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Joseph McCarthy -Reexamining The Life And Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator by Arthur Herman (ISBN: 0684836254)...In retrospect, McCarthy's disgrace and obloquy has come at a certain price to historical truth. He has become so taboo a figure, someone presented only in Rovere-style caricature rather than flesh and blood, that confusion and ignorance about what he did and the times in which he operated are widespread. Books like David Caute's The Great Fear, which implicitly compared the anti-Communist crusade of the fifties to Stalin's Great Terror, or Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, can portray the entire period in the most terrifyingly nightmarish colors, and be believed. So part of dispelling the myths about Joe McCarthy has to include dispelling the myths about the 1950s and the so-called red scare.
We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947 to 1958, no American citizens were interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial. As George Kennan, no admirer of the investigations, stated, "Whoever could get his case before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of justice no smaller than at any time in recent American history." All through the "worst" of the McCarthy period, the Communist Party itself was never outlawed, membership in the party was never declared a crime, and it continued to maintain public offices, publish books and the Daily Worker, and recruit new members (admittedly a tough sell by then).
In fact, most of what people ordinarily mean when they talk about the "red scare" -- the House Un-American Activities Committee; anti-Communist probes into Hollywood, labor unions, and America's schools and universities; the Rosenberg trial; blacklisting in the media and schoolteachers fired for disloyalty -- had nothing to do with McCarthy and he had nothing to do with them (although when asked, he generally approved of them, as most other Americans did). McCarthy's own committee in the Senate, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he chaired for less than two years, had a specific duty to investigate communism in the federal government and among government employees. It had done so before he became chairman, and it did so after he left, under Senator John McClellan and Bobby Kennedy. The men and women McCarthy targeted, rightly or wrongly, as Communists or Communist sympathizers all shared that single characteristic: they were federal employees and public servants, and therefore, McCarthy and his supporters argued, they ought be held accountable to a higher standard than other American citizens.
That fact tends to get lost when historians dwell exclusively on the stories of harassment, professional disgrace, and other indignities suffered as a result of McCarthy's and other anti-Communist investigations. Dalton Trumbo, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, Paul Robeson, Steve Nelson, Frances Farmer, and Lillian Hellman appear in standard treatments of the period in the same way in which the names of martyrs grace the pages of histories of the early church. Their personal ordeals are constantly presented as proof that America in those days must have been in the grip of an anti-Communist hysteria and a "witch-hunt." (In order not to be left out, Hellman told her own tale of woe in a short book of breathtaking dishonesty, entitled Scoundrel Time.) The best and most generous estimate is that during the entire decade of the red scare, ten thousand Americans lost their jobs because of their past or present affiliation with the Communist Party or one of its auxiliary organizations. Of those who lost their jobs, two thousand worked in the government, and in perhaps forty cases McCarthy himself was directly or indirectly responsible for their being fired. In only one case -- that of Owen Lattimore -- can anyone make the argument that McCarthy's allegations led to any actual legal proceedings, and there a judge eventually threw out most of the indictment. Paradoxically, the fact that McCarthy never sent anyone to prison is also turned against him; opponents claimed that during his entire career, he never actually exposed a single spy or Communist -- a claim that is manifestly untrue, as we will see...