Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America Book

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.