| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday. By Arthur J. Sabin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. xvi, 262 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8122-3507-X.)

On June 17, 1957, the United States Supreme Court spoke out against McCarthyism. It interpreted restrictively the Smith Act (a sedition statute used to wage legal warfare against the Communist party), imposed constitutional limitations on federal and state legislative investigations of subversive activities, and overturned the dismissal of a State Department employee under the federal loyalty-security program. These rulings so upset national security alarmists that they christened June 17 "Red Monday." Arthur J. Sabin believes they "altered the course of legal history and the Red Scare." He wrote this book to explain what produced them. 1

"My aim," he says, "is to examine what motivated a majority of the Court to move from routinely confirming guilty verdicts, and thus endorsing government prosecutions of leftists and other dissidents, to raising substantial legal obstacles to further prosecutions." His explanation is that the times changed. By June of 1957 the Zeitgeist had shifted from an atmosphere that drove government and the media to seek signs of Red influence and subversion to a more rational approach. Because law and courts mirror society, those changed too. The result was Red Monday and also other decisions earlier in the same term of the Court significantly limiting the anticommunist crusade. . . .

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