McCarthyism, Past—and Present?
Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, by Clay Risen, Scribner, 480 pages, $31
Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation’s institutions mobilized against the Communists believed to be burrowing into American society. But his new book, Red Scare, doesn’t stick to that era: It also aims to comment on contemporary American politics.
When wearing his historian hat, Risen blends an established academic understanding of the Second Red Scare, which he describes as “a long-simmering conflict in which social conservatives faced off against the progressives of the New Deal,” with a popular recollection that it was produced by “the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War.” This is a reasonable approach, though it has its limits: His thesis strains under the need to distinguish between the elements of the scare that were pure hysteria and the realities of Soviet espionage and influence. It also glosses over the ways the Red Scare was bipartisan.
The book runs into bigger issues in the era’s aftermath. Risen argues the scare set up later generations for an assault on the “deep state,” which he defines as “the notion that underneath the layers of elected officials and public figures who supposedly ran the government lay the real power, a vast cadre of anonymous bureaucrats.” He approvingly invokes Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” thesis, which he summarizes as “the easy slide into conspiracy-mongering and disinformation that has long held a small purchase on the country’s collective psyche.”
That view of the present hampers his treatment of the past. The result is a book that often shines when it discusses the scare as a tragedy fraught with legal ambiguities and bouts of mob violence but that stumbles when it centers its arguments exclusively around conservative hysteria.
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Risen’s coverage of the Second Red Scare spans from 1946 through the 1957 death of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.). It covers the oft-trod ground—the early espionage cases of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the congressional hearings aimed at ferreting out Hollywood Communists—and it explores several lesser-known cases of Soviet espionage, both real and imagined. It offers ample coverage of the inner workings of the Communist Party and the battles within the American labor movement.
Its early chapters are particularly strong. Switching between two central sites of the scare, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Risen shows how conservative Republicans built a relationship with Hollywood’s studio heads, who, while otherwise tending to be liberal in their politics, shared a disdain for labor radicalism and for the influence of the in
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