Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Scribner, 2025. Paperback: March 3.
U.S. Army Private James Kutcher slipped away from the Battle of San Pietro to pee. In the next moment, a German mortar shell found him. Kutcher went home without his legs, moved into a subsidized housing unit in Newark with his elderly parents, and worked as a file clerk in the Veterans Administration. Four years after his injury, the VA summarily fired him. The Army canceled his disability pension, and he and his parents received a notice of eviction. Why? The Red Scare found him. President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 instituted a loyalty program for federal employees. Truman’s Attorney General placed the Socialist Workers Party on a list of subversive organizations. Kutcher belonged to the party since the 1930s. Ergo, a file clerk accused of no substantive wrongdoing was retroactively classified as an enemy of the state he had sacrificed his legs to defend.
Kutcher sued to reclaim his rights of speech, association, and due process and took his artificial limbs on a speaking tour to promote his autobiography, The Case of the Legless Veteran. “What has the majesty of the U.S. descended to,” the Washington Post asked, “when a cripped veteran can be so hounded and harassed in the name of national security?” No fired federal employee generated more publicity adverse to the loyalty program. No ordinary American did more to discredit the Red Scare. In 1956, a circuit court of appeals decision reinstated Kutcher. Two years later, the U.S. Court of Claims returned his pension and pay. The rulings dealt the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations a mortal blow.
Clay Risen begins The Red Scare with Truman’s 1947 loyalty program and concludes with a series of 1957 Supreme Court decisions limiting the government’s power to punish dissent. In the book’s four hundred pages, James Kutcher receives one short paragraph. A more glamorous cast of characters hogs this book’s attention: Whitaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethal Rosenberg, Henry Wallace.
Risen’s book is not without considerable merits: The prose is brisk, the detail sharp. That the topics is timely, even urgent, needs no elaboration—and the author gives none. Readers of the New York Times, where he works as a reporter, may connect the postwar logic of guilt by association to NSPM-7, the Trump administration’s national security strategy, may even analogize postwar repression to the current right-wing campaign to slander New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a foreign agitator, due to his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.
Like most histories of the Red Scare, however, Risen’s views it as an invigilation. The storyline identifies a spate of “dark energy” that spread panic in the corridors of power between Manhattan and Washington D.C. What needs explanation is why the repression “went far beyond what was necessary.” Given that the U.S. government controlled both oceans, owned half of the world’s wealth, and held a monopoly on the most powerful weapon in human history when Truman instituted the loyalty program, one is left to wonder much domestic repression was necessary—and exactly who thought so.
Risen ascribes the program and its foreign-policy companion, the Truman Doctrine, to a panic roiling the whole nation. “Observers in the United States,” he writes of responses to Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Missouri, “were quick to conclude that the threat extended wherever Communism was found — even at home. Winning this new Cold War, they believed, would necessitate an unmitigated, unblinking effort to root out domestic subversion and dissent.” Which “observers?” Outside of Washington, public opinion snarled at Churchill’s incitement. Polls reported 18 percent of Americans approved of the speech; more than 40 percent disapproved.
“There was no question,” Risen continues in this vein of tragic necessity, that the Truman administration had to intervene in the Greek Civil War. “It is impossible to overstate just how overpowering the fear of a new world war became,” he asserts. Did the administration’s counterinsurgency really destroy a popular, anti-Nazi resistance movement of Greek workers and peasants because U.S. officials felt overpowered by fear of a wider conflagration? The imputed motivation would be more credible if Risen had showed any of them attempting to reduce the likelihood of World War III. He comes closest to doing so in praising President Dwight Eisenhower for bringing “a level of sanity to the Cold War through his New Look strategy, which reconceived the Soviet threat as a long-term, chronic challenge.” Economic warfare, global countersubversion, and nuclear brinksmanship count for sanity in this view.
In truth, the repression was necessary only to the institutions that promoted and abetted it. The Catholic Church and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, neither of which rates a page in this book, worked assiduously with the FBI to promote the devil theory of communism because their rational interests demanded they do so. The Chamber wanted to roll back the New Deal. The FBI wanted bureaucratic legitimacy for a secret police force. The Church, itself a past target of countersubversion, wanted to preserve its moral authority from Hollywood’s mass culture. Then, as now, sensationalized mass media banked advertising dollars.
It was not hysteria that motivated the mandarins of the new American power state to isolate and censor left-wing thought and practice, sparing the New Right’s Christian nationalism and white supremacy. The national security apparatus installed under the penumbra of the Red Scare transformed dissent into criminal disloyalty in order to sabotage political imagination. What the mandarins actually feared was that they could not win the open competition of ideas enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
Today, Washington carries on its forever war against the ideals of the American Revolution, dismantling what remained of distinctions between elected official and demagogue. The cognoscenti of Manhattan and Washington may cock their ears for “vibes” and “dark energy.” But it’s not political physics. It’s not a case of the jitters. Folks, it’s tyranny.
A stronger
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