor and sexual exploitation as well as fortitude and resistance. I argue that Ward's prescient concern with intersectionality developed in tandem with increased external repression, and his vision simultaneously moves from Popular Front visions of collective action to individualized protest. Chapter 3 explores Ann Petry's deployment of domestic servants as representative of racialized and gendered labor in the early Cold War, arguing that Petry locates agency and especial insight in marginal characters who, as workers, are isolated and both subject to and capable of surveillance. In Chapter 4, I focus on Correspondence as a form of journalistic activism in the 1950s. I show how Correspondence facilitated a greater engagement in its pages with issues of gender, family and racialized labor. Correspondence's hostility towards the Communist Party of the United States and the Soviet Union is also explored in depth to show how such antipathies failed to protect the group from debilitating McCarthyist harassment. This project expands on relevant ongoing discussions of the varieties of political activism invoked at times of reduced capacity. Thus this project brings attention to writers that have often been obscured by the very forces they protested, and engages the work of racially and politically marginalized people whose activism bridges the more well-known cultural and social movements of the 1930s and the 1960s.

In the early years of the Cold War, more than one hundred American academics lost their jobs because university administrators suspected them of Communist Party membership. How did intellectuals respond to this crisis? Referring to contemporary books, articles, organizational statements, and correspondence, I argue that disputes over academic freedom helped shatter a tenuous liberal consensus, unite conservatives, and challenge defenses of professorial liberty among academia’s largest professional organization, the American Association of University Professors. Specifically, I show how Sidney Hook and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s dispute over academic freedom was representative of larger quarrels among liberals over McCarthyism. Conversely, I demonstrate that conservatives such as William Buckley Jr. and Russell Kirk overcame serious differences on academic freedom to present a united front against liberalism, in and outside of the academy. Finally, I show the difficulty an organization such as the AAUP encounters when defending professional values in a democratic society.