Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America [Hardcover]

Ellen Schrecker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0316774707 | ISBN-13: 978-0316774703 | Edition: 1

From an award-winning McCarthy scholar comes the first post-Cold War exploration of the anticommunist witch-hunt and its devastating impact. Tracing the way that a network of dedicated anticommunists created blacklists and destroyed organizations, this broadbased inquiry reveals the connections between McCarthyism's disparate elements in the belief that understanding its terrible mechanics can prevent a repetition. of photos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ellen Schrecker's history of the American anticommunist movement provides a much-needed objective perspective on one of the most troubling periods in twentieth-century politics. While she refuses to excuse the flaws of the American Communist party or its individual members and leaders, she is also bluntly honest about the systematic persecution they experienced at the hands of conservatives--and more than a few liberals.

Schrecker reaches back in history to examine the roots of McCarthyism in the activity of Communists in the 1930s, as well as the response to that activity; not nearly enough people today recall that the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the forerunner to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Army hearings, received its mandate back in 1938. She reveals the dishonest practices of McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and other professional anticommunists, and how the media often played--wittingly or unwittingly--right into their hands. One Washington-based journalist of the time would later say, "McCarthy was a dream story. I wasn't off page one for four years."

But Schrecker commands attention most when she writes of the effects of the anticommunist movement on men and women like union activist Clinton Jencks, one of the first men to be prosecuted under the Taft-Hartley Act, and of its stifling effect of leftist politics, particularly within the civil rights movement. The longterm consequences of McCarthyism, especially its proof of the ease with which a democratic government can adopt methods of political repression, are felt in America to this day. Many Are the Crimes is not only excellent history, but a powerful cautionary tale that should be required reading for any participant in modern politics.

From Library Journal

Why did so many Americans collaborate with the domestic political repression of the late 1940s and 1950s, asks Schrecker (The Age of McCarthyism, St. Martin's, 1994), who argues that McCarthyism was far more than the antics of Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57). Schrecker exposes several McCarthyisms, identifying separate brands with separate agendas and ways of operating whose shared consensus on communism mediated their collaboration. Probing the many corners where McCarthyism prowled, she fingers a set of professional anti-Communists who deftly maneuvered federal officials under the guise of patriotism to adopt the indiscriminate crusade that treated dissent as disloyalty. Her focus is sharp and sweeping and her sources broad, ranging from the FBI, HUAC, NSA, and the KGB to the personal papers of various individuals. Schrecker's deft reconstruction of the longest wave of political repression in our history is recommended for all collections on U.S. history and politics.?Thomas Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 573 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316774707
• ISBN-13: 978-0316774703
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #361,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ellen Schrecker is a professor of history at Yeshiva University who has written extensively about the Cold War red scare. Among her books are No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and Cold War Triumphalism: Exposing the Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism. Schrecker is the former editor of the American Association of University Professors' magazine, Academe. She lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Authoritative Review Of Evidence Concerning McCarthyism! July 17, 2003

By Barron Laycock HALL OF FAME

Format:Hardcover

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!

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent historical overview June 5, 2009

By Derek Grimmell

Format:Hardcover

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.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive history of McCarthyism's Lesser-Known Victims May 18, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

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.