Synopses & Reviews
Drawing upon a rich selection of documents, this text provides a detailed account of McCarthyism, a period which spanned from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s. It discusses the turbulent years during which Americans were routinely persecuted because they were suspected of being insufficiently patriotic or too sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The persecution took various forms, from imprisonment to the purging and blacklisting of untold thousands. Fried demonstrates how the end result was to consign the American radical left to irrelevancy, helping to ensure that already established policies, both foreign and domestic, would remain unchallenged. Fried provides informative introductions and headnotes for each section, as well as a useful bibliography. Through speeches, executives orders, congressional hearings, court decisions, official reports, letters, memoirs, and essays, this text offers the most sweeping and comprehensive look at McCarthyism, highlighting the cruelty, poignancy, and absurdity of this extraordinary period of time. Documenting both the persecuted and the persecutors, this is the definitive reader and core text for courses on McCarthyism, and an ideal supplement for courses on American history and political science.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Definitions. Chapter 2. Intimations of Things to Come
1. The Sin of Advocacy
2. HUAC Gets Under Way
3. J. Edgar Hoover Alerts the Nation
4. The Right to Wiretap
5. Un-Americanism in California
Chapter 3. McCarthyism in Earnest
1. Defining Loyalty
2. Two Case Studies
a. O. Edmund Clubb
b. "Case Number 16"
3. Cleaning out the Unions
4. The Ordeal of John Howard Lawson
5. In Defense of the Hollywood Ten
6. Hollywood's Response
7. Trying the Communists
Chapter 4. Liberal Response and Counter-Response
1. Liberal Idealism: Contra Loyalty Reviews
2. Liberal Realism: Pro-Loyalty Reviews
3. In Defense of Liberal Anti-Communism
4. A Communist Advises Anti-Communist Liberals
5. Throwing the Communists Out of the CIO
6. Liberal Anti-Communism in Extremis
7. The Case of the American Civil Liberties Union
Chapter 5. McCarthy the Man: McCarthyism Triumphant
1. McCarthy Anticipates McCarthyism
2. Versions of the Wheeling Speech
3. Mrs. Smith's Declaration of Conscience
4. Democratic Rebuttal
5. Total Security: The McCarran Act
6. McCarthy Unbound
7. McCarthy's Assault on General Marshall
8. McCarthy in Full Stride
9. McCarthy as Hero
Chapter 6. Judicial Acquiescence
1. The Court Gives the Go-Ahead
2. Defining the Fifth
3. Loyalty, Past, Present and Future
4. Suppression Legalized: Dennis v. United States
5. New York Leads the Way
Chapter 7. Inquisition Triumphant
1. Blacklisters at Work: Red Channels:
a. Larry Adler
b. Leonard Bernstein
c. Paul Draper
d. Will Geere
Arthur Miller
2. The California Loyalty Oath
3. Reagan versus the Reds
4. Industry Goes Along
5. How to Get Off, Or Avoid Gettin on the Blacklist
6. The Pathos of Larry Parks
7. Kazan Explains Why
8. Hellman's Cry of Conscience
9. "The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and their Faculties"
10. Stander Confound HUAC
11. Dr. Oppenheimer's Disgrace
12. The Butterfly and the Committee
13. Paul Robeson Takes on the Committee
Chapter 8. Expulsions and Imprisonments
1. Adler's Lament
2. The Fruits of Defiance: Lardner
3. The Fruits of Defiance: Bessie
4. Travails of a Communist
5. Getting Dashiell Hammett Et Al
6. "Sedition" in Pittsburgh
7. Harrassing a Labor Radical
Chapter 9. McCarthy's Fall
1. Assailing Eisenhower
2. McCarthy and His Nemesis
3. Defiance to the Bitter End
4. Condemned!
5. Liberals Seek Cover: The Communist Control Act
Chapter 10. A Measure of Redress
1. End of the Lattimore Affaire
2. Freedom for Steve Nelson
3. Matusow Confesses
4. The Fifth Vindicated
5. The Smith Act Disabled
6. HUAC's Wing's Clipped
7. The Right to Travel Abroad Affirmed
8. Faulk Breaks the Blacklist
Chapter 11. Afterward
1. COINTELPRO in the Flesh
2. Breaking and Entering
3. Tom Huston's Try
4. J. Edgar Hoover Still Sees Red
Bibliographical Essay