Niña Huanca

by Faustino Gonzalez-Aller

English, Spanish (translation)

Genres: History

243 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1968

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly, for all that's been written about the McCarthy Era, no modern author's attempted a comprehensive account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Walter Goodman's 1968 work remains the standard, and with good reason. Exhaustingly thorough, it traces the Committee from its earliest days as an antifascist body in the '30s under liberal New Yorker Samuel Dickstein (a curious figure later unmasked a Soviet agent!), its evolution into Communist hunting under reactionary Texan Martin Dies, its most notorious epoch in the Red Scare of the '40s and '50s and its slow, lingering decline through the '60s. Goodman is a remarkably judicious writer: his characterizations of HUAC figures and personalities are sharply drawn, often scornful (John Rankin of Mississippi, the segregationist and pathological Jew-baiter, is most repulsive of all), his accounts of famous investigations like the Hollywood Ten, Hiss-Chambers case and Commerce Department communist William Remington engaging. Yet he's unwilling to pass easy judgments on a body that's become a synecdoche for nascent dictatorship. Goodman notes that HUAC did find real communists and fascists on occasion, and argues that their actual investigations weren't as indiscriminate as their public grandstanding suggests. That said, HUAC's role in poisoning discourse, illegitimizing political dissent and wielding the threat of state-sponsored repression came to outweigh whatever value their work had, to the point where it became an embarrassment as the postwar hysteria faded. HUAC was formally abolished in 1975, seven years after the book's publication; Goodman shows that it had long since reach its sell-by date, a cautionary tale of security concerns curdling into grandstanding, demagoguery and abuse of power.

[Davi Kushner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written and balanced study of HUAC with numerous hilarious comments. Was a bit disjointed at times as characters left the scene and reappeared, but this may be inherent to any history of a congressional committee.