Many Are The Crimes
   Ellen Schrecker
  1998 Little, Brown & Co. Boston MA USA
   ISBN: 0316774707


The McCarthy Era was a bad time for freedom in America. It was the most widespread episode of political repression in US history, encompassing far more than the brief career of a senator from Wisconsin.

Those who were too young to understand what was going on yet were old enough to know something was happening, glimpsed the secrecy, sensed the social distress, have now grown up; become scholars & done the difficult & grim exhumation of one horrible carcass we've interred without honor for half a century.

It is not impulsive, this tracing of the causes for this crime - it is a lengthy, labyrinthine labor - Many Are The Crimes has a Notes section half as thick again as the book's text. It is easy to see Professor Schrecker's dedication: she has learnt to interpret the national body language of the time, & has written a deeply researched, articulate & readable book that offers a fascinating autopsy.

My interest in McCarthyism had been piqued by the brouhaha at the 1999 Academy Awards when a renowned movie director was given a lifetime award. There had been some angry & indignant people objecting to him being so honored because, they said, he had given in to the power of the Senate Hearings & betrayed his friends, as he was asked to do by the US government of that time.

From reportage I gleaned this director had been a new immigrant from a part of the world where life, politics & repression was of the kind, most young(under 60)Americans can only guess at. Who are we, today, to indulge in indignation about someone's behavior when, forty years ago, he'd been caught in the twin head lights of anti communism & national panic?

So, when I came across Many Are The Crimes (from Justice Robert Jackson: Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name. 1950) I decided it was time to learn how that era came about, who were the players & why did this little-known Senator from Wisconsin get a period of national grippe named after him.

In Many Are The Crimes Ellen Schrecker does not disappoint. She introduces us to her large, shaggy sixth-grade teacher, with a gift for transforming daily life into a learning experience, who suddenly, one day in 1953, was gone. It was only years later, when Ellen Schrecker began to write about McCarthyism that the pieces clicked into place.

McCarthyism flourished for nearly a decade - 1946 to 1956. Although its antecedents reach back beyond the 19th century, its main feature, that of an anti communist crusade developed during the 1930s when American Communism gained attention among the working class, in labor unions & for fighting fascism.

In Chapter 1: “We Were Sitting Ducks” - we meet Steve Nelson who became a Communist in 1923. We find out why. We also find out how American profiteers & their paternalism began to curdle in the working masses' craw. We see the stage being set for Socialism, with its vision of economic equality. It offered explanations for, as well as alternatives to, the perceived injustices that troubled the millions who worked so very hard, had so little security & made so little money.

It is to be remembered that: “...many of the elements that exposed American Communism to repression were also, at one time or another, either sources of strength for the party or measures of self-protection...The one fatal flaw in all of the American Communist movement was its tie to the Soviet Union...”

Even forty years later these contradictions have not gone away... was the party a progressive political reform movement or a revolutionary Soviet-led conspiracy?...American Communism came in many flavors and changed significantly over time...the CP was a highly disciplined, undemocratic outfit that tried to apply Soviet prescriptions to American ills. It was also a genuinely forward-looking organization that stimulated many of the most dynamic political & social movements of the 1930s & 1940s, often it was both at the same time.

Ellen Schrecker writes: “...It is hard to avoid taking sides or passing judgements, hard, in other words, to treat the CP as just history. Those on the left tend to view its record as one of heroic exploits or lost opportunities, while those on the right see it as a series of crimes...”

I was exhausted by this book - it's long, it's substantial & thick with information & history. It's lovely - I'm sure that's not the word for it - satisfying? Absolutely! I expect it was not to have been read quite as intensely as I did; perhaps meant to be studied in a group with much discussion & review. I feel I know a lot more about that time & how it came about. I also feel that McCarthyism was inevitable, given the animus of the American psyche then. No judgements, no excuses - simply being aware that it did happen & could happen again.

Well done indeed! One of those books I recommend with the quip: Lest We Forget!

Among others by Ellen Schrecker, obviously one of our foremost scholars of McCarthyism & the American Communist Movement:
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities(1986)
Plus: the Introductory essay in The Age of McCarthyism: A Short History with Documents(1993)
(06/12/99)

Rebecca