Many Are the Crimes

Rating:
Summary: This is a joke...right???
Review: Former Harvard professor Ellen Schrecker is a Marxist. Wake Up! The Great Sen. Joseph McCarthy exposed her pinko mentors of yesteryear. Look at how she drools over the American Communist Party. She's on a mission - "vengeance is mine", sayth her! And what outdated material, I guess Harvard specializes in dated material. Heck, if she even looked at all the evidence in the '90's - she would have had to scrap half this book.

Well Ms. Schrecker, your Communist Utopian dreams have been shattered and lays in the gutter along with Nazism.... deal with it lady!!! It's Dead. Its diseased ridden carcass is there for all to see.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy was ahead of his time and a visionary along with the great Roy Cohen. They WERE the primary reason why it never took hold in the USA ... because THEY EXPOSED YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE. And now there is Ann Coulter sweeping up your left-over's of filth and debris ... the illegitimate son of communism - the Liberal.

What I did enjoy was I realized that she is smart enough to know what really went on (you can read in between the lines). Some writers are just ignorant and really believe there was no commie threat ... but I can tell SHE KNOWS THE TRUTH. I see her as a very embittered "true Believer" of the insane and evil cause. And she is vehemently "beating" the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy with her pen - the only way she knows to get back at the man who destroyed her political/philosophical idealized cause (and she's frothing at the mouth in true mad dog fashion). You can tell she hates this man with a purple passion ... and to jeopardize her career by writing well-known lies? Well, let's just say she is taken a big chance.

Rating:
Summary: This is a joke...right???
Review: Former Harvard professor Ellen Schrecker is a Marxist. Wake Up! The Great Sen. Joseph McCarthy exposed her pinko mentors of yesteryear. Look at how she drools over the American Communist Party. She's on a mission - "vengeance is mine", sayth her! And what outdated material, I guess Harvard specializes in dated material. Heck, if she even looked at all the evidence in the '90's - she would have had to scrap half this book.

Well Ms. Schrecker, your Communist Utopian dreams have been shattered and lays in the gutter along with Nazism.... deal with it lady!!! It's Dead. Its diseased ridden carcass is there for all to see.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy was ahead of his time and a visionary along with the great Roy Cohen. They WERE the primary reason why it never took hold in the USA ... because THEY EXPOSED YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE. And now there is Ann Coulter sweeping up your left-over's of filth and debris ... the illegitimate son of communism - the Liberal.

What I did enjoy was I realized that she is smart enough to know what really went on (you can read in between the lines). Some writers are just ignorant and really believe there was no commie threat ... but I can tell SHE KNOWS THE TRUTH. I see her as a very embittered "true Believer" of the insane and evil cause. And she is vehemently "beating" the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy with her pen - the only way she knows to get back at the man who destroyed her political/philosophical idealized cause (and she's frothing at the mouth in true mad dog fashion). You can tell she hates this man with a purple passion ... and to jeopardize her career by writing well-known lies? Well, let's just say she is taken a big chance.

Rating:
Summary: Authoritative Review Of Evidence Concerning McCarthyism!
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Awfully biased book
Review: I bought this book for the research paper I was writing on McCarthyism. I agree with her that the McCarthyism era was a time in our history where the government overstepped it's bounds and infringed upon the rights of many, but I can't I agree with much else.

Shrecker's book is very left-biased and some of her conclusions and opinions are ridiculas. For instance, she claims that while communist in the U.S. were in fact giving secrets to the Soviets (including nuclear secrets, it was no big deal. She tries to soften this claim by saying that the Soviets would have likely had the bomb only 2 years later than they did if they weren't given nuclear secrets by American communists.

Besides that, the book is incredibly dry and boring.

I would NOT recommend this book. Try to find a more balanced, less biased book on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Mccarthyism goes against the constitution.
Review: Like the best dust jackets, that of "Many Are The Crimes" neatly gives the gist of the book. The anti-Communist movement, which often goes by the name McCarthyism, was, "generally accurate in (its) accusations" but, "exaggerated the danger of Communism" and was responsible for the "most widespread episode of political repression in the history of the US".

Here is laid bare one of life's mysteries: the left wing's enduring sympathy and empathy for one of the most brutal and repressive and hate-filled ideologies in history. Seemingly, nothing is enough to justify prosecuting the communist crowd. Not even when mass murder is carried out against their own kind. No act is too atrocious to be rationalized. The author quotes an American Communist who saw several friends disappear in Moscow in the Thirties, accepting it "as part of the brutal realities of making a revolution, of building an oasis of socialism in a sea of enemies". This attitude, this craven, nauseating rationalization Schrecker deems "tough-mindedness". One wonders how it would go over with Ms. Schrecker's chums at Yeshiva University if she were to call "tough-minded" the condoning of purges in Berlin in the Thirties-- "part of the brutal realities of making a revolution, of building an oasis of Aryanism in a sea of enemies".

In the same spirit, Ms. Schrecker ascribes Stalin's pact with Hitler to Stalin's being "disillusioned by the Western democracies failure to stand up to Hitler" (p.15). Well! We all must lose our innocence some time. But this must have been a particularly shattering realization for Stalin. Imagine the depth of his disillusionment upon realizing that he'd have to share the butchery of the next 20 million people with the hated foreigners.

Usually communist sympathizers are blissfully ignorant of what communists are all about right up to the moment when the jack-booted baboons bang on their door in the middle of the night and haul them off to a labor camp in order to build oases of socialism in a sea of etc, etc... Not Schrecker. She is fully informed of the atrocities of the Reds of the world.

Fully informed, she chooses to overlook these shortcomings in order to examine how the ideology was "repressed". Unlike Joe Stalin, Schrecker is under no illusions. She details the essentially autocratic, rigid, self-righteous nature of the CP. She elucidates in energetic, trim prose the growing of the movement against the CP, not just by narrow-minded xenophobic whitebread males like those pictured on the dust jacket, but by socialists, labor leaders, and liberals of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

Yet throughout this meticulous account runs the whisper: "the anti-communists exaggerated the danger of communism". Thus, while acknowledging the guilt of the Rosenbergs, she refers to their case as "judicial murder". While acknowledging the chronic mendacity of the CP, she is indignant that its followers should be imprisoned for perjury or contempt of Congress. Although communists subjugated half the population of the globe in a short span of years, she clings to the notion that it could not happen in America.

Schrecker willfully ignores the set and setting of anti-communism in order to smear the movement. Russia had completed two decades of mass murder. Mao had just subjugated China and was just beginning his decades of mass murder. North Korea invaded South Korea--not a civil conflict, but a crude bid for conquest. Millions died, families were destroyed, businesses were gutted, people were enslaved.

Meanwhile, Ellen Schrecker's sixth grade teacher lost his job for a couple years. Dalton Trumbo had to write under a pseudonym for awhile. A handful of people were called in front of a Congressional Committee to answer questions about their politics. This is Ms. Schrecker's conception of repression: the horror of answering the pointed questions of Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, and other politicians who happened to serve on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

In a note to her Introduction, Schrecker notes that Stalin was "more repressive" than McCarthy--thus suggesting that both were guilty of "crimes", with no word of the incomprehensible enormity of the one and the paltriness of the other. One might as well compare the Columbine massacre to a panty raid.

Incredibly enough, she runs this litany out to book length. It goes like this: Stalin was guilty of crimes, but that was in Russia, and this book is about America. Here in America, communists were not bad. They were compassionate folk: labor organizers and civil rights activists. In foreign countries evil communists took control from the good communists. That couldn't happen in America. No way a Stalin or a Lenin or a Mao or a Pol Pot or a Castro could ever come to power in the USA. It's mere coincidence that every other communist regime in the world turned into a totalitarian bloodbath. The real danger in America was J. Edgar Hoover and his lists.

The climax of this symphony of equivocation finds Schrecker, in the petulant tone of a thwarted child, blaming anti-communism for everything from lousy TV programming to Watergate. I must say, she retained my interest to the very end. I've never seen a more perfect example of how a highly intelligent person can be so completely and consistently deluded.

She would make a more serious contribution to history if in her next book she were to examine how communism has evolved from the dream of a control freak to something more closely resembling the Cosa Nostra. If and when the RICO statute is adapted to international law in order to crush organized crime in Russia and China, as it has been crushed here in the US, Schrecker would be the perfect chronicler, with her eye for the nuances of repression.

Rating:
Summary: A Balanced Account of an Imbalanced Era
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: I am overall dissatisfied with it
Review: Schrecker's history of the anticommunist movement in America is an interesting study in to politics and personal liberty. She points out that many of these communists were persecuted by conservatives (professional patriots she sometimes calls them) but liberals as well. She does a fine job describing the history of the CP in the US, especially how "mainstream" it appeared during the early New Deal.

Schrecker tells us how far reaching McCarthyism came to be in the US, and that it ruined individuals who were blacklisted or imprisoned. McCarthyism led to the silencing of political, artistic, and intellectual expression, as many were afraid to proclaim sentiments that might be deemed verboten by those with the power to ruin them. It was easy for anti-Communist sentiment to take root in the mainstream of American culture, she contends, as heightened insecurity and fear of the USSR made it seem plausible that evil agents were under every bed plotting to kill Americans or at the very least destroy our culture.

Schrecker's strength is that she shows how far the reach of the government was in finding the people it sought, and how strong was the public support behind it. It is clear that constitutional liberties were in some cases overlooked, though the author seems to overlook herself that we were at war with a powerful foe at the time. Lincoln resorted to the same measures when he was trying to save the Union from dissolving. Schrecker's failure to mention this (as well as her failure to compare McCarthyism with the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 under Pres. John Adams) shows a lack of historical perspective on her part.

While I would have to say that this thesis is plausible and that the book is competent, I am overall dissatisfied with it, and somehow I am not sure I'm getting the whole picture. To state on page ix that "for some reason, this book touched an ideological nerve" is either demonstrates an incredible naïveté on Schrecker's part, or a smug disingenuousness that makes me skeptical from the outset. When she writes that if she were writing the book now she would "acknowledge more conclusively than I did that the American Communists spied for the Soviet Union," she in effect admits that she is a poor researcher. Where was she looking when she first wrote the book? Although reams of documents are now available to researchers with the fall of the USSR, had Schrecker gone to the trouble of carefully examining what materials existed before this new cache of documents became available she would have found testimony, deposition transcripts, court documents, memoirs, letters, newspaper articles, etc., all showing that-surprise! -the Rosenburgs were spies, and so was Alger Hiss! I suspect that Schrecker did not find what she wasn't looking for-guilt on the part of Soviet agents. Nevertheless her admission in the new preface shows little contrition for such shabby research.

Rating:
Summary: Many Are The Crimes - red scare/cold war!
Review: The McCarthy Era was a bad time for freedom in America. It was the most widespread episode of political repression in US history, encompassing far more than the brief career of a senator from Wisconsin. Those who were too young to understand what was going on yet were old enough to know something was happening, glimpsed the secrecy, sensed the social distress, have now grown up; become scholars & done the difficult & grim exhumation of one horrible carcass we've interred without honor for half a century. It is not impulsive, this tracing of the causes for this crime - it is a lengthy, labyrinthine labor. It is easy to see Professor Schrecker's dedication: she has learnt to interpret the national body language of the time, & has written a deeply researched, articulate & readable book that offers a fascinating autopsy. Superb!.....................

Rating:
Summary: Proof.
Review: Whittaker Chambers wrote in his book WITNESS that liberals are/were incapable of ever effectively fighting Communism because they did not see anything in Communism that was antithetical to their own beliefs. In short, Liberals are Communists and Communists are Liberals. Ellen Schecter's MANY ARE THE CRIMES is simply one more in an appalling decades long list of such proofs of this assertion. Schecter is aware of the horrors of Communism; the tortures, the Gulags, the over 100 million persons done to death. She is even aware that the American Communists were taking their orders from Moscow and were attempting to impose the Red Utopia upon the United States. If successful, this would have led to millions tortured, enslaved, starved and murdered. It would have led to the death of human freedom for untold years. As the US was the bulwarked of freedom and Democracy, it's communization would have turned the entire world into an abatoir. Shecter knows all of this and the knowledge means nothing. The Communists were victims. The Anti Communists were Evil villains. Murdered millions mean nothing. The Soviet Archives mean nothing. The testimony of persons who were actually there are to be dismissed. One is hard pressed to see the difference between someone who denys that the Holocaust happened and your average Liberal. Both are abettors of genocide. Make no mistake. Schecter's book IS important. Once more Chambers has been shown to have been telling the truth. MANY ARE THE CRIMES is proof.