It’s happening again: The Red Scare has come out of hiding

Imagine you are forced to appear before a government committee that suspects you are a subversive. It’s a less likely scenario for Canadians, but American citizens are facing that threat daily as Donald Trump’s masked ICE agents rampage through the cities of the world’s richest country. For those Americans, it must seem as frightening as it was for millions of people living in the Cold War 1950s, the period covered by Carl Risen’s Red Scare.

Risen offers a fresh investigation of one of the most frightening periods of United States history. The result is a timely mirror image of the country we are seeing today. Both periods are filled with lies, fear, threats, intimidation and illegal invasions of privacy. Citizens cannot exercise their democratic rights or even know the accusations lodged against them.

Risen acknowledges the first red scare as an earlier example of how the American right festers until it sees an opportunity to surface and try to seize power. Like Trump today, the target was immigrants. During the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer assigned an enthusiastic young agent named J. Edgar Hoover to deport thousands of people as undesirable aliens.

Here Risen focuses on the even more toxic repeat performance of the 1950s – the age of McCarthyism. “Tailgunner” Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, took the reins of this dark moment. McCarthy’s target was communists. No one was safe from the senator or from Hoover’s FBI. No one’s job was safe regardless of the economic sector. No one who uttered a critical word about the government or voiced a progressive political viewpoint was left untouched.

Risen’s study begins with anti-communist attacks on Hollywood. In 1945, movie studio workers, then under attack by an early version of the House Committee on Unamerican Activity (HUAC), went on strike shutting down 60 per cent of the Hollywood studios.

“The strike forced Hollywood to take sides,” observed Risen. “The ensuing fight would tear Hollywood apart.” The dispute set the tone for a war that would involve public hearings of some of Hollywood’s star players. “Are you or have you ever been a communist?”

Ultimately, refusals to answer that question and to cooperate with the committee led to the Hollywood studio owners’ blacklist. Careers were crushed. A group known as the Hollywood Ten were fired along with other suspected communists. Dalton Trumbo, the secret screenwriter of Oscar winners like The Brave One and Roman Holiday, was a survivor of the blacklist, but many never worked again in Hollywood.

It was just the beginning of a purge of suspects deemed a threat to American democracy. Ironically, the authorities dispensed with the democratic rules to harass writers like Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour), African-American poet Langston Hughes and caustic social critic Dorothy Parker among others.

Hoover’s FBI agents began amassing files on hundreds of thousands of teachers, trade unionists, social activists and politicians deemed potential enemies of the U.S.

“It was a time of lists,” Risen writes. “The FBI had its own vast collection of data, decades worth, spilling over the rumors and hearsay but also carefully documented observations by agents sent to tail suspects, or just the merely suspicious.”

Among the most notable files were those on Paul Robeson, the celebrated singer and civil rights activist. During his appearance at a HUAC hearing, Robeson was called a “crypto-communist” though he had never joined the community party. The state department later removed his passport, preventing the world-renowned entertainer from earning a living. The committee’s attempt to link Communism and the civil rights movement “tarnished them both.”

Another thick file was kept on longshore labour leader Harry Bridges, an Australian who later became a U.S. citizen. The leader of the famous 1934 West Coast longshore workers’ strike, was continually harassed by the FBI and even the labour movement. Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a stalwart anti-communist who refused to support Bridges. He was supported by famed autoworker leader Walter Reuther.

“The impact of the Red Scare on the American labor movement was immense and tragic,” Rosen wrote. Ironically, Murray and other CIO leaders, including John L. Lewis of the mine workers, had hired communists to unionize millions of industrial workers after the CIO was founded in 1935.

Risen saves some of his most revealing comments for convicted atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were tried under the Espionage Act, found guilty and executed, but many Americans witnessed the process of convicting them, protested the sentence, and wondered if “they deserved to die.” Yes, they were guilty, but the Red Scare had sealed their fate. Americans wanted blood.

Perhaps the most prominent file deals with Robert J. Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb at the Manhattan Project. After the FBI investigated his past, they tried Oppenheimer secretly and stripped him of his security clearance, thus ending his career. Americans wanted his blood, too.

High-level government officials were also on the hit list. One of the highest was the patrician Alger Hiss, the high-level State Department official that the young Californian Senator Richard Nixon condemned as a communist. The case spearheaded Nixon’s eventual drive for the White House.

When McCarthy decided to take on the U.S. Army, the tables started to turn. After four years of witch hunts and public fear mongering, a Boston lawyer named Joseph Nye Welch finally called out McCarthy revealing his shameful ruthlessness at a public hearing. “Have you left no sense of decency?” he asked.

Risen’s review of Cold War events such as these yields a riveting portrait of one of America’s most vicious periods of paranoia wherein attacks on its own citizens are supported and cheered by a public that lives in fear and is fed a steady flow of disinformation.

In Red Scare, we revisit the creation of a political playbook invented by the radical right wing of the Republican party and played out so effectively by McCarthy and others. Through Risen’s factual lens, we see a reflection of today’s MAGA movement as it pushes the country ever closer to what some would call a police state.

“The Red Scare had inflamed a passionate core of hard-right conservatives,” Risen concludes. “It was left to future generations of Republican politicians to decide whether to keep such sentiments on the fringe, or to invite them into the center of the party.”