Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired an extensive collection of oral histories related to the Red Scare that were conducted by Bay Area author and Stanford alumnus Griffin Fariello.
In the early 1990s, Fariello developed an interest in McCarthyism and the 1950s Red Scare that led him to seek out and interview individuals who had participated in or been affected by the raging ideological conflicts of America in the post–World War II era. With the backing of historians such as Howard Zinn and Walter LaFeber (whose correspondence with Fariello is included in the collection), Fariello assembled the interviews for publication. Excerpts from approximately half of the 150 interviews in his collection were included in Fariello’s book Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition (2008). The book was awarded the Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights Award for Outstanding Work on Intolerance in North America. As Fariello wrote in the preface to Red Scare, the book explores “a time of political upheaval, when the question ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ was prologue to personal ruin, life in exile or on the blacklist, a shattered family, imprisonment, suicide, and for some even a violent death. For many who faced that question, the consequences of their answer still haunt them today.”
Fariello’s collection includes interviews with notable figures such as Alger Hiss, Ring Lardner Jr., Chris Trumbo, and Peter Szluk. The interviews portray grim repression and stubborn resistance, narrated by veterans from all sides of the Red Scare. Throughout his research for the book, Fariello interviewed blacklisted actors, writers, professors, scientists, schoolteachers, union members, and federal employees. He also conducted oral histories with the FBI agents and informers who worked against the targeted, and spoke with men and women who, as children, were caught in the ideological crossfire of the 1950s.
As renowned Cornell University Cold War historian Walter LaFeber wrote in a review of the book, “It is well that we keep memories fresh about certain parts of the Cold War, especially the ‘Red Scare’ that ruined lives and corrupted parts of American society. Fariello has made a signal contribution by letting many of the victims—both famous and less known—speak directly and often dramatically for themselves, and he has given us a succinct historical context within which we can understand these revelations.”
Griffin Fariello graduated from Stanford University in 1973 with a degree in psychology and earned a master’s in fine arts from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. He worked as a freelance writer and university instructor in the Bay Area following his education. He died on February 16, 2012, at his home in San Francisco.
The collection of his oral histories was generously donated by his siblings in the hope that it will be of use to future scholars and students seeking to understand political repression and resistance to abuses of power.
The collection will soon be made available through Hoover’s digital collections portal.
