Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America

by Ellen Schrecker

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.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, The United States Of America, Grad School, United States

573 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Ellen Wolf Schrecker is an American professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University. She has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU. She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellen Schrecker’s Many are the Crimes provides a sociocultural look at the McCarthy era, focusing more on its impact on American culture than its well-worn political drama. Schrecker analyses the Red Scare not as an aberration but a long-standing tradition in American politics, dating back to the turn of the century. Unlike other Red Scare historians, she's not afraid to show the close, often embarrassingly naive cooperation of New Deal liberals and more extreme progressives under Franklin Roosevelt, showing how a socialist-Democrat alliance managed to serve both groups' interest for a brief period. Then the emergence of a hostile, empowered post-WWII USSR, the ascension of the staunchly anti-Communist Harry Truman to power and a general American revulsion against all things Red, Pink or remotely unorthodox destroyed this alliance. Schrecker recounts familiar events and traumas while stressing their long-term impacts: the McCarthy era, far from a fleeting fit of hysteria, virtually destroyed American progressivism while rendering all ancillary causes (from Civil Rights and labor issues to healthcare reforms) eternally suspect, turning the Democratic Party stubbornly centrist...and how the Red Scare emboldened America's right to see Democrats not merely as misguided rivals, but illegitimate, un-American traitors. It's painfully easy to see the contours of our current divides in Schrecker's story, with no sign of their improving.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellen Schrecker’s synthesis of scholarship on McCarthyism, Many are the Crimes, expands on the methods and costs of suppressing leftist politics in the early Cold War. The consequence of embracing a politically polarizing American identity defined against a Soviet Other was “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history,” mobilized by a coalition of politicians, bureaucrats and activists to repress “an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture.” From its roots within conservative anti-socialist groups formed in the first decades of the twentieth century, embittered during the New Deal, and empowered by the national security ideology and its new state institutions, Schrecker traces an anti-communist movement with many variations that operated through official intelligence, unofficial collaboration, and public fear. Intelligence agents, mainly in the FBI, had only to implicate someone with a past or present leftist affiliation, and unofficial reprisals saw to the rest. Far from being the indiscriminate witch hunt of popular history, Schrecker notes that “most of the men and women who lost their jobs or were otherwise victimized were not apolitical folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong mailing lists or signed the wrong petitions. Rather . . . they had once been in or near the American Communist party.” Nor were all of the victims innocents. Some had passed information to the Russians, and the willingness to follow Soviet direction and secrecy practiced by the American Communist Party made it particularly vulnerable to vilification and repression. It was neither “Joseph McCarthy nor J. Edgar Hoover” who “had invented American Communism.

While the bulk of her study traces the development and practice of anti-communist repression, Schrecker devotes her final and longest chapter to speculation on the ultimate implications of repressing an unpopular minority, which extended far beyond the death of the Rosenbergs, the hundreds imprisoned and the roughly ten thousand citizens who lost their careers. As Schrecker has it, the chill which settled over the United States, the appeals to patriotism and the direction of federal money ultimately crippled mid-century feminism, civil rights advocacy, left leaning unions and anti-poverty activism. It narrowed acceptable bounds for dissent, for images of American life portrayed in the media, and changed the language and ideas taught in universities. Both American art and thought retreated into anti-populist elitism, and social problems like poverty, racism and crime were increasingly dealt with as psychological rather than societal in nature. Anti-imperialist strains within American politics were silenced, and following the “loss” of China, East Asian specialists were purged. In many ways, Schrecker argues, the peculiar blindnesses created by McCarthyism led to the wreckage of the Vietnam War. Perhaps because her focus is so broad, and perhaps because her judgment is an indictment, she fails to examine the outcomes of McCarthyism in terms of anything but the absence of leftists, whereas other historians have noted how the Christian framework of the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the Black Power movement in the north both sprang up partially due to the absence of leftist organizing.

[Julia Xiang-Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the best historical book I’ve ever read. Do not be mistaken, this is hardly a light read. All 20 years of research Schrecker put into this book comes through in explicating both the rise and fall of the American left through McCarthyism. After reading this book, I have a hard time imagining a period of 20th century American history more crucial to shaping the contemporary realm of American governance than McCarthyism. From the rise of the surveillance state through the mechanisms Hoover developed to target political undesirables to the normalization of subterfuge and illegal activities in American politics, the cultural arena that we live in today is largely a product of the anti communist fervor that struck the nation. For anyone interested in the history of the American Left, this book does an incredible job at exploring the ways McCarthyism devastated the possibility for progressive politics while presenting an internal critique of the the American Communist party that rendered it more vulnerable to external repression. The last chapter is particularly devastating. We will never know what could have been in the realm of progressive organizing. I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone interested in a comprehensive overview of the history of the American left as told through the story of American political repression, much of which would go on to have consequences beyond the initial political “undesirables.”

[AskHistorians]

A good introduction to (and history of) McCarthyism.

[Olivia Bowers · Rating 4 out of 5]

FINALLY putting this one to bed. A very dense, but incredibly informative read, filled to the brim with history as told from the lens of actual instances of persecution during this dark time. The final chapter is the real kicker, where after reading all of the atrocities committed in the name of “public safety”, the author reminds you of McCarthyism’s lasting impact and its continuing influence in American politics. Most pointedly, Schrecker points out that the biggest crime McCarthyism espoused was showing American politicians that anyone can be persecuted, shunned, jailed, and even killed if you tack the right label to the right group at the right time. McCarthyism showed that there will always be a shadowy nature to American politics, so long as those in power use fear to their advantage. Deeply unsettling, and at times, genuinely shocking. This is required reading for all young American adults. Four and a half stars rounded down for the rambling case studies that could’ve benefitted from condensing.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: For some reason this title is appearing under "Hashtag - Life's Not Fair." I do not believe this is the author's intention. The site has probably been hacked by an opponent who replaced the book title with some snark. Goodreads of course does not know this. But I know my enemy.

This is Professor Ellen Schrecker’s follow-up tome to her “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.” Here she takes on the whole post-war McCarthyite Red Scare movement. In doing so, she bites off a bit more than the book’s premise. As she admits, American anti-Communism was more than the late Senator or his committee. It had prewar roots in the 1930s, the post-WWI original Red Scare - indeed, going back to the Chicago Haymarket affair of the 1880s, even to the first years of the Republic in the Alien and Sedition Acts. What made this movement stand out was its embodiment in a single grandstanding provocateur/political entrepreneur, whose star-power and feel-good snake oil rose with the birth of TV mass marketing.

Since anti-radicalism had such deep roots – in a country noted for its bitter partisan extremes – anti-Communism easily lent itself to the social straitjacketing of the United States necessary to keep the military-industrial complex at work. It’s no accident, as a good Marxist would say, that McCarthy’s purges surged with war: the “loss” of China, and the Korean “conflict.” As such it smashed Red influence, real or alleged, in government, culture, entertainment, academia, the media, labor, civil rights, law – any sphere of human activity beyond one’s own suburban back yard. Its bruises still lay around the throat of American life long after the Senator himself succumbed to his personal demons in a DT ward.

Professor Schrecker does an excellent job piecing together its main fabric, its threads and loose ends. The tapestry was raw and half-finished, but effective. In delineating their motives and attitudes toward said Reds she holds back from analyzing the anti-Commies themselves. If its members joined the Communist Party and sympathizers filled its fronts because of their “social inadequacies” or “mental maladjustment,” the same is certainly true of those riding this other bandwagon: looking for Red spooks in the closet, under the bed, or reveling in simian crap-throwing from behind. Americanism itself became a totalitarian ideology that did, indeed, through the Internal Security, or McCarran Act, of 1950 authorize gulags of its own (if never enforced).

McCarthyism has been called “American Stalinism,” and with good reason, even if the sanctioned Alaskan gulags were never opened, no one physically tortured, or literally executed. (After all, lack of rape does not justify sexual harassment.) Stalin’s purges coincided with the “loss” of Germany and the Spanish civil war, brought home in a vicious manhunt for an “anti-Soviet Fifth Column” in all walks of life. McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee hearings many not have been Moscow Show Trials, but they were close enough. It was politically suicidal to make the ironic analogy in Washington after 1950; just as obvious comparisons with Hitler’s Long Knives was unthinkable in Moscow. It is necessary to note, btw, that the real Red-hunting was done by HUAC and the FBI; McCarthy's antics merely sponged off their muck-raking. The Senator himself never "exposed" an actual Red anywhere.

"A lost moment of opportunity," Professor Schrecker phrases it on p. 369, when the late 1940s offered America and the world more choice than it would ever have again. This was the aftermath of WWII's victory, when it seemed that the world might be made anew. However, others feared these changes and sought to cram the world back into its prewar business-as-usual foxhole. Among the Allies, Britain epitomized the latter trend, the USSR (to many) the first, with the US maintaining a cautious center. Under Truman the US sided unequivocally with Churchill. The Brave New World-to-Be was conveniently coupled with Stalin, the USSR, and gulags, the very idea of social justice demonized, and reactionary backlash disguised as "freedom."

But the political right’s embrace of McCarthyism is understandable. Anti-Communism always made a good cover for those opposed to liberalism, religious tolerance, racial equity, public spending, the rights of labor – just democracy itself. More reprehensible, to my mind, is the “liberal-left” surrender. In what was obviously a mixture of careerism and cowardice, “progressives” allowed themselves to be divided and deflected away from what should have been their main agenda: promoting social equity against entrenched privilege, corruption, and oppression. Who cares if “Commies” endorsed, even aided and abetted the same causes? By stoking leftist sectarian mud-slinging, said interests ensured that what they hated most – social democracy – would be left choking in the dust. Here another Russian analogy – the “Kerensky syndrome” – best fits. It was this muddled attitude that brought Lenin and Trotsky to power in the first place; and when General Kornilov came riding into town, it was for Kerensky’s scalp as well as theirs. That intelligent men and women - who knew all this ancient history, had even lived some of it - couldn’t see the “them today, you tomorrow” nature of the anti-Red movement is truly astonishing. Though American civil rights and union contracts were promoted after McCarthy, with the goal of “thwarting the Reds,” their tattered state today reflects one of his longest legacies.

There are other dissections of McCarthy and analyses of America in the early cold war. But Professor Schrecker’s book – like Danton’s head – is certainly worth a look.

[Public Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many are the pages!!! A massive, very dense, very thorough dissection of the anticommunist era in the US. I am ashamed to admit that I lost all momentum about halfway through and called it quits. It's not because it's a bad book. It is exhaustingly detailed. There are strong points, but I was too overwhelmed to pick it back up after months on the shelf. Perhaps my intestinal fortitude will return. Until then, I remain defeated by this book.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Ellen Schrecker points out early on in this book, something like McCarthyism had existed in the US long before the senator from Wisconsin gave it his imprimatur. There was, for example, a serious “red scare” in America at the end of the First World War, in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. And, as she also points out, it did not cost millions of lives as Stalin’s purges or Hitler’s crimes did.

That said, it cost an awful lot of people their livelihoods, self-respect, even their freedom and put the whole of society under relentless pressure. Though the chapter dealing directly with McCarthy himself is relatively short, the whole book makes clear how big the phenomenon was. Liberties were restricted or denied, moves towards such “socialist” concepts as universal healthcare were stymied, and a sleaziness was injected into American politics that, Schrecker contends, obtains to this day.

All in all, this is a sobering account of a sorry episode in US history. Could it happen again? Schrecker thinks not, not least because the Cold War has been won and, at the time this book was published, Communism had largely disappeared from the world scene.

All the same, you have to wonder.

[Nanette Bulebosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The McCarthy era was a tragic chapter in American history. Schrecker's book is one of the best I've read on this period. She reminds us that hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives were shattered by unfair or disingenuous accusations. Most affected were academics, union leaders, Hollywood writers, directors, and actors, and government workers. Many of them were chastised for trying to live their political ideals 20 years before, when the economy was in ruins and people were looking for more equitable solutions to poverty, not to mention racism and unfair labor practices. Communism, along with socialism and anarchism, was seen for a brief period of time by some as offering alternatives to what was then a very broken system.

There was never any threat to the American way of life, despite what Joe McCarthy and others said. As Schrecker points out, many of the loudest accusers knew this. Their real motive was breaking up union activity, protecting corporate power, and undermining many of the successes of the New Deal. In large part, they succeeded.

Worse still, and beyond all the lives and families it destroyed, McCarthyism had lasting negative effects on politics and culture that still hurt us. It destroyed the left. The damage wrought on the labor movement has never been recovered. It hurt America's international relations by narrowing foreign policy, and thus intensifying the cold war. As Schrecker puts it, "The anticommunist purges wiped out the means through which it was possible to offer an alternative vision of the world."

I do recommend this book.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her preface to the paperback edition, Schrecker takes note of the recent publication of The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, a book that took advantage of KGB and FBI files that have become available since the end of the Cold War to examine the issue of Americans spying for the Soviet Union. In that book, it becomes clear that many had indeed spied for the USSR, especially during the 1930s and in WWII. By 1950, Schrecker concludes, this was pretty much over. The normal background investigations of government employees in sensitive positions would have done just fine to protect the government from internal subversion, yet it was in the first years of the 1950s that the most virulent anti-communism flourished.

Having studied anti-communism and the career of Tail Gunner Joe for more than two decades, Schrecker is probably better positioned than anyone alive today to put the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s into perspective. What she concludes is that anti-communism was a crusade that has its roots in the 1930s, when the "old left," sympathetic to the USSR, had worked to further causes like trade unionism. In that timeframe, the infrastructure for an anticommunist crusade was put into place. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, HUAC, and a network of professional anti-communists were all in place by the late 1930s and WWII represented merely a diversion from the crusade. The reason why this crusade received such wide-spread acquiescence is that it was plausible that communists were in government -- indeed, as Weinstein and Vassiliev have shown, many were. There are many different reasons for individuals picking up the anti-communist cause in the immediate post-war period. The U.S. was, in fact, sliding toward cold war, with confrontation increasing at an ever more rapid pace from 1946-49. Partisanship, and ultimately official government sanction of anti-communism's institutional apparatus were amongst the most effective supports.

Schrecker is concerned with the general effect on America of a creeping conformity that distanced itself from anything "controversial". For individuals singled out, such as the author's sixth grade teacher, there was plenty of personal trauma. The nation as a whole emerged from the anti-communist crusade weakened, with the range of discussion narrowed to a "Cold War consensus". One wonders if the creeping conformism of "the good war" also laid some of the groundwork for this phenomenon. As Richard Polenberg points out, the New Deal Liberals who ran the OWI stepped away from anything that resembled conflict, approving only films that were "patriotic" in that they did not show any conflict between labor and management, ethnic groups, or black and white. The Red Scare era's aversion to controversy had already been pretty well developed in the course of the hot war, now it's pernicious influence was extended to the cold war.

So what of "Tail Gunner Joe"? Schrecker sees him more as a creature of the anti-communist crusade than as its maker. If the Truman administration had merely played down the Wheeling W VA speech when he announced the alleged list of communists in government, the Senator from Wisconsin may have remained at best a marginal figure. He gained credibility when the Truman administration fought back. In the hothouse atmosphere of the Korean War, McCarthy exploited the partisan potential of attacking the state department for the "loss" of China to the "reds." The Acheson state department, so the conservative argument went, had lost China. McCarthy inherited a group of witnesses who were just waiting to testify against Dean Acheson's faculty at the "cowardly college of containment" (Richard Nixon's formulation). The NY lace importer Alfred Kohlberg was among the star witnesses that had been looking for a political outlet to purge the state department. McCarthy called on Kohlberg and a whole list of others before Patrick McCarran's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to investigate the communist ties of the Institute for Public Research. The committee grilled the "China Hands" like John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John Patton Davies. (All of whom were eventually fired from the department) The roughest treatment was reserved for the eminent Sinologist Owen Lattimore. Lattimore's career as an academic in the U.S. was effectively destroyed by the process. He ended up leaving the U.S. to head the Chinese Studies Program at the University of Leeds in 1963.

As the IPR investigation revealed, McCarthy was aided in his meteoric rise by a network of professional anti-communists. Among this network certainly the most prominent and powerful was J. Edgar Hoover, who only turned against him after he became worried that too many former G-Men were working for the Senator's Committee and only cut him off totally when it became clear that his recklessness had angered Ike. Always the consummate bureaucrat, Hoover knew when to cut an ally loose. When McCarthy took on Eisenhower, by calling the administration "soft" on communism in November 1953, he prompting Eisenhower to get down in the gutter to fight back. The Army McCarthy hearings were prompted by the release by the administration of the records on Private Shine, which then lead to McCarthy being investigated for securing privileges for the special friend of his chief counsel Roy Cohen. The brilliant setup by Joe Brewer was a very public finale to a process whose outcome was more or less pre-determined. Once McCarthy took on the very popular and politically astute president, he was a doomed political figure.

Why did Eisenhower let him get away with it so long? It seems that the reasons were purely political. As Michael Rogin pointed out in The Intellectuals and McCarthy, McCarthy was the darling of the conservative mid-western wing of the Republican party. Eisenhower, clearly in the camp of the eastern elite moderate Republicans, feared splitting the party. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut "And so it goes."

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people finally learn the real history of the United States, they will realize that the "anti-red" scare of the 1920s and the"anti-communist" movement of the mid-twentieth century were actually anti-union thrusts by a corporate run government they may decide to vote progressive. This book shows how much damage one man (J. Edgar Hoover) and those like him can do to damage democracy and destroy civil rights. Using anti-communism as a cover, government helped corporations destroy unions and keep labor wages and benefits low. It is a book most Americans should read and the history should be taught in high school if not earlier.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of McCarthyism that was very readable. It was a pretty fair treatment, neither minimizing the amount of control that Moscow had over American Communists nor downplaying their importance to the American left. The one thing it didn't do was go inside the heads of either the communists/fellow travelers or the anti-Communists, so you never really get to see what motivates them, just what they do.

[John NM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of the purging of the communist party from American public space. Great balance between the broader trends and individual, humanising stories. Nicely outlines the coordination of public and private efforts as well as the conditions that made these efforts successful. The repeated intersection of anti-communist actions with anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and racist efforts is pretty edifying when looking at the current political landscape.

[Sarah Weiner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well-written and very informative, but, like a lot of non-fiction, it’s not a page-turner.

If you’re looking for an explanation of McCarthyism and an overview of the actions of the anti-communist crusade of the 40’s and 50’s or haven’t read much about McCarthyism, this is the book for you. If you want a deep-dive into the Hollywood Blacklist or Edward R. Murrow, this is not that book.

[Fidel Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very edifying book about how the American ruling class succeeded in mobilizing state, parastate, and deep state institutions, as well as often violent and unchecked private interests in the civilian realm, to crush Communist, trade-union, and progressive forces in the context of a Cold War it had begun to pursue unilaterally against the Eastern Bloc and the nascent post-colonial revolutions.

[Matthew Warchal · Rating 2 out of 5]

See her historical arch-nemesis, John Earl Haynes instead. There are ways to acknowledge the damage of McCarthyism in the US without completely ignoring the vastly worse horrors of Soviet internationalist expansionism, the realities of Cold War espionage, and Stalinism.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweeping study of the ways McCarthy effected the US

[Kate Gupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Extended Essay, DNF fully

[evelyn]

banger

[Tobias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great in parts, but mostly okay. I thought the organization was a bit jarring - jumped back and forth chronologically in a somewhat confusing way. Nevertheless, important chronicle of a shameful episode in American history. I do wonder whether something like McCarthyism could happen again in precisely the same way. While the appeal to national security and Americanism has never gone away, will there ever be an other quite the same as communism, which its enemies were able to portray as just a step away from plain old American liberalism or socialism, thereby enabling them to violate the rights and destroy the lives of thousands of American citizens? That combination seems unlikely to recur.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book to review because while it gives a good overview of the McCarthy era, particularly in the sense that "McCarthyism" actually existed before McCarthy, the emphasis on individual stories (always presented sympathetically) is not necessarily the best technique for such a history. Still a fair and interesting read.

[Errol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book on the McCarthy era!

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

The must-read historian of McCarthyism. Great stuff.

[Gustaf Erikson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of the anti-communist movement in forties-fifties USA.