Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America
By Clay Risen
Scribner, 480 pages, $31
Although the 1950s Red Scare has never entirely left popular consciousness, it has returned to prominence lately as the subject of George Clooney’s celebrated Broadway drama, Good Night and Good Luck. The obvious explanation for the show’s popularity is liberal anxiety about the second Trump administration and its campaign of retribution against progressive enemies. This is also the context for New York Times reporter and editor Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America. Risen’s book is vividly written and tightly organized. Yet it also reveals the limits of the Red Scare narrative promoted by establishment institutions.
In recent years, retellings of the Red Scare came to focus almost exclusively on the targeting of elite constituencies of the modern Democratic Party: high-profile scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, well-connected journalists like Edward Murrow, and Hollywood royalty. Sitting on the sidelines are the masses of organized industrial workers who were striving for material advancement. The promotion of Marxism in the 1930s that triggered fears of Soviet subversion came primarily through the blue-collar labor movement, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As a result of anti-worker legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, the CIO was reduced to a subsidiary of the anti-communist American Federation of Labor (AFL).
“Sitting on the sidelines are the masses of organized industrial workers.”
Despite this central connection, the New Deal-era labor movement is explored in one short chapter of Risen’s Red Scare—the same amount of space the author devotes to the Lavender Scare, the McCarthyite persecution of gays and lesbians. Saying any more about this predominantly white male labor movement would conflict with one of the book’s core themes: that populism, which Risen frames as a movement of lower middle-class suburban white men, has always been the fountainhead of anti-communism and far-right repression.