‘Red Scare’ author lets past political hysteria teach us about the present

Early in “Red Scare,” Clay Risen’s thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.S., the author makes a point of explaining what his subject is — and isn’t. “There is a lineage to the American hard right of today,” he writes, “and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare. It did not originate then, nor is Trumpism and the MAGA movement the same as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them.”

For 480 detailed, tension-packed pages, Risen lays out that line without stepping over it, allowing the past to become prologue. He trusts the reader to make the connections between then and now, and he doesn’t stray from the task at hand, or the specifics of time, place, conflict and culture that led to a protracted period of national shame.

“Red Scare” burrows deep not just into the well-known major players, including Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and the Hollywood Ten, but also the myriad committees, opportunistic enablers and the long, long line of scapegoats who paid for the mid-20th-century anti-communist witch hunt. Told by a friend that he had endured a “dry crucifixion,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb who was dragged through the mud (and had his security clearance revoked) largely for publicly wondering what he had wrought, replied: “You know, it wasn’t so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.”

“Red Scare” has the integrity to operate on a “yes, and ...” basis, rather than indulging in the easy “either or.” Risen takes pains to point out that yes, a great many Americans did join the Communist Party, especially in the 1930s, when American capitalism teetered on the verge of collapse. Some of these people even posed grave security risks. And at the same time, there was no shortage of ideologues and charlatans who took advantage of this fact to stomp out that most American trait of dissent. One reality does not preclude the other.

(Scribner)

The New York Times journalist, who also has written books about the Rough Riders, the Civil Rights Act and whiskey, chronicles how national hysteria can take on a life of its own, like a deadly fever dream that overtakes the public consciousness. But this is a work of history, not a polemic. It encompasses two world wars and a “police action” in Korea that quickly turned into something much bigger. It’s the story of how backlash against the New Deal fueled reactionary fervor deep into the 1950s and beyond, and how “communist” became a catch-all pejorative to smear civil rights, feminism and, especially, homosexuality, the fear of which red baiters leveraged into a “Lavender Scare” that purged gay people (and those suspected of being gay) from public life under the pretense that they could easily be blackmailed. After World War II, as Risen writes, “Anti-communist fervor was both a catalyst and a symptom of the return to rigid gender roles, and with it a hard turn against homosexuality as a threat to the older ways.”

“Red Scare” is a tapestry of individual dramas and miniature paranoid thrillers, each defined by the zeal of the age, a few resulting in the actual apprehension of Soviet spies. The Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers affair, in which the disheveled former Communist Party member Chambers revealed the slick, erudite diplomat Hiss to be a Soviet agent (with a lot of help from an ambitious California congressman named Richard M. Nixon), gets detailed narrative treatment. Many other names here are less well-known: Julius Hlavaty was a popular 46-year-old high school math teacher born in what is now western Slovakia. He made the mistake of appearing on a Voice of America radio segment to speak about his immigrant experience in a piece that was broadcast across Central America. By the time McCarthy and his Senate committee had picked through Hlavaty’s past left-wing affiliations, his career was over, as was that of his wife, also a teacher.

As Risen points out, purging suspected subversives from the American education system carried a bitter irony: “It was an enormous loss for the profession and a self-inflicted wound by a country that, in other respects, was eager to get out ahead of the Soviets in educational achievement and technological prowess.”

The Red Scare used mass fear to put a long, deep freeze on freedom of thought and creativity in America; this may be the closest parallel to what we are seeing today. These pages are filled with people commanded to fall in line or else, to cease dissent or risk losing it all. The witch hunt quickly became more about punishing anyone who defied the bully pulpit than about tracking down actual Communist Party members. As Risen writes, “It is a great irony of the Red Scare that by the time it began, the era of Soviet espionage was almost entirely in the past.” None of which made it a less effective cudgel.

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Risen likens the dormant durability of such national hysteria to the illness described by Albert Camus in his 1947 novel “The Plague.” Camus wrote that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen closets; that it bides its time in bedroom cellars, trunks and bookshelves … .”

It is, as Risen writes, “ready to spring to life again. Something similar happened in the 1950s, which is to say also the 1960s and ’70s, and I believe, on up through today.”

Vognar is a freelance culture writer.