Jewish Champions of First Amendment

[Tom Grey]

Howard writes:

   Before WWII, people were drawn to the Party
   because it seemed as though no one else was interested in fighting the
   Fascists.  My all-time favorite term from the McCarty era was HUAC's
   label
   for people who had fought on the side of the communists in
   Spain;  "premature anti-fascists."

I'd always thought "premature anti-fascist"  was the official Communist
term of opprobrium for leftist radicals who denounced the Hitler-Stalin
Pact in 1939. But googling the phrase, I see that the above is the
prevailing usage. Did the American right make this bit of Kremlin jargon
its own in the 50s?


Thomas C. Grey
Sweitzer Professor of Law
Stanford Law School
tgrey at law.stanford.edu


                                                                                                                                             
                      Howard Schweber                                                                                                        
                      <schweber at polisci.wisc        To:       Conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu                                                      
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                      Sent by:                      Subject:  Re: Jewish Champions of First Amendment                                        
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                      09/11/2006 08:46 AM                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                             




At 11:08 AM 9/11/2006 -0400, DavidEBernstein at aol.com wrote:
>Just to be clear, my original post in response to Paul specifically
>referenced folks who were "members of the Communist Party or were
>otherwise adherents of totalitarian ideologies."  Somehow, this morphed in

>the post below into an attack on the "entire American Left."

First reaction:  my bad -- I blame the medium.

Second reaction:  "Members of the Communist Party" still seems to me to go
way too far.  Membership in the Party, in America in particular, has not
meant adherence to all party principles any more than membership in the GOP

necessarily means that the person agrees with every element of the
Republican Platform of a given year.  In the 1920s and 1930s plenty of
Americans joined the Communist Party because no one else seemed to be doing

anything about serious problems or paying any attention at all to the
African-American community.  Before WWII, people were drawn to the Party
because it seemed as though no one else was interested in fighting the
Fascists.  My all-time favorite term from the McCarty era was HUAC's label
for people who had fought on the side of the communists in
Spain;  "premature anti-fascists."  And the European examples I mentioned
all involve versions of communist parties that were not, in fact,
totalitarian ideologies.

As time went on, the difficulty of being a liberal and a communist at the
same time became greater.  There was a large exodus from the CPUSA after
1956, and others later as the ugliness of the Soviet system became
increasingly well documented.  But if we are talking about the Gitlows and
Schencks of the world, then I stand by the tenore -- although not the
specifics -- of my previous comments.

Howard Schweber

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