Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, on August 23, 1953. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons
In 1938, in the face of rising fascism in Europe, the United States Congress created the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Preceded by at least two internal security committees meant to expose Communist activity in the United States, the Dies Committee, named after its chair, Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr., lasted until the end of the war. It was almost immediately followed by a new body, the House Un-American Activities Committee, later known as HUAC, that set out to investigate Russian spy networks, the Communist Party of the United States, and so-called “fellow travelers”—progressives who were, with or without their knowledge, Communist-adjacent.
The Red Scare that followed World War II is largely identified with Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. But the hunt for Communists—in Washington, Hollywood, the journalism establishment, and classrooms—was well underway by the time McCarthy gave his famous Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in February 1950. There, McCarthy waved a white paper, which he claimed was a list of 205 known Communists working in the State Department.
Later, McCarthy said it was 57 Communists on the list, while others claimed that what Tail Gunner Joe really pulled out of his vest pocket was a grocery list.
Whatever. McCarthy’s grand gesture was what President Donald Trump, in his incarnation as an unsuccessful real estate developer and casino owner, calls “creative hyperbole.” The list may have been fake, but it helped Americans get the point.
Politicians really got the point. 1950 was a midterm election year, after all. The political uproar over McCarthy’s accusations put Democrats, who had been investigating subversion for over a decade, on their back foot. Washington Postcartoonist Herb Block stitched the whole phenomenon together with a neologism: “McCarthyism.”
In the 1950 Congressional midterm campaign, Joe McCarthy took the fight straight to the heart of the Democratic party. That summer, he spoke at a rally for fellow Senator Forrest C. Donnell, a Missouri Republican, and coined the word “Commiecrats” for his opposition.
Sound familiar? A powerful political figure making up numbers, conjuring faceless foreign enemies, inventing disparaging names for his political opponents, and insisting that some Democrats were actual Communists? In any case, it worked. The Republicans took 28 House seats from the Democrats and five Senate seats, setting the GOP up to seize the Senate majority and the presidency in 1952.
As it turns out, culture wars pay. And, as many people have pointed out before me, there’s another connection between McCarthy and Trump. That was Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer who cut his teeth on hunting Communists by McCarthy’s side, scoured government libraries abroad for subversive books, and perfected the art of filing aggressive, specious lawsuits to get his way.
But as journalist and historian Clay Risen points out in his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthy and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, 2025), if the Communist witch hunts promoted by McCarthy and dozens of other public figures were a grave threat to democracy, they also distract us from why communism was so attractive to Americans of all races, and what it promised as a route to a more perfect democracy.
Yes, communism was politics. But it was also a romance about what the United States could be if it embraced socialism. The witch hunt narrative also draws a veil across why professional anti-Communist witnesses Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, came to regret the choices they had made so deeply that they dedicated themselves to destroying others.
Show notes:
Clay Risen appeared in Episode 11, You Are Dead To Me, where he talked to us about obituaries as popular history.
Clay points out that there really was Soviet espionage in the United States: listeners who want to know more may wish to read Herbert Romerstein and
Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America (Regency, 2014).
More than one person has equated the McCarthy period with the Salem Witch Trials and other moral panics in the United States. Listeners may wish to revisit Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible.
Claire raises a theme of Clay’s book, Americans’ genuine fear of nuclear weapons. That fear of World War persisted well past McCarthy’s dominance in American politics, and is expressed in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Clay discusses the sharp break between American political institutions and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA): James Traub discusses Hubert Humphrey’s role in purging communists from Minnesota progressive politics in episode 48, “The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights.”
Listeners who want to learn more about Whittaker Chambers may wish to read his best-selling 1952 memoir, Witness (Regency, 2014).
Claire’s favorite professional witness is Elizabeth Bentley; you can read more about her in Kathryn Olmstead, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Clay talks about how unusual William Wyler’s post-war movie, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), was—and how rare a film as critical of the United States as that would be until the 1960s.
You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. You can also keep up with Political Junkie content and watch me indulge my slightly perverse sense of humor on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and TikTok.
If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:
Episode 68, Arise, Ye Workers From Your Slumbers: A conversation with Maurice Isserman about American radicalism, past and present, and his new book, "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism."
Episode 25, Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book "Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s."
Episode 20, Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice: A conversation with historian Matthew Dallek about his book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right."
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