The Logic of Persecution: Free Expression and the McCarthy Era - Softcover

Redish, Martin H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804755930 ISBN 13: 9780804755931

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

This book demonstrates that neither the current liberal nor conservative position on the McCarthy era provides the basis for an appropriate normative perspective. Adding the perspective of the theory of free expression, it becomes apparent that both sides have ignored a vitally important point. While recently declassified documents demonstrate widespread participation by American Communists in conducting or facilitating espionage, much of the negative treatment received by American Communists had little or nothing to do with such activity.

From the perspective of the First Amendment right of free speech, there exists a significant difference between speech that advocates conduct, on the one hand, and speech that itself is part of a nonspeech criminal act, such as espionage, on the other. By helping to separate protected speech from unprotected "speech-acts," First Amendment theory can do much to distinguish between the legitimate governmental responses to American Communism and those that contravened basic notions of communicative freedom protected by the Constitution. At the same time, by focusing the First Amendment inquiry on the McCarthy era, one should be able to glean insights about the broader implications of free speech protection.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martin H. Redish is Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy at the Northwestern University School of Law.

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This book demonstrates that neither the current liberal nor
conservative position on the McCarthy era provides the basis for an appropriate normative perspective. Adding the perspective of the theory of free expression, it becomes apparent that both sides have ignored a vitally important point. While recently declassified documents demonstrate widespread participation by American Communists in conducting or facilitating espionage, much of the negative treatment received by American Communists had little or nothing to do with such activity.
From the perspective of the First Amendment right of free speech, there exists a significant difference between speech that advocates conduct, on the one hand, and speech that itself is part of a nonspeech criminal act, such as espionage, on the other. By helping to separate protected speech from unprotected “speech-acts,” First Amendment theory can do much to distinguish between the legitimate governmental responses to American Communism and those that contravened basic notions of communicative freedom protected by the Constitution. At the same time, by focusing the First Amendment inquiry on the McCarthy era, one should be able to glean insights about the broader implications of free speech protection.

Aus dem Klappentext

This book demonstrates that neither the current liberal nor
conservative position on the McCarthy era provides the basis for an appropriate normative perspective. Adding the perspective of the theory of free expression, it becomes apparent that both sides have ignored a vitally important point. While recently declassified documents demonstrate widespread participation by American Communists in conducting or facilitating espionage, much of the negative treatment received by American Communists had little or nothing to do with such activity.
From the perspective of the First Amendment right of free speech, there exists a significant difference between speech that advocates conduct, on the one hand, and speech that itself is part of a nonspeech criminal act, such as espionage, on the other. By helping to separate protected speech from unprotected speech-acts, First Amendment theory can do much to distinguish between the legitimate governmental responses to American Communism and those that contravened basic notions of communicative freedom protected by the Constitution. At the same time, by focusing the First Amendment inquiry on the McCarthy era, one should be able to glean insights about the broader implications of free speech protection.

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The Logic of Persecution

Free Expression and the McCarthy EraBy Martin H. Redish

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5593-1

Contents

Preface...........................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Logic, History, and the McCarthy Era..............................................12 The Legal Topography of the McCarthy Era........................................................233 McCarthyism, Free Expression, and the Role of Pathology in American History.....................464 Unlawful Advocacy, Free Speech, and the McCarthy Era............................................635 HUAC, The Hollywood Ten, and the First Amendment Right of Nonassociation........................1326 Public Education, Free Speech, and the McCarthy Era.............................................1727 Conclusion: The McCarthy Era as a First Amendment Laboratory....................................220Notes.............................................................................................227Index.............................................................................................297

Chapter One

Introduction: Logic, History, and the McCarthy Era

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

-Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissenting in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919)

To historians, the cold war in recent years has become quite hot. More than twenty years after the historical book on the so-called McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States appeared to have been irrevocably sealed, startling revelations in the 1990s of previously secret documents-documents whose very existence was unknown except to a very few-appeared to dramatically alter well-accepted understandings of historians about this troubled period in American history. During that era, when the nation first began to grasp the gravity of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations to our national security, both the government and private institutions imposed extensive and severe punishment on American communists, and often any American who at one time had been a communist (or even suspected of being a communist) and who failed to repudiate those connections.

Once the McCarthy era ended, historians vigorously debated whether such suppression was ever justified by anything other than the nation's naked ideological repugnance for communism. Many concluded that, whatever dangers the Soviet Union and its allies may have presented, American communists caused no real threat to our internal security. Rather, the expression of national security concerns was merely a subterfuge, strategically designed to justify the persecution of those who held repugnant political views. Others, however, continued to see American communists as nothing more than a tool of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In the words of a respected group of historians, "[t]o their admirers and defenders, American Communists [were] usually ... seen as idealistic and committed radical populists. They built unions, fought for racial and social equality, and battled fascism, often prodding their reluctant fellow citizens to live up to America's democratic ideals." However, "[t]o their enemies, American Communists were `soldiers of Stalin,' committed to a totalitarian philosophy and willing to alter their political stance whenever it suited the foreign policy needs of the Soviet Union."

By the early 1970s, the view that American communists had presented no real threat had become the dominant position among American historians. The fears of the dangers presented by American communists that had dominated American society during the period in question were generally "dismissed as the product of paranoid fears created by third-rate spy novels." Certainly, those scholars who adopted this so-called revisionist view argued, whatever minimal threat to which the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) actually gave rise failed to justify the widespread suppression of American communists that took place during the period in question. The true rationale for the suppression of American communists, according to the revisionists, was not really a threat to national security, but rather the ideological offensiveness of the views expressed by American communists. In the words of the two leading modern historians on the subject, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, "[i]f one were to read [the] early revisionists' writings and nothing else, one would gain the impression that the CPUSA was largely a figment of the anticommunist imagination and that anticommunists were simply paranoids embarked on a hunt for imaginary witches." Moreover, "[w]here early revisionists had dismissed American communists as so unimportant that public fears about them were irrational, the second wave of revisionists believed communists to have been important shapers of American politics and culture."

Those who vigorously opposed communism during the McCarthy era did so for a variety of reasons: fear on the part of American business people that communism would undermine well-established principles of American capitalism; antagonism on the part of religious Catholic Eastern European immigrants who had themselves witnessed the viciousness of communist suppression firsthand; and concern by American liberals about the totalitarian threat to human rights and democracy that communism presented. From the revisionist perspective, then, all of the seemingly wild allegations of American communist espionage or attempted overthrow made during the 1940s and 1950s were, for the most part, unsupported or even concocted means of discrediting American communists, designed to justify the suppression by both public and private levels of American society.

For much of the latter part of the twentieth century, this view was so widely accepted that few scholars bothered to challenge it seriously. As the last decade of the century dawned, this well-accepted view was about to change dramatically. It was the revelation of two sets of previously unavailable documents, one in the United States and one in the former Soviet Union, that jolted the relatively peaceful world of mid-twentieth-century American political history. Although "[t]he revisionists ... either denied or downplayed arguments about what others have described as the dark side of American communism," these documents, according to the historians who initially reviewed them, "provided a powerful challenge to the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804755930
• ISBN 13: 9780804755931
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 314
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar