The Great Fear: The Anti-communist Purge under Truman Eisenhower by David Caute

The Great Fear: The Anti-communist Purge under Truman Eisenhower Reviews

• 
  Christopher Saunders

  Caute, a left wing British historian, tries his damndest to cram every incident, great and small, of America's Red-baiting epoch between V-E Day and Joe McCarthy's downfall into a single book, resulting in a riotous, rambling, ill-formed but intermittently fascinating volume. That the book's dated can be overlooked since it was written in the late '70s (free the Rosenbergs!); Caute's vitriol against America's Commie hunters, whether "responsible" liberals like Truman or frothing reactionaries like McCarthy and McCarran, can be forgiven since the wounds were still relatively fresh. Instead, Fear's main downfall is a lack of clear structure. Caute flits between topics while eschewing discernible chronology, resulting in a messy read that's hard to follow from one subject to the next; a pointillist collection of details rather than a coherent portrait. Which isn't to say that the details aren't occasionally fascinating; Caute discusses topics ignored or only lightly touched on in other books, from purges of teachers and union members throughout the country, to Paul Robeson and the Peekskill Riot (where American Legion goons attacked progressive concert-goers), to the vigilante violence against Henry Wallace supporters in '48. As such, Fear provides a useful springboard for further research; on its own, and especially at this late a date, it possesses limited utility.
• 
  Kristi Thielen

  Extensive, data-driven study of American society during one of the most frightening - and repressive - eras in American history.
  
  While blacklisted Hollywood has received the most attention in examinations of the Purge, Caute takes an in-depth look at other professions: public school teachers, college professors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, laborers.
  
  There is no documentation of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period - even during the Korean War - and at most the Communist Party was only 60,00-80,000 out of a U.S. population of 150 million, with over half of these Communists being in New York City. Still, rabid "Red" hunters, looked for Communists throughout the U.S. Careers were destroyed - some permanently - marriages ended, families were damaged and more than a few despondent people took their own lives.
  
  There is even a case to be made for the fact that the gutting of the scientific community deprived the U.S. of physicists during the early days of the space race, when the Russians bested America by successfully launching Sputnik.
  
  Stories of people ousted from jobs because of "kinship charges," such as a relationship with someone who had "Communistic" tendencies, are especially absurd. One man faced a charge related to his mother-in-law, who had died when he was 10, a decade before he met his wife. Elsewhere, a baffled subject of a public hearing was asked, "Have you ever had a close relationship with your mother?"
  
  The primary perpetrators of the Purge were Republicans, seething from years of being out of the White House and finally free to reveal their contempt for Roosevelt's New Deal; and southern Democrats, who were most anxious to believe that Communism was to blame for inciting African-Americans to desire equal rights.
  
  But few entities are entirely free of complicity in the Great Fear and of all organizations, only one truly refused to bow to loyalty oaths.
  
  And that organization was the American Library Association.