McCarthyism Handled Like a Pop Thriller

The “Preface” describes how the author “grew up in the 1980s” at near “the end of the Cold War”. I don’t think it ended that early. Whenever, anybody meets me out here in Quanah, TX in 2024, they only ask where I’m from, waiting for me to say “Russia” before refusing to say anything else, as if I’ve confessed to being an enemy-commie. I felt so ostracized across high school and college in Massachusetts that I rebelled by making my Honors College graduation speech in Russian. A few dozen people followed my example by making their remarks in their own languages because they obviously experienced similar xenophobia or fear of otherness. Americans seem to live to ostracize people, and to find any fault to harass, or intimidate, or to fire-without-cause, or to not hire “others”. Anybody who taps into this thirst to hate “others” tends to be given a pulpit to spew hatred. McCarthyism is just one of these hatred-propagandas that still resonates in the nonsensical tirades among Republicans against “socialists”, while they are themselves making many by-definition “socialist” arguments to win voters, while sneaking in anti-populist policies that repay their bribing donors… It’s getting a bit late, as I near the end of another day, so I’ve digressed here…
The “Prologue” describes the features of a woman before stating that she is testifying before the Un-American Activities committee in 1946. An FBI report “described her as ‘believed Jewish’”: in other words, they failed to do enough research to figure her ethnicity out. The narrative does not address this, as it digresses into random info about where she worked, and what she did. A transcript dialogue from this hearing follows: at least these are evidence-based quotes, unlike some other non-fictions that just make up conversations that never took place. The dialogue allows this woman to not submit her evidence, and then she is held “in contempt of Congress”. This threatened her imprisonment, and it passed this Committee: “7 to zero”. Then, the author explains that this example became “numbingly common” in the following decade, as random “school teachers movie stars, longshoremen, and diplomats” were brought in for this “degradation ceremony. If they refused—to hand over documents, to name names, to admit membership in the Communist Party—they went to jail.” While this is a good way of summarizing this case, the lack of concrete details about what these people did that made them targets, and what evidence were used against them makes this a very paranoid narrative that fails to accuse the villains of specific misdoing. This seems to be designed to scare modern readers of potential similar mass-imprisonments by Trump without any rational explanations, as opposed to merely frightening readers of America’s past misdeeds.
“1: A Blue Envelope” echoes this problem as it starts with a visit, and a portrait of how people looked, and what they did: these seem irrelevant because they are given before the author clarifies what these characters are going be accused of or accuse others of. The story is framed like a pop fiction narrative: “Savile Row suits. Homburg hats. Cream-white shirts….” What does this have to do with the prosecution of innocent people? This is an incredibly annoying book to read for anybody who has been exposed to such mistreatment, and who are looking to understand it with a detached, researched perspective (which is missing in this book). I do not recommend folks to try to read this. It’s a tough hill to climb.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024