Remembering McCarthyism

I've been known to get irritated at Tony Judt's analyses of contemporary events.  But I was impressed with his article A Story Still to Be Told New York Review of Books 03/23/06 issue.  I'm quoting two book reviews in a row here, I know.  (Sometimes I do actually read the books myself!)

He's reviewing a book by John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History.  In the course of the review, he has some interesting things to say about the McCarthy period in the United States.  One of the strange things about that particular Red Scare ("red" meant Communist back then, not Republican) is that the fear of domestic Communists was much stronger in America, where the Communist Party's political power was almost non-existent, than in European countries like France and Italy which had large, powerful and popular Communist Parties.  Judt writes:

Had Gaddis thought more about spies and spying, he might have avoided one particularly revealing error that highlights his self-confinement within the straitjacket of American domestic experience. Although there is only one mention in his book of McCarthyism, Gaddis uses that occasion to write that "it was not at all clear that the western democracies themselves could retain the tolerance for dissent and the respect for civil liberties that distinguished them from the dictators." But Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American original. There was no McCarthyism in Britain, or France, or Norway, or Italy, or the Netherlands. Numerous victims of McCarthyism—whether actors, singers, musicians, playwrights, trade unionists, or history professors—came to live in Western Europe in these years and flourished there. Tolerance and civil liberties were not under threat in all "the western democracies." They were under threat in the United States. There is a difference.

And he recalls how the Dick Nixons exploited the fear of Communism in nationalistic/jingoistic fashion:

During the first decade of the cold war, espionage, subversion, and Communist takeovers in distant lands were perceived by many in the US as a direct challenge to the "American Way of Life"; Senator McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the Republican Party were able to exploit the security issue in cold war America by pointing to real spies (Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs) as well as imagined ones. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, Klaus Fuchs, George Blake, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, and above all Kim Philby betrayed their country, their colleagues, and hundreds of their fellow agents. Between them they did far more damage to Western interests than any American spy until Aldrich Ames. Yet the serial revelation of their treason - beginning with the arrest of Fuchs in 1950 - aroused remarkably little public anxiety; it certainly never provoked in Britain collective paranoia and political conformism on the scale that seized the US in these same years.

Incidentally, I do think that both Hiss and the Rosenbergs were involved in espionage, although I'm more familiar with the Hiss case.

And Judt also recalls one of the weirder aspects of the McCarthy period:

America's many friends in postwar Austria were forced to watch in frustration as the libraries of the popular "America Houses" in postwar Vienna, Salzburg, and elsewhere were stripped (on instructions from McCarthy-era Washington) of works by "unsuitable" authors: John Dos Passos, Arthur Miller, Charles Beard, Leonard Bernstein, Dashiell Hammett, and Upton Sinclair—and also Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Alberto Moravia, Tom Paine, and Henry Thoreau.

If you're in the mood to gorge on McCarthy madness, Findlaw.com has online five volumes of transcripts of previously-secret McCarthy hearings, first made pubic in 2003.  Five volumes of the nasty old drunkard on his quest to find Commie spies in government.  He never found a single one.