When the American witch hunt comes up on, or not alleged or not, after the Second World War, it is usually the first name that falls from Joe McCarthy, Senator from Wisconsin. The two terms ‘witch hunt’ and ‘mccarthyism’ have become just about synonyms over time. One of the many merits of Red Scarethe new book by Clay Risen, journalist and editor at The New York Timesis that he once again emphasizes that the fear of the red danger already existed much earlier and made victims. MC-Carthy’s name only falls for the second half of the book, and risen places the fear and paranoia in the much broader mass psychological perspective of what historian Richard Hofstadter called the Paranoid Style in American Politics’.
In the chronologically stuffed book, the author pays ample attention at the beginning in 1947 when the Democratic President Truman (which became anxious because the Republicans had won the interim elections with the meaningful slogan ‘Communism vs. Republicanism’) executive order that contained a loyalty program to keep an eye on all ‘subversive’ presence within the civil service corps. It kept the FBI busy: there were almost five million Background checks performed and fired hundreds of federal officials. The rest did fit with what they said or did in public.
The large affairs, between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, the persecution of atomicist Robert Oppenheimer, are already extensively recorded in series of other studies, as well as the dubious role in the many affairs of the later presidents Nixon and Reagan. But Risen manages to give much more unknown names a face, such as that of the black, left-wing folk singer Paul Robeson around whose performances racist riots broke out. And Van Helen Reid Bryan, who was locked up in 1950 in the women’s prison of West Virginia. Her crimes: she was secretary of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (which was considered a cover for a communist network) and her refusal to name the names of supporters.
Risen convincingly shows that the fear of the red danger was often mixed with a hefty dose of homophobia and anti -Semitism. It is not without reason that the parliamentary committee that called the red infiltration Bow Huac: the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Black frames
Risen, rightly, pays a lot of attention to Hollywood where before that time in the film industry the fear of persecution and the existence of black frames led to the ruining of reputations and sometimes suicide. The keyword was often ‘Naming Names. ‘ Anyone who refused to name the Huac’s names of colleagues who may have been suspected of communist sympathies, with implication, already suspected.
And also, of course, Risen gives ample job to the role of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple suspected of playing atomic secrets to the Soviets, a matter that occupied America more than any other in this period. That their two sons of orphans became the execution of the couple in 1953; That Ethel had to take a few minutes after her husband’s execution on the same electric chair that was still warm from the urine that her husband had already died up: risen does not destroy for these details, although he, perhaps from electority, lets the heads unmentioned in New York newspaper that looked forward to the Rosenbergs’Will Sizzle and Fry“On the electric chair.
The fact that Julius Rosenberg indeed passed on ‘atomic secrets’ to Russia was confirmed by later research, as well as the fact that he was nevertheless sentenced to the death penalty on dubious grounds. It has never been convincingly demonstrated that Ethel was more than an obedient courier for what she thought the ‘good thing’.
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McCarthy
Did there ever come to an end to this Red Scare that controlled American society for so long? According to Risen, this was 17 June 1957, the day on which the Supreme Court made four statements, all four “the infrastructure of fear of the red danger”. But also the confrontation on television between Joseph Welch – lawyer for the US Army who won McCarthy during the hearings about communist infiltration within that army “Have you no decency, senator?” – was a decisive moment.
There is still a lot to be found in American literature about this unsavory period: I married a communist from Philip Roth, but also Dissident Gardens From Jonathan Lethem, gives a good picture of what the left looked like then.
In addition, it is to be praised that Risen, the subtitle of the book, notwithstanding, does not opt for the excess of the parallels between this period of hysteria and voter frog with the current America of Donald Trump.
But the paranoia that turned out to be an important part of the American collective consciousness has certainly not disappeared since then. Risen argues partly convincingly that it has nestled, no longer in the corners of, but in the mainstream of the Republican Party.
The fear of risking the wrath of the great leader is indeed visible in the cowardly behavior of the Republicans, which affects the foundations of American democracy. Trump has also sworn to eradicate the “radical left madmen” and their “Marxist ideas”, although it is here Cultural Marxism that the threat is called. And that is just as disturbing as the decrees of this autocratic president himself.