The Red Scare—the era from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s during which fears of domestic communism became one of the major issues in American political life—has generated innumerable books and articles dedicated to documenting its alleged victims and searching for those ultimately responsible for the harm it inflicted and the ways in which it distorted American culture. During the 1960s and ’70s the dominant motif was that hysteria and fear had demonized American communists and their supporters, and contributed to framing such innocents as Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Robert Oppenheimer for crimes they did not commit.
That campaign hit roadblocks with the release of FBI material under the Freedom of Information Act and the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the availability of reams of data from once-secret American and Soviet archives. It turned out that many of those accused of being Soviet spies during the Red Scare (with the notable exception of Oppenheimer) had been ones—and that there were hundreds of other Americans, most of them members of the Communist Party of the United States, who had also spied and gotten away with it.
These revelations did not mitigate the many injustices that had occurred during the Red Scare—the sometimes absurd or frivolous charges that derailed individual lives, the overreach that caused states to deny fishing licenses to communists, or the use of anonymous informants to fire individuals for such “subversive” activities as entertaining black friends in their homes. People lost their jobs or faced ostracism and penalties for having unpopular opinions.
Writing a balanced account of the era did become much harder. While such conventional villains as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to the era, turned out to have been right about the big issue—there had been extensive communist infiltration of the American government—he had been wrong about many of those he accused. The other archvillain of the era, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had missed some major spies and crossed the line into illegality with warrantless wiretaps and burglaries, but had ferreted out a serious national security threat.
Clay Risen, a reporter for the New York Times, attempts to thread the needle in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. He does provide numerous examples of government overreach and injustice but only partly succeeds in detailing why the campaign took place or the culpability of the Communist Party and its allies in why it went so viral.
Risen covers virtually all the episodes that transfixed America during this era, from HUAC hearings on Hollywood to the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948, from the Smith Act trials of leaders of the CPUSA, to the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, from the Chambers-Hiss confrontation to the government campaign against labor boss Harry Bridges. He delves into the China Lobby, recounts the Rosenberg case and its aftermath, the controversy over “naming names” before congressional committees, the farcical pageants that reenacted supposed communist takeovers of American towns, investigations of teachers, and McCarthy’s rise and fall. He concludes with an examination of how external events and President Eisenhower’s careful campaign led to McCarthy’s overreach and the Supreme Court cases that drove a stake in the government’s war on domestic communism.
While Risen makes an effort to incorporate the revelations of the past quarter-century that have so discomfited proponents of the argument that all of the hoopla about Soviet spies was concocted by troglodytes anxious to discredit the New Deal, he also minimizes their significance. While “almost all [communists] were loyal Americans,” he writes, “a small fraction did spy for the Soviet Union.” Thus, while the “threat of Soviet espionage was minor, it was not an invention of the administration’s enemies.” Paradoxically, he admits it included “some of the New Deal’s best and brightest,” among them Alger Hiss and Larry Duggan, high-ranking officials in the State Department, but glosses over the abundant evidence that Harry Dexter White, the number two man in the Treasury Department, was a Soviet source, and does not mention dozens of the government officials implicated by Elizabeth Bentley, regretting that her testimony about “the humdrum flow of stolen information that she had ferried out of Washington [was turned] into a firehose of secrets fatal to the health of the republic.” Most American communists were not spies, but virtually all the spies were communists.
Contra Risen, the American security apparatus at the end of World War II did not go “looking for new threats to counter.” Several investigations in 1944-1945 had turned up evidence of Soviet espionage, including the Amerasia case and the involvement of Arthur Adams and Clarence Hiskey in stealing atomic bomb secrets. Beginning in 1947, the Venona intercepts began yielding clues indicating that some 350 Americans had worked for Soviet intelligence during the war. A significant number were government officials and virtually all were communists. Only 125 to 150 were ever identified by American counterintelligence (after the 1989 opening of archives that number increased), but the flow of information they turned over included material on radar, sonar, proximity fuses, jet propulsion, and, most significantly, the atomic bomb. Internal discussions of American diplomatic negotiating tactics, arms production, and a host of other topics went from sources in virtually every government department to Moscow. Minor it was not.
While Risen underplays how revelations and concern about the extent of Soviet espionage contributed to the Red Scare, he does note how many liberals felt betrayed by American communists who suddenly shifted their foreign policy stances after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Risen argues that “the 1930s left was a near-seamless spectrum, running from center-of-the-road liberals to hard-core communists, united behind FDR.” But the CPUSA only fully supported FDR during one of his four campaigns for president, opposing him twice (1932, 1940) and coyly approving of him once (1936). While Earl Browder proclaimed that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” in 1937, the CPUSA abandoned the slogan at the order of the Communist International in 1938. At no time in its history did it ever deviate from blind obedience to Soviet foreign policy aims.
By the late 1940s, with Soviet testing of an atomic bomb—the fruits of espionage—the blockade of Berlin, a communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese civil war, most Americans had had enough and concluded that any cooperation with domestic communists who apologized for and justified Soviet authoritarianism was no longer tenable. Liberal organizations, most notably the labor movement, had had enough of duplicitous communists in their ranks whose cooperation always depended on whether it furthered Soviet foreign policy.
Communists pretended to be adherents of democracy but by insisting that the USSR was a true democracy, while the United States was lapsing into fascism, they discredited themselves. Because they often concealed their party membership, they confirmed the suspicion of many Americans that they could not be trusted. The party leadership had cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies and abetted efforts to infiltrate non-communist organizations.
Risen, to his credit, agrees that in 1948 Henry Wallace was surrounded by secret members of the CPUSA, who pushed his presidential candidacy to positions favoring Soviet foreign policy. But he then suggests that the anti-communism of such leaders of Americans for Democratic Action as Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger, and Eleanor Roosevelt “helped poison the well of public sentiment against the policy of the left generally,” when it actually targeted those unwilling to call a communist a communist.
Risen exculpates Harry Bridges from charges he was a communist, but never mentions that documents from Russian archives confirm he was a perjurer who was not only a secret communist, but also a member of the party’s Central Committee.
Risen makes a valid point when he argues that prosecution of the party leadership for violating the Smith Act and conspiring to “teach and advocate the overthrow” of the U.S. government was a weak case, but, as he later admits, the Supreme Court reversed itself within several years and the worst excesses of the Red Scare petered out. There were, however, real demons targeting America; the leadership of the CPUSA was a tool of the Soviet Union and an ally of Soviet intelligence.
Democratic societies can go overboard when they undertake crusades against real or perceived enemies. Demagogues can and will latch onto causes and some of the guard rails against unwise and extreme solutions can break. Given the dangers democratic societies faced from international communism, the response to domestic communists sometimes was excessive, but it was also understandable, and it was corrected.
Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
by Clay Risen
Scribner, 480 pp., $31
Harvey Klehr is the author of numerous books and articles on communism and Soviet espionage.
