Writer Clay Risen describes a political movement which destroyed the careers of thousands of teachers, civil servants and artists whose beliefs or associations were deemed un-American. His book, Red Scare, is about post-World War II America, but he says there's a throughline connecting that era to our current political moment. Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews The Pitt and Adolescence.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who were the Minute Women of the USA?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America.
The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutewomen is one of many told in a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen.
Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes that there's a through-line to be found from that era up to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at The New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.
Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor. And one of the strands, you say, was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal.
You know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc., Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs. What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
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.
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—
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Chapter 2: How did the Red Scare affect American 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.
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.
You know, I often think of... The excesses of the Red Scare as being driven by congressional hearings, people demanding loyalty statements and the like. But Harry Truman, the Democratic president who followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was actually pretty active on this front as well. Tell us why he embraced this idea of asking citizens to commit to loyalty hosts and the like.
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...
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.
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.
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.,
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
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,
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