Price Of Dissent Book Probes Motivations Of Hunters And Hunted During Mccarthy Era

“Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition: An Oral History,”

By Griffin Fariello (W.W. Norton & Co., $29.95, 576 pp.)

‘You know what blackballing means?” a former security officer for the State Department named Peter Szluk asks the journalist Griffin Fariello during one of the 70 oral histories that make up “Red Scare.” “They’d end up on a breadline somewhere, and I didn’t give a hoot. Blackballed everywhere - we could do it, yessiree, boy. … Get rid of that son of a bitch. Put him on a breadline. And we did.”

With that single burst of braggadocio, Fariello as interviewer and Szluk as subject eradicate 40 years of time, 40 years that blur all but the keenest memories of the anti-Communist fervor that gripped America during the most frigid period of the Cold War. It is Fariello’s achievement to have plumbed those memories so skillfully that this collection terrifies, outrages and saddens even at the remove of two generations.

By the subtitle alone, Fariello makes no pretense of producing anything but a polemic, a documentary of the merciless persecution of the innocent, and I will leave the inevitable ideological debates over that thesis to others.

In the pages of “Red Scare” we hear from such martyrs of the McCarthy era as Alger Hiss, Ring Lardner Jr. and John Service. From the Rosenberg case to the Peekskill riots to the Hollywood Ten blacklist, the totemic events of the post-war Left recur across the testimonies.

Fariello mines the survival instinct and gallows humor of radicals both within and without the Communist Party.

“Red Scare” succeeds most greatly when it surpasses the predictable depiction of party members as idealist and patriots who wanted only a more just America.

It seems clear that he listened especially closely to what the screenwriter Paul Jarrico advised in one interview: “You have to be careful not to picture the casualties of that war purely as victims. It’s true that there were casualties, but they were casualties in a fight, and the people who took the casualties more or less knew there was a price to pay for dissent in this country.”

Neither Fariello nor his subjects, however, skimp in recounting the consequences of resistance - prison terms, shattered careers, relentless surveillance, pressure to disassociate even from family members. As familiar as those episodes seem to anyone familiar with the period, “Red Scare” often penetrates a more subtle and intimate level of experience. Gene Dennis, the son and namesake of the Communist Party leader indicted under the Smith Act, recollects an outing in the late 1940s:

“I went with my mother to the movies to see ‘Ivanhoe’ with Robert Taylor, and the second feature was a film about the Red Menace and I was feeling kind of uncomfortable and anxious while it was on. And then came a big shot of my father and the other party leaders who were indicted coming down the Foley Square courthouse steps. Then came the anger and fear in this dark movie house. I was glad it was dark. It was one of the first times I had felt that kind of public venom.”

“Red Scare” seems most singular of all when it leaves the accused to probe the consciences of those who informed or divine the motives of those who hunted. If anything, I wish that Fariello had given an even greater portion of his book to these participants in the grand and hideous pageant.

The book ends, quite pointedly, with Sylvia Thompson recounting the prolonged struggle to have the ashes of her husband, a Communist Party leader and a World War II hero, interred in Arlington National Cemetery.