TY - BOOK ID - 77886188 TI - Commonsense anticommunism PY - 2012 SN - 1469601710 0807869899 9780807869895 9781469601717 9780807835418 0807835412 PB - Chapel Hill DB - UniCat KW - Anti-communist movements KW - Communism KW - McCarthy, Joseph, KW - American Federation of Labor. KW - AFL-CIO KW - Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada KW - AFL KW - AFT KW - AF of L KW - A.F.L. KW - A.F. of L. KW - Amerikanskai︠a︡ federat︠s︡ii︠a︡ truda KW - Federação Americana de Trabalho KW - United States KW - Politics and government UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77886188 AB - Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's ""first line of defense"" against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's ""commonsense anticommunism,"" she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Dealorder led labor conservatives to redbai ER -