Clay Risen is a reporter and editor at the New York Times, where he write obituaries. Writing obituaries is great training for his other passion, writing about American history. He has written books about the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the fight to pass the Civil Rights Act, and Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign with the Rough Riders in Cuba. He previously worked as assistant editor at The New Republic and the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
What’s the big idea?
Red Scare examines the era of anti-Communist hysteria between roughly 1946 and 1957. Understanding this confusing time remains relevant to making heads or tails of our own political moment. Conspiracy-mongering today is possibly as forceful as it was during the 1950s, so it would serve us well to learn some lessons from the past and avoid making the same mistakes.
Below, Clay shares five key insights from his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America. Listen to the audio version—read by Clay himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The Red Scare was about more than Joe McCarthy.
Senator Joe McCarthy became famous for his witch hunts and wild allegations about Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. government, so much so that his associated “ism” is synonymous with the Red Scare era. But the Red Scare started long before McCarthy launched his anti-communist campaign in 1950. Three years earlier, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, held hearings on allegations of communism in Hollywood, sending ten witnesses to prison for contempt and setting in motion a blacklist in the film industry.
Around the same time, President Harry Truman initiated a loyalty program that investigated millions of federal workers. Across the country, anti-communist grassroots groups were popping up—some targeted teachers suspected of harboring progressive ideas, while others protested movies featuring actors accused of pro-communist sentiments.
McCarthy was more of a symptom than a cause of the Red Scare. He’s important because he perfected the methods of insinuation, guilt by association, and media manipulation that defined the Red Scare era. But his story is not the whole story.
2. The Red Scare was a culture war.
In 1949, the famed British correspondent Alistair Cooke parked himself in the New York courtroom where Alger Hiss, the State Department official accused of espionage, was on trial. He filed regular dispatches for his newspaper back home, The Manchester Guardian, and later wrote a book about the case titled A Generation on Trial.
Cooke argued that the Hiss case had to be understood as part of a conflict between the progressive ideals of the 1930s (the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal) and a reinvigorated conservatism that was using the specter of communist subversion to push back at the progressives’ gains. And that’s pretty much how the era played out.
“The Red Scare represented a sharp rightward turn in American life.”
The Red Scare was supposedly about communist subversion. Yet thousands of people who had never been communists, but had merely signed an anti-fascist petition or raised money for civil rights groups, were targeted as subversives. Hollywood stars who had stood up for left-wing causes suddenly found themselves blacklisted. The Red Scare represented a sharp rightward turn in American life, and its victims were those who didn’t turn quickly enough.
3. The Red Scare was a witch hunt, but that doesn’t mean there were no witches.
They say that just because a person is paranoid, that doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get them. Something similar applies to the Red Scare. There really were pro-Soviet spies working in the U.S. government, and the American Communist Party really did take orders from Moscow. Today, we can say confidently that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg really did pass secrets to the Soviet Union.
But there is an important caveat. By the time the Red Scare started after World War II, almost all the spying had stopped. The Soviets had shut down most of their operations. The irony is that while the Soviets were spying on the United States, the government looked the other way. By the time politicians and the public began hunting for spies, there was no one left to find.
4. Gay men were prime targets of the Red Scare.
During what was called the Lavender Scare, which roughly overlaps with the Red Scare, politicians and federal officials purged hundreds of gay men from the U.S. government, under the pretext that gay men were untrustworthy and vulnerable to blackmail by the Soviet Union. It was a ridiculous accusation, rooted in the rampant homophobia of the era.
“It should go without saying that not a single victim of the anti-gay purge was ever found to be a subversive.”
Though there were thousands of gay men working in Washington at the beginning of the Cold War, those at the State Department were especially vulnerable. Conservative senators and commentators derided diplomats as less than masculine and tossed around double entendres about “pinkos” undermining American interests. It should go without saying that not a single victim of the anti-gay purge was ever found to be a subversive.
The result was a double tragedy: Not only did the Lavender Scare ruin the lives of hundreds of loyal Americans, but also many of those men were serving on the diplomatic front lines of the Cold War. Removing them was the real assault on American security.
5. The Red Scare is still with us.
The Red Scare petered out by the mid-1950s, thanks to the end of the Korean War, the death of Josef Stalin, and the lack of any real evidence of subversion among the American left.
But the scars of the Red Scare remained. It put in place a deep skepticism among millions of Americans toward the federal bureaucracy. To some, it was simply out of touch with most Americans, but to many, it was a positively evil force, a cabal of un-American elites who answered to a foreign ideology. That conspiratorial sentiment remained on the fringes for decades, but it occasionally surfaced into the mainstream.
We see it today perhaps more forcefully than at any time since the 1950s. When politicians talk about the “deep state,” or about “Marxist elites,” they are drawing on the same wellspring of conspiracy-mongering that drove the Red Scare. Such thinking has become endemic in American life and can no longer be dismissed as merely the fringe of our political life. To understand where we are today, we need to understand the Red Scare.
To listen to the audio version read by author Clay Risen, download the Next Big Idea App today:
