Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast

• Episode 72: Commiecrats

  Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, on August 23, 1953. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia CommonsIn 1938, in the face of rising fascism in Europe, the United States Congress created the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Preceded by at least two internal security committees meant to expose Communist activity in the United States, the Dies Committee, named after its chair, Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr., lasted until the end of the war. It was almost immediately followed by a new body, the House Un-American Activities Committee, later known as HUAC, that set out to investigate Russian spy networks, the Communist Party of the United States, and so-called “fellow travelers”—progressives who were, with or without their knowledge, Communist-adjacent.The Red Scare that followed World War II is largely identified with Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. But the hunt for Communists—in Washington, Hollywood, the journalism establishment, and classrooms—was well underway by the time McCarthy gave his famous Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in February 1950. There, McCarthy waved a white paper, which he claimed was a list of 205 known Communists working in the State Department.Later, McCarthy said it was 57 Communists on the list, while others claimed that what Tail Gunner Joe really pulled out of his vest pocket was a grocery list.Whatever. McCarthy’s grand gesture was what President Donald Trump, in his incarnation as an unsuccessful real estate developer and casino owner, calls “creative hyperbole.” The list may have been fake, but it helped Americans get the point.Politicians really got the point. 1950 was a midterm election year, after all. The political uproar over McCarthy’s accusations put Democrats, who had been investigating subversion for over a decade, on their back foot. Washington Postcartoonist Herb Block stitched the whole phenomenon together with a neologism: “McCarthyism.”In the 1950 Congressional midterm campaign, Joe McCarthy took the fight straight to the heart of the Democratic party. That summer, he spoke at a rally for fellow Senator Forrest C. Donnell, a Missouri Republican, and coined the word “Commiecrats” for his opposition.Sound familiar? A powerful political figure making up numbers, conjuring faceless foreign enemies, inventing disparaging names for his political opponents, and insisting that some Democrats were actual Communists? In any case, it worked. The Republicans took 28 House seats from the Democrats and five Senate seats, setting the GOP up to seize the Senate majority and the presidency in 1952.As it turns out, culture wars pay. And, as many people have pointed out before me, there’s another connection between McCarthy and Trump. That was Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer who cut his teeth on hunting Communists by McCarthy’s side, scoured government libraries abroad for subversive books, and perfected the art of filing aggressive, specious lawsuits to get his way.But as journalist and historian Clay Risen points out in his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthy and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, 2025), if the Communist witch hunts promoted by McCarthy and dozens of other public figures were a grave threat to democracy, they also distract us from why communism was so attractive to Americans of all races, and what it promised as a route to a more perfect democracy.Yes, communism was politics. But it was also a romance about what the United States could be if it embraced socialism. The witch hunt narrative also draws a veil across why professional anti-Communist witnesses Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, came to regret the choices they had made so deeply that they dedicated themselves to destroying others.Show notes:* Clay Risen appeared in Episode 11, You Are Dead To Me, where he talked to us about obituaries as popular history.* Clay points out that there really was Soviet espionage in the United States: listeners who want to know more may wish to read Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America (Regency, 2014).* More than one person has equated the McCarthy period with the Salem Witch Trials and other moral panics in the United States. Listeners may wish to revisit Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible.* Claire raises a theme of Clay’s book, Americans’ genuine fear of nuclear weapons. That fear of World War persisted well past McCarthy’s dominance in American politics, and is expressed in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.* Clay discusses the sharp break between American political institutions and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA): James Traub discusses Hubert Humphrey’s role in purging communists from Minnesota progressive politics in episode 48, “The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights.”* Listeners who want to learn more about Whittaker Chambers may wish to read his best-selling 1952 memoir, Witness (Regency, 2014).* Claire’s favorite professional witness is Elizabeth Bentley; you can read more about her in Kathryn Olmstead, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).* Clay talks about how unusual William Wyler’s post-war movie, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), was—and how rare a film as critical of the United States as that would be until the 1960s.You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:* Episode 68, Arise, Ye Workers From Your Slumbers: A conversation with Maurice Isserman about American radicalism, past and present, and his new book, "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism."* Episode 25, Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s."* Episode 20, Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice: A conversation with historian Matthew Dallek about his book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right."And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.) Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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  37:06
• Episode 71: Black Children, White Schools

  Ruby Bridges leaving William Frantz Elementary School, in New Orleans in on or about November 14, 1960. Bridges became one of the first four Black children to integrate a White school in that city after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Federal marshals are protecting her from the violent White mob outside the frame.On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Tessie Prevost woke up and put on one of her prettiest dresses.Like Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Ruby Bridges, Tessie was a very special little girl. Along with hundreds of other Black children, the New Orleans Four, as they would forever be known, had taken a test. The test was devised by the Louisiana Pupil Placement Board after Brown v. Board of Education had declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional. A federal court was now insisting, eight years later, that Orleans Parish integrate its schools, and testing Black children’s academic skills was part of that process.I don’t think we know how many children passed that test, one that White children never had to take just to enroll in their neighborhood public school. But we do know how few of these Black children were seen as worthy. We know that Black boys were generally not seen as desirable candidates for what school boards, parents, and politicians in Jim Crow states viewed as an unwelcome social experiment.Ruby Bridges, the best known of these children, faced a screaming white mob at William Frantz Elementary all by herself, while Tessie, Leona, and Gail were assigned to William McDonogh 19. All were escorted by federal marshals, since New Orleans law enforcement would not guarantee their safety.This is how Tessie remembered that morning for an oral history project, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement. “I’m going to take care of your baby,” a federal marshal promised Tessie’s mother. It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? The child was going to school. She should have been safe in her school.But dramatic scenes about brave Black children and violent White mobs conceal a great deal of American history. They conceal the fact that, once she agreed to become a symbol of racial justice, no one could truly take care of Mrs. Prevost’s baby. It conceals the fact that Tessie and the other three went to class in largely empty buildings, taught by a single teacher, at schools White parents abandoned. Those White parents remained committed to segregation, transferring their children to religious and private schools that many states supported with tax credits, initiating the school voucher systems legal in many states today.Stories about these truly heroic Black girls also obscure a history in which segregation didn’t only happen in the South, and didn’t end. As historian Noliwe Rooks points out in her new book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon, 2025), school integration was not always a traumatic experience—but that doesn’t mean it was a success either. In several states, politicians responded to desegregation orders by closing the public schools: some Black students didn’t go to school for years.Desegregation also often dismantled well-functioning, sometimes prestigious, Black schools, run by Black teachers and administrators who took care of everybody’s babies, and were ambitious for their students. These institutions were embedded in thriving Black communities where taking care of a mother’s baby was not a job entrusted to adult, armed men, but to skilled professionals committed to high quality academics, athletics, and co-curricular activities.Here’s another dirty truth: the trickle of Black children permitted to attend formerly all-White schools reinforced the racist notion that most of their peers were inferior and incapable. Integrated tells that story: why our schools are more segregated than they ever have been, even though segregation is not the law, and why the phenomenon of Black “only-lonelies” persists in majority White schools.Show notes:* For a full account of what legal school desegregation did not accomplish, see Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford, 2005).* Civil rights actions related to school segregation in the north included a boycott on February 3, 1964, in which 464,000 New York City students—about half of the young people enrolled—boycotted classes.* Melba Patillo Beals has written a personal account of the Little Rock Nine, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of Battle to Integrate Little Rock (Atria Books, 1995).* Claire and Noliwe discuss historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s experience of integrating an elementary school in Texas. That, and the story of her parents’ marginalization when Black schools were closed, is in Gordon-Reed’s memoir, On Juneteenth (Liveright, 2021).* In discussing the phenomenon of Black strategies for self-protection in White society, Noliwe cites Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” (1895).* Claire and Noliwe discuss the methods and ethic of pathbreaking educator Marva Collins, winner of the 2004 National Humanities Medal.* Noliwe also cites the contributions of Black Panther Ericka Huggins, who ran the organization’s education project. You can read more about Huggins in Mary Francis Phillips, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (New York University Press, 2025).You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:* Episode 43, Where In the World Is Merze Tate? A conversation with historian Barbara Savage about freedom, independence, and her biography, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."* Episode 16, The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice: A conversation with historian Matthew Pratt Guterl about his book, "Skinfolk: A Memoir."* Episode 3, Black and White Together: historian Victoria Wolcott discusses prefigurative politics and her book, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement."Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. Can you convert to a paid subscription? And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.) Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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• Episode 70: Fagin!

  A 1903 illustration in London’s Daily Graphic of actor Ivan Berlyn as Fagin, one of the “weird and eccentric parts” he was said to specialize in. Descended from German Jewish immigrants, Berlyn (born Isaac Berlin) played Fagin on stage and in silent films. He seems to have made some effort to obscure his ethnicity and religion, but the artist did not: in this drawing, Berlyn has a pronounced, hooked nose and a threatening expression, in contrast to the depiction of the other actors’ more delicate and Anglicized features. Image credit: S A H Robinson/Wikimedia Commons.That was the trailer for the award-winning 1947 movie, “Gentleman’s Agreement.” If you watch the whole thing, you will find out that it starred Gregory Peck. You will also learn that in 1948, it was nominated for eight Oscars, and won three, including Best Picture. But what you will never learn is what the “taboo topic” that forms the basis of the plot is. That story is so taboo that movie audiences would not know what Gentleman’s Agreement was about unless they went to see it.It's about antisemitism. That’s right—a topic that was apparently unspeakable in the United States, even two years after American and Soviet soldiers liberated the first Nazi death camps.But antisemitism was unspeakable—although not as much so as homosexuality. Crossfire, another 1947 movie, was originally about a homophobic murder and rewritten as a story about antisemitism. It seems significant, for example, that Hobson’s novel, which is not about women, was first published in a women’s magazine. Did publishers of serious literary fare not want to touch the manuscript initially? It seems so.And yet, there is a reason that a movie about antisemitism could be both taboo and rewarded in 1948. The previous year, the Truman administration launched the Voice of America (now shuttered by Donald Trump) to broadcast the virtues of democracy into Soviet-controlled eastern Europe. In April, Jackie Robinson would become the first Black player since the 19th century to take the field for a major league baseball team. In May, President Truman signed an Act of Congress that promised aid to Turkey, Greece, and any other nation under siege from communism—and launched almost four decades of what we now call the Cold War. In October, the House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation into communism in Hollywood.We know that by 1947 the United States was grappling with an enormous contradiction: that it sought to be a beacon of democracy around the globe—and that it was a cesspool of racial inequality at home. U.S. federal courts heard a series of cases—Mendez v. Westminster, Delgado v. Bastrop, and Shelley v. Kraemer—that began the process of breaking the back of Jim Crow. The separation of white and Black was public, well-known, and defended robustly by white Southern politicians.But the nation’s dirty little secret was antisemitism. The Roosevelt administration knew what was happening to Europe’s Jews under Nazi rule and did nothing. American colleges and universities had, for decades, worked to ensure that their campuses did not become—too Jewish. While Black home buyers were steered away from all white neighborhoods, Jews were steered by agents away from some of them, a fact that became even more uncomfortably clear when home ownership was supported by new banking policies and federal subsidies after World War II. Parallel spaces grew up to serve Jews—hotels, resorts, country clubs, and golf courses—because they were barred from others.That’s the America I grew up in, and it didn’t start to change until the 1970s. This is why I have been astonished and angry about how so many non-Jewish Americans today want to dismiss the history, and contemporary pervasiveness, of antisemitism in this country. If it is possible, I have been even angrier at how Donald Trump and the Republican party have deployed cynical, fake concern about the eruptions of antisemitism since October 7—when their own movement springs out of antisemitic conservatives like Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, and Ron Paul; and they continue to embrace antisemitic, proto-Nazi groups today.But it’s also important to remember that antisemitism, its tropes and stereotypes, are something we all need to grapple with. Hatred and contempt for Jews is baked into Western culture and our literary canon; we cannot simply wall off the past when it is convenient. This is why I asked historical novelist Allison Epstein to come on the show to talk about her rewriting of the Oliver Twist story, in which the hero is not a darling blonde English child, but Jacob Fagin—a tutor in crime, and a Charles Dickens character cobbled out of every 19th century antisemitic stereotype available to him.Listeners will remember Allison from Episode 38 and some of you will know her from her Substack, Dirtbags through the Ages, where she profiles saints who were sinners, and sinners who are…just dirtbags. Fagin is a legendary dirtbag, but in Epstein’s hands, he is something else: a man who survives not by exploiting people, but by holding them close and teaching them; an orphan who yearns for connection but knows it can never last. Freed from Dickens’ antisemitism, Epstein’s Fagin also gives us a gift: insight into how antisemitism works, how it burns the soul, and how it drips into our present.Join Allison and me for this episode of “Why Now?” where history and politics meet the challenge of today. And I’m your host, Claire Potter, Professor of History emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of the Political Junkie Substack.This is Episode 70, “Fagin!”Show notes:* Claire mentions Christine Stansell’s history of early national New York, and the need for working-class children to earn their own keep on the street, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (University of Illinois Press, 1987).* In our conversation about the importance of voluminous Victorian women’s fashions to female shoplifting, Claire reminds listeners about Elaine Abelson’s When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford, 1992.).* Allison learned the ins and outs of how to pick pockets from Henry Mayhew, The London Underworld in the Victorian Period: Authentic First-Person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves and Prostitutes (Dover, 2005. Orig. 1852).* Claire and Allison declare their mutual dislike for “As Long As He Needs Me,” the most covered song from the movie, Oliver! as an example that rewritings of the Dickens novel failed to grapple with its misogyny as well as its antisemitism. You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:* Episode 31, Haunted By History: A conversation with historian Tiya Miles about her novel, "The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts."* Episode 23, Creative Fictions: A conversation with historian Sam Franklin about "The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History."* Episode 4, Bringing the War Home: A conversation with writer Zayd Ayres Dohrn about the Weather Underground, a generation raised in its shadow, and the search for answers in his podcast, "Mother Country Radicals."Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.) Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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  38:42
• Episode 69: No More Girl Bosses

  Image credit: Cookie Studio/ShutterstockOn October 12, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was sworn in for her testimony before the Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee. If you were a Democrat and a feminist, it was a galling moment for so many reasons. First, the United States was on the brink of an election, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—who had denied Merrick Garland a hearing in the final year of the Obama administration—had contradicted himself, handing President Donald Trump his third Supreme Court nomination, one that would bend the Court to the right for decades.But it was also galling because it was our seat—one occupied by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a pioneer of feminist jurisprudence, and a woman who had carved a narrow path of rights for women in the 1970s by building case law around the idea of gender discrimination. So many women like me had careers and economic security because of Ginsberg and others like her—in fact, Ginsberg became a law professor and then a civil rights litigator at the ACLU because, despite her stellar credentials from Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia, she couldn’t get a job at a law firm.Amy Coney Barrett was where she was because of Ginsberg—but also because, like Ginsberg, she had a husband, Jesse, who supported her career.Barrett then went on to say a few sentences about each of her seven children. It established her credentials as a mother. But she failed to mention that she, as part of a power couple clearly had lots of household help. Instead, she attributed her success to her strong belief, inculcated by her father, that girls and boys were intellectual equals.Confirmed to the Court, Amy Coney Barrett then voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, stripping the right to reproductive freedom from millions of working-class women—many of whom are doing care work for the children and parents of other white women, conservative and liberal.Because let’s get real: the vast majority of women who are held up as exemplars of the feminist meritocracy, from the executive who works down the hall from you to Sheryl Sandberg, have squads of well-paid, moderately paid, and poorly paid people caring for their homes, children, and elderly parents. Door Dashers shop for them. Amazon warehouse workers stuff clothes, toys, and nutritional supplements into boxes to be shipped to them. Grub Hubbers deliver dinner made by line cooks.What does girl boss feminism has to say about this? Not much. And now that Donald Trump is back in power, we’ve got more White conservative women telling us that women are full members of the meritocracy—and Republicans have Barrett, Ivanka Trump, and Pam Bondi to prove it. That’s why I wanted to talk to feminist philosopher Serene Khader, the author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press: 2024.) Khader wants us to revisit the question of which women succeed, and which ones are forever invisible, what feminism is—and what it could be, if weren’t so very white.Show notes:* Serene mentions an earlier publication Claire wrote, a blog called Tenured Radical. The archive lives on at The Chronicle of Higher Education.* Claire mentions her upcoming biography of Susan Brownmiller, a radical feminist who was a radical feminist journalist, anti-rape activist, and anti-pornography activist. Until the book comes out, you can read about her here.* Black feminists began to theorize their own position early on: listeners may wish to read Toni Cade Bambara ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New American Library, 1970.)* Claire mentions Joan Wallach Scott’s important book about Muslim women in France, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2010.)* For conservative feminism, Claire points to Faye Ginsburg’s book about women who oppose abortion, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (University of California, 1998.)* The clip where Donald Trump vows to protect women is from an October, 2024 campaign stop in Wisconsin.* A critical text for Serene’s work is Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review (1991.)You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.Would you prefer to read this interview? Become a paid subscriber! Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication, and interview transcripts are a paid subscriber benefit. Transcripts go out a few days after the episode drops.If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:* Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy: A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his new book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."* Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."* Episode 22: Hit Them in The Pocketbook: A conversation with Annelise Orleck about her book, "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty."And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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  39:51
• Episode 68: Arise, Ye Workers From Your Slumbers

  In 1938, philosophy professor Edward I. Fenlon testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that that professors and students at Brooklyn College were "deluged" daily with communist propaganda. Photo credit: Harris & Ewing/United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division (Wikimedia Commons)For years now, those of us who are paying attention have heard a range of political positions, from those held by moderate Democrats to socialism, described by MAGA Republicans as something called “the Left.” Sometimes “the Left” is simply invoked by the shorthand “they,” as in: “They tried to assassinate Donald Trump;” or more commonly, “They want you to believe,” followed by some caricature of an idea about women, race, gender, or sexuality.But I’ve noticed something else: warnings from Republican politicians and pundits about a growing cadre of Marxists and Communists who are hostile to the United States and seek to destabilize the nation with things like “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” and “DEI.”To the MAGA partisan, the term “Marxist” can describe anyone, from former Vice President Kamala Harris, to an anti-Israel activist, to the local librarian who steers readers to Judy Blume, to a Girl Scout troop leader who doesn’t discriminate against trans children. For example, on Saturday, June 28, 2023, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump made a pledge to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” event in Washington D.C. that he would secure the nation’s borders against Communists and Marxists clamoring to destabilize our society.In 1947, Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan described to the House Un-American Activities Committee his success in purging massive numbers Communists from the organization. However, there had never been more than 100,000 CPUSA members, and in 1947, as Maurice Isserman’s Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism (Basic Books, 2024) explains, the party was already in trouble, a fracturing that would intensify over the next decade, aided by government harassment and industry blacklists. When news of Stalin’s crimes erupted at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February, 25 1956, disillusioned Americans fled communism, and networks of activists that had sustained them for decades.Today, Trump almost seems to be invoking Communism and Marxism as part of that fictional Cold War world where America was supposedly great. So, what better time to point out that Communists, although their movement failed, also did a lot of good? Despite their flaws, blind spots, and sometimes harsh internal discipline, the CPUSA fought for a just society in America. Members organized powerful industrial unions, protested racism, and moved the nation towards reforms and small revolutions: the New Deal, Black civil rights, the Great Society, the movement to stop the war in Vietnam, and even feminism and gay liberation.Show notes:* Claire begins by mentioning that radical feminists often came out of Communist Party, or CP-adjacent, backgrounds: she name checks Susan Brownmiller, who she is writing about now, and Maurice mentions Betty Friedan. You can read about Friedan now in Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).* Two books Claire mentions that dovetail with Maurice’s critique of the CP are Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (Verso, 1977) and Bettina Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, 2006). Listeners might also be interested in Jane Lazarre, The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A Memoir (Duke University Press, 2017).* Claire and Maurice discuss the importance of Communism to Black workers and intellectuals; you can learn more about this in Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990).* Maurice mentions his experience in SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing student movement that emerged in the 1960s from the wreckage of the CP and later spawned the more revolutionary group, Weatherman. Listeners who wish to learn more may wish to read Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2010).* Communism has, over time, been attractive to Black American intellectuals; there are a lot of good books on this, but listeners may wish to start with Harry Haywood’s memoir, Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).* Claire asked Maurice who his favorite character in the book was: he picked Dorothy Healey. The two collaborated on an earlier book, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party ()Ford University Press, 1990).* Readers interested in learning more about Mary Heaton Vorse can consult Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent (Temple University Press, 1989).You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:* Episode 37, Black Resistance, Black Joy: A conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his book, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care."* Episode 25, Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s"* Episode 21, A World To Win: Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her book, "Cannibal Capitalism: How our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It."Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.) Get full access to Political Junkie at clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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  37:33

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