Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
By Clay Risen
Scribner, 480 pp.
At a time when fealty has been elevated to a governing principle in Washington, when federal employees who advanced DEI programs or investigated the violence of January 6 or advocated mass vaccination have found themselves investigated or informed upon, the parallels are impossible to ignore. In the years between the end of World War II and the late 1950s, many Americans faced questions about their loyalties. A belief in communism, or a past association with the Communist Party of the United States of America or its front organizations, could (and for many did) spell professional ruin. A refusal to answer investigators’ questions or to name colleagues with communist leanings in their past or present might lead to prison.
The bad news, driven home by Clay Risen in his excellent history of what has come to be referred to as the McCarthy era, is that if we are hoping for political heroics or judicial courage to affirm the importance of civil liberties, the American past does not augur well.
The term “McCarthy era” is an unfortunate one. The eponymous Joseph McCarthy makes an ideal icon if one’s purpose is to minimize the excesses of what Risen more correctly calls the Red Scare.
It was in fact President Harry Truman who launched federal loyalty boards in 1947, hoping, as Risen recounts, to generate enough public fear of communism at home to sell a war-weary public on spending abroad. The spending was needed to contain the territorial and political ambitions of Joseph Stalin in Greece and Turkey in a nascent “cold war.” Over the following ten years, federal loyalty programs would lead to an estimated 2,700 dismissals of federal employees and 12,000 resignations. There were state programs modeled on Truman’s federal plan, as well as loyalty programs at state universities and in the private sector.
As the Red Scare got underway, McCarthy was a Wisconsin freshman senator, a backbencher of little note and a man with a serious drinking problem. He would rise to fame only in 1950, making outrageous and undocumented claims of pro-Soviet communists running amok in the State Department. Probably the most remarkable and overlooked fact about McCarthy was the stunning lack of success of his personal witch hunt. In postwar Washington, the popularity of communism among some progressive New Dealers, when Communist Party membership was legal and Stalin was America’s wartime ally, was indisputable. What was in doubt was whether a communist affiliation equaled a propensity for espionage.
McCarthy did not find the communists he claimed to know about, but he became popular as the leading champion of anti-communism, despite trafficking in empty accusations that he could not substantiate. After repeatedly promising to do so, he was publicly debunked on the new medium of television. The moment when Boston lawyer Joseph Welch dressed him down on camera, in the middle of a congressional hearing, with the rhetorical question “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” gave rise to a narrative of “problem solved, dangerous bad guy denounced for selling snake oil”—even if the bad guy remained hugely popular.
If we are hoping for political heroics or judicial courage to affirm the importance of civil liberties, the American past does not augur well.
By that point, though, left-wing civil servants, union officials, Hollywood actors and screenwriters, authors, playwrights and various others who had once believed in the promise of Marxism had lost their livelihood. McCarthy’s dramatic fall did little to undo their deprivation. We should be mindful that political repression is not just about the few celebrity persecutors and victims but about the thousands of anonymous citizens hunting down, being hunted by and fearing one another.
Another lesson this book underscores: The victims of the Red Scare are often not easy to love, certainly not in hindsight. Risen writes with the benefit of a cache of decrypted wartime Soviet diplomatic cables known as the Venona transcripts. They were recorded in a code that was cracked only after World War II ended and were not made public until 1995. The cables rebutted progressive pieties that Soviet espionage was a paranoid fiction. The files made it clear that there had in fact been much pro-Soviet espionage through the 1930s and 1940s and that rising star diplomat Alger Hiss and the convicted atomic spy Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been spying for Moscow. (They also make clear that Julius’s wife Ethel, convicted and executed along with him, did little to merit such punishment. In fact, she did not even have a code name in the Soviet cables. In any case, President Eisenhower declined calls to commute her sentence to life in prison.)
American communists who were still keeping the faith up through the 1940s are hard to accept as idealists. Stalin had liquidated his opposition in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. His onetime rival Leon Trotsky had been purged and assassinated in Mexico. George Orwell, who went to Spain to write about the civil war there and ended up fighting in it, called out the communist leadership there in 1937 for what they were: loyal not to the workers of Spain but to the interests and orders of Moscow.
Edward R. Murrow of CBS took on McCarthy, revealing him as a fake by airing and disproving McCarthy’s charges in his documentary program See It Now, and he is the closest I can find to a hero in this story. But the thrust of Murrow’s journalism, great as it was, was that non-communists were being caught up in the witch hunt, not that a radical political idea has a protected place under the umbrella of free speech. A journalist who is not mentioned, Murrey Marder of The Washington Post, did equally important reporting showing that McCarthy’s alarms about communists at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey were unfounded.
The Supreme Court, for its part, was painfully slow to find something constitutionally amiss in the purges. Ultimately Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had led the court to desegregate schools, came around. Risen reminds us, though, that when Eisenhower named Warren to the court, he was not only the Republican governor of California and the unsuccessful vice presidential candidate in 1948 but a former “tough on crime” prosecutor who was also proudly tough on communists.
A few members of Congress spoke out, but most did not, and the House Un-American Activities Committee remained active and energetic through the 1950s and, after a name change to the “House Committee on Internal Security,” was finally shut down only in 1975.
Joseph Welch, the aforementioned Boston lawyer (he was hired by the Army for Senate hearings exploring McCarthy’s spurious claims of communist penetration of the military) is rightly remembered for his superstar performance skewering Senator McCarthy. But even he did so after first slyly alluding to McCarthy aide Roy Cohn’s homosexuality, a reminder of another shameful campaign Risen writes about that was going on at the same time, the so-called Lavender Scare that forced gays out of the federal government.
Red Scare does not describe a country deeply devoted to free speech and willing to fight for the right of others to express dissenting or disagreeable opinions. Many who took issue with communist-hunting did so privately, though with rare courageous exceptions. McCarthy, though diminished by the Army-McCarthy hearings and Murrow’s reporting, remained popular among both Republicans and Irish Catholic Democrats. When McCarthy ultimately was censured by the Senate in 1954, the only Democrat not to vote for censure was Senator John F. Kennedy, whose family counted McCarthy as a friend. Kennedy was hospitalized at the time and might have gone either way, but he never definitively said how he would have voted.
While the parallels between those times and today are inexact to say the least, they caution us against hoping that the constitutional guardians of our freedoms will risk having, or at least publicly stating, an unpopular opinion. They also urge us to look less to places like contemporary Hungary or Turkey for insight into our present situation and more to our own history and its tragic shortcomings.
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary correspondent.
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