> Dear Matthew,
> My guess would be that unlike that of Ayn Rand, who
came from Russia,
> Spillane had no personal axe to grind on behalf of
McCarthyism but simply
> saw the Commies as efffective villains.
He may have. Another issue is that there clearly was an
historical issue
going on. There was an somewhat unholy alliance during WWII
with
Stalin. When the war was over, USSR failed to retreat from
the countries
they moved though. The countries of eastern Europe did lose
their
sovereignty in a real way -- including the eastern half of
Germany. The
Hungarian Revolution was another big point.
> Although historians seem to agree
> that there was no Communist threat to the American
Way of Life after 1949
> (or possibly ever),
I am sorry, but this phrase is nonsense. In adddition to the
issues cited
above there were real threats including the Cuban Missile
crisis. I am not
interested in engaging in deconstructive rhetoric here. I am
well aware of
missiles in Turkey. There were mutual things going on and
that's why it
was called the Cold War. There is also no doubt there
subversive activities
did occur.
> the Red Scare of the fifties resulted in
27,000,000
> Americans having to sign loyalty oaths as a condition
of keeping their
> jobs, hundreds of imprisonments, at least a dozen
suicides, and many
> mental illnesses.
Was the reality of the red scare justified? I doubt that I
would say yes.
What I am not willing to say is that there was no threat;
That there was no
justification for anti-communist feelings; That a communist
leader didn't
really say "we will bury you."; That the repression on
Czchoslovakia in the
mid 60s didn't happen; That the fear of nuclear war was not a
major reality
of the times.
Take a look at Jim Thompson's _A_Swell-Looking_Babe_
> for a fictional account of how, in paranoid fifties
society, the
> accusation of communism could destroy a person. For
an easy introduction
> to the tenor of the times, try Michael Barson's
_Better_Dead_Than_Red_.
> One of the earliest critiques of the phenomenon is
Richard Hofstader's
> _The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics_. Within the
context of the
> fifties, Mike Hammer is simply being an all-Amurrican
patriot.
=========================================================
Joseph M. Johnston, Ph.D. johnston@netreach.net
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