A few weeks after Sept. 11, President George Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act, which included authority for the FBI to compel booksellers and libraries to reveal the titles of books that were bought or borrowed by their customers and patrons.
This egregious attack on civil liberties calls to mind a far more vigorous and dangerous threat to human rights during the McCarthy era. Describing what happened in that infamous political period through the story of a notorious informer, authors Robert Lichtman — a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer — and Ronald Cohen — a professor of history at Indiana University Northwest — have presented a fascinating, but chilling, biography.
Readers can draw their own inferences as to what lessons
are to be learned from this thorough account of an earlier time when suspicions and accusations produced a climate of fear and hysteria in America.
Harvey Matusow, the subject of this book, was born in 1926 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Russia. They lived in a middle-class Bronx Jewish neighborhood where Harvey and his older brother went to public schools, held part-time jobs and frequented Yankee Stadium. Their father, who served in the American Army during World War I, owned several successful cigar stores but suffered financial reverses during the Depression. Both Harvey and his brother enlisted in the Army during World War II. The brother was killed but Harvey survived. He was an infantryman in Europe, remaining there for a year after the war ended.
Discharged from the Army in August 1946, Harvey drifted aimlessly until he joined American Youth for Democracy, a left-wing group, later identified as a communist front. He became more and more involved in the group and soon joined the Communist Party. He was employed by the party, working at various jobs such as operating the bookstore at a Communist Party camp.
When Sen. Joseph McCarthy made his famous speech in February 1950, falsely claiming that he had a list with 205 names of State Department employees who were communists, Harvey became an FBI informant. Presumably, he was disillusioned with the Communist Party and was attracted to McCarthy to the degree that he campaigned for him when the senator ran for re-election. For the next few years, Harvey drifted about the country, always seeking out an FBI office and providing names of communists known to him during his period of party membership. He began to serve as a witness before the various congressional committees investigating communists, including the McCarthy committee.
Although Harvey achieved some notoriety, he failed to attain the front ranks of informers such as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. This may have contributed to the decision he made to publish a book in 1955, recanting his testimony and confessing to having lied about the people he had named as communists. This strange turn of events led to his being convicted of perjury. He served almost four years in prison. Released in 1960 at the age of 33, he lived until 2002, residing in various parts of the United States and in England for part of a year. He held a variety of short-term jobs, was married and divorced a dozen times and converted to Mormonism.
Harvey Matusow’s life story is strange, even bizarre. Lichtman and Cohen have presented it with all its contradictions and inconsistencies. More important than the biography, however, as interesting as that may be, is the portrayal of the United States in the 1950s. Alarm about the communist threat led to attacks on civil liberties and a witch hunt that ruined lives. Undoubtedly, there were Soviet spies, but whether or not some of the government’s excessive actions were justified remains a matter for debate. This book is a useful contribution to the controversy and has lessons that are applicable to our contemporary dilemmas.
“Deadly Farce” by Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen (229 pages, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, $27).