The American Inquisition 1945-1960 [antikvár]

Preface As these pages underwent final revision, America's "cold war" crusade against Communism had proceeded continuously for a quarter of a century; and at this rather late date in the resulung holocaust, the questioning of the crusade's credentials had developed into a veritable industry with a name—"historical revisionism." Thus the New York Review of Books (September 2, 1971) deals with nine re-evaluations of the cold war's origins. Some of the reviewed authors still insist on America's "good intenrions"; the reviewer has more sympathy with "radical revisionists" who find the crusade to have been hypocritical, immoral and imperialistic from the outset. The faa that some Americans saw this at the time—and what happened to them for saying so—is ignored by all "revisionists" or so distorted that they might better have ignored it. The domestic arm of the cold war was a calculated campaign to wash America's brain. The distortion of the reality of that campaign begins with the label now firmly and hygienically attached to it: "the McCarthy Era," referring to the late meteoric senator from Wisconsin. If any single American deserves his name on the label, implying fatherhood and rearing of the monster, it would be J. Edgar Hoover. The few "revisionists" who purport to chronicle what was known as the American witch hunt have not found it possible to detach themselves from the Establishment viewpoint.* Yet without the viaims' viewpoint the history of these years, the most decisive since America's revolution against England, is like a contemporary history of Germany or Russia without the concentration camps. We * The author of a 500-page account of the Un-American Activities Committee (Walter Goodman, The Committee, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1968), for example, finds no space for the perjury of government witnesses and its consequences. The book is described in a preface by Richard Revere as an "indictment" of the committee by one who is "no less anti-Communist than Martin Dies [first committee chairman] or any of his successors." The text makes the latter claim—if not the former—redundant, and suggests that the study of American inquisiting has moved backwards since William Geller-mann's Hartin Dies (John Day, New York 1944), and August Ogden's The Dies Committee (Murray & Hester-Catholic University Press, Washington, D.C., 1946), both written when the inquisition was in its infancy and seemed about to expire.