Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York

摘要

Marxist scholars of today should never forget that we live, work, write, and teach in spaces built by the compound and excruciating struggles of writers, teachers, artists, and professionals of the Old Left. With vivid archival detail, Philip Deery's rich and refreshing Red Apple presents six disquieting but apposite case studies from the Red Scare in New York City during the late 1940s and 1950s. The upshot is a group biography of key actors diversely close to the Communist movement: Dr. Edward Barsky (1897-1975), Professor Lyman Bradley (1899-1979), Professor Edwin Berry Burgum (1894-1979), novelist Howard Fast (1914-2003), Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-75), and attorney John O. Rogge (1903-81). By couching the targets of the Cold War's bifurcated political forces in human terms, he superbly underscores the personal costs of the ordeal to each protagonist. These men (women are mentioned only secondarily) variously suffered imprisonment and blacklisting by the U. S. government, defamation by their former comrades, and persecution by the Soviet ruling elite.