From My Bookshelf
Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998)
In times of political demagoguery, the most consequential factor is often how elites respond to demagogic forces within their own ranks. In her book Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America, historian Ellen Schrecker offers one of the most comprehensive accounts of anti-communism in mid-century America.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was the central figure in a political firestorm fueled by right-wing activists and organizations that exploited the Cold War to promote a brutal purge throughout major institutions.
Rather than centering the story on McCarthy himself, Schrecker shows that the senator’s influence rested on an extensive network of organizations and institutions—most notably the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI—that together fueled the anti-communist scare. Earlier narratives that treated McCarthy as the primary driver tended to overlook the broader infrastructure that enabled him to flourish (with some notable exceptions, such as Robert Griffith’s 1970 book, The Politics of Fear). The FBI stands out as particularly egregious, as Hoover used executive power to vastly expand his ability to go after alleged communists.
The anti-communist network’s actions, which targeted perceived opponents and imposed a range of punishments, from professional blacklists to imprisonment and execution, wreaked havoc on the lives of countless Americans. Many institutions, Schrecker notes, simply capitulated to the fury of the right. Law firms refused to represent persons accused by the federal government while the press “created the monster it then chronicled,” she writes with regards to McCarthy.
By focusing her attention on the victims of the purge, Schrecker shows the immense costs borne by society when such politics is allowed to thrive. She is sympathetic towards American communists while acknowledging the findings from the Venona files —declassified in 1995—which revealed that there were communist spies working in the U.S., including those whom liberals had historically defended as innocent. She argues that while many communists in the U.S. were simply part of the American left, focused on championing labor and civil rights, right-wing forces presented anyone even tangentially connected to the party as part of a worldwide conspiracy directed by the Kremlin to overthrow the U.S. government.
