"Red Scare" by Clay Risen

Anti-Communist feelings reached a fever pitch in the United States following World War II. The big war was won, but the Cold War was on.

Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter, addresses this point in his fourth book, Red Scare, where he takes you back to that postwar period, where, as author Stacy Schiff put it in one of the blurbs on the book’s back cover, “a group of hardened conservatives lost their heads and a country lost its way.”

“Everywhere it seemed the Communists were on the offensive and winning,” Risen writes of the late-40s period that gave birth to the Scare. “In February 1948, Czechoslovakian Communists took control of the country in a Soviet-backed coup,” he noted, adding that later that same year, Russia closed off West Berlin, setting up a massive airlift by Allies to supply the city. Meanwhile, U.S.-backed forces in China were losing ground to Mao Zedong.

With Communism on the march, tensions in Washington ran high, setting the stage for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Hollywood 10, and Joe McCarthy. But the Red Scare involved more than much-publicized stories of blacklists and McCarthy’s list of Communists in high office, more than the high-profile trials of accused spies Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.

McCarthy, who dominated the media for four years, was a symptom of the era, not the cause, said Risen.

At a time when finger-pointing was encouraged, when U.S. citizens, be they teachers, reporters, or everyday workers, lost their jobs as a result of past associations or rash accusations, it was a time when fear ran wild in this country, noted the author.

Among those profiled, Risen tells the story of Harry Bridges, who organized West Coast dockworkers. Bridges was a successful labor leader who worked well with the shipping companies he negotiated with, but had to fight off government attempts to have him deported to his native Australia for years, said Risen. Bridges was even the subject of a record, “The Ballad of Harry Bridges,” sung by Pete Seeger with Woody Guthrie among the backup singers.

The book’s subhead is Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America so it’s not surprising to find similarities between that toxic 50s period and the divisive politics of today. 

While McCarthy was in the national spotlight, Republicans routinely lashed out at Democrats and the left as anti-American.

Compare that with the recent characterization of left-wing critics as “scum”  in President Trump’s Memorial Day address. Earlier this year, a congressional subcommittee hearing, a Republican-backed effort to investigate public broadcasting, was titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”