Table Of Content★
MANY ARE THE CRIMES
BOOKS BY ELLEN S C H R E C KE R
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the
Universities
The Hired Money
Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook {with John Schrecker)
EDITED BY ELLEN SCHRECKER
The Age of McCarthyism
Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on
Academic Freedom in the 1980s (with Craig Kaplan)
MA N Y ARE THE
C R I ME S
★
McCARTHYISM
IN
AMERICA
ELLEN SCHRECKER
i B
I $17
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON
Copyright © 1998 by Ellen Schrecker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
FIRST EDITION
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schrecker, Ellen.
Many are the crimes : McCarthyism in America / Ellen Schrecker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-316-77470-7
1. Anti-communist movements—United States—History. 2. McCarthy,
Joseph, 1908-1957. 3. Internal security—United States—
History—20th century. 4. Communism—United States—History.
5. Subversive activities—United States—History—20th century.
I. Title.
E743.5.S37 1998
973.9—dc21 97-42269
M V-N Y
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Designed by Barbara Werden
Published simultaneously in Canada by Little, Brown & Company
(Canada) Limited
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
★
Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes
committed in its name.
JU STI CE ROBERT JACKSON,
dissenting in U.S. exrel. Knauffv. Shaughnessy (1950)
★
For my brother and sister, Tony Wolf
and Mary Hurtig
★
CONTENTS
Introduction ix
PART ONE: ANTECEDENTS
Chapter 1: “We Were Sitting Ducks”: The World of
American Communism 3
Chapter 2: “Red-Baiters, Inc.”: The Development of an
Anticommunist Network 42
Chapter 3: “In the Interest of National Security”:
Anticommunism and the Roosevelt Administration 86
PART TWO: REPRESENTATIONS
Chapter 4: “They Are Everywhere”: The Communist
Image 119
Chapter 5: “A Great and Total Danger”: The Nature of the
Communist Threat 154
vii
CONTENTS
PART THREE: INSTRUMENTS
Chapter 6: “A Job for Professionals”: The FBI and
Anticommunism 203
Chapter 7: “In the Gutter”: The Anticommunism of
Joe McCarthy 240
Chapter 8: “A Badge of Infamy”: Anticommunist
Economic Sanctions and Political Dismissals 266
PART FOUR: INTERCONNECTIONS
Chapter 9: “How Red Is a Valley”: Clinton Jencks and
His Union 309
Chapter 10: “A Good Deal of Trauma”: The Impact of
McCarthy ism 359
Acknowledgments 417
Abbreviations 419
Sources 421
Notes 431
Index 551
★
INTRODUCTION
IT TOOK forty-three years to find out what happened to my
sixth-grade teacher at the Oak Lane Country Day School. A large, shaggy
man with the gift of transforming daily life into a learning experience, he
got a class of self-involved preadolescent girls interested in chemistry by
having us make lipstick and we worshipped him for taking us seriously, as
few adults did. Suddenly, one day in 1953, he was gone. Since he still lived
nearby, I and my friends visited him often and knew that he was having
trouble finding a job. But none of the adults talked about why he was no
longer teaching at Oak Lane, at least not to us.
We heard rumors that he wasn’t really a teacher, that he’d changed his
name, that he’d worked with a labor union — nothing that made sense at
the time to an apolitical teenage girl. Only when I started to write a book
about McCarthyism did the connections become clear. With a little re
search, I discovered that my sixth-grade teacher had lost his job for political
reasons and everyone who knew about it had tried to hush it up. He hadn’t
been fired, exactly, just forced to resign. In a sense, he may well have been
the most typical of McCarthy era victims — someone eased out of a job qui
etly, with no publicity, no fuss. The fifties were like that, less a world of fear
than of silence.1
Forty years of silence have not, however, erased the stigma that both
ix
INTRODUCTION
the victims and the perpetrators of the anticommunist political repression
of the 1940s and the 1950s bear. Though the Cold War is over and Commu
nism has all but vanished from the scene, the measures designed to elimi
nate its influence within the United States continue to provoke acrimony,
mystification, and fear. Like a scab that will not heal, the McCarthy period
remains so sensitive that some of its surviving actors still will not talk about
what they did and the federal government will not release all its records.
The statute of limitations expired years ago and no jobs are at stake, but the
political account books remain open. It is time to settle them, reach some
kind of closure, and come to terms with the meaning of that troubling chap
ter of the not-so-recent past.
Some parts of the story, it is true, stir little debate. There is a near-
universal consensus that much of what happened during the late 1940s and
1950s was misguided or worse. In the name of protecting the internal secu
rity of the United States against the threat of Communism, thousands of
people lost their jobs, went to prison, or were punished in other ways.
Whether viewed as an unfortunate overreaction to a genuine danger or the
product of a conscious campaign to wipe out dissent, the anticommu
nist crusade — incorrectly, though indelibly, identified with the gratuitous
smears and unfounded accusations of Senator Joseph McCarthy — has few
defenders today. The term McCarthyism is invariably pejorative.
It is also misunderstood. For McCarthyism (at least in the sense in
which I use it in this book) encompassed much more than the career of the
Wisconsin senator who gave it a name. It was the most widespread and
longest lasting wave of political repression in American history. In order to
eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of
politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded 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. That anticommunist crusade — McCarthyism — domi
nated American politics during the late 1940s and 1950s. It used all the
power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drasti
cally narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.2
When Joe McCarthy came onto the scene in 1950, brandishing his in
accurate and ever-changing lists of supposed communist agents within the
federal government, the “ism” with which he was identified was already in
