Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, by Clay Risen, Scribner, 480 pages, $31
Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation's institutions mobilized against the Communists believed to be burrowing into American society. But his new book, Red Scare, doesn't stick to that era: It also aims to comment on contemporary American politics.
When wearing his historian hat, Risen blends an established academic understanding of the Second Red Scare, which he describes as "a long-simmering conflict in which social conservatives faced off against the progressives of the New Deal," with a popular recollection that it was produced by "the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War." This is a reasonable approach, though it has its limits: His thesis strains under the need to distinguish between the elements of the scare that were pure hysteria and the realities of Soviet espionage and influence. It also glosses over the ways the Red Scare was bipartisan.
The book runs into bigger issues in the era's aftermath. Risen argues the scare set up later generations for an assault on the "deep state," which he defines as "the notion that underneath the layers of elected officials and public figures who supposedly ran the government lay the real power, a vast cadre of anonymous bureaucrats." He approvingly invokes Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style" thesis, which he summarizes as "the easy slide into conspiracy-mongering and disinformation that has long held a small purchase on the country's collective psyche."
That view of the present hampers his treatment of the past. The result is a book that often shines when it discusses the scare as a tragedy fraught with legal ambiguities and bouts of mob violence but that stumbles when it centers its arguments exclusively around conservative hysteria.
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Risen's coverage of the Second Red Scare spans from 1946 through the 1957 death of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.). It covers the oft-trod ground—the early espionage cases of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the congressional hearings aimed at ferreting out Hollywood Communists—and it explores several lesser-known cases of Soviet espionage, both real and imagined. It offers ample coverage of the inner workings of the Communist Party and the battles within the American labor movement.
Its early chapters are particularly strong. Switching between two central sites of the scare, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Risen shows how conservative Republicans built a relationship with Hollywood's studio heads, who, while otherwise tending to be liberal in their politics, shared a disdain for labor radicalism and for the influence of the industry's "swimming-pool Communists." Working together, they enacted the containment of radical forces within the film industry.
Risen's coverage of the Hiss case is ably executed and informative. He skillfully narrates the cultural and sectional divides at play, juxtaposing Hiss—who, like much of the "East Coast elite and certain Hollywood stars," presented himself as "polished, vaguely British, even slightly aristocratic"—with such red-hunters as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, whose cultural identities were antithetical to said elite. But there is an odd omission: Risen only briefly mentions the fact that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy, as revealed in decrypted Soviet cables. The book's introduction notes Hiss' involvement in the Ware Group, a covert association of Communist Party members, but Risen does not again touch on his guilt. It's a missed opportunity to complicate an already fraught historical narrative.
Risen's most harrowing chapters cover the era's moral crusades, which went well beyond the bounds of alleged Soviet spying: purges of gays in government employment, pushes to ban "subversive" literature in schools and libraries, mob violence against civil rights activists—all done in the name of anti-communism. These unambiguous abuses of civil liberties and acts of mob violence are a warning about the base instincts that can emerge when social permission structures allow them to do so.
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In a postscript, Risen follows some of McCarthy's proponents as they enter the John Birch Society. This, he asserts, tied McCarthyism to the populism of modern America. And thus, Risen argues, McCarthyism was held in escrow for the "next generation of anti-Communist, anti-government radicals."
With such arguments, Risen commits the same conceptual sin that the figures in his study did: He conflates different political groups as though they are the same thing. Indeed, he does this throughout his book.
Risen describes his New Deal protagonists as well-meaning idealists whose vision for social change "emerged from [the] darkness" of the Great Depression. He characterizes their critics as the "small-town middle class," "religious fundamentalists," and "avowed white supremacists." (Of course, there were plenty of "avowed white supremacists" among President Franklin Roosevelt's supporters as well as his opponents—and those opponents included some figures, such as Sen. Robert A. Taft (R–Ohio), who were relatively liberal on civil rights, despite Taft's "far right" reputation.) Risen touches on more substantive arguments against the New Deal and concedes that "some indeed" of the New Dealers were spies, but such nuances do not permeate the book outside of its introduction.
The reader will see little of the longstanding liberal grievances about the state's role at home and abroad that animated many of Roosevelt's opponents. Instead, Risen focuses on reactionary responses to changes in race relations, sexual identity, and similar areas of American life. Thus, like Hofstadter, Risen pathologizes conservative opposition to the postwar order by associating it with the darkest elements of America, presenting the New Deal as normative and its opponents as deviant. In fact, the anti–New Deal coalition was a motley crew that defied simple characterization.
Risen also doesn't do as much as he could to incorporate the realities of American Communism. To be clear, he is hardly in denial about the presence of actual Communists in the United States. On Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign, he notes that "the Communists were always part of his core" and "his most effective organizers." On labor unions, he notes that "Communist union leaders were indeed under the spell of Moscow." On the question of espionage, he acknowledges that "Moscow held tight control over the American Communist Party." Yet he still discusses the scare as though it was chiefly a culture war that presaged today's populism.
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Risen's biggest omission involves the ways the Second Red Scare constituted a "boomerang" from a World War II–era scare around the domestic far right and noninterventionists, part of a larger "scare cycle" that pits left against right in a political pendulum of slander, purges, and recrimination. As early as 1944, one figure in Risen's story—Sen. Karl Mundt (R–S.D.)—conspired with journalists like liberal-turned-conservative John T. Flynn and with veterans of the America First Committee to turn Congress' investigatory power against their New Deal–aligned opponents.
In his book Populist Persuasion, historian Michael Kazin notes that "liberals had charged that isolationists and labor-bashers were lackeys, willing or not, of fascism," but by the early Cold War, the "Right returned the barbs of this 'Brown Scare' with its own talk of an 'underground elite' filled with secret reds and their dupes." Another historian, Richard Gid Powers, argued compellingly in Not Without Honor that the Second Red Scare's liberal targets "now faced the wrath of vengeful isolationist anticommunists bent on settling scores for what they had suffered during the wartime Brown Scare."
This revenge element does not excuse the Red Scare's often gross civil liberties abuses. But it contextualizes them, warning against the growth of state power and the ever-present temptation for retribution (a temptation that the Democrats would act on in the early 1960s, in the Second Red Scare's wake). This, too, is a lesson of the scare: The pendulum of politics never rests.
Similarly, Risen's coverage of foreign affairs before the Korean War is comparatively light. While he covers the ways President Harry Truman, a Democrat, used the Second Red Scare to incite support for his foreign policy, the liberal sources of anti-communist panic are thinly considered and do not factor into his overall analysis. Intent on blaming conservatives for the hysteria, Risen never notes that, due to the demands of the nascent Truman Doctrine, ginning up fear of communism was very much a bipartisan affair.
Risen is right: The Second Red Scare was, in many ways, a culture war. But his omission of these larger cycles results in a simplified narrative that overlooks essential questions. If Americans are to learn from the McCarthy era, Red Scare is a good place to start but not to finish.
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