MY CHALLENGE TO McCARTHY
 

My clash with the House Committee on Un-American Activities
proved to be only a prelude to my most outstanding battle in the
field of civil liberties. That began in 1953 when, through no choice
of mine, I had a head-on colHsion with the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations," of which Joseph R. McCarthy,
Repubhcan of Wisconsin, was then Chairman.

Senator McCarthy first tiled to bring me before his Subcom¬
mittee in the summer of 1953 after his agents had made the hor¬
rible discovery that a book of mine. The Peoples of the Soviet
Union was in some of the U.S. State Department overseas li¬
braries. This work, published by Harcourt, Brace in 1946, was a
specialized study of the Soviet racial minorities and took no
position on the Soviet economic and poHtical system. During the
last week of June, McCarthy announced that he was subpoenaing
me and twenty-two other authors whose books had been found
in United States libraries abroad.

I had aheady gone away for the summer to the pleasant island
of Martha's Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast. Feeling that

"This is a subcommittee, functioning since 1946, of the larger Com¬
mittee on Government Operations, formerly designated the Committee
on Expenditures in the Executive Department. McCarthy headed both
the subcommittee and the parent body. Throughout this chapter and
this book I frequently refer to the subcommittee as the McCarthy Com¬
mittee.