Anatomy of a Brown Scare: Strategic Misrepresentation of the American Noninterventionists of 1939–1941 for Current Political Purposes 
Description
PREORDER
By Jack Ross
From the new author Foreword: I wrote this book in my late twenties taking for granted that I was dealing with an antiquarian subject and that the world had moved on. . . I was drawn to this subject as a teenager, receiving my formative political education from Antiwar.com in the years just after 9/11, and recognizing that so many of the figures in the “old right” they celebrated were in fact aligned to the same mid-century Socialist Party of America with whose legacy my father had long identified and to which many friends of my mother’s parents had actually belonged. . . Especially given how so many of the worst theories and narratives about American radicalism and populism from generations past have found new life in the Age of Trump, there is an urgent need for a new political science, as part of any larger effort to save the humanities, to inform any pedagogy toward building a decent Left.
At a time when the word “socialist” is but one of numerous political epithets that are generally divorced from the historical context of America’s political history, The Socialist Party of America presents a new, mature understanding of America’s most important minor political party of the twentieth century. From the party’s origins in the labor and populist movements at the end of the nineteenth century, to its heyday with the charismatic Eugene V. Debs, and to its persistence through the Depression and the Second World War under the steady leadership of “America’s conscience,” Norman Thomas, The Socialist Party of America guides readers through the party’s twilight, ultimate demise, and the successor groups that arose following its collapse.
Based on archival research, Jack Ross’s study challenges the orthodoxies of both sides of the historiographical debate as well as assumptions about the Socialist Party in historical memory.
