The Life and Lies of Paul Crouch
The Life and Lies of Paul Crouch

Author: Gregory S. Taylor

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2014-03-11

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 0813047528

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Paul Crouch (1903–1955) was the quintessential anticommunist paid government informer. A naïve, ill-educated recruit who found a family, a livelihood, and a larger romantic cause in the Communist Party, he spent more than fifteen years organizing American workers, meeting with Soviet leaders, and trying to infiltrate the U.S. military with Communist soldiers. He left the party in 1941, in part because of a growing conviction that the leadership had become dictatorial, but also in part out of vengeance for perceived wrongs. As public perceptions of Communism shifted during the Cold War, Crouch’s economic failures, desire for fame, and greed morphed him into a vehement ideologue for the anti-Communist movement. During five years of testimony, he named Robert Oppenheimer, Charlie Chaplin, and many others as Communists and claimed the civil rights movement was Communist inspired. In 1954, much of Crouch’s testimony was exposed as perjury, but he remained defiant to the end. How, and why, one southerner could become a loyal foot soldier on both sides of the Cold War ideological divide is the subject of Gregory Taylor’s incisive biography. Relying on personal papers, FBI records, and official Communist Party files, Taylor weaves through the seemingly contradictory life of the individual once known as the most dangerous man in America.

McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks
McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks

Author: Raymond Caballero

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0806165901

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For twenty years after World War II, the United States was in the grips of its second and most oppressive red scare. The hysteria was driven by conflating American Communists with the real Soviet threat. The anticommunist movement was named after Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, but its true dominant personality was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who promoted and implemented its repressive policies and laws. The national fear over communism generated such anxiety that Communist Party members and many left-wing Americans lost the laws’ protections. Thousands lost their jobs, careers, and reputations in the hysteria, though they had committed no crime and were not disloyal to the United States. Among those individuals who experienced more of anticommunism’s varied repressive measures than anyone else was Clinton Jencks. Jencks, a decorated war hero, adopted as his own the Mexican American fight for equal rights in New Mexico’s mining industry. In 1950 he led a local of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers in the famed Empire Zinc strike—memorialized in the blacklisted 1954 film Salt of the Earth—in which wives and mothers replaced strikers on the picket line after an injunction barred the miners themselves. But three years after the strike, Jencks was arrested and charged with falsely denying that he was a Communist and was sentenced to five years in prison. In Jencks v. United States (1957), the Supreme Court overturned his conviction in a landmark decision that mandated providing to an accused person previously hidden witness statements, thereby making cross-examination truly effective. In McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks, Caballero reveals for the first time that the FBI and the prosecution knew all along that Clinton Jencks was innocent. Jencks’s case typified the era, exposing the injustice that many suffered at the hands of McCarthyism. The tale of Jencks’s quest for justice provides a fresh glimpse into the McCarthy era’s oppression, which irrevocably damaged the lives, careers, and reputations of thousands of Americans.

Broadway and the Blacklist
Broadway and the Blacklist

Author: K. Kevyne Baar

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1476636168

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During the era often commonly known as McCarthyism, many motion picture and television creators were blacklisted for supposed communist ties. There remained, however, a creative outlet that still welcomed these artists--theatre. This book explores the role theatre played during this turbulent period, covering the formation of the Theatre Guild (which birthed the Group Theatre), the short-lived Federal Theatre Project, and the investigations of the motion picture and television industries, and Broadway, by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Appendices discuss McCarthy's role and present the memos of investigator Dolores Faconti Scotti, along with a list of prominent witnesses in HUAC's Broadway hearings, and reactions by artists' unions in the decades following the blacklist.