Ellen Schrecker

Ellen Schrecker taught history at Yeshiva University for many years and has spent her career on the American anti-communist purges of the mid-twentieth century. Many Are the Crimes, published by Little, Brown in 1998, was the first full account written after the Soviet archives opened, and it draws on FBI files released under freedom of information along with private papers and interviews. Her argument is that the purge was not an aberration produced by one senator but a machine with many parts, in which the Bureau supplied the material, congressional committees supplied the theatre, and employers did most of the actual damage by sacking people. The title comes from Robert Jackson, dissenting in 1950: many are the crimes committed in the name of security.