Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. By Ellen Schrecker. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. xviii, 573 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-316-77470-7.)

When historians pick a research topic such as war, some like it cold; and part of the reason is that the past has become so unpredictable. The opening of Soviet archives has generally resulted in the demolition of "revisionist" objections to the ardent anticommunism of the strategists of American foreign policy and also of the "witch-hunters" at home. The released kgb files as well as Venona decryptions, for example, have also tended to show that famous victims of the red scare were not framed; they had been devilishly busy conjuring up evil spirits after all. Revisionist historians have therefore been compelled to scramble to stay even with a growing body of evidence, the effect of which is to erase the quotation marks around the "Communists" and "spies" whose persecution was earlier explained as merely the sinister design of antilabor, antiegalitarian, and antidemocratic forces. The ranks of those who are still willing to sentimentalize Alger Hiss and exculpate the Rosenbergs as icons of innocence may soon be reduced to their sons. . . .

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