Many Are the Crimes - McCarthyism in America (Hardcover)

The McCarthy Era was a bad time for freedom in America. Encompassing far more than the brief career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was the most widespread episode of political repression in the history of the United States. In the name of national security, most Americans-liberal and conservative alike-supported the anticommunist crusade that ruined so many careers, marriages, even lives. Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and the Hollywood Ten were only the most notorious of the thousands of teachers, longshoremen, union leaders, civil servants, housewives, and others who were put on trial, lost their jobs, or ended up on blacklists.

However, despite the unfairness of their methods, the nation's most powerful anti-Communists in the FBI, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and elsewhere were generally accurate in their accusations. Most of the men and women who were charged in the McCarthy-era purges had been involved with the American Communist party. Demonized by the ret of the country, they concealed their relationship to the party. Their opponents, led by J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn, and an extended network of journalists, politicians, and professional ex-Communists, exaggerated the danger of Communism and hid their unlawful use of state power. Together, both sides contributed to the distorted, oversimplified image we still have of those unhappy times. Now, in Many Are the Crimes, Ellen Schrecker gives us the first complete post-Cold War account of McCarthyism. Drawing on newly released FBI files, private papers, and interviews.

"Ellen Schrecker has produced a sweeping and elegantly written history of the age of McCarthyism that rests on enormous research, much of it in newly opened archives. But its most important achievement is to offer a fresh and compelling explanation of this much-debated topic." --Alan Brinkley, professor of history, author of The New Federalist Papers and The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People

"A brilliant and fascinating book. I admire the dazzling clarity that Ellen Schrecker brings to this complex subject, as well as the breadth, depth, and scope of the new material she offers. Many Are the Crimes will be invaluable to readers who are familiar with the period and want to learn more about it and to those who need an introduction to the dramatic and shocking history of American anti-Communism." --Nora Sayre, author of Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the 1950s

"In Many Are the Crimes, Ellen Schrecker manages a trick known to only very few historians: she has written a book that is pungent, even-handed, clear-headed, informative, and morally secure. She has shed new and necessary light on an obscene time and done it with calm grace and an invigorating wit. If history, as they say, is written by the victors, she has turned out a winner." --Walter Bernstein, author of Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist

"This is a remarkably intelligent and amazingly well researched history of the anti-Communist impulse. Nothing can end our great national obsession with that issue, but Ellen Schrecker has elevated the debate to an altogether more productive level." --Nelson Lichtenstein, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit

"By carefully sifting the political realities of the early Cold War decades from the ubiquitous mythology that framed public discussion of Communism, Schrecker has contributed substantially to our understanding of both the widespread political persecution of the times and the enduring blight that persecution inflicted on our national life." -- David Montgomery, professor of history, Yale University