Clay Risen, <i>Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America</i>

Clay Risen is an accomplished popular historian, having written books on Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as a guidebook to U.S. producers of whiskey, bourbon, and rye. He brings his dexterity as a writer to his latest work, a broad overview of the post–World War II Red Scare in the United States. Risen claims that the Truman administration's loyalty program “set the stage for the anti-Communist hysteria that was to come” (p. 42). From there, Risen narrates a cavalcade of episodes and incidents moving from the early investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities through the denouement of McCarthyism with the censure of Joseph McCarthy by his U.S. Senate colleagues in December 1954.Risen also brings a clear presentist perspective to the book, although he seeks to downplay this stance. He asserts that his study “is a work of history, and as such it is not concerned with drawing parallels between past and present.” He claims to leave such parallels to the reader, but he then immediately asserts that “there was a throughline to be found from the era of the Red Scare to our current political moment” (pp. xii–xiii). Perhaps to give his book more contemporary relevance, Risen explains that to understand the “American hard right of today” one must examine “its roots in the Red Scare” (p. xiii). Rather predictably, he suggests there is a line linking Donald Trump and his MAGA populist movement to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Little wonder that the book has received gushing endorsements from leftist media personalities, like Rachel Maddow.Despite Risen's disclaimers, his commentary on various “parallels” between some of the obvious excesses of the Red Scare and the political ailments of the present is tiresome and detracts from the book—which has other serious problems. Although it covers the usual range of episodes (at times in clever fashion), it hardly advances understanding of the Red Scare beyond what David Caute's The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977) and Victor S. Navasky's Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1980) provided nearly a half century ago. It is an updated version of the by-now tiresome depiction of the postwar decade as largely a masquerade for domestic repression reliant on an exaggeration of the Communist threat both internally and externally. The “villains” in the story are familiar—Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers, and, of course, Senator McCarthy. The “martyrs” in the story are also well known—Helen Gahagan Douglas, Harry Bridges, Alger Hiss (with some qualification), and Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten.In Risen's estimation, most members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were loyal U.S. citizens, although “a small fraction did spy for the Soviet Union” (p. 17). This characterization is misleading at best and, to be kind, severely underestimates the influence once exercised by CPUSA members who gave their first loyalty to their cause rather than their country. For example, Risen fails to grasp the extent of Communist influence in the U.S. labor movement in the years after World War II. Nor does he sufficiently appreciate the crucial efforts of great liberal labor leaders, like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Philip Murray of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to challenge and defeat Communist control in significant parts of organized labor. Similarly, in covering Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party campaign in the 1948 U.S. presidential election, Risen glosses over the role played by overt and covert members of the CPUSA. As those familiar with Thomas W. Devine's valuable study of the 1948 campaign understand well, it was not “hysteria” on the part of President Harry S. Truman and others to express alarm that Communist operatives had gained control of Wallace's miserable campaign—as poor Wallace himself later conceded.Risen admits that some Soviet spies infiltrated the upper reaches of Franklin Roosevelt's presidential administrations in the 1930s and 1940s, but here again he markedly understates the significance and extent of the espionage on behalf of Moscow—thus portraying all concerns about Communism as hysterical overreactions. Risen cites the crucial work of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr based on the Venona files, but he fails to take their findings seriously. To acknowledge forthrightly that a major Soviet network devoted to spying on the U.S. government existed in the 1940s would complicate his “white hats” versus “black hats” narrative.Risen's narrow focus on the United States also downplays the horrors inflicted by Communist regimes globally. Although he effectively elicits sympathy for those in the United States whose careers were derailed or reputations unfairly tarnished by McCarthy's wild and unfounded accusations, there is little mention of the tens of millions of victims of Stalinist tyranny throughout the bloody empire the Soviet Union created during and after World War II. Perhaps a better understanding of the efforts of the Truman administration to contain any further expansion of this brutal totalitarian regime and ideology would also have provided a clarifying context for U.S. concerns about Soviet and Communist influence in the United States.If one truly wishes to understand better the complexity of the Red Scare, an essential account is provided by Richard Gid Powers in his Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Although Powers is not as colorful in his overview, he demonstrates that serious and legitimate anti-Communist endeavors should not be crudely equated with the abuses perpetrated by McCarthy. In fact, the latter could damage the former, as Truman discovered. This is a reality that Risen should have discerned and analyzed, especially at a time when Communist regimes in China and North Korea are actively trying to spread their disinformation and recruit spies. Perhaps the soundest lessons to be drawn from the Red Scare era will be not those pushed by Risen but those derived from the actions of courageous anti-Communists, like Walter Reuther.