Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America

“‘There is a lineage to the American hard right of today and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare.’” 

In 1954, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-W) was at the height of his campaign against “communism,” alleging that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. 

On March 9, 1954, millions of Americans watched as Edward R. Murrow used his national news program on CBS to attack McCarthy. He warned, “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”

In June ’54, the Senator turned his rage against the U.S. Army, charging it with lax security at a top-secret army facility. (McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s early mentor.) The resulting Senate hearings, known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, galvanized the nation. The Army was represented by Joseph Welch, a Boston attorney. On June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's associates, Frederick Fisher, was a communist. In response, Welch pointed a finger at McCarthy and declared, “Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness. . . . Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"

Symbolically, the Welch-McCarthy standoff marked the end of the Red Scare. Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America brings the past up to today, noting, “There is a lineage to the American hard right of today and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare.” 

Red Scare is a carefully researched and well-written narrative journey through the nation’s dark days following World War II. Risen, a reporter at The New York Times, is author of books ranging from histories of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders to studies of various whiskies. He is a good storyteller who carefully overlays in-depth discussions of broad political developments with vivid depictions of many key individuals who shaped the postwar era.

Looking back more than a half-century, Risen’s study is informed by a revealing insight: “It is a great irony of the Red Scare that by the time it began, the era of Soviet espionage was almost entirely in the past.”

Risen argues that the Red Scare began shortly after WW-II ended, in 1946, when Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter and a staunch anti-Communist Catholic, admitted at confession, “Father, I’m launching a campaign [against communists], and it’s gonna cause a lot of hurt.” The priest comforted him, saying, “Get those bastards, Billy.”

He reminds readers that the Red Scare was foreshowed by 1940 Alien Registration Act (aka Smith Act), which made it a crime to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government; in 1951, the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional.

In 1947, Pres. Harry S. Truman, worried that he would lose to a Republican challenger in the upcoming ’48 election, took on the growing anti-communism issue and signed Executive Order 9835, “Prescribing Procedures for the Administration of an Employees Loyalty Program in the Executive Branch of the Government.” It established a Loyalty Review Board as part of the Civil Service Commission to investigate “the political sympathies, affiliations, and memberships of all federal employees.”

Risen argues that the “red scare” was an outgrowth of a long-simmering conflict between social conservatives (often middle Americans) and New Deal progressives (often big city, Easterners) that took on intensified vehemence as the Cold War came to define U.S. foreign—and domestic—policy.  In addition to McCarthy, the book profiles many familiar figures like J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon as well as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The book also retells many old tales involving the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senate hearings as well as that of the Hollywood Ten, the Peekskill Riot, and the trials of 12 Communist Party members. Equally revealing, it spotlights the lesser discussed the roles of people like Elizabeth Bentley, an ex-Communist, whose revelations helped open the door for the showdown between Chambers and Hiss.  

Most disturbing, Red Scare is filled with the stories of ordinary Americans drawn into the communist orbit as a result of the economic devastation of the Great Depression and the U.S.-Soviet alliance of WWII. They include teachers, factory workers, and government employees who were not only socially shamed but often lost their jobs.

Risen reminds readers that in the late ’40s and early ’50s, suspicion of possibly being involved in communist espionage led the FBI to conducted 4.76 million background checks and investigated 26,236 individuals who held or applied for government jobs. He also notes that 6,828 people resigned or withdrew their applications, and 560 were fired. 

Risen acknowledges that there were “two strands of the Red Scare—the culture war and the politics of Cold War security. . . .” He stresses, “Anti-communist fervor was both a catalyst and a symptom of the return to rigid gender roles, and with it a hard turn against homosexuality as a threat to the older ways.” While most of his book explores the politics of “security,” he notes that thousands of homosexual employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, it was the second front in the anti-Communism crusade, promoted by Christian conservatives, Republican politicians, and congressional investigation.

One weakness in this comprehensive survey of the post WWII era is the lack of a fuller consideration of postwar prosperity—i.e., the “American Dream”—and the role it played in undercutting the Red Scare. This prosperity saw the rise of suburbia with Americans having their first homes, comfortable furnishings, new cars, and better clothing. Containing the worst of the post-WWII Cold War hysteria, global stability and domestic prosperity saw the nation adopt neoliberal social policies. This was reflected in a moderate Supreme Court and a marketplace that encouraged a “freer,” more secular—and sexualized—popular culture.

In addition, while Risen mentions the growing Civil Rights movement as an emerging social force challenging the inherent racism of the anti-Communist campaign, he seems unaware of a deeper critical force take shape during the ’50s – what one could broadly call the insipient counterculture. This emerging force is most evident in the era’s radical literature, represented by works like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems (1956); in 1957, City Lights’ publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shig Murao were arrest for publishing the book. 

The era also saw the release of other works that would refashion the era, including Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), the most utopian, visionary work of the era; he sites Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), but doesn’t acknowledge that by ’53, when Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was published, it had sold over 265,000 copies.  Truly, the post-WWII era witnessed the Red Scare—and a lot more.