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Many Are the Crimes: Mccarthyism in America Book Reviews Book Reviews Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 573 pp. $17.95 [paper]. Reviewed by Michael Warner, History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/3/2/101/695380/152039701300373907.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Ellen Schrecker has produced a comprehensive survey of the public assault on Com- munism in America in the mid-twentieth century. Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Univer- sities, knows her subject inside and out, having researched it from the most recently available documents and memoirs of those involved. The main purpose of the book is to explain the common “mechanisms, assump- tions, and institutions” of McCarthyism. That phenomenon began with the onset of World War II and lingered after Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fall. It came in several varieties: right-wing, liberal, Republican, and even left-wing versions (the latter comprising anti-Stalinist radicals and apostates from the Communist Party). All anti- Communists shared a consensus about the nature of Communism and its potential threat to American life, and they cooperated with one another to combat that threat. Many Are the Crimes shows how a relatively small number of anti-Communists became the vanguard of the movement. According to Schrecker, these writers, lawyers, and activists shared, to one degree or another, McCarthy’s “dishonesty, opportunism, and disregard for civil liberties” (p. 265). She argues that, with the institutional sup- port of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they were able indirectly to guide the loyalty proceedings, blacklists, and other McCarthyist actions against suspected Communists in government, academia, the media, and the business world. The concluding chapter of Many Are the Crimes assesses the effects of McCarthyism in four areas of American life: the budding civil rights movement, the federal government, organized labor, and the arts. Schrecker claims that the “body count” from McCarthyism totaled 10,000 to 12,000 persons. She acknowledges that only a handful actually lost their lives but contends that many lost their liberty, repu- tations, jobs, careers, or even spouses as a result of prosecution, blackballing, or stress. The “human wreckage” ranged from the Rosenbergs, executed for conspiracy to com- mit espionage, to Ellen Schrecker’s sixth-grade teacher, who was eased out of his post for his leftist past. According to Schrecker, the effects of McCarthyism have reached down through the decades by chilling debate and stiºing change in all four areas of American life on which she concentrates. In each area, radicals have lost their nerve or their jobs. By in- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 101–116 © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 101 Book Reviews timidating the left and foreclosing the political development of a generation of activ- ists, she argues, McCarthyism contributed to a narrowing of the possibilities for a more democratic life in a modern capitalist state. McCarthyism is a mineªeld for historians. Schrecker takes pains to pick her way through it, acknowledging the justice of arguments on both sides of some of the most bitter arguments in American history. The paperback edition of Many Are the Crimes includes a brief but signiªcant new preface, in which she concedes to critics of the ªrst Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/3/2/101/695380/152039701300373907.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 edition that her thinking changed somewhat after reading the evidence on Soviet espi- onage in Allen Weinstein’s and Alexander Vassiliev’s recent book The Haunted Wood. Some of the famous old controversies can now be put to rest, she admits, since the evi- dence “corroborates too many other sources to leave anyone but a conspiracy junkie in doubt” (p. x). On this and other points, the historiography of the McCarthy era seems to be nearing coherence, if not consensus. Conservatives, liberals, and progressives would all seem to agree with Schrecker that Senator McCarthy was indeed loathsome—but was so only because of his virulence, not because of his aims. Indeed, the Senator himself plays no more than a cameo role in Many Are the Crimes, appearing as the main sub- ject of only one of its chapters. This raises a question about the very term “McCarthyism.” Schrecker seems a lit- tle unsatisªed with it at points. She argues that American Communists made them- selves peculiarly vulnerable to attack. The party’s rigid adherence to the Soviet line and its conspiratorial manner were easy targets for the anti-Communists: “Many 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”; they had indeed joined or aided the CPUSA. “Whether or not they should have been victimized, they certainly were not misidentiªed” (p. xiv, emphasis in original). If the phenomenon was created by both Democrats and Republicans, and if many of its victims were not mis- identiªed, then why call the movement “McCarthyism” at all? I do not have a better term to substitute, but perhaps someone else will. The speculative conclusion of Many Are the Crimes may be the book’s weak point. Asking “what if” is a risky business for any historian. For example, it may stretch credibility for Schrecker to argue that McCarthyism, by destroying the Left in America, indirectly froze alternatives to the Cold War and delayed the expansion of the welfare state (p. 369). McCarthyism did indeed harm the Left, but this paradoxi- cally may have strengthened American liberals, who rose up in the 1960s to pass legis- lation that collectively changed the country’s life. One could plausibly argue that re- forms in foreign and domestic policies might never have happened if liberals had not “proved” their patriotism by supporting strictures against the Communists, thereby immunizing themselves and their programs against the sort of insults and doubts that might otherwise have impeded them. Many Are the Crimes is well written, and it raises new questions and helps to deªne old issues more clearly. Schrecker knows how to tell a story, how to present both the human aspects of larger events and the general implications of personal decisions, and how to judge individual cases with compassion and de- 102 Book Reviews tachment—all welcome skills in a historian dealing with such charged issues and incidents. ✣✣✣ Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. 256 pages. $32.50. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/3/2/101/695380/152039701300373907.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Reviewed by Malcolm Byrne, National Security Archive After more than 50 years scholars are still debating fundamental questions about the origins and early stages of the Cold War. Lately these debates have tended to feature new evidence from archives in the former Soviet bloc. Gregory Mitrovich, by contrast, has relied exclusively on archives in the United States, but he has found plenty of ma- terial to support his innovative theory about U.S. objectives “at the creation.” Mitrovich’s thesis is that U.S. policy makers initially did not anticipate a pro- longed period of containing the Soviet Union. They were worried about the global consequences of a drawn-out struggle with the USSR and therefore decided as early as 1947 on a strategy to “destroy” Soviet power altogether. In Mitrovich’s view, George Kennan was the driving force behind this aggressive line, and he found widespread support in the Truman administration, including the president himself. The grand plan, as it evolved, envisioned the elimination of Communist control not only in Eastern Europe but in the Soviet Union itself. Psychological warfare became the weapon of choice because of its successful application in World War II and because it mitigated the risk of a war with Moscow. American thinking and planning were based on the notion of the balance of power, which Washington assumed was in its favor until the Soviet Union tested a nu- clear bomb in August 1949, sooner than expected. The shock of this new reality prompted Harry Truman to order a reassessment of national security strategy. But Mitrovich argues that the resulting directive, NSC 68, did not fundamentally change U.S. policy, although it did dramatically expand the level of funding devoted to covert subversion of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, according to Mitrovich, the Soviet test of the ªssion-boosted “Joe-4” bomb in August 1953 triggered the opposite impulse in the Eisenhower administration. Mitrovich argues that this much more powerful bomb spurred a general fear that global destruction was now at stake. Despite continued harsh rhetoric, the Eisenhower administration quietly decided by 1955 to call a halt to its clandestine war and to follow a less belligerent policy. Until this change of course, aggressive covert actions targeted at the Soviet bloc were an integral part of U.S. policy—far more so than other scholars have appreciated, according to Mitrovich. Under the rubric of NSC 20/2, which Truman approved in June 1948, American planners had a variety of “instruments” at their disposal, such as planting disinformation and supporting armed resistance groups. However, the main strategy for the region, Mitrovich writes, was “to exploit the ‘paranoid nature’ of the Soviet power structure in an effort to incite conºict within the ruling circles” (p. 9). 103 Book Reviews Mitrovich gives some examples of these “spoiling operations.” “Operation Over- load and Delay” was a scheme designed to clog the hyper-centralized Soviet decision- making apparatus by encouraging U.S.
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