Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era

No issue so possessed the nation in the first half of the 1950s as alleged Communist subversion in the United States. Deadly Farce presents Harvey Matusow, a young Bronx "wise guy" who became a Communist Party member, an undercover FBI informer inside the Party, and then a leading witness for the government during the McCarthy era - until he recanted his testimony. His story illuminates a disturbing time in American history, one with renewed relevance today.
Matusow was easily the most flamboyant of the "professional" ex-Communists, an aspiring celebrity informer who considered himself "booked" by Congressional committees not just to testify, but to entertain. He testified that Communists fostered loose sex, taught politicized Mother Goose rhymes to small children, and tried to infiltrate the Boy Scouts. He also named more than 200 people as Communists and was a prosecution witness in major criminal cases.
Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen draw on FBI records, court transcripts, personal interviews, private papers, and other primary sources, most never before utilized, to describe the unusual role of ex-Communist informer-witnesses during the McCarthy era.

Robert M. Lichtman, a Washington lawyer for nearly thirty years, has practiced in San Francisco since 1986. Ronald D. Cohen is a professor emeritus of history at Indiana University Northwest and is a past president of the Historians of American Communism.