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Wiegand, Shirley A. and Wayne A. Wiegand. Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. 286p. alk. paper, $24.95 (ISBN 0806138688). LC 2007-4141.

On August 17, 1940, Oklahoma City police raided the local office of the Communist Party, the Progressive Bookstore, and five private homes. They confiscated thousands of books and other printed materials and arrested sixteen people under a state Criminal Syndicate law dating back to WWI. Law enforcement officials probably expected to achieve their aim of intimidating radicals and driving them out of the state quickly. Instead, the arrests resulted in a series of trials, convictions, and appeals that lasted over three years. In 1940, the Nazi-Soviet pact was in force and American Communists opposed the war. By 1943, Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States and Soviet Union were allies. The changed political climate, along with widespread public protest at the violation of civil liberties in the absence of "clear and present danger," helped the accused eventually to gain acquittal. A cause celebre that attracted the attention of the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt sank from historical memory.

When Wayne Wiegand stumbled on the story in 1999, he invited his wife Shirley to join him in the exhaustive detective work that eventually led to Books on Trial, one of the most engrossing books I’ve ever reviewed for a library journal. Shirley had taught law at the University of Oklahoma, and Wayne specialized in library history. They haunted archives and libraries around the country, pored over newspaper files, solicited documents under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviewed people with direct or indirect experience of the incident. Their narrative incorporates generous quotations and summaries of court proceedings, written documents, press accounts, and eyewitness testimony. It is sprinkled with vivid words and images that bring the era to life, such as this passage describing Detective Wade Webb’s preparations for an undercover visit to the Progressive Bookstore: "He then donned an old oil-stained shirt, an oil-soaked hat and overalls, and some greasy, oil-soaked boots. He had not shaved for two days. ‘Now I look like a Communist,’ he thought as he checked himself in the mirror."

What surprised me most about this story was the timing. I’d been under the impression that the anti-Communist witch hunt picked up steam only in the late forties, with the Cold War. I knew about the Hatch Act of 1939 outlawing membership in "subversive" organizations by federal employees, and the Smith Act of 1940 making it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the government. But I did not realize that the House Un-American Activities Committee existed before the war. The Wiegands provide information on the background to the trials within Oklahoma, where poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation were potent sources of discontent. Local issues were the real concern of the radical activists and the forces who opposed them (business, industry, veterans groups, the KKK). But the international situation forced the constitutional issue of free speech—the right to read and think what one wished—to the center of the conflict. The prosecution used scare words such as Trojan Horse and Fifth Column and ridiculed the names of some of the defendants, Jews from New York. Defense supporters hurled accusations of Gestapo tactics, while each side branded the other as fascist and un-American.

Bob Wood, the state Communist Party Secretary, was charged with running the bookstore, while the others were charged with being Communists, but all their cases rested on the purportedly seditious content of thousands of books, ranging from the works of Marx and Lenin to Thomas Jefferson and Charles Dickens. It was quickly pointed out that these books could be found in research libraries and were for sale in bookstores. Once the issue was defined as one of censorship, support for the defense (initially confined to left-wing voices) widened to include groups such as the American Booksellers Association, university faculty and administrators, and professional associations. But not the American Library Association.

The Wiegands learned what they could about the lives of the principals in the case, even tracking down their descendants to find out about their later lives. I particularly enjoyed the portraits of the brilliant strategist Bob Wood, the party loyalist Alan Shaw, the irrepressible would-be novelist Ira Jaffe, and their wives Ina, Nena Beth, and Wilma. An FBI informant reported on them this way: "Robert and Ina Wood are the real leaders and the party whips, experienced and well traveled and slick as ice." Alan and Eli were "mere babes in arms" next to Bob Wood, "who keeps them going through flattery and bombast." The Wiegands are unsympathetic toward the prosecution side, implying that their motives were political, but the pugnacious Assistant County Attorney John Eberle does emerge as an individual.

Readers are given ample evidence with which to make up their minds about the rights and wrongs of the case, with a few exceptions. The Wiegands offer little background on right-wing groups in Oklahoma such as the American Legion, and they tend to underestimate (in my opinion) grassroots support of racism and nativism. While they acknowledge that the American Communist Party was mouthing the party line from Moscow, they nevertheless view the Communists in the case as basically good-hearted and nonideological. More information on treatment of the American Nazi Party would have provided a useful context for comparison.

The authors occasionally hint at their story’s relevance to events today, as when they comment that "another part of Oklahoma’s conservative elite made clear its priorities on civil liberties in periods of national crisis." They speak their minds more openly in an epilogue, referring to periodic episodes of "paranoid politics" in American history, the antiterrorism bill passed under Clinton, and the USA PATRIOT Act. They are heartened that the strength of public opinion can restore the balance. Puzzlingly, they remark that the nation must have emerged from the Oklahoma affair with a "good dose of cynicism." Perhaps. The performance of the press and the legal system struck me as better then than now. My final impression is one of sad irony, knowing that the temporary victories for freedom of thought and expression recorded in this book were reversed almost as soon as the war was over.—Jean M. Alexander, Carnegie Mellon University.