A Critical Analysis Of Schrecker's The Communist Party

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When it comes to viewing the Communist Party USA, Schrecker has a fairly mixed opinion on them, but I believe she has a more sympathetic feeling as she spends more time highlighting everything that went wrong for them and why. She points out the good the Communist Party was doing once the Depression hit in the 1930s such as organizing neighborhood groups to prevent homelessness, rallying college students to oppose compulsory military training, forming militant unions of migrant laborers, miners, and textile workers, and would even send representatives to aid striking workers. With such a presence in many of the major social movements of the 1930s, helped the party gain some popularity by 1938. She also talks about their equal …show more content…

Even though she seems supportive of the Communist party here, she also points out its flaws on why it was so easy for the US government to do so much damage to them without much of a fight. Shrecker states that the members of the Communist party didn’t seem like victims, but more like stubborn, impractical idealists. When it comes to McCarthyism and its effects on the future, Schrecker really goes for the neck. She states that McCarthyism in the short term destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people, whether they lost jobs, careers, or even their lives. However, she also states that the effect was not only for communists, but anybody who worked in teaching, especially college professors, who were forced to really control themselves and limit everything they said to protect themselves from potential persecution. On top of that, Schrecker believes that McCarthyism has had a severe lasting effect on American politics as a whole. Not only does she think it ruined the Liberal side, but due to the immoral methodology used by all sorts of organizations, lead to more serious events occurring in the future. She states that when all these organizations used unethical tricks and deceit, this seems like

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