This is a book review that I did of “The age of
McCarthyism.”
This
book is set up like the other books that we have read previously. The book starts out with a forward that
gives the reader an idea of what the book contains. It gives good background on the topic at hand, and does a good
job of explaining it.
From
there the book goes into telling us the things that Joseph McCarthy did while
on his rampage of trying to stomp out communism in America. One of the biggest things it talks about is
the atomic espionage, which adds fuel to the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms
race. It also talks about the things
that the government did to stop communism in America. Things that we see today that might be unconstitutional were done
back then without a second thought.
The
second part of the book talks about the documents to back up or support the
author’s thesis. All the documents are
written by people that were around at the time that all of this anticommunist
movement. These documents cover things
from the Rosenberg’s to J. Edgar Hoover.
It gives you a good idea of the state of the people’s minds back
then. It covers so much information
that pertains to the topic, that you would have never thought of before you
read this book.
The
book was done very well. I thought that
it had a lot of good information and it was put across in a way that was
interesting and easy to understand. It
talks bout so many different aspects of what were really going on back then and
what this whole anticommunist did to the American people.
Joseph
McCarthy sent the American people into a tail spin and the people did know what
they were doing, but it just didn’t sink in at the time I think, “how otherwise
decent and intelligent Americans were willing to go along with what even they
in retrospect realize was political repression (p.2).” Although it is hard for us to say how they
could do such things, we never lived in the great danger of nuclear fallout.
Like
I just mentioned, we didn’t have to live through the fear of nuclear war, like
they had to with their everyday lives.
Especially when the Soviet Union dropped its first bomb, “Truman and his
advisors responded by stepping up the militarization of American foreign policy
and authorizing the immediate development of the hydrogen bomb (p.32).” If I saw my government taking steps like the
one I just mentioned I would have been paranoid too. I think that everyone was just looking out for America, and there
is nothing wrong with that. It shows
the amount of pride that people had in the country back then.
Overall,
I thought the book was done really well, and that there was a lot of
information to back up what the author was trying to get across. The supporting information that the author
gave was right on with backing their ideas up.