Customer Reviews

Many Are the Crimes

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Given the recent spate of controversial conservative tomes claiming Joe McCarthy had been widely vilified and misunderstood, the act of finding this terrific book by former Harvard professor Ellen Schrecker at the Toadstool Bookstore in nearby Peterborough was an incredible coincidence. I was looking for an authoritative source of objective and dispassionate history of the McCarthy era that would comprehensively review the evidence and aid me in determining the relative merit of the conservative claims that Tail Gunner Joe had been right about the "commie menace" all along. I was fortunate indeed, for Professor Schrecker's carefully researched and scrupulously documented work offers the interested reader with an absorbing plethora of substantiated and objective information regarding what has to be considered one of the most inflammatory and controversial periods in 20th century American history.

Schrecker takes great pains at fairly and carefully detailing the specifics of the events transpiring in the rise of McCarthyism and its effects in the society, which it literally turned upside down. And while the author meticulously avoids becoming an apologist for the American Communist Party, carefully describing the rather sordid and troubling aspects of their political activities, she also shows how unfairly they were treated at the hands of McCarthy and the congregated conservative and liberal cabal that rose in the midst of the great Red Scare. Details regarding the degree to which individual communists were systematically persecuted are carefully documented and are far from representing mere anecdotal reports.

Moreover, she gives the reader a consummate history of the rise of McCarthyism, finding its origins in the communist movement, as it was struggling toward its greatest success amidst the misery and despair of the 1930s Depression. She also gives us some key insights into the inner mechanics of how the House Committee on Un-American Activities, also referred to as HUAC, laid the groundwork for the later hearings in the Senate by Joe McCarthy. She draws a convincing and quite detailed road map as to how the activities by parties to the search for communists within the government, including such desperate and disconnected entities as J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, members of HUAC, and Joe McCarthy and his staff, independently used extra-legal means to pursue and harass innocent ordinary people who they found inconveniently laying in the path of their investigations.

Also extensively examined and criticized is the media, especially the print form by way of newspapers and magazines, so hungry for a never-ending news story that they consistently covered it on page one, providing the "legs" to the continuing story about the hunt for communists, and provided HUAC, McCarthy, and others with the public support they needed to persevere in their efforts. Yet it was in the damage that McCarthyism did both to innocent victims like union activists and other liberal politicians that Schrecker provides the most damning evidence for.

Conservatives cynically employed the Taft-Hartley Act and other suffocating political methods both to stifle opposition, on the one hand, and to effectively disarm liberal activism in general. According to Professor Schrecker, this had a devastating effect on the civil rights movement, which Hoover characterized as communist-inspired. Indeed, he continued to pursue activists like martin Luther King for decades, until King's death finally put a close to the surveillance.

Perhaps the most chilling conclusions one derives from the book are her observations regarding how damaging the McCarthy era was in terms of its chilling effect in inhibiting free and open debate by ordinary citizens, and in the way it so aptly demonstrated the remarkable ease with which the machinery of government can subvert and repress its citizens through the employment of political propaganda and cynical emotional manipulation. This is a wonderfully written book, and one that is quite thought provoking. Enjoy!

At last, a book that surpasses information on the joys of Kwanzaa and Black History Month and shows us how to incorporate our heritage into every celebration and holiday throughout life--all year long. My favorite planners--the Mamato Baby Shower, ethnic birthday parties, cultural weddings, adolescent rites-of-passage, and family reunions. The best part: it's a feel-good book with cultural love flowing from every page.

I thought that the book has some really good ideas to spice up tradional celebrations. It was also interesting to know the history of the celebrations.

This historical overview of McCarthyism covers much more than the late Senator's actions. It includes an overview of Communist activities in the United States, including the use of front groups to help Communists hide from public scrutiny; the origins of the established anticommunist movement before and during the Roosevelt administration; the various ways in which Communism was portrayed from the 1920's through the 1960's and beyond; ways that the Communists in America contributed to their own unpopularity and demise; the ways that the instruments of "political repression" developed and operated, including some interesting material on the development of the FBI; and the social, economic, and political consequences of McCarthyism for various people. Indeed, only one chapter is devoted to McCarthy himself, although it is a good chapter.

Someone who wants a sensationalized account of Joe McCarthy, pro or con, will be disappointed. Indeed, my impression is that Prof. Schrecker is not very interested in Joe McCarthy. She is interested in McCarthyism, the movement. Some of the negative reviews seem not to be aware of this fact. Some appear to be politically-motivated smears. Some appear not to have read the book.

Schrecker's work is a serious historical overview of the antecedents, processes, and consequences of McCarthyism, or the early Cold War Red Scare, written from the point of view of a scholar whose research has convinced her the anti-Communist movement attacked a danger that was already past. She does not say the danger never existed; the threat was contained between 1945 and 1950.

Any author who writes about McCarthyism must be insane, because the extremist nuts falling off both edges of their flat Earths will attack with everything they have. Thus, a three-star review calls this book "appallingly limited" and recommends various elements of the leftist press as sources. A one-star review charges that this book repeats the same old tired complaints against McCarthy, at a time when the Venona transcripts "prove" that he was right. It recommends elements of the right-wing press as sources.

Let's review the book instead of grinding an axe.

Prof. Schrecker is a historian, not an advocate. Her book rests on primary sources. She read the Venona transcripts, listened to the radio broadcasts of a blacklisted Texas humorist, read texts of House and Senate committee meetings, interviewed members of the Hollywood Ten, and so on. I doubt she has much interest in reading advocacy pieces from the left or the right, because she has read the primary sources herself, and doesn't need someone else to tell her what she saw or heard. I found that Schrecker summarized a lot of primary sources clearly and helped me understand how all the different aspects of American Communism and Anti-Communism fit together and moved over time.

The Venona decrypts are a bunnch of coded diplomatic cables sent between the USA and Moscow during WWII, which (for technical reasons) were able to be decrypted. Far from ignoring this primary source, as a right-wing review suggests, Schrecker has read them and weaves them into the larger story she tells. She also weaves in the anti-communist efforts of the late 1940's and declassified documents from the Soviet-era KGB to show that, by about 1950, all the ideological Communists in the Federal government had been eliminated. Thus, by the time McCarthy started his very public attacks on Communists in the government, the evidence suggests that the danger was past. Schrecker again functions as a historian and puts all these puzzle pieces together. Her interest lies partly in exploring the factors that kept anti-communism inflamed for so many years after the Communist menace had essentially been contained, and I gained some insights from her coverage.

And far from repeating the same tired ideas, Schrecker's opinion is that McCarthy himself was in no way a remarkable or bizarre figure. Instead, she portrays him as a more brawling and raucous version of several other congress members who held exactly the same views, but went about their political attacks in a more polished manner.

CONCLUSION: A solid, well-researched history book focusing on the McCarthyist movement, readable and in no way sensational or titillating. It will be of the greatest interest to people who want to understand this era accurately and objectively, and are willing to invest about 10 to 15 hours to gain such understanding. It probably will not interest people who are strongly pro- or anti-Joe McCarthy, or who are looking for an exciting or sensational read. John Earl Haynes's books are a good balance for this, as Haynes is also a good researcher and writer but concludes that Communists were more threatening than Schrecker believes.

PS: I have noted that there is a small cadre of dedicated drum-beaters who vote that a review is "not helpful" to them if it fails to agree with their political views. They write negative reviews of good books about McCarthy and anticommunism in order to drive down the average rating. No rock band has a more dedicated cadre of slavish groupies; no tyrant has a more dedicated cadre of hectoring foes.

In short, there is a small group of people who try to exert undue influence by "review-packing," and I assume they will vote that this review did not help them. Judge for yourself. I hope this review is as helpful as an amateur review can be: it's designed to describe who would and would not like this book so they will know whether to buy it.

Let's watch the votes and see what happens.

Many studies of the McCarthy period have focused on the "Big Names" such as the Hollywood Ten or Alger Hiss. Ellen Schrecker gives a sense of the broad swath cut by McCarthyism as it affected more ordinary people, who seldom made the headlines. Schrecker is the acknowledged authority on the period, particularly in regards to academe. Her new book presents new archival materials that have recently become available that shed new light on the era.

This book is a wide-ranging look at perhaps the most politically repressive era in US history, commonly referred to as McCarthyism, extending for the better part of two full decades beginning around 1940. In that period, it was widely held that anyone directly or indirectly belonging to the Communist Party or associating with such persons was by definition considered to be both disloyal and a security risk for the US, and thereby a suitable subject for investigation, harassment, job loss, and prosecution. One of the most disturbing aspects of the unrelenting search for Communists and leftists is that security threats to the US were highly exaggerated. Using disclosures from Soviet archives and secret communiqués, the author makes evident that alleged Soviet espionage during WWII (and they were our ally) had been well contained by the mid-40s, which suggests that investigative bodies and others had an agenda beyond security concerns. The author maintains that McCarthyism conveniently "fulfilled a number of long-standing right-wing objectives." Here was an opportunity for conservatives to discredit, if not harm, those who challenged the economic or cultural order by painting them as closet Communists and threatening to the US, thereby subject to the same censures.

The author's approach is generally chronological, though she roams freely across the era to describe specific aspects of the anti-communism movement. She briefly covers the origins of the communist party/movement in the US and the longstanding efforts to suppress it starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the First Red Scare that quickly followed. More important to the author than ordered, factual details of anti-communism, that is the specifics of investigating committees, legislation, departments, officials, suspects, informers, etc, is the attempt to understand the broader aspects and implications of this political and cultural phenomenon that had become so pervasive by the late 1940s.

Anti-communism was not a grass-roots movement; in fact, in the 1930s communists were quite active in working class issues. The failings of laissez-faire capitalism in the 1930s left both working people and intellectuals open to the consideration of alternative economic systems, especially socialism. It was primarily elites, political conservatives and business executives, who fiercely opposed communists and so-called fellow travelers, such as key members of CIO-led labor unions. Employers could quite conveniently support purging communists from unions, while downplaying their anti-labor sentiments. Interestingly, upon Germany invading Russia in 1941, Communists became the strongest supporters of the "no-strike" pledge and opposed any actions that would hinder production. Communist leadership, without a touch of irony, actually proclaimed that "Communism is twentieth century Americanism."

Relations between the US and the Soviet Union worsened considerably after WWII; with that came intensified attacks on communists in the US. The political climate forced Truman to respond with Executive Order 9835 which established loyalty procedures for all civilian federal employees with the FBI having both screening and investigative responsibilities. In addition, attacks on the labor movement were renewed resulting in the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which required union leaders to file non-Communist affiliation affidavits. With the expulsion of eleven non-compliant unions by the CIO, the US labor movement essentially ceased to be a militant voice for working people. Insufficient vigor in eliminating identified "subversives" by some gov departments under the loyalty program only encouraged others to hunt for communists.

Hollywood presented a tremendous opportunity for publicizing the infiltration of communists into popular institutions. The show-trial hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 forced Hollywood moguls to fire suspected communists, many of whom unsuccessfully invoked First Amendment rights, refusing to discuss their political affairs with the Committee. From this point, the entertainment industry maintained an updated and effective blacklist. Those in other professions who could likewise sway minds, such as professors and teachers, faced similar hearings and firings at the state level, usually with little opportunity to defend against anonymous accusers. The leftist lawyers of the National Lawyers Guild also came under intense scrutiny; a result was that many accused of being subversives had great difficulty in finding untainted lawyers to represent them.

A legal problem for the anti-communist movement was that belonging to political parties is not illegal in the US; communists had to be demonized sufficiently for the public to accept borderline legal actions. In contrast to normal Americans, communists were portrayed as being cut from the same cloth: sinister, devious, cunning, in thrall to Moscow, and atheistic - psychologically damaged, if not depraved. A justification for running roughshod over their rights was that they had in essence abdicated the protections of American freedoms by their seeming acceptance of Stalinism, including its brutalities. It was also widely held that they could never rescind their Party membership - once a Communist, always a Communist. Virtually all prosecutions of Communists were based either on questionable allegations of perjury or contempt citations for refusing to be badgered by Congressional committees. Invoking Fifth Amendment rights was hardly a route to exoneration; such individuals were assumed to be guilty and subsequently fired. The Smith Act of 1940 made it a crime to belong to any organization that advocated for the violent overthrow of any US government. Mostly through the efforts of FBI informants and using Communist literature dating back to Karl Marx, in a lengthy trial in 1949, the leaders of the US Communist party were found to be in violation of the Smith Act. Now it was actually illegal to be a Communist. The Supreme Ct, in essence, agreed that there was not a difference between advocacy and committing an act.

The author makes clear that the FBI was the foremost body during the entire McCarthy era that investigated claims of Communist membership, clandestinely kept elaborate lists of suspected members and other leftists, and provided information to virtually all of the leading investigative bodies. In fact, finding subversives of any stripe was an obsession of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. The FBI also maintained a large network of informants, some of whom were paid, but thousands of others served implicitly as members of such organizations as the American Legion. Several of the leading figures in this network were ex-Communists. Over several years, these same individuals were in great demand by various committees and prosecutors to finger suspected Communists. Years later, it became obvious that most of them lied to maintain their value to anti-communists, a fact not unknown to the FBI. To support their mission of monitoring subversive activity, the FBI expanded from a few hundred agents to upward of ten thousand. The author, semi-seriously, suggests that "Hooverism" is actually more apropos than is "McCarthyism" to name the period.

Sen. Joe McCarthy is of relative secondary importance in the author's telling of this era. McCarthy was actually a bit of a Johnny-come-lately to the entire repressive apparatus. He made a splash in the early 1950s by declaring that the State Dept had 205 Communists on the payroll, a number with no basis in fact. Given his penchant for playing to the press, for about three years his was the leading face of the anti-communist movement. However, his blustering, bullying, rash, opportunistic, and alcoholic manner and behavior finally led to his irresponsible accusations against Army personnel from his perch as head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. His fall was swift after the Eisenhower administration turned a cold shoulder to him and he was formally censured by the Senate in Dec, 1954. Perhaps it is fitting that the out-of-control McCarthy remains as the foremost symbol of the extremism of McCarthyism.

It is difficult to quantitatively assess the impact of McCarthyism. The sum total of those prosecuted for matters related to being a communist probably amounts to a few hundred with many being acquitted or winning on appeal. The loyalty programs dismissed at most a few thousand, but even more preemptively resigned. The author somewhat captures the personal toll of McCarthyism by examining many cases where individuals were pursued at length by investigative bodies until their lives were essentially ruined. Among them were China hands John Stewart Service and Owen Lattimore; the general secretary of the US communist party Eugene Dennis convicted under the Smith Act; Clayton Jencks head of the Mine-Mill workers; and the Hollywood Ten who ran afoul of the HUAC. Even the author's sixth-grade teacher was caught in the hunt for communists. Some of them were undoubtedly Communists; none of them even remotely were interested in violent acts against the US.

More broadly, McCarthyism was most certainly a society-wide assault on American ideals of freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. It should give anyone pause to realize that a democratic nation with many safeguards in place to protect individual freedoms went down this path. It is alarming that political and social elites were at the forefront of this unfortunate episode in our history; presumably they do not possess the power to subvert American freedoms. Beyond individual suffering, McCarthyism cast a pall across America. The author shows that it did curtail expressions of alternative political views among those who normally do so. In some respects those conducting the witch-hunts were successful. The Communist Party, a voice from the Left, was destroyed. Non-communist liberals definitely turned more moderate as "vital center" liberals. The labor movement became merely a part of the Democratic Party coalition, essentially toothless in being a strong force in shaping the workplace for American workers.

The book is a very good look at the McCarthy phenomenon. Due to numerous bodies and persons involved and the many threads of the period, the story is not easily told. It is difficult to assimilate all that occurred in a well-ordered, coherent pattern. The author is not unmindful of security needs, but that subject is only minimally discussed and by no means is thought to trump freedoms essential to a democracy. One could quibble with the author concerning her extolling the virtues of the Communist Party as an independent voice from the Left. The Party was never really big enough to have much influence. And it alone of all leftist political movements in US history had ties to a foreign state, not the most desirable situation.

The book is a more verbose version, with additional details, of Richard M. Fried's "Nightmare in Red," 1990. Both are quite good.

Anyone who can grab this valuable book while copies are still availble should! What a gold mine of information, cultural celebrations, innovative family ideas, and inspirations for self-love and dignity!

Are civil liberties and due process important considerations when viewing McCarthyism in the context of the Cold War? According to Thomas C. Reeves, in his recent review of Many Are the Crimes, the answer is no: "Solid research and good writing are not enough ... . It is simply unacceptable to continue to cling to the absurd illusion of heroic Reds as the champions of the highest ideals of humanity." Clearly confusing the book he wanted her to write, so he could condemn it too, with the one she did, Reeves berates Schrecker "for she is a woman of the far left." But the "far left" turf Schrecker defends with her "strident partisanship," is not, as Reeves would have us believe, some scorched-earth, totalitarian clam-back, but a land where the Ku Klux Klan has a right to march, anti-abortion protestors have a right to protest, vigilante bombers get due process of law and a jury trial, and a reviewer has the protected right to beat his own drum. It is no small matter of concern, nor surprise, then, that Reeves does not mention the stunning centerpiece of this book, Chapter 9 "How Red is a Valley" about Clinton Jencks and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers ("Mine-Mill"). How long it took Schrecker to find an individual through which association with the American Communist Party, the anti-Communist establishment, informal local networks, film colony, union activities, perjured testimony, and issues of due process intersected is hard to say. What is clear, and must be said, is the depth of Schrecker's research in telling the story of a man who fought for ten years in an utterly bizarre (but by no means unique) series of legal proceedings to prove himself innocent.

Notwithstanding the harshness of the title, I found this book to be a generally-balanced, thoughtful account of the intense and extensive anti-Communist campaign in the United States which flourished from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s. Now 50 years after the fact, the study of McCarthyism remains worthwhile for two reasons: As author Ellen Schrecker shrewdly observes, McCarthyism both predated and outlasted the heyday of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, which lasted only from 1950 until 1954; and McCarthyism reached practically every aspect of American life. It is virtually impossible to understand the history of the United States during the first decade after World War II (which also, of course, was the first decade of the Cold War) without careful reference to the phenomenon of McCarthyism. Somewhat to my surprise, this book is largely free of ideological cant, even as Schrecker carefully recounts the various ways in which McCarthyism distorted American politics in the early years of the Cold War, and I found her concluding chapter on the impact of McCarthyism to be especially effective.

Much of the copious background material Schrecker presents is both useful and interesting, although it takes her 150 pages to get to the mid-1940s, which is the ostensible beginning of the era of McCarthyism. Schrecker's formulation is intelligent and straightforward: By 1946, the United States was engaged in the growing Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union; McCarthyism was the home front of the Cold War; and it took little imagination to make American Communists and anyone who was or ever had been associated with them the principal targets on the home front.....

The focus of this book generally is events within the United States, but Schrecker does not whitewash the horrors perpetrated by Stalin's Soviet Union, nor the threat it posed to the United States. To the contrary, Schrecker is candid in reporting that, even during World War II, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies, the Soviets engaged in extensive anti-American espionage, the most egregious example of which was the passage of the secrets of the Manhattan Project, which allowed the Soviet Union to develop its own atomic bomb in 1949, "a year or two sooner than it otherwise would have." I believe that Schrecker's main premise, however, is that the dangerous international situation in the late 1940s and 1950s was conflated into a vicious hunt for subversives within the United States grotesquely out of proportion to any real domestic threat which might have existed. The record presented here of illegal conduct by the F.B.I. and its conscious exaggeration of the danger posed by Communism on the home front is what makes this book an important cautionary tale.

Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America by Ellen Schrecker is truly a seminal work; in American history carefully researched she proves the use of power by the few and the carefully orchestrated fear over the heart of the many maintains power in the hands of the elite minority. National culture of irrational trepidation meant living in a closed society in which liberties were sacrifice for the sack of a phony concern for National Security. The end result was McCarthyism, which predates Joe McCarthy and continued after he was gone. Ellen Schrecker carefully documents the key players Truman, Tom Clark, Eisenhower, and J. Edgar Hoover in this national shame that still haunts us today