McCarthyism, The Great American Red Scare A Documentary History [Paperback]

Drawing upon a rich selection of documents, this text provides a detailed account of McCarthyism, a period which spanned from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s. It discusses the turbulent years during which Americans were routinely persecuted because they were suspected of being insufficiently patriotic or too sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The persecution took various forms, from imprisonment to the purging and blacklisting of untold thousands. Fried demonstrates how the end result was to consign the American radical left to irrelevancy, helping to ensure that already established policies, both foreign and domestic, would remain unchallenged. Fried provides informative introductions and headnotes for each section, as well as a useful bibliography. Through speeches, executives orders, congressional hearings, court decisions, official reports, letters, memoirs, and essays, this text offers the most sweeping and comprehensive look at McCarthyism, highlighting the cruelty, poignancy, and absurdity of this extraordinary period of time. Documenting both the persecuted and the persecutors, this is the definitive reader and core text for courses on McCarthyism, and an ideal supplement for courses on American history and political science.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Definitions.
Chapter 2. Intimations of Things to Come
1. The Sin of Advocacy
2. HUAC Gets Under Way
3. J. Edgar Hoover Alerts the Nation
4. The Right to Wiretap
5. Un-Americanism in California
Chapter 3. McCarthyism in Earnest
1. Defining Loyalty
2. Two Case Studies
a. O. Edmund Clubb
b. Case Number 16
3. Cleaning out the Unions
4. The Ordeal of John Howard Lawson
5. In Defense of the Hollywood Ten
6. Hollywood's Response
7. Trying the Communists
Chapter 4. Liberal Response and Counter-Response
1. Liberal Idealism: Contra Loyalty Reviews
2. Liberal l£O