Clay Risen
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Yeah, I think it's important to remember that the New Deal was more than just a set of policies. It was a whole culture that was ushered in in the 1930s, one that was broadly progressive, cosmopolitan, pluralist. You saw rights advances for all sorts of people who up until then really hadn't had a chance. And You know, the opposition was economic.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
There were certainly a lot of people who criticized Roosevelt on, you know, tax policy, regulation. You know, this tended to come from the usual suspects. But there was also a lot of cultural opposition, a lot of anger over the idea that America was moving away from a society that was rooted in—they didn't say it this way, but a white patriarchy in a kind of vision of a small-town America—
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
in a fundamentally religious, Christian, Protestant worldview. And, you know, this was all linked together for a lot of people, for a lot of critics, that it was both, you know, there was this culture, but there was also this economic change and government assertion going on through the New Deal.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And another aspect of the 1930s that was both motivating for a lot of people but also seeding a backlash was that the left was very fluid. So that you had people toward the center as well as people on the far left, on the Communist Party and other radicals who saw themselves as part of a united front, a popular front.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
And whether that was in foreign policy, domestic policy, there was a sense that we're all working on this together. And so there was a lot of cross-mixing. And that became a problem for the people who then went into government jobs. And after the war, when communism started to be seen as this threat, suddenly any affiliation that they may have had a decade earlier became this scarlet letter that –
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
could be used as a way of targeting them and blacklisting them, whether they were in the government or education or in Hollywood. I mean, name an industry or a sector. And there was an element of the Red Scare going on. But also to your point, I mean, one of the reasons why the Red Scare happened when it did was that as much as there was a
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
sentiment against New Deal America, New Deal culture in the 30s, it really didn't find a purchase. Roosevelt was very popular. The Depression was on. Then the war was on. And it was really only after that when a lot of people wanted to get back to normal. There was a lot of fear over not being able to do that because of the communist threat abroad. And so it was sort of a ripe moment for
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. ,,,,
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, and they should have listened to the warning. So they also met with one of the leading, one of the most outspoken liberal members of Congress, Manny Seller from New York, who in the past had gone after HUAC and had stood up against anti-communism. But they met with him and he said, look, I'm not going to say anything about this.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I wouldn't touch this issue with a 10-foot pole now because, you know, it's taking over. And then sure enough, you know, within months, Eric Johnson helped lead the creation of the Blacklist.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, they largely stood aside. Now, the Screen Actors Guild was run by Ronald Reagan, who by then had begun his transition from being what he called a hemophiliac liberal. Yeah. All the way to, you know, the conservative that he became. He testified in those hearings. He actually came before the unfriendly witnesses, the writers, and he actually struck a note of caution.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, he had said, look, there is communism in Hollywood, and we don't want it there, but... But we can't go after people for speaking their minds. Other people were less guarded. But Reagan actually at the time was fairly measured. But what was striking was that the Screenwriters Guild, which had been a fairly progressive group, started to give away very quickly.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And certainly by the early 50s was a handmaiden of the Red Scare and the Blacklist.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, it was hard to find a lawyer because any lawyer was faced with you pick this client and you will never have another client in this town. But even more, bar associations were increasingly willing to censure or even to strip a license from somebody who took on an alleged communist or a subversive as a client. And so there were very few people—
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And even groups that we think of today like the ACLU, they did not drape themselves in glory during this period. They also were largely quiescent or even supportive of the Red Scare.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah. I mean, one of the, you know, one of the quotes, one of the many quotes that comes out of this era, you know, comes from Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice. And, you know, he was a very ardent opponent of all of this, a very strong civil libertarian. But in one of his dissents, he essentially said, you know, we just have to accept that this is how things are.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And hopefully, as a court, we can come back in calmer times and offer redress to what's going on. But at the moment, there's very little that even we as the Supreme Court can do.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, so this is a fascinating sort of turn of events because it's a group of former FBI agents who did have experience hunting communists and with this kind of incipient blacklist. They were also entrepreneurs. And they understood that there was a thirst out there in the public for information on potential subversives. You know, that there wasn't enough to have –
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
attorney general's list of subversive organizations. They wanted, you know, the next step, which was tell me who in this case in Hollywood is suspect. And so the book had, you know, it's like it's just a directory. And you would go through and say, okay, well, Kirk Douglas, okay, what is his, you know, here, here and here, Aaron Copland. Oh, Aaron Copland was
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
was in the greeting committee for Dmitry Shostakovich when he came and toured the United States. Well, Shostakovich is a Soviet composer. That makes Copland suspect. And this then was sold. Anybody could buy it. I know people, I need to find a copy myself. I mean, I've seen one, but I know people who have copies. It's kind of a cool little thing.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, I think it's important to remember that the New Deal was more than just a set of policies. It was a whole culture that was ushered in in the 1930s, one that was broadly progressive, cosmopolitan, pluralist. You saw rights advances for all sorts of people who up until then really hadn't had a chance. And You know, the opposition was economic.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But that would then be used by local radio stations. It would be used by the American Legion. If there was someone in red channels, then they would be protested if they came through in a performance or appeared in a movie. And there was never really an investigation. People weren't curious about, well, how good is this information?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Or what does it mean to be on the welcoming committee for Shostakovich? It was just taken. Well, therefore, Copeland is suspect. And it was an important part. It became, as you said, sort of the de facto blacklist. What I found was interesting was then there were all these knockoff red channels that were purported to tell the true story, that red channels didn't go far enough.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And so you had these sort of, you know, second, third tier, you know, red hunters for hire.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And it was like doxing, you know, I mean, and because sometimes now red channels didn't have addresses, but then people would take it upon themselves to draw up a list of addresses and say, okay, well, you know, here is where all of the, you know, subversives listed in red channels lives in your neighborhood, right? And people would get protested.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Dalton Trumbo, who was famous enough, no one needed to tell anyone where he lived, but he found dead animals and a bag of feces floating in his pool. You know, people had windows shattered. There was, you know, there was violence running through the Red Scare at the very grassroots level.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, I think for two reasons. First of all, he was useful to them. He was willing to go after Democrats in a way that they didn't quite feel comfortable doing. There was still a real order of decorum in the Senate that he violated very clearly. And so you have someone like Robert Taft, who was the Senate Majority Leader, the Mr. Republican in the Senate. He...
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
would never do something like what McCarthy did. But he very openly defended McCarthy and coached McCarthy on how to perform. And, you know, he was just that guy who was willing to say things that no one else did and land punches. But at the same time, they were also a little afraid of him because if you turned against him, he would make an example out of you.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The best example of that is Margaret Chase Smith, who was a senator from Maine. And relatively early on, this is in the summer of 1950, she gave a speech on the floor of the Senate and said, look, what he's doing is un-American. This is un-American.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
There were certainly a lot of people who criticized Roosevelt on, you know, tax policy, regulation. You know, this tended to come from the usual suspects. But there was also a lot of cultural opposition, a lot of anger over the idea that America was moving away from a society that was rooted in—they didn't say it this way, but a white patriarchy in a kind of vision of a small-town America—
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
unacceptable a senator should no one should be doing this and she got a few people to sign on ultimately they all dropped out and as soon as he could McCarthy I mean McCarthy went after her immediately but as soon as he got a committee position after 1952 She happened to be on his committee and he demoted her and sort of exiled her from any position of power.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And, you know, that became a, let's say, a cautionary tale for a lot of other senators. And it took a long time before anyone was willing to stand up and say, this man is unacceptable.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah. And it's noteworthy that McCarthy's first speech, the sort of debut of this at a Republican meeting in West Virginia, came in January of 1950. And it was just weeks after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. We know now that, you know, Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union within the U.S. government. We know that
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Julius Rosenberg and his circle did steal atomic secrets and give them to the Soviet Union. We do know that the Communist Party of the United States facilitated a lot of this. But what we also know is that there weren't many. Aside from Rosenberg, they didn't have much impact. And most importantly, by the end of World War II, The Soviets had largely dismantled their espionage efforts.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
They didn't think they were worth it. They weren't happy with the results. They later restarted them, of course. But what's important is during the Red Scare, there wasn't really espionage going on. And yet that's what everyone was afraid of. And so after that, for McCarthy to come along and say, well, I have evidence of spies and
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
It was hard, at least initially, for anyone to say he's completely wrong because, hey, there's evidence that there were spies. But you're right that his ultimately, as crazy as he was in terms of just, not clinically crazy, but his just shoot from the hip willingness to say anything, his manipulation, his understanding of how the media worked and his manipulation of the media was insane.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
was genius. And, you know, just for example, one thing he would do would be to wait until right before deadlines, right before you had to file a story. And this is back when there was only print, so there was no option other than you've got to get this story in. And he would identify the thirstiest, most driven reporters who, you know, all they wanted was that, to get in that deadline.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Give me the scoop. Yeah, get that scoop. And he would tell them, you know, just the most outlandish thing, that they didn't have time to fact check, that they couldn't start to call around and verify. And they were faced with choice. Do I print this scoop and hope that it's true? Or do I lose this scoop, someone else gets it, and I look bad? More often than not, they went with the scoop.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And more often than not, in fact, pretty much always, it was completely fabricated.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, Eisenhower is an interesting character in this story because he definitely, I think, drew a line and said – Anything beyond this is unacceptable in terms of anti-communist activity. And certainly, McCarthy was in that beyond the pale category. But there were a lot of things that he did allow. And he had his own version of a much more aggressive loyalty test than Truman did. He also...
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
in a fundamentally religious, Christian, Protestant worldview. And, you know, this was all linked together for a lot of people, for a lot of critics, that it was both, you know, there was this culture, but there was also this economic change and government assertion going on through the New Deal.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
oversaw and reinforced what today is called the Lavender Scare, in which anti-communism or fear, you know, allegations of subversion were used to fire hundreds of gay men from the federal government, mostly in the State Department. And so Eisenhower tolerated a lot of stuff that today we would look at and say that's disgusting that he would be for that. But
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
He should get some credit for saying, and I believe that there was a point at which this wasn't going to go further. And I think, at least I make the argument, that for him, he was trying to essentially just dry out. the Red Scare, and run it out. And that he believed, like Truman believed, that fundamentally the American people were not radicals.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The American people are pragmatic, centrist, and that they would come to their senses with good, strong hand at the tiller, very straight and narrow leadership, that he would provide. That was his idea. And he also, behind the scenes, went after McCarthy. It took him a while, probably too long, but he ultimately did go after McCarthy and really cut his legs out from under him.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And so Eisenhower was a big part of that story. He's not the only part, but I think it's important that he came along. And it mattered that you had a Republican doing this, given that Truman and Roosevelt unfairly had been tagged as soft on communism.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, well, I think, first of all, it's just basic parallels. We see a lot of the same animus toward ideas we don't like, or that some people don't like. We see the same willingness to use oppressive ideas measures to silence those views or to silence those organizations or people that we disagree with. And so it's a reminder that what happened during the Red Scare can be repeated.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
So I think there's that. But I think there's also something more causal in the sense that, you know, After McCarthy fell and after Warren pared back the tools of the Red Scare, there was still a lot of... There was a hard kernel of people who believed, who continued to believe in the cause.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And these were people who funneled into groups like the John Birch Society and other sort of similar, very far-right organizations who believed that McCarthy was a martyr and that there was this cabal of... anti-American elites running the government. And that didn't stop just because the Red Scare did. And it pops up here and there throughout subsequent American history.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And there's a through line. You can chart organizational relationships, intellectual influences through the Goldwater movement, through the Buchananite populist movement of the 90s. And I think very clearly you can see it today. And whether it's explicit, I think some people do understand this legacy and do see themselves as the latest in this fight.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Others implicitly, they may not necessarily understand the history, but they certainly see the situation in the same way. They believe that it's not just the government's too big or there's a lot of waste and bloat. They actually really believe that there is this – deep state. And they didn't say deep state in the 50s, but that's what they meant. That's what we mean today.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
This conspiratorial, anti-American, radical core that's running everything. And that we have to dismantle large sections of the government in order to get rid of them. And You know, in some ways, what we're seeing now is I would go as far as to say the apotheosis of what guys like McCarthy and the people around him could only dream of in the 1950s. What do you mean by that?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Well, I just mean that, you know, when they would talk about the need to root out this radical core, at the end of the day, they were not going to achieve that. The establishment was very strong and, you know, it was very easy to get up and rant about that. conspiracies and communist infiltration. But the idea that anything would actually happen to satisfy them was a fantasy.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But that fantasy, I think, at least so far, shows a good sign of being made reality today. I mean, we're still early in the administration and
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Anything can happen, but certainly if you look at the way people in the administration or under Elon Musk talk about what they're doing, the kind of almost ideological fervor that they're bringing to this project of dismantling the federal government and going after enemies. I mean, those are two parts of the same project, and yet they aren't just echoes of –
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The 1940s and 50s, they are, I would argue, an extension of what was first identified and codified as a project back then.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And another aspect of the 1930s that was both motivating for a lot of people but also seeding a backlash was that the left was very fluid. So that you had people toward the center as well as people on the far left, on the Communist Party and other radicals who saw themselves as part of a united front, a popular front.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And whether that was in foreign policy, domestic policy, there was a sense that we're all working on this together. And so there was a lot of cross-mixing. And that became a problem for the people who then went into government jobs.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And after the war, when communism started to be seen as this threat, suddenly any affiliation that they may have had a decade earlier became this scarlet letter that people could be used as a way of targeting them and blacklisting them, whether they were in the government or education or in Hollywood. I mean, name an industry or a sector. And there was an element of the Red Scare going on.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But also to your point, I mean, one of the reasons why the Red Scare happened when it did was that as much as there was a sentiment against New Deal America, New Deal culture in the 30s, it really didn't find a purchase. Roosevelt was very popular. The Depression was on. Then the war was on. And it was really only after that when a lot of people wanted to get back to normal.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
There was a lot of fear over not being able to do that because of the communist threat abroad. And so it was sort of a ripe moment for opportunists and ideologues to pick up that culture conflict of the 30s and give it this injection of real fear of another world war.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, Truman, when he came into office, it was at the tail end of World War II, one of the first things he had to do was decide to drop the atomic bomb and then deal with Stalin. I mean, he was thrown right into the deep end. And...
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
There was an immediately obvious need to reinforce Europe, to commit billions of dollars to shoring up their economies and societies so that the Soviet Union couldn't continue its press westward and take over more countries than it had. And there was a pivotal meeting with Russia.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
key State Department officials, key Senate leaders, in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously told Truman that, hey, I'll do what I can, I'm gonna help you out, but you have to scare the hell out of them, right? And essentially make communism out to be the biggest baddie. And, you know, there was obviously a strong case for that.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And so Truman gave a speech to a joint session of Congress where he explained what was ahead and made out a very strong case for a maximalist assertion of U.S.,
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
effort abroad but part of that was also talking about the limitless threat of communism and so then it became incumbent on him to do something about communists domestically and here he was sort of in a trap because he didn't really believe there was much of a threat but there were uh
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
particularly Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress who did say there was a domestic threat and J. Edgar Hoover said there was a threat. And truth be told, there was very good evidence that there had been espionage in the U.S. government. It turned out to be true that the Soviets were funneling money through the Communist Party. So Roosevelt versus Truman, I think,
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
implemented the loyalty oath largely because he thought it would be a sop to these folks and wouldn't do anything. It wasn't a big deal. He was wrong on that.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Well, there were a couple. First of all is that when you hire the exterminator to come in, you really expect there to be rodents, right? And there's something here, too, where once you set up these loyalty boards in all these government agencies, it's sort of incumbent on them to find something. And, you know, look, I mean, there's always something to be found in someone's background.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And the FBI would investigate any rumors. And there was really no way for someone to fight back. You know, if it came up from an anonymous, there were a lot of anonymous sources in these investigations, you couldn't really challenge somebody. This wasn't a court proceeding. So people who found themselves targeted under these loyalty programs had very little recourse to clear their names.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The other thing that was a real problem was that One of the sets of criteria for judging somebody suspect was a list of organizations that the attorney general drew up at Truman's directive that were deemed subversive. And it started off with a few dozen. It ended up being a couple of hundred. And some of them were anodyne.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Some of them were by no stretch of the imagination a threat to national security. But if you had any connection, even secondhand, to one of these, your career was in jeopardy. And the list was not long. The list got out. And so it then became something for the private sector, for state and local governments to start to use. It became viral in that sense.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And the list became this test against which millions of Americans were judged.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah, and look, I mean, some of them were fronts, but also some of the fronts were fairly anodyne. You know, if the Communist Party set up a club for writers and a writer joined it with no real interest in the Communist Party and maybe was in it for a year and then left and ended up in a government job somewhere, well, they would probably get fired years later for that.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Had they expressed any connection to communism by doing so? No. No. They had simply done this during that fluid period of the 1930s when this was de rigueur for the left.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
No, no. You know, there were people identified and found out to have been spies for the Soviet Union, but not through this program. And, you know, the other thing that I think is important, and it's very—you can't prove a negative, but—
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
This was a real deterrent for anybody who might have something in their background or just someone who didn't want to be investigated that way to ever join the government. And this at a time when the government really needed smart, capable, motivated people to come in and commit to public service.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
He did. Oh, no, he did in his memoirs. He said that it was a mistake.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
There are a couple of reasons. The first is Hollywood, like today, was super sexy. And it was a target for anybody who wanted to raise their own profile. And so the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time, his name was J. Parnell Thomas from New Jersey. he thought this would be a great way to raise the profile of the committee.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But he also had come to believe that Hollywood was this den of radical, subversive leftists. And it wasn't. There were a lot of left-leaning people in Hollywood, but it was hardly a subversive hotspot. But You know, there was an active Communist Party in Hollywood. And it did – it also saw Hollywood as a great place to be to raise money and to raise its own profile.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
It was never very successful because if you're living in Hollywood and you're a star, who wants to – You go to a five hour meeting where you talk about Marx all night when you could go hang out at a club or who wants to have to hand out communist newspapers on the street corner if you're a star. So it never really got far.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But that didn't keep Parnell Thomas and his committee from making that target number one.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
He was. He was. And that's why, well, I mean, I think he stood on principle, but everyone knew what the answer was. He wasn't a secret communist. Everyone knew that he was in charge of the Communist Party in Hollywood, but he refused to answer on principled grounds.