The Red Scare Was No Moral Panic

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission. 

One central left-wing myth, underlying many other beliefs, is that the United States is a “McCarthyite” society prone to “Red Scares.” The belief props up the narrative the political left uses to pooh-pooh any concerns about socialism these days, but itself is founded on a misleading understanding of history.

According to the now standard media and academic storyline, the Red Scare was simply a case of rube politicians abusively harassing innocent teachers and actors, whom they falsely accused of being Communist agents or assets, throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s—and such insane behavior could begin again at any time.

The problem is that we now know for a fact that it wasn’t just baseless paranoia.

In the mid-1990s the U.S. government declassified the Venona cables, intercepted Soviet missives detailing post–World War Two Soviet espionage activities within the United States, which means we now know that most of the more prominent persons accused of spying for the Russkis during the Cold War were in fact spying for the Russkis during the Cold War.

Not that you’re likely to see these revelations reflected in left-wing syllabi. One textbook, America, Past and Present, opens a discussion of the McCarthy and anti-Communist era by presenting the Red Scare as paranoia, saying that the “fear of Communism abroad” was also turned against home front citizens not by “Democrats” but by “politicians willing to exploit the public’s deep-seated anxiety.”

The textbook frowns on the American public’s response to worldwide communism: “The Truman Administration, portraying the men in the Kremlin as inspired revolutionaries bent on world conquest, frightened the American people [who] viewed the Soviet Union as the successor to Nazi Germany”; “the Justice Department further heightened fears of subversion [by charging] eleven officials of the Communist party with advocating the violent overthrow of the government”….The real story, the book hints, is the emotional reaction to these events, not the events themselves.

No wonder, then, that Senator McCarthy, the textbook claims, “failed to unearth a single confirmed Communist in government,” despite keeping the entire Truman presidential administration “in turmoil.”

Hollywood certainly supports the preferred academic and journalistic version of the historical narrative. Films lionize Tinseltown dwellers accused of being Communist spies or sympathizers during the Cold War. Most prominently, Trumbo—which drew several Academy Award nominations—focused on a screenwriter whose former membership in the Communist Party drew criticism from pro-American celebrities like Hedda Hopper and John Wayne and led to his becoming un-hirable under his own name during the Hollywood blacklist era of the 1950s and early 1960.

Dalton Trumbo is the unabashed hero of the piece, which presents his financial difficulties in wrenching detail: he closes it by speaking about how the Blacklist “victimized” everyone in what seems on the surface to be a conciliatory speech.

There’s just one problem with all of this tear-jerking about “civil rights violations:” Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, and so—with the probable exception of most of those on Tail Gunner Joe’s first bad-judgment “list of names”—were most of those accused of espionage or other pro-Soviet activity during this period.

Hollywood is repeating the same mistake as the activist lessons, textbooks, and articles that dismiss the Red Scare as a moral panic. But how did everyone get it so wrong?

In part, it’s because the U.S. government concealed the truth. In the 2007 book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, renowned conservative historian M. Stanton Evans argues that much of the strong and immediate backlash to McCarthy’s allegations occurred because the government wasn’t about to admit how real McCarthy’s worries were about infiltration. U.S. officials from both parties “weren’t eager to have [the reality of ] Communist penetration on their watch, and their failure to do much about it,” broken down in front of the general public.

The Venona Cables revealed the truth. Very often, Evans argues, “these McCarthy cases were right there in the Soviet cables.” In other words, data recently obtained from no-longer- Soviet Russia demonstrates that specific individuals long thought to be martyrs of a kind were in fact “Communists, Soviet agents, or assets of the KGB—just as McCarthy had suggested.”

Why is this a problem? Isn’t it still persecution of Americans for their private thoughts? Something we don’t fully appreciate today is that being a Communist at that time didn’t just mean holding a mildly unfashionable opinion.

As film critic Godfrey Cheshire notes in a review of Trumbo, the film is deceitful when “it invites us to the [sic] see the Communist Party USA as just another political party rather than as the domestic instrument of a hostile and ultra-murderous foreign tyranny.”

In truth, as historian Ron Capshaw writes, the film’s “Trumbo-the- free- speech- avatar” is highly inconsistent with “Trumbo the actual person.”

[Trumbo’s] daughter Nikola has said that being a communist in that period had ‘nothing to do with Russia’ but was instead about the ‘rights of workers.’ If so, Trumbo spent a great deal of ‘wasted’ time defending Joseph Stalin. It is easy to confirm his zigs and zags in accord with the policy changes out of Moscow throughout much of his adult life…

To help the non-interventionist cause, Trumbo even defended the Third Reich. In response to Hitler’s crackdown on France, the famous civil libertarian disputed reports of Nazi brutality coming out of France, declaring that ‘To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman.’

While horrifying, this is at some level not surprising. Russians and other Eastern Europeans have a long tradition of maskirovka—skillful camouflage designed to confuse and manipulate an opponent—and subtle infiltration of systems has long been a strategy for Communists of all backgrounds.

So why won’t American teachers and textbooks and journalists admit it? Maybe because admitting that Communist infiltration of the United States, abetted by geopolitical foes like Russia and Red China, was never a made-up bogeyman would mean realizing that such a threat could still be a real threat to American national interests.

Picture by Queensland State Archives on Flickr & Icon added by Jared Gould