Jews and McCarthyism

My family lived in the Hunts Point section of the East Bronx, a then still largely Jewish, working- and lower-middle-class enclave in a larger neighborhood that was in the process of absorbing two of the great postwar migrations—of blacks moving north and of Puerto Ricans leaving their island for the isle of Manhattan and, eventually, the Bronx. Hunts Point was contiguous with two “red” electoral precincts in Bronx Park East whose nucleus was a workers' cooperative apartment house built in 1927. “Intended as a Communist heaven on this capitalist earth,” ¹ the project had gone bankrupt twice and was eventually privatized. These two “red” precincts, along with eight others in East Harlem, continued to show an American Labor Party (Wallace) majority as late as the 1950 elections. In the twenty other precincts that Wallace had carried in 1948, by contrast, the ALP received only a small vote in 1950, “indicating,” Samuel Lubell speculated, “that their vote for Wallace was not Communist-inspired, but primarily a protest against Truman's stand on Palestine.” Lubell estimates that of the 1,150,000 votes Wallace received in the entire country “probably three fourths of Wallace's vote came from Negroes and Jews.” ²