Landon R. Y. Storrs

Really depressing book about “redhunting” of government employees in the 40s through the 60s and how it was used particularly and disproportionately against women (along with homosexuals and African-Americans). While being independent-minded could sometimes convince investigators that a man wasn’t Communist-influenced, it had the opposite effect for a woman, and women were also tarred by their relatives’ politics in ways that men weren’t—though for New Deal men who tended to marry ambitious women who shared their education and values, their wives’ questionable pasts could harm them too (and this included anything even with a faint whiff of socialism, because the conservatives who conducted these hunts saw no differences between socialism, Communism, and the consumer protection/labor rights movements). Storrs argues that these attacks cut off political possibilities on the left, scaring even the officials who survived into turning right. He also argues that the terror distorted the historiography; many of the victims hid their loyalty investigations, so their changed behavior seemed like self-directed evolution and we lost sight of the continuities between democratic socialist principles and some New Deal programs.… (meer)