The Red Scare Sounds a Little Too Familiar

But offers some noteworthy lessons. With Clay Risen.

Today, we’re talking about the Red Scare: a time of black-and-white politics when people could be arrested just for their political views. Granted, ICE wasn’t abducting people with visas off the street, but I think you’ll find today’s interview relevant nonetheless. Among other things, Clay Risen helps draw a clear throughline from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump and shares some valuable takeaways for combating fascism today.

Clay is a reporter and editor at The New York Times. He’s the author of several books on American history (and American whiskey). In our conversation, we explored his latest book: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below (I’ve bolded the takeaways for today at the end if you want to skip ahead). You can also listen to our conversation on the Skipped History podcast:

Unfortunately, the government took some cues from Tropicana orange juice

Ben: How did President Truman (a Democrat) set the stage for the Red Scare?

CR: Truman was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president. He took over at the end of World War II, but also at a point when it was very clear that the United States and the Soviet Union were going to clash.

By 1946 and 1947, it was known that there were Soviet spies in the U.S., and there was a lot of pressure on Truman to act. So he devised what can be called a loyalty program: an executive order where he said all new applicants for federal jobs and all existing federal employees had to have their backgrounds checked for any evidence of connections to subversive groups.

It was a gargantuan, very expensive program.

Ben: You note that during its five and a half years, Truman’s loyalty program involved 4.76 million background checks at a cost of $25 million a year, about $325 million today.

CR: And it was sort of a given that when you spend that much money hunting for witches, you better find witches. Tens of thousands of people were given full investigations. Many were taken to loyalty boards, which often involved anonymous evidence and secret reports that the FBI wouldn't even reveal the details of.

All of this set the stage for the hysteria that was to come. In Truman's mind, the executive order was largely a way to deflect criticism. He thought it would do some good and wasn’t a big deal. But the way the executive order was written and the way these loyalty programs were designed quickly proved him wrong.

Ben: At the same time, a quartet of Harvard Law School professors did foresee what was to come. In a letter to The New York Times, they pointed out that a government panel only needed to “reasonably believe” that an employee might be disloyal to fire them. The standard for judging someone disloyal was “impalpable.”

I like the use of “impalpable” here. If we’re using Tropicana orange juice as a model, the options were lots of palp, some palp, or impalp—AKA with as little substance as possible.

CR: Ha, yeah, for a lot of these loyalty boards, people were up against an FBI report that often had no names attached and vague charges. But the FBI would say, we actually think this person is reasonably suspicious.

At a time when the FBI was very powerful—it still is, but then it was all-powerful—and J. Edgar Hoover was one of the most powerful figures in Washington, were you going to say we don’t believe the FBI? More often than not, loyalty boards sided with the FBI, regardless of what evidence people could bring.

Ben: I think an important point to emphasize here is liberal complicity in the Red Scare, whether intentional or not.

CR: One of the things the right pounded Democrats for was the idea that anything to the left of center was on the spectrum of communism. Of course, that wasn't true. Most liberals were diehard anti-communists, and they were as aggressive as some Republicans. For instance, anti-communist labor organizations were in a long, drawn-out war with pro-communist and communist labor organizations, which really hurt the labor movement.

So the civil war within the left was almost as significant as the war between the left and the right during the Red Scare.

Ben: I think you're speaking to a challenge we're familiar with today on the left: how do you govern in a time of black-and-white politics?

CR: Absolutely. Though to be clear, no one was as aggressive as someone like Joseph McCarthy.

Ben: You describe McCarthy as “a symptom of the era, not its cause.” Can you explain?

CR: So by the time McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946, he had spent about four years as a real non-entity in Congress, even as the Red Scare was building up. It was only in early 1950 that he decided this was an issue he could really grab onto. Cold War tensions were mounting, the Soviets had a nuclear weapon, China had just fallen to the communists, and Alger Hiss had been found guilty, essentially, of espionage.

So there was a real fear of more spies at home. McCarthy grabbed onto this fear and quickly became the face of this era.

But it's important to keep in mind that he was also part of a network and an ecosystem. When he first started claiming to know about communists in the State Department, people started reaching out to him. People like Alfred Kohlberg, a textile importer, were very conspiracy-minded and saw McCarthy as a battering ram of the government on their behalf. A lot of other people played similar roles, feeding McCarthy information, financial support, and political cover.

A young lawyer, Roy Cohn, came in in 1953 and really became sort of the CEO of McCarthyism Incorporated. He gave McCarthy direction and focus, while also amplifying his aggression.

Ben: Roy Cohn obviously has connections to the present day. He was very close with Donald Trump and formative in Trump's career in New York. And for me, the connections don’t stop there.

You write, people worried McCarthy “was a loose cannon, more interested in the trappings of power than the reasons why he had it. He was disorganized, slovenly, and prone to mistakes. Cohn was none of that. He was committed to the cause. He was a legal wizard. He was focused. But he was also a distillation of everything” that people on the right loved in McCarthy: “his viciousness, his vindictiveness, his willingness to lie.”

CR: No one wanted to be Joseph McCarthy, but both in his politics and his presentation—for a lot of people, at least as filtered through the media—he was seen as the id of the American male. He was the guy lurking inside every American man, maybe held in check by his ego, but nevertheless there. Some people liked to think McCarthy was the guy they wanted on the wall, the guy defending them.

That was true for many senators. They loved that McCarthy was willing to say things they weren't. He was willing to go after the president and the president's friends. Whether or not they believed what McCarthy was saying or even agreed with his goals, he was very useful to a lot of people. And of course, for those who truly believed communists were infiltrating every corner of American society, he was raising the banner.

Ben: And yet, as you highlight, one of the ironies of the Red Scare is that by the time it began, the era of Soviet espionage was almost entirely in the past.

CR: Yes. The Soviets in the 1930s and then during World War II had a pretty extensive network in the U.S. President Roosevelt and to some extent, Truman, didn't pay a lot of attention, which I think was a real failure on their part.

But the Red Scare then happened at a time when Soviet espionage was, by coincidence, in retreat.

Ben: It seems to me like taking medicine for an illness right after getting over it. Like, you no longer have strep throat. Here's a Z-Pak for five years.

CR: Well, it’s like chemo for a paper cut.

It was also a national security issue that should have been answered with law enforcement and counterintelligence. Instead, it became this cultural issue. And that's really what the Red Scare is about: how what should have been a discreet response to a discreet issue took on the enormity that it did.

Ben: One familiar consequence of that enormity: many qualified civil servants ended up out of government.

CR: Right. I think a good example of this is related to China. McCarthy and other members of Congress would go after members of the public, journalists, screenwriters, activists, and more, but they would also target individual diplomats.

They ended up going after a group of experts on China, known as the China Hands, who’d been working in and around the country for decades. The China Hands weren’t pro-communist, but when it became clear that Mao was going to take power in China, they argued for at least attempting to make sure he didn’t align with the Soviets. They were accused of selling out the U.S. and were all fired, eviscerating our institutional knowledge about China and East Asia.

Among other things, that came back to bite the U.S. during Vietnam. Not to say that we wouldn't have ended up in Vietnam in any case, but I think we would have been in a much better position if we’d had experts on East Asia in place who could bring a different perspective.

Ben: Even before then, I can’t help but think about coups the U.S. fomented in places like Guatemala, Iran, and Indonesia—and the dismissal of really qualified civil servants just beforehand.

CR: A good point.

Ben: Let’s shift to the end of the Red Scare. The Supreme Court played a role. Dwight Eisenhower played a role. One thing that also played a really interesting role was television.

CR: I think you're absolutely right. McCarthy was a master of the newspaper—he knew how newspapers worked. That was the dominant news source for a lot of Americans in the late forties, early fifties. But he was not a TV guy. He didn't really understand the medium. Edward R. Murrow, among a small number of other journalists, did understand it; that there was a way to make McCarthy look bad simply by showing people what he looked like on tape.

Murrow spent months building up his case, which was light on commentary, long on sustained shots of McCarthy, put together in a documentary that he ran in early 1954 on his TV show. And it absolutely gutted McCarthy—showed him to be a bully, a slob, unfocused. It had a huge impact on his supporters and on his popularity level.

Someone else who did this in a slightly different but very effective way was Joseph Welch, who famously said to McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency?" Welch was a lawyer, a veteran, and had been around for a long time, but he was also sort of a born actor. Years later, he was cast as a judge in a movie and got a Golden Globe nomination for it. He went after McCarthy in public hearings in 1954, known as the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Welch set this trap, and the details are all in the book, but essentially, he got to a point where McCarthy went after one of his associates. That gave Welch the opportunity to unspool this soliloquy against McCarthy that came across as spontaneous but was at least partially planned. That, in combination with Murrow and other events that year, just tanked McCarthy. It did a lot to help take the energy out of the Red Scare. It wasn't the only thing, but the fact that McCarthy had become the figurehead and then fell so dramatically helped delegitimize the entire enterprise.

Ben: So what I'm hearing is Adam Schiff should go to acting school.

CR: Ha, one of the things I take away is that—and I have no idea what this will look like—the person who comes along and offers a tenable, effective opposition to the administration will be somebody who understands the media today. It might be a journalist, a politician, an influencer—it could be somebody nobody knows anything about who goes viral based on some TikTok posts. Who knows? But it'll be somebody who really understands how the media works today as opposed to even ten years ago.

Ben: I have another takeaway. We've talked about the civil war within the left during the Red Scare. You describe this war as a breakdown of the Popular Front that emerged during the New Deal and World War II. “Taken together,” you write, “the 1930s left was a near-seamless spectrum running from center-of-the-road liberals to hardcore communists, agreeing to disagree on the details but united on the big things like racial equality, labor rights, fighting fascism, and defending the New Deal.”

For me, your book highlights how important that sort of alliance is in countering demagoguery and fascism.

CR: Absolutely. The way the Red Scare split and exposed tensions had a lasting effect. There are still vast gulfs between the left and the center-left. Granted, there's something endemic to liberal left politics that almost demands that debate, and yet, you're right that a kind of Popular Front is often the thing that makes or breaks an opposition.