THROUGH an extraordinary number of personal interviews and a thorough examination of papers in scores of archives and personal collections, Schrecker has broken through the barriers of silence imposed by McCarthyism as has no previous historian. She can talk confidently about who was and wasn’t an authentic Party member, and about the motives for resistance or cooperation in each case. Moreover, she takes her story back to the 1930s to show the conversion experience of an important part of a generation of young scholars to communism, and re-creates in some detail their political lives on campuses and in Party units.
What emerges is not a portrait of foreign agents or aliens—although, as she frankly acknowledges, a disproportionate number of Communist intellectuals were of Jewish background—but of radical scholars all too human. They were naive about the Soviet Union and the nature of the Communist Party in the United States, and they committed a number of blunders that may have helped in their own undoing. Most of all, they were preoccupied by fear of losing their jobs—not only because of income, but also because they dreaded having to work in a field where they could not pursue their scholarly and scientific interests. In the 1930s, this insecurity urged them to maintain secrecy, to disobey Party norms of behavior, and to refrain from classroom propaganda or even from close association with students—even though, ironically, they would later be purged in part because of their alleged devotion to subverting the young.
How well does Schrecker respond to those who now defend the behavior of the 1950s Cold War liberals? In my judgment, she is devastating in her claim that one could participate in the witch hunt—as did the liberal Cold Warriors of the Sidney Hook variety—even as one insisted that one was “standing up to McCarthyism and defending free speech and academic freedom”; the real test was in actions, not words.
She also demonstrates convincingly that the purpose of the witch hunt was not to ferret out unknown Communist agents who were abusing their academic positions, but to induce the universities to enforce the general political climate needed to assure acquiescence in the Cold War. Her empirical data confirms the argument of Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman in The Uses of Anti-Communism that anti-communist ideology functions in the West as a means of discrediting all movements for social change by tainting them with the crimes of Stalinism.