| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945–1963. By Robbie Lieberman. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. xx, 244 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8156-2481-2.)

Several historians have recounted the reasons for the failure of the challenge of Henry Wallace and his Progressive party to the Truman administration's Cold War orthodoxy during the presidential campaign of 1948. While Robbie Lieberman's book does not offer startling revisions about the Wallace effort, it neatly traces the steadily escalating national fears and intolerance that undermined resistance to the Cold War consensus pervading American life. In particular, Lieberman shows how "communism" and "peace" became virtually synonymous in the public mind and how mainstream liberals and conservatives hounded American Communists for their pro-Soviet line on foreign policy questions. Although Lieberman provides good coverage of a few individual Communists, most of those involved in the peace movement remain shadowy figures. 1

The heart of the book traces the gradual revival of the peace movement beginning in the mid-1950s. By then, the weakened Communist party was encouraging its members to cooperate with the main peace groups and not try to control them, but peace organizations and individual noncommunist peace workers, tainted because of their former or alleged associations with peace-seeking Communists, had to decide whether to accept their support. . . .

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