Keith Parsons: Red Scare Review

Guest essay, Friday, 20 June 2025

Keith Parsons …

Clay Risen

REVIEW OF RED SCARE BY CLAY RISEN

On September 2, 1945, onboard the battleship USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay—the site littered with the broken remnants of the once proud Imperial Navy--representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the surrender documents officially ending the Second World War. A massive overflight of US fighters and bombers demonstrated the overwhelming might of the American military. America, with its Allies, had triumphed over Nazi Germany, perhaps the most fearsome military machine since the Roman legions. Japan lay prostrate, blasted and burned. By contrast, the American homeland had been barely touched by the war. American industry had achieved prodigies. Pittsburgh alone had produced more steel than all the Axis nations combined. America was the sole possessor of the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb.

Time for a victory lap, right? Time to relax and enjoy the fruits of victory, confident in a future of prosperity and security, right? No. America soon descended into a maelstrom of manic fear and suspicion. The specter stalking America was communism, the godless collectivist ideology that had seized a third of the world, and which apparently threatened to metastasize and take so much more. That communism was a clay-footed giant was not apparent at the time; it appeared to be a mighty colossus.

The military threat posed by the Soviet Union was real and especially intimidating after they acquired nuclear weapons in August of 1949, years ahead of expectations. However, much more terrifying was the perceived threat of communist subversion, the fear that in communities across the nation, nefarious subversive forces were hard at work, silently, invisibly undermining American institutions and values. Camouflaged as your neighbors and coworkers, these agents of Moscow exploited American freedoms to sow the rot of communism. They could be anywhere.

The fear of communism became a national mania. Everyone was suspect. Smears, innuendo, and guilt by association ruined lives and careers. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) conducted inquisitions that badgered witnesses and threatened them with contempt citations unless they confessed and named names. Many of those who refused to cooperate were sent to prison and blacklisted so that they could not work in their professions. The FBI hounded some for years. Loyalty oaths were required of teachers, professors, and even professional wrestlers. A hunting or fishing license required a loyalty oath. Joseph McCarthy and other lesser demagogues conducted a virtual reign of terror. All of this and so much more is documented in Clay Risen's wonderful history of that terrible era, Red Scare (Scribner, 2025).

Red Scare is a riveting read, as gripping as any novel. The cast of characters includes heroes and rascals, with the latter greatly predominating. The biggest rascal, of course, was McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin. His campaign of allegations and insinuations, unsupported by evidence, gathered such momentum that even those who personally detested him, like President Eisenhower, would not oppose him directly. The few who did were subject to calumny and threats. Most politicians and the public either supported him or were willing to acquiesce, not wanting to be put in the crosshairs themselves. Risen deftly traces McCarthy's rapid rise and even more precipitous fall. He notes, very insightfully, that McCarthy's influence is still felt, reflected in all of those on the right who are convinced that the federal government hides dark forces who work their sinister will, hidden from oversight. Today's conspiracy theorists call those purported manipulators the "deep state" rather than communists, but the paranoid style remains.

Among the victims of the red scare, artists and intellectuals were particularly vulnerable. During the thirties, for many thinking people, the Great Depression signaled the failure of capitalism, and communism seemed like a promising alternative. Some joined the Party, and others remained on the periphery, sympathetic but not members. Others joined organizations later depicted as front organizations. Membership in the Communist Party and all of the other left-wing organizations was perfectly legal, yet in the years of the red scare, any such association, however temporary or tenuous, was damning. Those closely associated with communists, like Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," whose brother, wife, and mistress were communists, were doomed, whatever their past service to the country.

The effect of the red scare on Hollywood is one of the most interesting aspects of the story. Hollywood had long been suspected of harboring subversives, and then, as now, it had many progressives. Writers especially were suspect and soon drew the attention of HUAC. Risen focuses on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, the abundantly talented and highly prolific author of the scripts of many big movies. Trumbo was the most prominent member of the Hollywood Ten, ten writers, directors and producers who had fallen under suspicion and were subpoenaed by HUAC but refused to discuss their communist affiliations. They were cited for contempt and each served prison time.

After prison, they found themselves blacklisted, cut off socially and professionally. Former friends would not speak to them. Work dried up. Banks would not lend them money. The previously progressive Screen Actors Guild said that producers should not credit the work of writers who had been members of the Communist Party or who refused to cooperate with HUAC. Trumbo persisted and wrote a number of scripts under pseudonyms or under the names of writers not blacklisted who would lend their names for a cut. Eventually, when the hysteria subsided, he once again wrote under his own name, producing the scripts for such memorable films as Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Exodus, The Sandpiper, and Papillon.

Needless to say, most people did not have the courage of The Ten, and when they found themselves under suspicion, they would do public penance, offering histrionic confessions, and naming names (Risen does not mention it, but the parallels with Stalin's show trials are striking.). Prominent director Elia Kazan, whose credits included A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman's Agreement, and A Streetcar Named Desire, not only named names but took out a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing his former left-wing friends. You deflect suspicion from yourself by trying to shout "Commie!" louder than anyone else. Risen records that when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award at the 1999 Oscars, many in the audience refused to applaud.

Of course, the red scare made some people's fortune—Richard Nixon's, for instance. He was a star of the HUAC, not a loudmouthed blusterer, but a savvy and persistent operator. He gained prominence when his dogged pursuit of Alger Hiss finally ended in Hiss's conviction for espionage. He then shamelessly employed red-baiting rhetoric in his senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas. He did not outright call her a communist, but a "pink," a communist sympathizer and "fellow traveler." Risen notes that, in all fairness, Nixon ran a much better campaign than Douglas and did not win on smears alone. However, he established his anti-communist bona fides, and this certainly made him more attractive as a running mate for Ike. So we also have the red scare to thank for giving us Richard Nixon.

So what do you do when your society succumbs to a paranoid obsession? As Risen makes clear, defiance came with a heavy cost of ostracism, job loss, and calumny. Generally, people contrived a way to get along. Eisenhower's strategy was to attempt to co-opt anticommunism and make it "respectable." Most people either jumped on the anticommunist bandwagon, or cooperated in varying degrees. Courage and integrity were real but rare.

Were there communist agents in America? Was there espionage? Yes, but, of course, not to the extent to justify national paranoia. For instance, Risen notes that the consensus now is that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage. However, his trial was full of irregularities, which leads Risen to quote one source saying, "they framed a guilty man." The outcry against the Rosenbergs' execution was international. In Paris they exhibited posters depicting a grinning Eisenhower with electric chairs for teeth. America's international reputation was another victim of the red scare.

The supreme irony of the red scare is that America did more to damage itself than any harm Russia had ever done. Stalin could not have hatched a better plan to make Americans fearful, suspicious, and self-destructive. At the height of the red scare, America resembled Russia during Stalin's "great terror." It was said that during Stalin's terror, a man would only speak candidly when he was in bed with his wife and the covers pulled up. Likewise, thoughts and speech were monitored during the red scare for any taint of disloyalty, and, as in Russia, an unsupported suspicion could result in accusation, and accusation was often sufficient for an assumption of guilt.

Like every craze, the red scare eventually petered out. Americans got sick of the whole thing and finally settled down into their customary hedonism. By many measures, 1957 is reckoned the happiest year in American history, the year that fulfilled our nostalgic stereotypes of the fifties: big cars with tailfins, cheeseburgers, fries, and malts at the drive-in, sock hops and doo-wop music, poodle skirts and saddle oxfords, cool guys with D.A.'s and a pack of Luckies rolled up in the t-shirt sleeve, Doris Day, Elvis Presley, and James Dean.

Anxiety was not banished, however. In October 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. American space efforts at the time were futile to the point of comedy. Pundits, and especially educators, wrung their hands, fearful that while American teenagers idled in rock-and-roll and cruising the strip, disciplined Russian kids were being drilled in calculus and rocket science. The science content of school curricula was amped way up, and that certainly was a benefit for my education. Echoes of the red scare persisted into the times I can remember. I recall when commercial breaks in Saturday morning cartoons would carry "public service" announcements showing Khruschev pounding the table and threatening to bury us, as well as encouragement to get busy building your fallout shelter.

Really, as Risen notes, the paranoid style that was typical of the red scare persists today. We find it in the conspiracy theories like the QAnon insanity and the crackpot anti-science of RFK, Jr. Perhaps most notably and harmfully it survives in the extreme antipathy towards immigrants of the Trump regime and its hysterical, demonstrably false, accusations of rampant criminality among the immigrant population. One encouraging thing is that now, as opposed to the fifties, many more people are unwilling to accept such narratives. Millions of people, seemingly the majority, do not accept the MAGA worldview and are calling it out in mass demonstrations. Trump can preach his bullshit to his choir, but the rest of us see through it.

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