Many Are the Crimes : McCarthyism in America

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 And what outdated material, I guess Harvard specializes in dated material.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.

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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: 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.