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was "faced with a desperate situation." Miss Knight went to a meeting to learn what her friend meant. I went to the meeting and it was not a meeting which I would have recognized — I knew very few of the people there — it might easily have been a meeting of the Steamfitters Union and it had no relation to writers or writers' rights or anything of that sort, and it was entirely a labor meeting and a meeting in which a great deal of violence was expressed. There was a great deal of turbulence ... I do not think I am exaggerating when I say the mob spirit of the meeting was very evident, and the Author's League, as I say, had always been a dignified body of writers . . . Thus, the "pro-Communist" and "anti-Communist" split was rooted hi a larger disagreement. On the one side were those who resisted the Guild's labor orientation as strongly as Ruth Adams Knight. On the other side, a large group, by no means all Com- munist, differed with them. Since some of the most articulate and powerful "anti-Communists" of later years came out of the group which opposed the trade-union concept of the Guild, many of the non-Communists who had disagreed with them in the past felt that a purge of "militant unionists" was on, when blacklisting began. A similar situation existed in the American Federation of Radio Artists where the right-wing "anti-Communist" faction first began to form during the Second World War in opposition to the union's endorsing Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the period when blacklisting developed, this confusion had immediate practical consequences. For one thing, the anti-Com- munists of extreme right-whig persuasion were in a good position: they had never joined Communist fronts, their records were "clean." For another, they took their own analysis of the split in the industry seriously. The result was an "anti-Communist" ideology largely based on the proposition that there was only one kind of anti- communism, that represented by the right wing. Exceptions were made (Morton Wishengrad, a liberal anti-Communist writer, is 148