George Santayana’s most famous quote regarding history is: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This quote emphasizes the importance of learning from past mistakes to avoid making them again.   I guess when one looks at our contemporary political, social, and economic landscape we as a society have not followed the Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’s advice.  We live in a partisan world where things seem to be defined by which tribe we belong to.  It appears that our country is split almost down the middle in terms of our loyalties and belief systems.  Currently, the administration that occupies the White House is led by a cult leader whose primary goal is power and enrichment for himself and his family.  To achieve this, he has manufactured a world identified as “Make America Great Again” or MAGA and through executive orders and partisan legislation seeks to implement what has been identified as “Project 2025” which will devastate certain governmental components, social programs for the poor, the international trading system, the federal budget, our immigration system, and god knows what else that is written in the weeds of that document. 

In examining American history, I can think of three periods where contemporary events have their role model.  One is the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century, when tariffs, crony capitalism, and hard-and-fast hierarchies were the stuff of American politics.  Secondly we turn to the 1920s with its version of anti-communism, an economic system that was overloaded with debt, highlighted by Wall Street, racism manifesting itself in anti-immigrant legislation, and a strict reshaping of American politics.  Lastly, is the post-World War II period highlighted by the Red Scare, when the federal government was weaponized against the American left.  This last example sounds familiar as we are bombarded on a daily basis by public commentary and social media posts by our president who has weaponized the Justice Department seeking revenge against his perceived enemies be it individual politicians, educational institutions, businessmen or lawyers who do not conform to his demands, a feckless Congress and Supreme Court, all with the goal of seeking total fealty to the beliefs of one man.

(Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo before HUAC)

In Clay Risen’s latest historical monograph, RED SCARE: BLACKLISTS, McCARTHYISM, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA the author examines a period that is close to being the precursor of our contemporary world.  President Trump vows to root out “radical left wing lunatics” and “Marxist equity” from the bowels of the state.  One of Trump’s minions, former DOGE overlord Elon Musk has proclaimed that U.S.A.I.D. designed as a soft power vehicle to enhance American popularity in poor countries particularly by improving their health care is “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists” and deserved to be destroyed.  This commentary which pervades actors in the current administration sounds like Senator Joseph McCarthy, legal counsel Roy Cohn, Senator and later Vice President Richard Nixon, and even Robert F. Kennedy, and many others.  In fact, McCarthy garnered a range of support, including from fellow Republicans, some ordinary Americans, and even some Democrats. His supporters often believed in the necessity of identifying and suppressing perceived communist influence, justifying the denial of civil liberties to those deemed subversive. Conversely, many Americans and political figures strongly opposed McCarthy’s tactics, highlighting the divisive nature of the movement as he lied over and over about the dangers of the “Red Menace.”  Risen’s book shows that the Red Scare burst forth from a convergence of Cold War fears and a long festering battle between social conservatives and New Deal progressives.  Risen begins at the outset of the Cold War concluding with McCarthy’s death in 1957 providing a fuller understanding of what the American people experienced at a time of moral questioning and perceived threats, and what people are capable of doing to each other under the right circumstances.

Risen has an interesting metaphor in approaching his topic by discussing how a bacillus, in this case, cultural and political can, lie dormant for decades and reappear years later.  The bacillus of the 1950s Red Scare receded but did not totally disappear in the decades that followed, but its lineage has reemerged in the last decade or so with the American hard right.   To understand contemporary culture and politics which is occurring before our eyes today we must understand it and its roots in the Red Scare.  This is not to say that Trumpism and the MAGA movement is the same as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, but there is a line linking them.  Risen’s goal is to demonstrate that at a moment in the late 1940s, and in a certain political and cultural context, that knowing where we are today requires an understanding of where we were then.

Risen quickly turns to the origins, personalities, and actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), especially toward its witnesses and the people they were trying to destroy and disseminating its right wing agenda.  The Committee would become the spear driving a decade long campaign of intolerance and political oppression.  Risen clearly develops the case that the emergence of a strong anti-government agenda which used the fear of communism as a foil against its opponents had its origin in hatred for the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt (much like Trump’s abhorrence of any achievement  wrought by Barack Obama or Joe Biden).  The anti-communist movement morphed into an anti-civil rights movement represented by HUAC and other congressional committee investigations highlighted by its war against Hollywood, epitomized by the investigation of Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten.  For HUAC members and others the New Deal was a “stalking horse” for Soviet collectivization, which today we refer to as the deep state.  The conundrum as Risen argues is that there were two visions of America; “one built on an expansive vision of government as the guarantor of the rights and welfare of all its citizens, the other built on a retrograde nostalgia for an America built on privilege and exclusion.”

(Elizabeth Bentley testifying before the House Committee)

The author integrates the major figures of the period nicely.  Whether presenting the careers and beliefs of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, J. Parnell Thomas, Dalton Trumbo, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Bentley, Judith Coplon, Harry Bridges, Owen Lattimore,  Alger Hiss, Whitiker Chambers, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and a host of others, Risen analyzes their role in the Red Scare and their impact on post-war American history.

The 1948 election plays a key role in Risen’s analysis as Truman was able to defeat New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey.  After losing the 1946 congressional elections to Republicans Truman realized he needed to shore up support with those who felt he was weak on communism.  This would lead to the Federal Loyalty Program and a rhetorical war within the Democratic party represented by former Vice President and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.  During the 1948 campaign Dewey, to his credit did not get down and dirty with other Republicans who went after Truman as being “soft on communism.”  With their defeat, Republicans learned their lesson and in future elections they had no compunction about using politics of the gutter.

(Whittaker Chambers)

It takes Risen almost halfway through the narrative to introduce Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.  According to Risen McCarthy had a “unique ability to braid the two strands of the Red Scare – the culture war and the politics of Cold War security – into a single cord.”  McCarthy was a Senate “nobody” until he forced his way on the scene in January 1950 accusing the State Department of harboring 205 communists in its midst.  McCarthy’s story has been told before in excellent biographies by David Oshinsky, A CONSPIRACY SO IMMENSE: THE WORLD OF JOE McCARTHY and Larry Tye’s more recent work, DEMAGOGUE: THE LIFE AND LONG SHADOW OF SENATOR McCARTHY.  However, Risen presents an astute analysis reviewing the McCarthy hearings and his obfuscations, outright lies, and the careers he destroyed, as he turns to the role of an individual’s sexuality during the Red Scare.

Focusing on Carmel Offie, a U.S. State Department and later a Central Intelligence Agency official, who served as an indispensable assistant to a series of senior officials while combining his official duties with an ability to skirt regulations for his and others’ personal benefit.  Offie’s career is important because he was gay and becomes the center of Risen’s discussion of how McCarthy and his Republican allies believed that sexual perverts had infiltrated the government and “were perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”  McCarthy and his allies helped push the politics of homophobia at a time of animosity toward Washington, particularly the State Department which was blamed for the loss of China a few months before McCarthy gave his damning speech in Wheeling, West Virginia.  The name given to the move to dismiss and prosecute gay people was the “Lavender Scare.”  Thousands would lose their jobs and careers due to their machinations as they now had another tool to fight their culture and political wars against the Truman administration and their supporters. 

(Alger Hiss testifying in 1948)

It is clear from Risen’s account that McCarthy was able to rouse support because of the earlier work of the House Un-Activities Committee, the Chambers-Hiss imbroglio, and the actions of Richard M. Nixon.  McCarthy would take advantage of the fall of China to the Communists and the outbreak of the Korean War.  Further, certain personalities gravitated to the Wisconsin senator, and they would develop a relationship based on the need for power, ideology, and the ability to use each other.  Two of those individuals were Alfred Kohlberg, a millionaire ideologue who made his money taking advantage of cheap Chinese labor and McCarthy would become his megaphone concerning the loss of China and the role of the State Department.  The second individual was Roy Cohn, who in his later career became Donald Trump’s mentor.  In his earlier career he would join McCarthy’s staff and mirror his viciousness, vindictiveness, and willingness to lie.  Risen describes him as “the chief executive of McCarthyism, Inc., determining the senator’s targets, writing his talking points, and pushing him further than even he might have chosen to go.”

The fall of China to Mao Zedong and his forces greatly impacted American politics and paranoia.  This was fostered by what is referred to as “the China Lobby,” a term often used for groups favoring the Republic of China on Taiwan under the leadership of Kuomintang head, Chiang Kai-Shek, an American ally during World War II.  The China Lobby’s collective influence, fostered by Alfred Kohlberg and others, shaped policy and politics throughout the 1940s and 50s boosting and destroying careers as they enlisted McCarthy to their cause.

 If we would set up an opposition to the China Lobby it would be called the “China hands,” career State Department diplomats and officials who had grown critical of Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces during the Chinese Civil War.  They believed the US could not turn back to imperialism and the Chinese people had the right to determine their own future.  Risen lays out the China lobby’s victory through McCarthy as many Asia experts in the State Department had their careers destroyed as well as Asia scholars at Harvard.  Interestingly, the purge of the State Department deprived policy makers with experts on Asian countries and movements.  It would be interesting to ponder what would have occurred in Korea and Vietnam if these individuals had been in place to offer their expertise.  Perhaps the many errors surrounding the eventual “domino theory” could have been avoided.

Whether it was Hollywood, HUAC, or McCarthy, all of whom Risen explores in marvelous detail, the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s drew much of its energy from the ongoing war in Korea, exacerbated by the entrance of Chinese Communists troops into the war.  Interestingly, General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo became a satellite headquarters for the China lobby and the hard-core anti-communist right.  Once MacArthur was fired by Truman it provided the hard core right with further ammunition against the president, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and General George C. Marshall, and others who were critical of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang.

(Richard M. Nixon)

The atmospherics of the time period are expertly recreated by the author.  Risen’s descriptions of committee hearings, including the demeanor of witnesses, the response to questions, and the overall climate of this phase of American history allow the reader to feel as if they are in the committee rooms, the oval office, experiencing the political debates, and getting to know the major and minor players of the period.

A criticism of Risen is offered in Kevin Peraino’s New York Times book review entitled “Scarlet Fever: Culture in the United States is still driven by the political paranoia of the 1950s,” published on April 6, 2025.  Peraino correctly writes; “Risen, a reporter at The New York Times who has written a history of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, among other books, coyly insists that he is “not concerned with drawing parallels between the past and the present” and desires to “leave it up to the reader to find those as they will.” But this is disingenuous. In his 400-some pages Risen touches on anti-fascism, white supremacy, campus activism, anti-elitism, cancel culture, virtue signaling, doxxing, book bans, election interference, anti-immigrant racism, F.B.I. overreach, conspiracy thinking, antisemitism, the surveillance state, anti-colonialism, the Koch family and America First-style ultranationalism. To suggest all this amounts simply to a Rorschach test for his readers stretches credulity.”

In her recent New Yorker article, entitled; “Fear Factor: How the Red Scare reshaped American politics,” historian Beverly Gage concludes; “What can we learn about our current moment from all of this? Risen hopes that readers will decide for themselves. “This is a work of history, and as such it is not concerned with drawing parallels between the past and the present,” he writes. “I leave it up to the reader to find those as they will.” So, as a reader, let me offer a few thoughts.

The unfortunate truth is that most mechanisms of the Red Scare, including congressional hearings and loyalty investigations, would not be especially hard to revive. Indeed, recent developments have indicated that they might be deployed with genuine glee. Already, the Trump Administration has started asking for lists—of federal workers who attended D.E.I. training, of F.B.I. agents who investigated January 6th cases, of scientists engaged in now suspect areas of work. Trump himself has openly announced his intention to deploy the Justice Department and the F.B.I. against his personal, political, and ideological enemies.

(President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office)

The history of the Red Scare suggests that it won’t take many firings, federal inquiries, or acts of public humiliation to frighten a whole lot of people. But it also offers some reason to think that such intimidation methods may not be quite as effective this time around. For starters, there is much less agreement about the Trump Administration’s agenda than there was about Communism in its heyday. The Red Scare gained momentum because nearly everyone in American political life shared the same basic assumption: Communism is bad and poses an existential threat to the American way of life. It’s hard to come up with any contemporary issue that would generate the same powerful consensus.

Generally speaking, we also have better protections for political speech and assembly than Americans had in the fifties. Indeed, some of those protections are legacies of the Red Scare. In 1957, as the anti-Communist furor was winding down, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions limiting some of the most sweeping methods deployed against political dissenters, including parts of the Smith Act.

But to say that Trump won’t necessarily succeed in setting off a new Red Scare is not to say that he won’t try. And, in this sort of politics, the trying is part of the game. As long as the nation’s “cultural Marxists” feel vulnerable to random accusations or secret investigations, they’ll likely be more careful about what they do and say. As Roy Cohn once instructed a young Donald Trump, much can be accomplished by attacking first and dealing with the consequences later.”  Today, with trade wars, immigration, DOGE’s dismantling key aspects of the federal government, cutting foreign aid etc. we are now experiencing Cohn’s advice to Trump, and I wonder a few years down the road how bad the impact will be, and how long it might take to undo what he has done.

(Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954)