In the US in the 1930s, many on the Left believed that New Deal liberalism and Stalinist communism had much in common. In a rhetorical gesture that is characteristic of this book, Arthur Herman rather triumphantly points out that the communist-hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy a decade or so later was based on the same belief. He does not seem to grasp that the belief was profoundly mistaken.
Herman's book is not a biography, nor a work of original historical research, but a political polemic hung on an often flimsy narrative clothes-line. The polemic grows in vehemence as the book progresses. Herman begins with mildly embarrassed claims that McCarthy was "right in the big things, if not always in the details", that notwithstanding his lying, cheating and smear tactics he was "on to something". By the end, he has talked himself into viewing McCarthy as the martyred begetter of the vaguely populist hard-Right tradition that stretches from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan and beyond.
This is, of course, an inflation of our hero, but a forgivable one. What is harder to swallow is Herman's insistence that McCarthy was essentially correct in viewing the "liberals" who ran the country in the Truman and Eisenhower years as dangerously sympathetic to communism in the USSR and China, and indifferent to the presence of communists in the US. He presents no convincing evidence in support of this, carping instead on the few trivial security breaches brought to light by McCarthy and on the failures of the Acheson-Truman foreign policy, which "lost" China and settled for stalemate in Korea.
McCarthy made no attempt to understand foreign policy and had no part in exposing any of the handful of genuinely serious cases of espionage or sabotage by Soviet agents in this era, so Herman must labour to justify the senator's hysteria over a few small-time fellow-travellers. If these people were not guilty of spying or treason, at least they were guilty of - wait for it - "intellectual dishonesty". This is just silly, especially as Herman does not deny that McCarthy himself was deeply dishonest (to say nothing of his modest intellect). The arrant foolishness of those who made excuses for the gulag and the show trials would only have been reinforced by the ravings of the senator from Wisconsin.
The book has almost nothing to say on what we call "McCarthyism": the blacklists and censors and loyalty boards that reached far beyond McCarthy's probes into the State Department and the Army. It is not clear whether this silence arises from a scrupulous focus on what McCarthy himself actually wrought - a scruple not evident elsewhere - or from a reluctance to acknowledge the extent to which government bureaucracies searched for communists and communist ideas in places where they could not conceivably have posed any threat to national security. The important question of whether McCarthy himself was a cause or a symptom of this wider paranoia is never broached.
Just as the American Left in this era failed, disastrously, to construct an indigenous vision of social and economic justice, so McCarthy and other anti-communists allowed themselves to believe that the hunt for "subversion" - for what they might have seen as "intellectual dishonesty" - should not be hindered by any concern for those freedoms that were supposedly intrinsic to the American idea. McCarthy could never demonstrate that the domestic communist threat was sufficient to justify his squalid crusade, and nor can Arthur Herman, despite his best efforts.
Brendan Barrington is an editor and critic.
