Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
Return to Contents»
Our History of Political Repression: An Interview with Ellen Schrecker / Victor Cohen
Introduction
Ellen Schrecker, an historian who teaches and lives in New York City, is the author of two seminal works on the impact of McCarthyism. No Ivory Tower (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) provides an invaluable look into the workings of McCarthyism in a single institution - academia in the United States - and Many are the Crimes (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1998) expanded that analysis into a comprehensive look into the history of McCarthyism as a whole. She has recently edited a collection of essays on the impact of the Cold War on American life - Cold War Triumphalism (New York: The New Press, 2004). With Corey Robin, a political theorist at CUNY, she is currently working on a history of political repression in the United States since the nation's beginning, as well as writing a book about the current state of academic freedom.
The interview was conducted by phone on 27 October, 2007 by Victor Cohen.
***
(As the interview began, we were talking about the nationwide anti-war protests that had taken place the day before.)
Ellen Schrecker: I am only mildly paranoid. There we were, marching in the rain, and everyone was taking pictures of us because we had such a large sign - Historians Against the War. I'm assuming only half of them were FBI agents. The others were NYPD people for all I know.
Victor Cohen: Given your work on the world of McCarthyism, would you say even the rally you attended yesterday was shaped in part by its legacy?
ES: That's an interesting question, though I'm not sure that's the case. I think that much of the legacy of McCarthyism was overcome by the civil rights' movement. What ended McCarthyism basically was that the mass movement for social justice and social reform that couldn't be stopped by red-baiting. That was it for McCarthyism. Of course, there are still little moments of red-baiting, but I don't think it has the power it used to have to intimidate people. I think other things have, but not that sort of core-anti-communism.
I should probably tell you what I'm working on now, because it's quite relevant. When I finished Many are the Crimes, I was very excited because I was about to start another project, and then along comes 9/11. All of a sudden I get phone calls - I'm on people's rolodex because I'm "Ms McCarthyism," right? And so, I'm being asked - "is the Patriot Act the new McCarthyism? Make comparisons . . ." that sort of thing. I realized I was in a position where I had something to say and nobody else could say it, so I had to drop my other project and think about how I would deal with these questions. I was on the verge of signing a book contract, when all of a sudden I got very bored. I thought, I can't do McCarthyism yet again, I just can't. It was just too stale and intellectually not challenging - I had said what I needed to say. So I decided to expand the project, because, while I was working on McCarthyism, I kept looking for some kind of theoretical discussion of political repression. I figured there must be some broader framework with already-worked-out categories that I could just plug my own work into.. And I couldn't find it. There are a few studies, one general book on American political repression, but nothing that gives you a sense of what characterizes it, or describes how it differs from political repression in other places, and how it changes over time. Or looks at every major aspect of nearly four centuries of American political repression So I decided to do a general study.
But I was nervous about not being particularly well-grounded in political theory. So I am collaborating in this with a political scientist - Corey Robin, who teaches at Brooklyn College-CUNY. He is a political theorist who published a book on fear a few years ago. So he and I are working through a template of what American political repression looks like. I'm doing most of the empirical research, and he's doing the theory. So what I've been doing is looking at political repression from the Puritans to the Patriot Act, which is a massive amount of material, needless to say. Obviously, we're not doing everything - we're trying to look at individual aspects of it. So for example, one of our main findings, and one of the main theoretical points we want to make, is that American political repression operates through the collaboration of the public and the private sectors. When you think about political repression in a global sense, it's usually the state throwing people into prison. But you look at something like McCarthyism, which is certainly political repression, and it's the movie studios firing their screenwriters as the follow-up to what? A congressional investigation. And so it's the collaborative nature of public and private forces that is really a very unique and important element in American political repression, and we see it all the way through. We have a chapter, for example, in which we look at the labor violence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it's just full of that collaboration. There're private detectives everywhere, but then if there's a strike, the companies call in the state militia.
VC: Since you're taking this longer perspective, do you think McCarthyism stands out as an exception to this rule?
ES: No, it fits in perfectly. It's more interwoven with the private sector. I mean, there was much more private collaboration than what we're seeing today, which is largely coming from the state. But you can see almost everything that existed during McCarthyism having happened both before and after. Probably the most unique element is the emphasis on exposure and the use of congressional and state investigating committees - that particular mechanism. But FBI surveillance? That started really with WWI, and continues to this day. I mean, yesterday, there we are, marching through the rain down Broadway in New York City, and lots of people are taking our picture. Are these friendly supporters or FBI agents?
VC: Well, then what do you think about the Patriot Act and the political atmosphere at the moment? How does that stack up against this history you're looking at now?
ES: That fits right in, too. What we saw was the government, the Bush administration, taking advantage of an emergency, in order to implement much of this repressive apparatus.. Think about the Japanese internment - that's a response to Pearl Harbor. What was Pearl Harbor? The worst military defeat in US history. That parallel between Japanese internment and the Patriot Act is very clear. Similarly, Congress simply rolled over, just as it did after Pearl Harbor, and gave the Bush administration exactly what they wanted, which was a package of measures that the Justice Department had long been trying to get. . They just pulled these draft measures off the shelf and gave them to Congress - and Congress didn't even ask any questions. We see that over and over and over again in American history. And what is this uncritical response to a crisis doing? Giving the federal government more power to intervene in people's lives, and increase surveillance in particular.
VC: Do you think, though, that people have learned from the excesses of McCarthyism?
ES: Yes and no. I don't think we're going to have people fired for being Communists. What we are having are people being fired for being politically outspoken and confrontational and controversial. But that is what happened during the McCarthy period, they were just called Communists. Now they're being called anti-Semites. The terminology has changed but the process is distressingly similar. In other words, what they're doing now is what they did during the McCarthy period, what they did during the First World War - there was a purge in the universities then, bowing to outside political pressures to get rid of politically embarrassing faculty members. Now, it's not at the scale that it was during the McCarthy period, yet. We've really only seen two or three very high profile cases so far . . .
VC: You're thinking of Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein, right?
ES: Yes. But there's no question that both of them would have retained their jobs if there hadn't been enormous outside political pressure. I mean, the University of Colorado knew what they were getting with Ward Churchill - he's a controversial public intellectual. They wanted somebody like that. He does have an unconventional background, and his scholarship is not always one hundred percent pure, but he did go through the standard academic procedures for promotion when he was promoted to full professor - the faculty committees, the outside evaluators, the whole thing. They would not have mounted this investigation if there had not been that political pressure.
And the same thing with Finkelstein. He went through two faculty committees before the administration cracked down on him. And they did that on the grounds of his . . . what did they call it . . . "intemperate language." In other words, he wasn't being polite. I've read his stuff - the guy's a polemicist. But he's also a scholar. He's not making this stuff up. I, as a scholar, would never say in my own work something on the order of "these right-wing fascist bastards." That language alienates people, and I think it's politically ineffective. But you've got guys who do use that language, and they're getting smacked for it. But I don't think the academic community has to be all nice people.
VC: God forbid. And how does this question of "niceness" actually relate to the issue of academic freedom? It seems beside the point, really.
ES: I'm doing another book looking at the nature of academic freedom today, and my concern this time is much more structural. What's been happening in the universities, especially in second- or third-tier state schools where funding is being cut back, is this corporatization of the university, which is really narrowing intellectual life in some very unhealthy ways. I'm looking at academic freedom in conjunction with this broader crisis within American higher education. Feeding into that, because I think it's very much related, are some of what you could call the culture wars. Remember the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s?
VC: Sure, with Lynne Cheney and the rest?
ES: Yes. Probably people in literature were more affected by it, although historians have their own version. But what you're getting today is a situation where that prior discussion has seeded American discourse about higher education so that people now assume universities are these hotbeds of tenured radicals. So when something comes up, like David Horowitz and his Academic Bill of Rights, people say "Oh yeah, what a good idea." It's very much related to the same forces that pushed the culture war business fifteen years ago.
VC: It always struck me that the culture wars were geared towards starting a movement that could dismantle the gains of the civil rights' movements. What do you see the work of Horowitz and this next generation doing?
ES: Well, let me connect it to Ward Churchill. After all, some of the regents who were calling for his scalp were also talking about getting rid of his department, the Ethnic Studies department. It was set up the same way as many departments like it, including Black Studies or Women's Studies, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in response to student demands and also to reflect new scholarship. They were activist departments as well, because you don't study, say, American Indian affairs unless you are interested in the politics of it. And so the attacks are on the field as much as the individuals.
I think it's the whole 1960s that are under attack,, that moment when a whole set of mass movements challenged the status quo. And did so, of course, on college campuses. First the Civil Rights' movement, which came from the black colleges in the South, and then the anti-war movement. And what you get by the late 1960s and early 1970s is a counter-attack on the part of the organized business community.
I have a document which just always blows my mind. It's a memo from Louis Powell who became a Supreme Court justice but had been very active in the Chamber of Commerce in Virginia. A friend of his became the head of the Education Committee of the Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970s, and asked Powell for some advice. So Powell sent him this memo in which he says something on the order of "Look, the universities have been taken over by people who are anti-business - we've got to win them back, and we have to do it through a massive public relations campaign that will change the institutions." And he talks about creating what later became all these right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institution, and about developing a kind of counter-academy that could be used to eliminate what he called the academy's anti-business bias. That campaign - with its stable of right-wing writers and foundations -- produced many of the books that came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the culture wars - Dinesh DeSousa, all of that stuff.
They got this discussion going in the public, and it really took off. And it's still there, so that you get ordinary people assuming academics hate white men and are cross-dressing deconstructionists who can't write anything in English and work only twelve hours a week. All of these stereotypes make it very hard to make a case for academic freedom, because the feeling is, "and these people have tenure, too? And they're not patriotic comes 9/11!" What happened then is ACTA [American Council of Trustees and Alumni], Lynne Cheney's organization, puts out a pamphlet identifying un-American professors and claiming everybody else has hopped upon the bandwagon of American patriotism except the American college and university faculty, and that we're "out of step with the American public."
VC: That document you mention raises an interesting point, that all this comes out of a fear that academics are anti-business.
ES: Sure. But it's one of these multi-pronged things, with lots of different agendas. There's the anti-affirmative action stuff that ultimately ends up in attacks on race-based university admissions, things like that. And that's coming from a slightly different group, obviously - the hard-core neocons.
VC: If we could change the direction just a bit here - how did you end up on this research track in the first place?
ES: Many, many years ago. I was in graduate school in the 1960s, in European diplomatic history, and I wrote my thesis on the French debt to the United States after WWI. It was excruciatingly dull. I remember once - I knew I.F. Stone through his daughter, and he was at our house for dinner and he asked me what I was working on. I told him, and he said, "Oh! That's so boring!" And it was. When I finished it I knew that I didn't want to teach European history. It just wasn't where I was, and I didn't know what to do. I was living in Cambridge at the time, and I got a job teaching freshman composition at Harvard. In those days you could teach the course as a kind of mini-course on any topic you wanted as long as you gave the students paper assignments and feedback and talked about writing. And so I decided to teach a course on the 1950s. That was when I was growing up, and I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at it. But I couldn't find any books on McCarthyism. There was nothing in print that was useful.
After about two years of this, I still knew I didn't want to go on in European history, so I decided I'd write a book about McCarthyism. I got a grant from the Radcliffe Institute - the Bunting Institute - and that legitimized the project. I had a few friends in American history, and they said "you're crazy, the topic's too broad, you need to narrow it down." So at that point, I'd done enough introductory reading and I understood what it was I wanted to be looking at. And I realized that I could either look at a profession, or at a city. Since I was an academic, I decided to do the academy. I knew how it worked. I think an equally good and( important book could be done on, say, the legal profession, on the medical profession - there are other books to be done. The same thing with cities - nobody to my knowledge has really done a good book on McCarthyism in a specific city. I was going to do Boston, but luckily I didn't, because it wouldn't have worked. But somebody needs to do Pittsburgh or Detroit, because really it's a labor story. But I did the academy.
And when that was done, nobody had still done a general book on McCarthyism. There was a book by David Caute, The Great Fear, which is very comprehensive and very descriptive, but that's also the problem - it's descriptive. It just says this bad thing happened, that bad thing happened, and this other bad thing happened. (Coincidentally, David Caute was also a French historian way back when - he and I were in a history seminar at Harvard in the early 1960s.) So I decided to go back to the general book, and that's what I did.
VC: So you weren't a red diaper baby?
ES: I am not. I'm one of the few people in my peer group who is not. Everybody always assumes I was. In fact, The New York Times once did something in which they said I was, and I made them retract it. My parents were Adlai Stevenson democrats - ADA liberals. They were very active in the Americans for Democratic Action.
VC: What did they think about it when you started writing about McCarthyism?
ES: Well, my father's a sort of historian, and he was always pleased I was a historian. And my mother wasn't alive at that point. They were very liberal, and I think it was fine. My mother was especially liberal, politically.
VC: So you hadn't had any personal encounters with McCarthyism prior to taking up the topic?
ES: Well, I lived through it. And I later discovered that, for example, that my sixth-grade teacher had been fired because he was identified as a communist. But I didn't know that at the time - I just knew that everybody I knew was horrified by McCarthy. I mean, these were good liberals. They were against McCarthyism. But did I know anything about McCarthyism? No. I didn't grow up fearing the FBI was going to take away my parents, or anything like that, which was, apparently, what the Red Diaper babies were afraid of..
VC: It's interesting that it drew you in so completely, then.
ES: Yes. I think a lot of this is my mother's influence. She was not a Communist in any way, but she was very politically concerned. She was very into civil rights and stuff like that, so there is that tradition in my family.
VC: Since we're talking about liberalism and McCarthyism, a lot of what you unearth is this huge split that McCarthyism drove between liberals and the left. You show how groups like the ACLU, or the AAUP, or the NAACP - populated by progressive individuals for the most part - suddenly had to choose between forwarding their own political program and the larger political agenda that I'm sure they were aware of in the 1930s and 1940s.
ES: Yes. I think that's the big tragedy of McCarthyism - that it did distract liberals in the classical sense, from pursuing a social justice agenda in the 1950s. There's a wonderful book that did not get very much attention by a woman named Carol Polsgrove called Divided Minds, and it's about how the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s simply avoided the issue of race. They were so caught up in this anti-communist stuff that they just didn't deal with what was the really big, important issue in American life - and one which I think has yet to be solved.
VC: That's a good point to raise, and gets to the far-reaching effects McCarthyism had on general intellectual and political life. I think in Many are the Crimes, you briefly talk about Betty Freidan's work and how although she was part of the Popular Front, by the time she comes to write The Feminine Mystique, she really downplayed her discussion of class and race so as not to be attacked for being a social critic.
ES: Yes. Interestingly enough, when I started that book, I didn't have that last chapter which talks about the impact of McCarthyism. I just didn't want to go there. But my editor really pushed me - she said I had to go into that. I said "I don't want to go out on a limb, I'm nervous" but she said "do it." So, I did. Now, we're seeing that in some fields, people are beginning to look at the more discrete legacies of McCarthyism. There's a book on the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology now, by a guy named David Price. The impact on the civil rights movement is very crucial - somebody whose name I forget is writing about how Martin Luther King Jr. held back on pushing an economic agenda out of fear of being red-baited.
VC: Would you say that is the biggest legacy of McCarthyism, then, the fear of addressing the economic as a category of social analysis?
ES: I think that's a lot of it. But what I think is so interesting is when I started doing this recent book and began looking at some of the labor problems of the late 19th century, the same kinds of attacks were being made. The accusation was "Oh, you're bringing in class warfare!" So this pre-dates McCarthyism, and still continues to this day in a reluctance to challenge the economic status quo. During the 1930s these issues were openly discussed, and those discussions closed down very definitely during the late 1940s and early 1950s, partly because of McCarthyism, but not entirely. The political landscape had already begun to shift.
VC: Was it hard to get people to talk about their experiences with McCarthyism? You mention in Many are the Crimes, that many people were reluctant to revisit that history.
ES: Well, I don't think they're that reluctant - you get PBS documentaries, Hollywood treatments. The real problem is that most of the people who were involved in it are beginning to die out - we don't have that much direct experience of it anymore.
VC: Was it difficult to persuade people to publish your work?
ES: No, not at all. When I was at the Radcliffe Institute working on No Ivory Tower, I was approached by several university presses right away. So, no, I've never had any trouble publishing. That's not been an issue for me. Though I'm the only person in my peer group never to get an NEH grant, which I find somewhat ironic since I was on an NEH panel that awarded grants. And I know that I'm considered a lefty within my profession, which brings along with it baggage, including a whole book about me.
VC: Really?
ES: Yes - Harvey Klehr and his main collaborator John Haynes, who works in the Library of Congress, are out there writing all this stuff about espionage which is essentially trying to prove that even though McCarthy was a bad guy, he was basically right. They wrote a book called In Denial in which they attack a whole bunch of people in the historical profession. Do you know what the Venona Decrypts are? They're these telegrams that were sent from the KGB office in New York and Washington back to Moscow that got intercepted during WWII. They were decrypted, translated, and finally released in about 1995. They prove there were a lot of people connected with the Communist Party who spied for the Russians. And in their book, Klehr and Haynes claim that even with this evidence, people like myself are still arguing that communism was a good thing. They devote a lot of time to going over my writings - it's actually amazing. They have comments I'd made at an historical meeting that I don't even remember going to, and they've got it down. They cite me more than Joseph Stalin.
VC: Where are they coming from with this project?
ES: Their funding comes from these right-wing foundations - the Olin Foundation, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, there's the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation. Their scholarship is perfectly ok, it's just the twist they put on it. Their books read like prosecutors' briefs.
VC: Do you think there's a need on the part of the academy to state the correct record on the "Communist Threat"?
ES: No, actually, I don't. This just strikes me as antiquarianism. It's history, we know what happened. If the Russians would open another set of archives, maybe we'd even find out definitively if Alger Hiss was a spy or not. But it's antiquarian. It really is. And what I just plain don't understand is what motivates somebody like Harvey Klehr? Why does he feel so strongly? Why can't he admit that the record is mixed? That's basically the take that most of us have on American communism, historians like Robin Kelley, or Maurice Isserman . . . We have a more nuanced picture. Yes, the American Communist Party did bad things, yes, they were dogmatic, but they also did good things. And the tragedy is that for something like fifteen years, in the 1930s and 1940s, the American Communist Party was the most effective organization on the left. And it's a tragedy as well because it wasn't a particularly good organization. It was much too closely tied into the Soviets - and we can't, we don't, deny it.. But the party was also active in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and around a number of international issues. It's a mixed legacy: Communists were central to the movement for social justice in the 1930s and 1940s and some of them spied for the Soviet Union.
VC: Do you think that part of the difficulty doing this work it is that it's hard, in 2007, to understand the appeal Communism had? I mean not only to those who joined the party, but to the broader public who might have been sympathetic to the larger themes it represented? Or is part of it that idea of the Popular Front is still threatening to people like Klehr and Haynes?
ES: Perhaps. I interviewed a whole bunch of ex-Communist academics, and I thought some of them were just terrific. I found them interesting, thoughtful people, and they explained to me what it was about Communism that attracted them, why they joined and what they did, and that was one of the things I was trying to show, in No Ivory Tower, what it was and why they joined. As an historian, and someone who's clearly politically committed, I always asked myself, suppose I had been an adult in 1937 - would I have joined the Communist Party? And the answer is it would have depended on where I was. There was a real variation - in some places it was real dogmatic and Stalinist, and in some places it was pretty loose.
VC: It's a good question to ask, though as I think you point out, if you were interested in being active in oppositional left politics in the 1930s, the Communist Party seems to have been the logical group to join.
ES: That's where the action was. Probably I would have joined the League Against War and Fascism and maybe would have tried to organize a teachers' union. Who knows?
VC: What was it like talking to the people you interviewed? Were they happy to talk to you? Guarded?
ES: I was lucky in the sense that I did most of my interviews in the late 1970s. Politically, it was a much more relaxed time - post-Watergate, pre-Reagan - so there was a much greater willingness on the part of people to be open about these things. People that I talked to wanted to tell their stories. They knew where I was and they were willing to talk.
Only one person gave me a political quiz, and that was Sidney Hook. I asked him if I could interview him, and he asked me a whole bunch of questions. I wrote back to him and we had this kind of correspondence, and then he had a heart-attack and that was that. But then later, I found his papers while doing research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and discovered he had a little folder on me. I looked into it and there was a letter to him from the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, talking about how terrible I was. I guess it was written after No Ivory Tower was published, and Handlin says that he certainly hoped that "some awful person" like me wouldn't get tenure anywhere. And apparently, according to the president of Yeshiva University, Sidney Hook actually tried to get me denied tenure. He was pulling an Alan Dershowitz, but it was a different era.
VC: I'm fascinated by the correspondence between you and Hook - what kinds of questions did he want you to answer?
ES: Basically, he wanted to know what my position on Communism was. In other words, the guy was not a liberal in the classic sense of the term. What happened was that I had attacked his position on academic freedom, and Communism, and he assumed that was bad scholarship.
VC: How has the collection of essays you edited - Cold War Triumphalism been received?
ES: Well, it didn't get many reviews. There may have been three or four. But that was to be expected - books of essays do not necessarily make much of an impact anywhere. That was the culmination of a project that began sometime in the late 1990s. Nelson Lichtenstein and I were talking at these historians' conventions about doing something on the impact of the Cold War, looking at questions of how the Cold War affected different aspects of American life, and we wanted to do something but weren't sure what. Then in 2001, Marilyn Young organized a three-year project on the Cold War at the NYU International Center for Advanced Studies - I had been talking about this with Marilyn as well. We decided that the NYU project would host a two-day conference on the impact of the Cold War, and we invited a lot of people to give papers, and that's what eventually turned into the book.
The book wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it was ok. It has a lot of intellectual history in it, and I'd rather have seen people focus on the impact of the Cold War on different aspects of American life. Some of the pieces were wonderful - the article by Corey RobinI is brilliant. We were also very lucky to get a piece by Chalmers Johnson - he wasn't at the conference, but I knew him through his work, and got in touch with him to ask if he had anything to contribute. He said "I just so happen to have something on the shelf here," and he pulled it out and gave it to us.
VC: In general, what do you think are the areas that still need to be explored, in terms of the impact of the Cold War?
ES: Gosh, that's a big issue. I think that more can be done looking at the impact of the military on American life. When I was doing that introductory piece [in Cold War Triumphalism], I started reading a lot of defense-type stuff, and I think that there's a lot there. People are doing stuff - there are wonderful books out there - but I think there can be more. When I'm done with my current projects, I want to look in particular at the political culture of the military, which I think is really scary - they're really quite conservative, far beyond what those of us in the academy are used to. On top of that, here is this massive piece of American society that clearly is taking the bulk of the federal budget, distorting the economy in certain ways, and I'm not sure people have seriously looked at it. Military historians are kind of narrow. There are a few books on civil defense that are pretty good, but I want to get into the military itself. And you can make a lot of connections - there's a wonderful book called The Gun Belt or something by Ann Markeson that talks about the geography of the military-industrial complex. It explains a lot about the development and political culture of much of the sunbelt and Southern California .
Ultimately, I think, we'll have to figure out how the mindset that operated during the Cold War contributed to what's happening today. In other words, we need to look at the continuities - both intellectual and institutional. That's why I'm writing the book about political repression. It's something that's as American as apple pie, yet most historians (especially those on the left) look away from it and study more congenial topics. Joe McCarthy has a great quote here that's actually applicable to my work. He was comparing his anticommunism to killing the skunks that menaced his mother's chickens. "I don't enjoy this task," he said. "It is a dirty, disagreeable job, but a job which must be done." That's the way I feel about the study of American political repression - someone's got to do it.
Return to Top»