Newly Declassified Documents Reveal the Untold Stories of the Red Scare, a Hunt for Communists in Postwar America

In his latest book, journalist and historian Clay Risen explores how the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy upended the nation

Sara Georgini - Historian, Massachusetts Historical Society

April 1, 2025

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In the anxious years after World War II ended in 1945, nuclear power reshuffled the global order, and fear of communist intrigue in the United States ignited a Red Scare that targeted government workers and Hollywood stars alike. As book bans, loyalty oaths and blacklists became the norm, the House Un-American Activities Committee and later Senator Joseph McCarthy barreled through stormy congressional hearings, eager to sweep up any suspected Soviet sympathizers who crept through American life.

“If you had signed a petition, if you had given money to a group that was affiliated with communists, if you had a family member who had been a communist—suddenly you were running the risk of getting fired, of being called in front of a congressional committee,” says historian and journalist Clay Risen.

At some point in school, many Americans learned the names of the Red Scare’s most prominent targets: Alger Hiss, a government official who was convicted of perjury after lying about spying on behalf of the Soviet Union; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple executed for conspiracy to commit espionage; and J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” whose security clearance was revoked over his communist ties. While historians today generally agree that the evidence against Hiss and Julius (and, to a lesser extent, Oppenheimer) was solid, these well-publicized investigations represented just a fraction of the cases unfolding across the nation.

“Hundreds of New York City teachers were fired, suspended or punished because in the 1930s they affiliated with something that was considered too far to the left, whether it was the Communist Party or not,” Risen says. On a broader scale, thousands of innocent Americans would see their lives upended by the politically motivated witch hunt between roughly 1947 and 1954.

Risen’s new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America, draws on newly declassified documents to tell these overlooked stories and paint a lively portrait of the postwar era’s political climate. To mark the book’s release, Smithsonian magazine chatted with Risen about the roots of the Red Scare, the Hollywood blacklist and more. Read on for a condensed and edited version of the conversation.

In your books, you’ve followed whiskey trails, explored the Civil War’s disunion and traveled alongside Theodore Roosevelt. What drew you to the Red Scare?

There was always something about the Red Scare that intrigued me, going back to when I was a kid. It was such a part of the ecosystem of American culture, certainly in the 1980s and 1990s, people talking about things like McCarthyism and blacklists. It was something that stuck with me as an interesting historical question, because it wasn’t something I learned about in school, and yet it was clearly something that had left a really big mark on American culture.

I’m always interested in the way politics and culture intersect, and it’s a two-way street. I thought the Red Scare was a great way to examine that, because there’s a strong cultural component, but there’s also obviously a strong political component, both in terms of domestic politics and foreign policy coming out of World War II.

I started working on this book six-plus years ago. It was not my intention to write a book that reflected on current events, but that’s where we are. … So the book ends up being a work of history, and it offers parallels, lessons—and a road map for where we might be going today.

Why was it so different being a communist in the U.S. in the 1930s versus in the 1940s?

One of the main arguments in my book is that the Red Scare is at the heart largely a culture war. It’s one that pits the progressive New Deal culture of the 1930s against a revanchist, certainly anti-New Deal, but also anti-progressive conservatism. In the 1930s, there was not just the New Deal, and not just the tumult of the Great Depression, but the emergence of a culture in America that was very different from what had come before, certainly what had existed in the 1920s. It was cosmopolitan, pluralistic, very, very much in favor of an expansive government—but also in favor of things like women’s rights and civil rights and labor rights. It was a very much a different conception of America.

Among the people who shaped that culture, you had a wide variety of groups. They didn’t necessarily agree on a lot. But there was a sense that we’re in this together, and that there was a common cause. In the 1930s, fascism was growing as a threat in Germany and in Spain. It gave everyone a sense of what the stakes were.

Fast forward ten years or so. It’s the end of World War II, and we immediately find ourselves as a country in the grips of the Cold War. It’s going to be a war fought through propaganda, through espionage, subversion and all these things that suddenly gave fuel to people who said those folks from the 1930s are suspect because they have the taint of communism. What was acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable. We cannot run the risk of allowing foreign ideologies, pretty much anything left of center, to have anything to do with American society. If you were a communist, you were in trouble.

One of the people I talk about in my book is Julius Hlavaty, a math teacher from the Bronx High School of Science. He was the chair of the department and broadly considered the best math teacher in America. But in the 1930s, he dabbled in left-wing politics. He was called in front of Joseph McCarthy’s committee in 1953. He refused to talk about his past. He was fired for it and blacklisted from teaching. The whiplash that a lot of people experienced is what drove the fear that you could suddenly be in trouble for something that you had done earlier in your life. You could be in trouble for beliefs that you believed were fundamentally American, or beliefs that you were [previously] allowed to have as an American.

None of the teachers who were fired ever taught communism in their classes. They brought a sensibility of protecting and expanding rights, of discussing a more tolerant America. This was their viewpoint, and suddenly that was forbidden.

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman sought Congress’ support in sending military aid to Greece, whose government was fighting a civil war against communist rebels. Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan who had previously been an isolationist, told the president that the only way he would win over Congress was to “make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.” How did Truman’s actions help spark the Red Scare?

When the Cold War became this imperative after the Greek crisis, Truman … gave a speech in front of Congress that was full of fervor about what the Soviet threat looked like. I don’t think that Truman really understood the extent to which that would set off hysteria domestically. He signed an executive order that created a loyalty test program calling for federal workers to be investigated, and millions of people were. No spies were ever found. The program metastasized. It became a model for state and local loyalty programs. And that investigation list was not secret. It was used to go after people in all aspects of life. This is where the fear at a grassroots level starts to come out. We talk about politics as downstream of culture. But I think it’s a two-way street. Politics and policy drove culture, and it starts with the decisions Truman made in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Red Scare has a massive cast of characters. How did you choose whom to follow?

I could have made this a McCarthy story. But I didn’t think McCarthy was the whole story. McCarthy comes along really chronologically halfway through the story [in the early 1950s], and there’s a lot that happened before he was even on the scene.

The really tough part was sewing this all together and trying to tell compelling individual episodes, life stories, grand scenes, intimate scenes and make them make sense as a whole.

It was a fun challenge. For the past few years, I have been an obituaries writer at the New York Times. In a really weird way, it’s been great training for this book. First of all, it’s basically writing history, in a really compelling way.

Wait, how do you write a good obituary?

Any obituary has to be able to, in relatively few words, not only tell the life of somebody, but tell a through line about that person and tell why that person is relevant is impactful. Sometimes it’s obvious that they are a famous actor or a politician, but oftentimes it’s not. They exist in a niche, or are reflective of something, even if they themselves did not have a big impact. [Knowing how to craft] a compelling, readable little story was great for this book, because there are a lot of characters who come and go. My test was: How do you make them memorable, and how do you make them contribute to the story?

What happened to the Hollywood Ten, a group of producers, directors and screenwriters who were jailed and blacklisted for refusing to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947?

It was a huge story at the time, and it makes for gripping reading, because these are all larger-than-life characters. There was the true believer, [playwright and screenwriter] John Howard Lawson, who had maintained his position in the Communist Party. You had the loyal doubter in [screenwriter] Dalton Trumbo, who had been a party member for a little while, decided it was not for him but remained loyal to the left and very much stood up alongside these guys. And you had, essentially, a couple of Judas characters.

There’s the original Hollywood Ten and the creation of the blacklist. Then HUAC comes back a few years later and decides to focus on Hollywood again, but this time to go after actors. They’re tragic stories because they are names that were ascendant at the time. They were going to be huge stars. And then they were not. They had their contracts canceled. Some of them went to jail, but most of them were just drummed out of the industry.

If you can’t write for Hollywood, you can write for other places. If you can’t act in Hollywood, you can’t really go anywhere, because the theater world was very connected with Hollywood. One guy ended up selling used cars. Another found a job teaching in a small girls’ school.

Why were people in Hollywood, actors and screenwriters, being treated like national security threats? It was one of the really terrible parts of the Red Scare, because there was no justification, really, for what happened to Hollywood. And yet it was such a central part of this story.

Looking back, it’s often the figures who are more cultural than political who end up taking the most impressive stands. [Folk singer] Woody Guthrie was an immensely popular figure, and he used that platform to tell the stories of migrant workers in California. Trumbo and [novelists] Howard Fast and Dashiell Hammett went to jail. People saw their books removed and sometimes burned. Yet they stood by their beliefs. It’s important that those were the people who were willing to stand up at a time when a lot of politicians, jurists, lawyers and judges did not.

How did the Red Scare influence the careers of Richard Nixon, then-vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, then-president of the Screen Actors Guild? In 1947, Reagan testified in front of HUAC, saying that the guild had “been eminently successful in preventing [communists] from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority.”

Nixon is a really important character, because he was fundamentally anti-communist. He was concerned about espionage. Here was someone who came into Congress as [a Republican representative] critical of the New Deal, critical of communism. He clearly demonstrated great political skills. He was a climber. Nixon took a detour and became vice president [in 1953]. That was because of his ability to find the political wind and figure out exactly where it was going.

Ronald_Reagan HUAC Testimony Excerpt, 1947

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The weird thing with Nixon is that he was both a “red-baiter” and at times a moderate. He was on the House Un-American Activities Committee when it investigated Hollywood. And Nixon was very sympathetic with what Reagan was saying: We don’t like communism, but at the end of the day, communism has no real toehold in America. We just need to expose these people, but we don’t need to blacklist them. The public will take care of it.

The McCarthy hearings took place in 1953 and 1954, a few years after HUAC’s investigations into the Hollywood Ten and Alger Hiss. How did the media cover these proceedings? Journalist Edward R. Murrow, for example, criticized McCarthy in a 1954 television broadcast, arguing, “His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.”

Murrow was a hero because of his famous broadcast against McCarthy. He was a very diligent, very smart, systematic reporter. He knew that it was probably useless for him to come out early in the process and just get up on a soapbox. So instead, he was steadily building his own reputation, building a case against McCarthy, building a case against the Red Scare, so that when he made his statement, it landed.

One of the things that I thought was interesting was that Murrow used a lot of blacklisted writers on his show. They weren’t public about it. Murrow would hire them to write scripts for various shows that he was doing that didn’t necessarily have anything explicitly to do with the Red Scare. But so much of the history of America that he painted was one that was implicitly a critique of the Red Scare. He was both laying out a vision [and] also helping people who needed the money. That speaks volumes about Murrow as a journalist and about his character.

Murrow on McCarthy, no fear, 1954

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The Red Scare unfolded amid all of this other incredible political activity, including the civil rights movement and the push for women’s rights. How did it affect these causes?

One thing that I hope comes across was that of all the sectors of [activist causes] in the 1930s, the civil rights movement is the one that really suffered due to the Red Scare. The Communist Party, one of its major focuses during the 1930s was civil rights and advocacy on behalf of African Americans, particularly in the South, but also Latino Americans out west, and immigrants and migrant workers. The civil rights movement experienced an unchosen pause [in the 1940s], in part because of the Red Scare. It was only in the mid- and late 1950s that a new type of civil rights activist [arose], led by Martin Luther King Jr., one that was very adamantly anti-communist—still on the left, but with a very different approach.

As a historian, how do you make connections between the past and the present?

My approach was fairly hands-off, to say, “These are things that are going to resonate today, but I am not going to try to predetermine how those things resonate.” Of course, you can always find parallels, but it’s almost as important to find where there are no parallels, or where the parallels break down. There’s an element to what’s going on today that draws directly on a genealogy that goes back to the Red Scare, but at the same time, it’s 2025. There are obviously lots of differences. What I try to get across to readers is both the value of looking back to history, but also maybe with enough humility, warning against reading too much into history.

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Sara Georgini is series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She is the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family. Bluesky: @sarageorgini.bsky.social