On November 13, 1950, a fifty-six-year-old woman waved goodbye to a handful of supporters, surrendered to the custody of a U.S. marshal, and was committed to the District of Columbia jail in Washington. She was then incarcerated at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderston, West Virginia, for a period of three months. Helen Reid Bryan was a Quaker. In her lowly paid role as administrative secretary in an organization deemed “subversive,” she had refused, as a matter of principle, to hand over the organization’s records to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. This was her crime. Eight years later,...

On May 4, 1949, Dr. Edward K. Barsky received some reassuring news. His reappointment as surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, where he had worked since 1923, had been confirmed for another two years. Twelve months later, he received some disturbing news that changed his life forever: he learned that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a decision that he should serve a six-month sentence in a federal penitentiary. Accordingly, he became Prisoner No. 18907. Upon his release, he learned that his license to practice medicine would be revoked. These misfortunes had nothing to do with medical...

During the early years of the Cold War, Howard Fast, born in New York City in 1914, was one of America’s most celebrated novelists. Until his resignation in 1957, Howard Fast was the single most important literary figure in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).¹ The first of his sixty-five novels was published in 1933, when he was eighteen. WhenCitizen Tom Paineappeared in 1943, he was regarded as “one of the few major American novelists.”² According to an American academic who visited the Soviet Union in 1956, “the name of Howard Fast was on...

On Monday, April 16, 1951, Professor Lyman Bradley received a telegram from James L. Madden, the Acting Chancellor of New York University. It informed Bradley that the University Council had resolved “to remove you from the faculty of New York University.”¹ We do not know which emotion Bradley most felt when he read the telegram that day: astonishment, anger, despondency, or bitterness. But we do know that the genesis of his dismissal lay in events external to the university and that had commenced six years earlier. Eighteen months later, on October 13, 1952, another telegram was delivered from NYU. It...

At New York’s opulent Waldorf Astoria hotel in March 1949, the internationally famous Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich experienced “the worst moment in my life.”¹ His nadir occurred when he was asked publicly if he supportedPravda’srecent denunciation of several Russian composers.² Forty years later, the American playwright Arthur Miller still remembered that moment: “It is the memory of Shostakovich that still haunts my mind when I think of that day.”³ William Barrett saw him as “unhappy” and “nervous,”⁴ while to Nicolas Nabokov “he seemed like a trapped man.”⁵ According to another participant at that conference, Dwight Macdonald, Shostakovich was...

For three long years, a New York lawyer, O. John Rogge, assiduously defended the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC). Although he could not save its executive board from the federal penitentiary, the reputation of Rogge as a lawyer with a high public profile and an established record of activism in both legal and political circles remained intact. Before Barsky, Bradley, Bryan, and Fast were imprisoned, Rogge was an invited speaker at the Waldorf conference in March 1949, at which Dimitri Shostakovich was the drawcard. After they were imprisoned, he was again on the hustings, invited by the Joint Committee for...

“The Un-American hearings were held last week,” wrote Jessica Mitford on December 10, 1953. “You can’t imagine how revolting they are. They dragged about 100 people into it … just about every kind of person you can imagine.”¹ Mitford, a member of the Communist Party in California who had already appeared before HUAC in September 1951, says little more in her letters about the direct impact of McCarthyism. Each of the Americans whose stories are told in this book had previously confronted HUAC, and it was no less “revolting.” Unlike Mitford, most lost their jobs. But as with Mitford, the...