How the Red Scare Reshaped American Politics

When, exactly, was America great? For as long as Donald Trump has touted the MAGA slogan, he has been cagey about the answer. But recent weeks have suggested a few possibilities. One is the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when tariffs, crony capitalism, and hard-and-fast racial hierarchies were the stuff of American politics. Another is the postwar Red Scare, when the federal government was weaponized against the American left.

Trump has long vowed to root out “radical left lunatics” and “Marxist equity” from the bowels of the state. Most members of his Administration now seem to share that commitment. The DOGE overlord Elon Musk proclaimed that U.S.A.I.D. is—or was?—“a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists” and deserved to be destroyed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has similarly promised to rid the U.S. military of its “cultural Marxism.” An update on the old Judeo-Bolshevik myth, “cultural Marxism” is now the term favored by the right to get around the obvious fact that there are vanishingly few doctrinaire Marxists, much less a vigorous Communist Party, in the United States today. Unlike actual Marxism, “cultural Marxism” includes almost any form of progressive multiculturalism or egalitarianism. Thus the war against diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives, campus protesters, and the Green New Deal is, in fact, the good old war against Communism.

For much of the country, the Cold War ended quite some time ago. But the far right has always nurtured a counternarrative in which hard-core Marxists are forever pushing the nation down the road to serfdom. After Joseph McCarthy’s Senate censure, in 1954, right-wing organizations and self-proclaimed McCarthyites vowed to keep the flame alive against a corrupt, treacherous, and deluded liberal establishment. And it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to get from then to now. McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, famously served as one of Trump’s early mentors, a tutor in the ideological and practical workings of American politics.

So it might be a good time for the rest of us to brush up on our Red Scare history. The latest book from the New York Times journalist Clay Risen, “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America” (Scribner), describes the biggest showdowns and the many oddities of the postwar Red hunt. It also documents the fear and suffering of those who bore the brunt of it.

As a scholarly subject, the Red Scare has never quite experienced its moment of glory. During the second half of the twentieth century, the topic was too combustible to make for great history: you were either for or against Joe McCarthy, for or against Alger Hiss, for or against the Rosenbergs. The end of the Cold War produced a rush of work seeking to assess new political, archival, and conceptual openings. For the first time, it became possible for non-Marxist historians to write admiringly about the Communist Party’s civil-rights and antifascist activism without needing to denounce Stalin on every page. Historians examined classified materials opened by U.S. intelligence agencies and even, briefly, by the post-Soviet government, seeking to get to the bottom of decades-old mysteries.

Then the outpouring of interest and energy largely stopped. The political and academic Zeitgeist moved on to questions deemed more pressing and relevant for the twenty-first century. Even academics who described themselves as Marxists expressed little interest in, say, the operations of America’s Communist underground during the height of the McCarthy era. Partly as a result, younger generations often find it hard to grasp what everyone was so worked up about.

Risen wants to remedy that. But, he notes, the Red Scare can be hard to understand—and hard to narrate—because it was so many things at once. The nineteen-forties and fifties were supposedly an era of liberal consensus, when both parties agreed on the virtues of the welfare state and a U.S.-led international order. At the same time, those decades saw ferocious political battles, with Republicans and Democrats flinging accusations—“You’re a comsymp!” “No, you are!”—across the aisle.

As Risen suggests, the Red Scare was also a “cultural war,” in which many Americans fought “atheistic communism” by squaring off against anyone who thought or acted out of step with the status quo. The anti-Communist surge reshaped every institution in American life: Hollywood, labor unions, churches, universities, elementary schools—and, above all, the national-security state. McCarthy became the movement’s title character, but he was just one marcher in the parade of Red-baiters that included his fellow-Republican Richard Nixon, the wunderkind of the House Un-American Activities Committee; the Democratic senator Pat McCarran, who ran a rival Communist-hunting committee; and the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, an unelected bureaucrat, and the most powerful of them all. From on high, they told ordinary Americans how to live, whom to love, and what to say.

Until they didn’t. Risen’s book usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets. It also describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end.

Other than the Communist Party itself, no group suffered as much scrutiny or punishment during the Red Scare as the amorphous agglomeration known as the federal workforce. Today, the U.S. government’s employment of millions of people is a familiar part of American life, if not, as we’ve recently discovered, an entirely settled matter. In the forties, when the Red Scare began in earnest, a robust federal workforce was still a new proposition, and not one that everyone in Washington was willing to concede. Republicans worried that federal employment was doing the Democrats’ work for them; with every government paycheck, a new Democrat was made. They also didn’t like what many of those workers were doing: creating regulations, dispensing Social Security, enforcing labor rights. They saw a cabal of eggheaded do-gooders intoxicated by bureaucratic power. Worst of all, Republicans alleged, the sprawling federal workforce was where Communists went to hide and wait for instructions from their Soviet masters.

Franklin Roosevelt dismissed this last charge as vicious partisan politics, which it was. But there was enough truth in it to kindle the Red Scare’s earliest flames. Beginning amid the New Deal and continuing into the Second World War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were ostensible allies, Russian intelligence recruited dozens of people inside or close to federal agencies to steal information and spy on policymakers. Toward the end of the war, the F.B.I. began to warn the Truman Administration about spies inside departments such as Agriculture, State, and Treasury, and even in top-secret programs such as the Manhattan Project. Many spies were recruited through the Communist Party, which maintained close ties with the Soviet government despite claiming that “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” When Republicans caught wind of the operation, they saw an ideal issue around which to build the 1946 midterm campaign.

“Communism vs. Republicanism” became their slogan, casting all New Dealers, liberals, and progressives as either Communist sympathizers or pathetic dupes. When the votes were counted, it was plain that the American people had chosen Republicanism, giving the G.O.P. control of the House and the Senate for the first time since the early nineteen-thirties. At that point, Truman figured he had to get out ahead of the Communist issue. In March, 1947, he signed Executive Order 9835, establishing a “loyalty program” to investigate the political sympathies, affiliations, and memberships of all federal employees. “Although the loyalty of by far the overwhelming majority of all Government employees is beyond question,” the order read, “the presence within the Government service of any disloyal or subversive person constitutes a threat to our democratic process.” The Red Scare was under way.

During the next five and a half years, Risen estimates, authorities conducted almost five million background checks on federal employees, seeking evidence of views or associations that seemed too far left. The F.B.I. followed up with in-depth investigations into more than twenty-six thousand federal workers; five hundred and sixty were fired, and another sixty-eight hundred resigned or withdrew their applications. About .01 per cent of all federal workers were fired for ideological reasons. That might not sound like much, but that’s all it took to set off a wave of anticipatory obedience. As the historian Landon Storrs has shown, the Red Scare pressured an entire generation of federal workers into putting their heads down, keeping their mouths shut, and renouncing interest in progressive ideas.

Much of the country did the same. In 1945, Truman proposed a national health-insurance program; by the late forties his proposal for “socialized medicine,” as its critics labelled it, was dead. In the meantime, liberals and leftists tried desperately to separate themselves from their former far-left allies. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee held spectacular hearings to expose the alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. In response, some motion-picture industry leaders volunteered to keep a blacklist and to fire any suspected Communists. The following year, the Truman Administration arrested twelve leaders of the Communist Party on charges that they were in breach of the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government. Aside from some courtroom discussions of Marx and Lenin, there was not much evidence for the charges. Convictions ensued nonetheless. Waves of Communist Party leaders went to jail for speech, not deeds, that suggested a sympathy for revolutionary violence.

The Smith Act trials sounded the death knell for the nineteen-thirties Popular Front, when Communists, Socialists, progressives, and liberals had worked together—or at least tried to—on issues such as antifascism, racial justice, and labor rights. Many liberals and progressives were happy enough to get rid of the Communists, who had always been secretive, dogmatic, and, in general, hard to deal with. For others, the breaking apart of the Popular Front was intensely painful and personal, with friends turning on friends and allies on allies. If these early Red Scare battles hold any lesson for our time, it’s how quickly people tend to capitulate at moments of intense political pressure, when careers and reputations and institutions seem to be at stake.

Of all the high drama during the early days of the Red Scare, no episode was more personal than the split between the former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers and his alleged contact in the New Deal government, the Harvard-trained lawyer and State Department official Alger Hiss. Risen delivers a marvellous account of the Hiss case, with its many plot twists, involving accusations about a fake typewriter, microfilm hidden in a pumpkin, and the intricacies of ornithology. Today, few Americans—even few historians—could describe the ins and outs of the case, but in the forties almost any literate American could have told the tale. Hiss became a generational touchstone: what you thought about him revealed what you thought about pretty much everything else. On one side was the liberal establishment, which swore that Hiss would never betray his country. On the other were supporters of Chambers, the schlumpy senior editor at Time, who insisted that anyone, even Hiss, could be lured in by the siren song of Marxism.

In the end, Chambers was more right than not. Hiss served time in prison for perjury, and documents released in the nineties helped the historical case against him. But even Chambers lamented what the harsh political times had wrought. “I do not hate Mr. Hiss,” he insisted. “We were close friends. But we are caught in a tragedy of history.”

Much of that tragedy—the loyalty program, the Smith Act trials, the Hiss showdown—took place before most Americans had ever heard the name Joe McCarthy. Prior to 1950, McCarthy was an obscure first-term senator from Wisconsin. After 1950, the country couldn’t shut up about him. In retrospect, what makes McCarthy a significant political figure is not that he started the Red Scare; he didn’t. But when he came along, several years into it all, boasting that he had in his hand a list of two hundred and five Communists in the State Department, he introduced a whole new political style. As a noun, McCarthyism was a mode of politics rather than an ideology. It meant hitting hard, moving fast, telling lies, and grabbing headlines along the way.

McCarthy came to Congress as a fighter in both the figurative and the most literal sense. Born in 1908 to an Irish Catholic family, he practiced as an attorney and coached boxing before leaving for the war and then returning to run for the Senate. Like Trump, he sold himself as a straight talker and a tough guy. He explained his style of mudslinging as “Americanism with its sleeves rolled.” During his Senate run, he fulminated against federal workers. “Tired of Being Pushed Around?” read one campaign ad. “Do you like to have some government bureaucrat tell you how to manage your life?” Like everyone else in Washington, he was an anti-Communist, though initially of a rather anodyne sort. In early 1950, most people would have said that Nixon, not McCarthy, was the Republicans’ young Red-baiting star, owing to the work he had done on the Hiss case.

But it was McCarthy whose name came to dominate the era, in part because he knew how to dominate the media. From his first big Communists-in-government speech, in February, 1950, he showed an uncanny ability to stay a step ahead of the news cycle, insuring that he was generating the headlines rather than responding to them. Almost immediately, his critics—including many fellow-Republicans—began to call him on his lies and cruelties, and to fact-check his evidence. By then, though, he was on to a new target, and the whole cycle started again.

The newspapers loved McCarthy’s outrage machine, even when they did not love the man himself. In 1952, at the height of McCarthy’s influence, Republicans reclaimed not only the White House but both houses of Congress—a three-pronged triumph not repeated until the Presidency of George W. Bush. Many Republicans attributed their victory not just to President-elect Eisenhower’s popularity but to McCarthy’s ability to manage the media and roil the masses.