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Detroit's Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism locates the roots of American conservatism in a city that was a nexus of labor and industry in postwar America. Drawing on meticulous archival research focusing on Detroit, Colleen Doody shows how conflict over business values and opposition to labor, anticommunism, racial animosity, and religion led to the development of a conservative ethos in the aftermath of World War II. _x000B__x000B_Using Detroit--with its large population of African American and Catholic workers, strong union presence, and starkly segregated urban landscape--as a case study, Doody articulates a nuanced understanding of anticommunism during the Red Scare. Looking beyond national politics, she focuses on key debates occurring at the local level among a wide variety of common citizens. In examining this city's social and political fabric, Doody illustrates that domestic anticommunism was a cohesive, multifaceted ideology that arose less from Soviet ideological incursion than from tensions within the American public. _x000B__x000B_By focusing on labor, race, religion, and the business community in one important American city, Detroit's Cold War shows American anticommunism to be not a radical departure from the past but an expression of ongoing antimodernist and antistatist tensions with American politics and society. _x000B_

In February 1952, Coleman Young, the executive secretary of the left-led National Negro Labor Council (NNLC), defiantly testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) when it came to Detroit to investigate Communism in defense industries. While many witnesses shrank before HUAC’s harsh light, Young attacked the committee for targeting local black leaders and for being led by a segregationist. He castigated HUAC Chairman John Wood, who was from Georgia, for his bigoted pronunciation of the word “Negro” and forced Wood to apologize. He denounced segregation and pointed out that “in Georgia, Negro people are prevented from voting by

On October 7, 1945, Detroit News reader Dorothy A. Riis wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the “general strike trend in this nation.” She argued that the 30 percent wage increase that the strikers wanted was part of a larger Communist campaign to convince the public to support “complete control by our Government over all private enterprise.” The Communist Party, in conjunction with the “New Deal mob,” had planned on “bring[ing] on these strikes as soon as the war ended to try to convince the unsuspecting American people that the Communistic way of having the Government control every

On May 1, 1947, more than five thousand men met on a sidewalk in front of a church in downtown Detroit just as office workers were leaving for the day. At 5:00 p.m., the men knelt, despite the driving rain, and began to pray the rosary. These members of the Detroit Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Men complained that “Socialists, atheistic Communists . . . [and] votaries of the Red Antichrist” had made so much “noise and clamor” on May Day that it had come to be a Communist holiday. May 1, they protested, had become the day when radicals “roared

Anti-Communism, which became a key part of modern conservative ideology, was a central component in postwar political culture. In order to understand Cold War anti-Communism in Detroit, it is important to provide some context on the city of Detroit, New Deal labor, and the Communist Party. As late as 1900, fewer than three hundred thousand people lived in Detroit. However, mass production of the automobile remade the city. By 1920, as a result of the huge demand for labor in the auto plants, Detroit’s population surged to 993,675, and the city became the fourth largest in the nation. This expansion

In January 1943 a group of top General Motors executives gathered together to discuss the corporation’s plans for the postwar period. Flush with their wartime profits and power, these businessmen might have been expected to gloat in victory. Big business, after all, flourished during the war, averaging a net income during the three years of war production of $22 billion before taxes. As a result of the conflict, General Motors was in “wonderful financial shape.”¹ The public’s opinion of business, which had been battered during the depression, was rising at the same time as the American “miracle of production” was

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This study of Cold War Detroit showed the roots of contemporary conservatism, which combined support for free-market capitalism, small domestic government, anti-Communism, and traditionalism. All of these core ideas had been present in American society before the Cold War. The anti-Communism of the early Cold War helped bring together these previously disparate forces. Although the proponents of what became the new conservative movement did not always see eye-to-eye, they perceived that they shared common enemies. It would take many years and a great deal of both elite and grassroots activism before a powerful conservative movement formed nationally. However, the components of that ideology were well developed long before the late 1960s and 1970s.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the beginnings of post-World War II popular conservatism, particularly the glue that held this disparate movement together: anti-Communism. Building upon recent scholarship on conservatism, the book brings their insights to bear on the debate on the nature of early Cold War domestic politics. It argues that the key elements of twentieth-century conservatism—antipathy toward big government, embrace of religious traditionalism, celebration of laissez-faire capitalism, and militant anti-Communism—arose during the 1940s and 1950s out of opposition to the legacy of the New Deal and its modernizing, centralizing, and secularizing ethos. The book examines a specific urban center, Detroit, and grounds its conception of politics in the daily decisions of a wide variety of individuals rather than on the actions of political elites.