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I wait for your touch to spring into lifeYour absence is pain and torment and strife(Helen Sobell, “Empty Hours”, 1956)1Shall I languish here forgottenOn the perjured word of oneOr will valiant men...

For much of the twentieth century, branches of the New Theatre in Australia presented left-wing theatre within a culture that was resistant to their ideas. A novel mix of conventional theatre forms, experimental performative styles, agitational propaganda and Communist theories of ‘art as a weapon’ produced theatre that was responsive to international issues, infused with social comment, and oppositional in orientation. The larger Melbourne and Sydney branches of the New Theatre, on which this article focuses, attracted the attention of governments and security services anxious about the ‘insidious’ influence of left-wing workers’ theatre. The article explores the various attempts to monitor, censor and silence the Melbourne and Sydney branches of New Theatre from 1936 to 1953, and suggests that the state circumscribed but did not cripple the groups’ contribution to the development of a radical cultural activist tradition in Australia.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested by the FBI in July 1950, put on trial in March 1951, and received the death sentence in April of that year. Their electrocution two years later, on 19 June ...

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs”, recalled Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Others recalled this event differently: as legal murder and a flagrant miscarriage of justice. The electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in June 1953, on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, was unprecedented in the history of the United States and aroused international outrage. Although there are scattered studies of the worldwide protest movement, none has examined the Australian dimension. This paper, therefore, fills a historiographical gap by exploring the genesis, development, and activities of the Australian campaign to pressure the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to grant clemency to the Rosenbergs. That campaign faced several obstacles: one was the liaison and intelligence sharing between the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and US Consular and Embassy officials in Sydney and Canberra and another was the infiltration of its leadership by an import...

The purpose of this article is to examine Shostakovich’s trip to the United States in 1949: why he went, why he experienced such extreme discomfort— ‘‘I still recall with horror my first trip to the USA’’ —and what it suggests about the paradoxical position of the creative artist from a Communist country during the early Cold War. Using Shostakovich as its primary focus, this article will reveal the contradictions between his officially sanctioned role and his private doubts and misgivings. Because the first subsumed the second, the costs were considerable: his creative work diminished and his self-respect suffered. This public/personal disjuncture was most acute from February 1948, associated with the ideological assault on his music led by Soviet functionary Andrei Zhdanov, until the death of Stalin in March 1953. In March 1949 it reached its apotheosis.

The historiography of the blacklist is uneven. There have been numerous scholarly studies and personal memoirs concerning blacklisting during the McCarthyist era, particularly in the entertainment industry. But there are very few works that directly focus on the blacklisting of writers, or refer to the subject of this paper, Howard Fast. There is no discussion of the processes or consequences of the blacklisting of Fast’s books in a critical biography, since none exists. This paper will therefore focus for the first time on the blacklisting experience of Fast. The period examined will be 1947 to 1958, when Fast’s literary reputation in the United States plummeted, along with the sales of his books. The paper will examine four different instances of blacklisting and explore the impact on Fast’s life. It will demonstrate that blacklisting significantly harmed Fast – professionally, financially and physically. In seeking to counteract such blacklisting, he used various devices, notably self-publication, none of them successful. It was only after he publicly renounced the Communist Party in 1957 that both his literary reputation and his access to publishers were restored

This special issue of American Communist History marks a starting point in the use of the comparative approach to better understand Communism and anti-Communism in both Australia and the United States. The main scholarly outlet for historians of Australian Communism remains the quarterly journal Labour History, which has been published continuously since 1962. It has made only two forays into comparative labor history— discussing Canada in 1996, and Great Britain in 2005. So this issue of American Communist History marks a new development: it is not only this journal’s first comparative issue, but also the first to bring together Australian and American Communist history.

This paper is an anatomy of an inquisition. It examines the Cold War persecution of Edwin Berry Burgum, a university professor and literary theorist. Whilst his professional competence was consistently applauded, his academic career was abruptly destroyed. His “fitness to teach” was determined by his political beliefs: he was a member of the American Communist Party. The paper argues that New York University, an institution that embodied liberal values, collaborated with McCarthyism. Using previously overlooked or unavailable sources, it reveals cooperation between NYU’s executive officers and the FBI, the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Through its focus on one individual, the paper illuminates larger themes of the vulnerability of academic freedom and the bureaucratic processes of political repression.

The aim of this paper is to use the assault on the JAFRC, and Barsky’s individual story within that, to illuminate the mechanisms of political repression during the early Cold War. The JAFRC was the first to be subpoenaed by HUAC, the first to challenge its legitimacy, and the first to set the pattern for Cold War inquisitions. In 1950, after three years of unsuccessful legal appeals, the Committee’s entire Executive Board was jailed. Barsky received the most severe sentence. It was the biggest single incarceration of political prisoners in America during the early Cold War. Upon release, Barsky lost his right to practise medicine. By early 1955, the JAFRC had dissolved: like Barsky’s career, it had been crippled by McCarthyism.

Because of its clandestine character, the world of the undercover agent has remained murky. This article attempts to illuminate this shadowy feature of intelligence operations. It examines the activities of one double agent, the Czech-born Maximilian Wechsler, who in the early 1970s successfully infiltrated two socialist organizations. Wechsler was engaged by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. However, he was ‘unreliable’: he came in from the cold and went public. The article uses his exposes to recreate his undercover role. It seeks to throw some light on the recruitment methods of ASIO, on the techniques of infiltration, on the relationship between ASIO and the Liberal Party during a period of political volatility in Australia, and on the contradictory position of the Labor Government towards the security services.

In 1948 O. John Rogge, a prominent American liberal, was a contender for the Progressive Party's vice-presidential nomination. He was then a man of the Left: an activist in the international peace movement, a champion of radical causes and a defender of organizations deemed subversive by the Department of Justice. In 1951 he persuaded his client to turn government witness in the Rosenberg espionage trial and was converted into ‘Rogge the Rat’ by his former allies. In tracing this transformation, this paper will argue that Rogge was neither a typical Cold War apostate nor a typical anti-Stalinist intellectual. Instead, his political trajectory was the outcome of a failed attempt to steer global politics away from Cold War dichotomies. The paper will therefore throw new light both on the movement to find a ‘third way’ between East and West, and on the phenomenon of non-communist Left activism during the early Cold War.

In the early 1950s the imminence and inevitability of a third world war was widely accepted. America had lost its atomic monopoly, Russia promoted itself as the defender of world peace against the war‐mongering West and Korea had turned the Cold War hot. In Australia, the Menzies government prepared the country for combat while the fledgling peace movement mobilised public opinion against war. This article will examine the contrasting reactions of both government and peace movement to the threat of war through the prism of the 1953 Convention on Peace and War, an event that has been overlooked by historians. The article will also analyse and evaluate Menzies’ political assault on the Convention: the context, the rationale and the consequences.

This article focuses primarily on Australian government responses to the 1952 Peace Conference for Asia and the Pacific Regions. Because the conference was to be held in Peking, it was the subject of immense controversy: Chinese communists were fighting Australian soldiers in Korea and Australian peace activists, most communist or 'fellow travellers', sought to travel behind the 'bamboo curtain'. In this context, the Menzies government's policies on passports were sharply silhouetted. Although this conference has been overlooked in the literature, we can infer from the trajectory of relevant Cold War historiography that Prime Minister Menzies would adopt restrictive, even draconian, policies. This article argues otherwise. It suggests that it was that consistent champion of civil liberties, former deputy prime minister, attorney-general and secretary of the General Assembly of the United Nations and now, in 1952, Leader of the Opposition, Dr Evatt, who favoured more repressive action towards prospective d...

The accepted historical view of British-Australian relations during the early Cold War emphasizes compliance, cooperation and dependency. Australia's acquiescence to British pressure to establish an effective security service and her readiness to permit British testing of atomic weapons on Australian soil are assumed to typify this close if subordinate relationship. The two countries, after all, shared a mutual interest in combating communism, globally and locally. However, an examination of one key aspect of the non-military response to the Cold War—anti-subversive and anti-communist propaganda—reveals a more complex picture. Using recently-released files from British and Australian archives, this article argues that attempts by a counter-propaganda unit of the British Foreign Office, the highly-secret Information Research Department, to forge a close working relationship with the Menzies government were met with indifference or resistance. Such unresponsiveness in such a crucial area challenges the accepted assumption that Australia in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, was a lackey of Great Britain.

In 1958 a British serviceman, based near the Woomera rocket range in South Australia, passed secrets to the Soviet Union. They concerned the joint Anglo-Australian guided missile project. Recently-released archival files reveal the intense anxiety, bordering on panic, that this security breach provoked in Canberra and London. The article places this reaction against the background of a long-term quest by Britain and Australia to convince the United States to restore wartime co-operation in the field of atomic technology and lift its embargo on the transmission of classified information. By unraveling, for the first time, the story of the Woomera spy case, the article illuminates issues of security, defence preparations and Anglo-Australian relations.

This article argues that the Attlee Labour government's depiction of communist influence within the trade union movement and, particularly, on the docks in the late 1940s, was neither as irrational nor deluded as many historians have alleged. When Attlee's response is understood within the context of Cold War developments, the Communist party emerges not as the innocent victim of government smears, but as a contributor to Labour's fears. The article explores the interplay between domestic and international concerns, and the nexus between local subservience to Moscow and the embrace of hard‐line sectarianism, and an aggressive Soviet foreign policy. The article also explores the role of the security services in sharpening Attlee's apprehensions about communism in Britain.

When a young ALP Industrial Group leader was thrown from a ferry, allegedly by communists, into Sydney Harbour during bitter Cold War battles inside the labour movement, it was the culmination of an extraordinary career involving duplicity, mendacity and political intrigue. This article peers into one year, 1949, of the crowded life of William Thomas Dobson. In doing so, it enables a fuller understanding of how Groupers, communists and security agents—all of whom Dobson worked for or had contact with—operated in Australia during a period of intense anticommunism.

The historiography of the Cold War has generally overlooked issues of ethnicity and immigration. By focusing on the case of one left-wing migrant from Cyprus, this article retrieves from historical obscurity the battles for citizenship rights that many migrants faced in Cold War Australia. The article throws light on the serious implications that existed for those who fell foul of the security establishment and argues that, on the principle of deportation, ASIO’s position was more draconian than that of the Department of Immigration. This article has been peer-reviewed.