The Red Scare

McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American

History
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Subject: 20th Century: Post-1945, Political History, Cultural History, Labor and Working Class
History
Online Publication Date: Jul 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.6
Summary and Keywords
The second Red Scare refers to the fear of communism that permeated American politics,
culture, and society from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of
the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode of political repression lasted longer and
was more pervasive than the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and World
War I. Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin),
who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had
infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare predated and outlasted
McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single maverick politician.
Nonetheless, “McCarthyism” became the label for the tactic of undermining political
opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States.
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date: 16 April 2018

The initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism was built during the
first Red Scare, with the creation of an antiradicalism division within the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) and the emergence of a network of private “patriotic”
organizations. With capitalism’s crisis during the Great Depression, the Communist Party
grew in numbers and influence, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program
expanded the federal government’s role in providing economic security. The
anticommunist network expanded as well, most notably with the 1938 formation of the
Special House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, which in 1945 became
the permanent House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Other key
congressional investigation committees were the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
and McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Members of these
committees and their staff cooperated with the FBI to identify and pursue alleged
subversives. The federal employee loyalty program, formalized in 1947 by President
Harry Truman in response to right-wing allegations that his administration harbored
Communist spies, soon was imitated by local and state governments as well as private
employers. As the Soviets’ development of nuclear capability, a series of espionage cases,
and the Korean War enhanced the credibility of anticommunists, the Red Scare
metastasized from the arena of government employment into labor unions, higher
education, the professions, the media, and party politics at all levels. The second Red
Scare did not involve pogroms or gulags, but the fear of unemployment was a powerful
tool for stifling criticism of the status quo, whether in economic policy or social relations.
Ostensibly seeking to protect democracy by eliminating communism from American life,
anticommunist crusaders ironically undermined democracy by suppressing the
expression of dissent. Debates over the second Red Scare remain lively because they
resonate with ongoing struggles to reconcile Americans’ desires for security and liberty.
Keywords: anticommunism, communism, Martin Dies, Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal loyalty program, J.
Edgar Hoover, House Un-American Activities Committee, Joseph McCarthy, political repression, Red Scare
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The second Red Scare refers to the anticommunist fervor that permeated American
politics, society, and culture from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening
phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode lasted longer and was more
pervasive than the first Red Scare, which followed World War I and the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917. Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy
(R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of
Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare in fact
predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single
politician. “McCarthyism” remains an apt label for the demagogic tactic of undermining
political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United
States. But that term is too narrow to capture the complex origins, diverse
manifestations, and sprawling cast of characters involved in the multidimensional conflict
that was the second Red Scare. Defining the American Communist Party as a serious
threat to national security, government and nongovernment actors at national, state, and
local levels developed a range of mechanisms for identifying and punishing Communists
and their alleged sympathizers. For two people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, espionage
charges resulted in execution. Many thousands of Americans faced congressional
committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative
judgements in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to
deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment.
Interpretations of the second Red Scare have ranged between two poles, one
emphasizing the threat posed to national security by the Communist Party and the other
emphasizing the threat to democracy posed by political repression. In the 1990s, newly
accessible Soviet and U.S. intelligence sources revealed that more than three hundred
American Communists—some Manhattan Project technicians and other government
employees among them—indeed did pass information to the Soviets, chiefly during World
War II. Scholars disagree about whether all these people understood themselves to be
engaged in espionage and about how much damage they did to national security, but it is
clear that the threat of espionage was real. So too, however, was repression in the name
of catching spies. The second Red Scare remains a hotly debated topic because
Americans continue to differ on the optimal balance between security and liberty and how
to achieve it.
Anticommunism has taken especially virulent forms in the United States because of
distinctive features of its political tradition. As citizens of a relatively young and diverse
republic, Americans historically have been fearful of “enemies within” and have drawn on
their oft-noted predilection for voluntary associations to patrol for subversives. This
popular predisposition in turn has been easier for powerful interests to exploit in the
American context because of the absence of a parliamentary system (which elsewhere
produced a larger number of political parties as well as stronger party discipline) and of a
strong civil service bureaucracy. Great Britain, a U.S. ally in the Cold War, did not
experience a comparable Red Scare even though it too struggled against espionage.1
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The American Communist Party

Explaining American anticommunism requires an assessment of American communism.
The 19th-century writings of Karl Marx gave birth to an international socialist movement
that denounced capitalism for exploiting the working class. Some socialists pursued
reform through existing political systems while others advocated revolution. Russia’s
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 encouraged those in the latter camp. The American
Communist Party (CPUSA), established in 1919, belonged to the Moscow-based
Comintern, which provided funding and issued directives, ostensibly to encourage
Communist revolutions around the world but in practice to support Soviet foreign-policy
objectives. The CPUSA remained small and factionalized until the international economic
crisis and the rise of European fascism in the 1930s increased its appeal. During the
Great Depression, “the heyday of American communism,” party members won admiration
from the broader Left for their effective organizing on behalf of industrial and
agricultural workers and for their bold denunciation of lynching, poll taxes, and other
instruments of white supremacy. In 1935, party leaders adopted a strategy of cooperating
with noncommunists in a “Popular Front against fascism.” Party members joined or
organized groups that criticized Adolf Hitler’s policies and supported the Spanish
resistance to General Francisco Franco. They also drew connections between fascism
abroad and events at home, from the violent suppression of striking miners, textile
workers, and farmworkers, to the unfair trial of the “Scottsboro boys” (nine African
American teenagers from Alabama accused of raping two white women), to prohibitions
on married women’s employment. Not always aware of the participation of Communists,
diverse activists worked through hundreds of Popular Front organizations on behalf of
labor, racial and religious minorities, and civil liberties. The CPUSA itself grew to about
75,000 members in 1938; many times that number participated in Popular Front causes.2
Because rank-and-file members often kept their party affiliation secret as they attempted
to influence Popular Front groups, the term “front organization” came to connote
duplicity rather than solidarity.
The Popular Front period ended abruptly in August 1939, when the Soviet and German
leaders signed a nonaggression pact. Overnight the CPUSA abandoned its fight against
fascism to argue for “peace” and against U.S. intervention in Europe. Exposing the
American party leadership’s subservience to Moscow, this shift alienated many party
members as well as the noncommunist leftists and liberals who had been willing to
cooperate toward shared objectives. In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact by invading the
Soviet Union, and the Soviets became American allies. Reversing course again, American
Communists enthusiastically supported the Allied war effort, and the party’s general
secretary, Earl Browder, adopted a reformist rather than revolutionary program. With
Hitler’s defeat, however, the fragile Soviet-American alliance dissolved; U.S. use of atomic
weapons in Japan and Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe inaugurated the long Cold
War between the two powers. In 1945 William Z. Foster replaced Browder at the head of
the American party, which now harshly denounced capitalism and President Harry
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Truman’s foreign policy. Riven by internal disputes and increasingly under attack from
anticommunists, the CPUSA became more isolated. Its numbers had dwindled to below
10,000 by 1956, when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what
many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for
the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. After
these revelations, the CPUSA faded into insignificance.3
As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils
nor saints. The party’s secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty
of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was
demonized. On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by
the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice. The party was a dynamic
part of the broader Left that in the 1930s and 1940s advanced the causes of labor,
minority rights, and feminism.4
The Formation of an Anticommunist Coalition

Anticommunists were less unified than their adversary; diverse constituencies mobilized
against communism at different moments.
During the violent industrial conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employers
and employer associations frequently avoided acknowledging workers’ grievances, by
charging that foreign-born radicals were fomenting revolution. Employers often enlisted
local law officers and private detectives in their efforts to quell labor militancy, which
they cast as unpatriotic.
The correlation between labor unrest and anticommunist zeal was enduring. The first
major Red Scare emerged during the postwar strike wave of 1919 and produced the
initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism. Diverse strikes across the
nation coincided with a series of mail bombings by anarchists. Attorney General A.
Mitchell Palmer charged that these events were evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy.
Palmer directed the young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of
the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI),
to arrest radicals and their associates and to deport the foreign born among them. The
ensuing raids and surveillance activities violated civil liberties, and in 1924 the bureau
was reined in. But Hoover became FBI director, a position he would hold until his death in
1972. Intensely anticommunist, and prone to associating any challenge to the economic
or social status quo with communism, Hoover would be a key player in the second Red
Scare. Other early participants in the anticommunist network were Red squads on
metropolitan police forces, patriotic societies and veterans’ groups, and employer
associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.5
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After the wartime federal sedition and espionage laws expired, and after the FBI was
curbed, state and local officials took primary responsibility for fighting communism. By
1921 thirty-five states had passed sedition or criminal syndicalism laws (the latter
directed chiefly at labor organizations and vaguely defined to prohibit sabotage or other
crimes committed in the name of political reform).6 Through the 1920s and into the
1930s, anticommunists mobilized in local battles with labor militants; for example, in
steel, textiles, and agriculture and among longshoremen. The limitations of the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) in organizing mass-production industries led to the emergence
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized workers regardless of
craft into industry-wide unions such as the United Automobile Workers. Encouraged by
the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the CIO pioneered aggressive tactics such as
the sit-down strike and further distinguished itself from the AFL with its organizing
efforts among women and racial minorities. These positions attracted Communists to the
CIO’s service, leading anti-union forces to charge that the CIO was a tool of Communist
revolutionaries (a charge that the AFL echoed). Charges of communism were especially
common in response to labor protests by African Americans in the South and by Mexican
Americans in the West.7
Education was another anticommunist concern during the interwar period. Groups such
as the American Legion pressured school boards to drop “un-American” books from the
curriculum. By 1936, twenty-one states required loyalty oaths for teachers. School boards
and state legislatures investigated allegations of subversion among teachers and college
professors.8 Also in these interwar years, organized Catholics joined the campaign against
“godless” communism. Throughout this period, the federal role in fighting communism
consisted mainly of using immigration law to keep foreign-born radicals out of the
country, but the FBI continued to monitor the activities of Communists and their alleged
sympathizers.9
The political and legal foundations of the second Red Scare thus were under construction
well before the Cold War began. In Congress, a conservative coalition of Republicans and
southern Democrats had crystallized by 1938. Congressional conservatives disliked many
New Deal policies—from public works to consumer protection to, above all, labor rights—
and they frequently charged that the administering agencies were influenced by
Communists. In 1938 the House authorized a Special Committee to Investigate Un-
American Activities, headed by Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat. Dies was known as a
leading opponent of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the CIO, and the Fair Labor
Standards Act of 1938. The Dies Committee devoted most of its attention to alleged
Communists in the labor and consumer movements and in New Deal agencies such as the
Works Progress Administration (WPA). For his chief investigator, Dies hired J. B.
Matthews, a self-proclaimed former fellow traveler of the Communist Party who later
would serve on Senator McCarthy’s staff. Matthews forged a career path for ex-leftists
whose perceived expertise was valuable to congressional committees, the FBI, and anti–
New Deal media magnates such as William Randolph Hearst. In one early salvo against
the Roosevelt administration, Dies Committee members called for the impeachment of
Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins because she refused to deport the Communist labor
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leader Harry Bridges; Perkins claimed (correctly) that she did not have the legal authority
to deport him.10 The Bridges controversy and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939 gave
impetus to the passage of Alien Registration Act of 1940, known as the Smith Act for its
sponsor Representative Howard Smith, the Virginia Democrat whose own House
committee was investigating alleged Communist influence on the National Labor
Relations Board. The Smith Act made it illegal to advocate overthrow of the government,
effectively criminalizing membership in the Communist Party, and allowed deportation of
aliens who ever had belonged to a seditious organization. Congressional conservatives
also engineered passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibited federal employees from
engaging in political campaigning and from belonging to any group that advocated “the
overthrow of the existing constitutional form of government.”11 The law’s passage was
driven by the first provision, which responded to allegations that Democratic politicians
were using WPA jobs for campaign purposes. It was the Hatch Act’s other provision,
however, that created a vital mechanism of the second Red Scare.
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The Federal Loyalty Program

To enforce the Hatch Act, the U.S. attorney general’s office generated a list of subversive
organizations, and employing agencies requested background checks from the FBI, which
checked its own files as well as those of the Dies Committee. FBI agents interviewed
government employees who admitted having or were alleged to have associations with
any listed group. Congressional conservatives continued accusing the Roosevelt
administration of harboring Communists, even after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941 put the Soviets in the Allied camp. Martin Dies charged that the wartime
Office of Price Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other
regulatory agencies were run by Communists and “crackpot, radical bureaucrats.” The
Civil Service Commission (CSC) created a loyalty board, which reviewed employees
named by Dies. When most of those employees were retained, the Dies Committee
charged that CSC examiners themselves had subversive tendencies. In 1943 the Dies
Committee subpoenaed hundreds of CSC case files in an effort to prove that charge.12
The Roosevelt administration and its supporters dismissed Dies and his ilk as fanatics,
but in 1946 accusations that Communists had infiltrated government agencies began to
get traction. Public anxiety about postwar inflation and another strike wave was
intensified by Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and by Russian defector Igor
Gouzenko’s exposure of a Canadian spy ring. Highlighting the “Communists in
government” issue helped the Republican Party make sweeping gains in the 1946
midterm elections, leading President Harry Truman to formalize and expand the
makeshift wartime loyalty program.
The second Red Scare derived its momentum from fears that Communist spies in
powerful government positions were manipulating U.S. policy to Soviet advantage. The
federal employee loyalty program that Truman authorized in an attempt to neutralize
right-wing accusations became instead a key force in sustaining and spreading “the great
fear.” Truman’s March 1947 Executive Order 9835 directed executive departments to
create loyalty boards to evaluate derogatory information about employees or job
applicants. Employees for whom “reasonable grounds for belief in disloyalty” could be
established were to be dismissed. To assist in implementing the loyalty program, the
Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was made public for the
first time. Millions of federal employees filled out loyalty forms swearing they did not
belong to any subversive organization and explaining any association they might have
with a designated group. Agency loyalty boards requested name checks and sometimes
full field investigations by the FBI, which promptly hired 7,000 additional agents. Among
the many sources that the FBI checked were the ever-expanding files of the House Un-
American Activities Committee (HUAC), which in 1945 had replaced the Dies
Committee.13
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During the program’s peak between 1947 and 1956, more than five million federal
workers underwent loyalty screening, resulting in an estimated 2,700 dismissals and
12,000 resignations. Those numbers exclude job applicants who were rejected on loyalty
grounds. More importantly, those numbers exclude the tens of thousands of civil servants
who eventually were cleared after one or more rounds of investigation, which could
include replying to written interrogatories, hearings, appeals, and months of waiting,
sometimes without pay, for a decision. The program’s oft-noted flaws included the
ambiguous definition of “derogatory” information and the anonymity of informants who
provided it, the reliance on an arbitrary and changing list of subversive organizations,
and a double-jeopardy problem for employees for whom a move from one government job
to another triggered reinvestigation on the same grounds. Those grounds usually
consisted of a list of individually minor associations that dated back to the 1930s.
Because loyalty standards became more restrictive over time, employees who did not
change jobs too faced reinvestigation, even in the absence of new allegations against
them.14
Loyalty standards tightened as the political terrain shifted. During the summer of 1948,
the ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC
that in the 1930s and early 1940s they had managed Washington spy rings that included
dozens of government officials, including the former State Department aide Alger Hiss. A
Harvard Law School graduate who had been involved in the formation of the United
Nations, Hiss vigorously denied the allegations, and Truman officials defended him. Hiss
was convicted of perjury in 1950. Meanwhile, the Soviets developed nuclear capability
sooner than expected, Communists took control in China, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
were convicted, and North Korea invaded South Korea. This combination of events
increased the Truman administration’s vulnerability to partisan attacks. Senator
McCarthy claimed to explain those events by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the
U.S. State Department. Congress then in effect broadened the loyalty program by passing
Public Law 733, which empowered heads of sensitive agencies to dismiss an employee on
security grounds. An employee deemed loyal could nonetheless be labeled a security risk
because of personal circumstances (alcoholism, homosexuality, a Communist relative)
that were perceived to create vulnerability to coercion. A purge of homosexuals from the
State Department and other agencies ensued. Over Truman’s veto, in 1950 Congress also
passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required Communist organizations to
register with the U.S. attorney general and created the Subversive Activities Control
Board. The new Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Patrick
McCarran (D-Nevada), was soon vying with HUAC for headlines about the battle against
Communists on the home front. After McCarthy claimed the loyalty program was clearing
too-many employees on appeal, Truman’s Executive Order 10241 of April 1951 lowered
the standard of evidence required for dismissal. That same month the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the loyalty program’s constitutionality, a reminder that all three branches of
government built the scaffolding for the Red Scare. The standards changed again in April
1953 with Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which extended the security risk
standard to every civil service job, imposed more-stringent “morals” tests, and eliminated
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defendants’ right to a hearing. It was not unusual for a career civil servant to be
investigated under the Hatch Act during World War II and then again after each executive
order. Of the more than 9,300 employees who were cleared after full investigation under
the 1947 standard, for example, at least 2,756 saw their cases reopened under the 1951
standard. Employees who had been cleared never knew when their case might be
reopened. Even after the loyalty program was curbed in the late 1950s, the FBI continued
to keep tabs on former loyalty defendants. Loyalty investigations often did lasting damage
to employees’ economic security, mental and physical health, personal relationships, and
civic participation.15
Because most of those dismissed under the loyalty program were low-level employees,
the program’s policy impact, at least outside the State Department’s jurisdiction, has
sometimes been underestimated. Unlike dismissals, investigations occurred across the
ranks, so all civil servants felt the pressure. Case files declassified in the early 21st
century indicate that loyalty investigations truncated or redirected the careers of many
high-ranking civil servants, who typically kept secret the fact that they had been
investigated. Many of them were noncommunist but left-leaning New Dealers who
advocated measures designed to expand democracy by regulating the economy and
reducing social inequalities. Their fields of expertise included labor and civil rights,
consumer protection, welfare, national health insurance, public power, and public
housing; their marginalization by charges of disloyalty impeded reform in these areas and
narrowed the scope of political discourse more generally. Through the federal loyalty
program, conservative anticommunists exploited public fears of espionage to block policy
initiatives that impinged on private-sector prerogatives.16
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The Fear Spreads

The loyalty program for federal employees was accompanied by similar programs focused
on port security and industrial security. Private employees on government contracts also
faced screening, and state and local governments soon imitated the federal programs.
Public universities revived mandatory loyalty oaths. In 1953, Americans employed by
international organizations such as the United Nations became subject to Civil Service
Commission loyalty screening, over protests that such screening violated the sovereignty
of the international organizations. One researcher estimated in 1958 that approximately
20 percent of the U.S. labor force faced some form of loyalty test.17 Although espionage
trials and congressional hearings were the most-sensational manifestations of
McCarthyism, loyalty tests for employment directly affected many more people.
Beyond the realms of government, industry, and transport, anticommunists trained their
sights on those arenas where they deemed the potential for ideological subversion to be
high, including education and the media. The entertainment industry was an especially
attractive target for congressional investigating committees seeking to generate
sensational headlines. The House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) 1947
investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood was an early example. Building on an
earlier investigation by California’s Tenney Committee, HUAC subpoenaed a long list of
players in the film industry. Many of them, including the actor Ronald Reagan, cooperated
with HUAC by naming people they believed to be Communists. By contrast, a group that
became known as the “Hollywood Ten” invoked their First Amendment right to freedom
of association and challenged the committee’s right to ask about their political views.
Eventually, after the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, the ten directors and
screenwriters spent six months in prison. For more than a decade beyond that, they were
blacklisted by Hollywood employers.18 Later, “unfriendly witnesses” declined to answer
questions posed by the investigating committee, by citing their Fifth Amendment right
not to incriminate themselves. This tactic provided legal protection from prison, but
“taking the Fifth” was widely interpreted as tantamount to an admission of guilt, and
many employers refused to employ anyone who had so pleaded. Another limitation of the
Fifth Amendment strategy was that it did not waive witnesses’ obligation to answer
questions about others. Congressional committees pressed witnesses to “name names” of
people they knew to be Communists as evidence that they were not sympathetic, or were
no longer sympathetic, to communism. Whether or not they answered questions about
their own politics, witnesses’ moral dilemma over whether to identify others as
Communists became one of the most familiar, and to critics most infamous, of
McCarthyism’s dramatic episodes.19
The entertainment industry blacklist did not end with HUAC’s investigation of Hollywood.
As countersubversives issued a steady flow of accusations, the cloud of suspicion
expanded. In 1950, the authors of the anticommunist newsletter Counterattack, who
included several former FBI agents, released a booklet called Red Channels: The Report
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of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. It listed 151 writers, composers,

producers, and performers and included a long list of allegedly subversive associations
for each person. The booklet was riddled with factual errors. Some of those listed were or
had been Communists, but others had not. In any case, they and those on similar lists
found it nearly impossible to get work in their fields; some could get hired only by
working under another name.
The fear of unemployment produced many ripple effects beyond those felt at the
individual level. The second Red Scare curtailed Americans’ willingness to join voluntary
organizations. Groups were added to the U.S. attorney general’s list over time, and
zealous anticommunists frequently charged that one group or another should be added to
the list, including such mainstream, reformist organizations as the National Council of
Jewish Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the
American Association of University Women. Very few of the roughly 280 organizations on
the official list engaged in illegal activity.20 Still, association with any listed group could
become a bar to employment, and also potentially a justification for exclusion from public
housing and veterans’ benefits. Rather than take chances, many people stopped
belonging to organizations. Being known as a “joiner” of causes acquired the connotation
of being an easy mark for Communists, and defense attorneys encouraged their clients to
present themselves as allergic to such activity.21 Civic groups lost membership, and many
Americans hesitated to sign petitions or engage in any activism that might possibly be
construed as controversial.
The second Red Scare also reshaped the American labor movement. By the end of World
War II, a dozen Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions had Communist party
members among their officers. Top CIO leaders tolerated Communists at first, valuing
their dedication and hoping to avoid internal division and external attack. In 1947,
however, congressional conservatives overrode President Harry Truman’s veto and
passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, required all union officers to
swear that they were not Communists or else to face loss of support from the National
Labor Relations Board. Many trade union members, especially Catholics, were intensely
anticommunist and stepped up their effort to oust Communists from their leadership. In
1948 the Communist Party made the position of its members in the labor movement more
difficult by supporting the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace rather than
President Truman. Liberal anticommunists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL)
and Americans for Democratic Action joined conservatives in attacking the CIO’s leftist-
led unions, which the CIO finally expelled in 1949 and 1950. The expulsions embittered
many workers and labor allies, and they did not prevent right-wing groups from
associating trade unionism with communism.22
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McCarthy’s Fall and the Waning of the Second

Red Scare
Many factors combined to weaken McCarthyism’s power in the latter half of the 1950s.
With a Republican in the White House as a result of the 1952 election, the partisan
motivation for attacking the administration as soft on communism diminished.
Opportunists such as Senator McCarthy made increasingly outrageous charges to remain
in the spotlight, straining the patience of President Dwight Eisenhower and other
Republican leaders such as Robert Taft of Ohio. In 1953 McCarthy became chair of the
Senate Committee on Government Operations, and he used its Subcommittee on
Investigations to hold hearings on alleged Communist influence in the State Department’s
Voice of America and overseas library programs. The book burnings that resulted from
the latter investigation, and the forced resignation of the committee’s research director, J.
B. Matthews, after he claimed that the Protestant clergy at large had Communist
sympathies, increased public criticism of McCarthy. Newspaper and television journalists
began featuring the cases of government employees unfairly dismissed as loyalty or
security risks, and various foundations and congressional committees undertook studies
that gave further impetus to demands for reforming the loyalty program. McCarthy
responded to his critics—from Edward Murrow of the See It Now television program to
his fellow legislators—by accusing them of Communist sympathies. His conduct and that
of his subordinate Roy Cohn in pressing unsubstantiated charges of disloyalty in the U.S.
Army led to televised hearings beginning in April 1954, which gave viewers an extended
opportunity to see McCarthy in action. McCarthy’s popularity declined markedly as a
result. In December the Senate censured McCarthy. A few months later, the FBI
informant Harvey Matusow recanted, claiming that McCarthy and others had encouraged
him to give false information and that he knew other ex-Communist witnesses, such as
Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz, to have done the same.
Changes in the composition of the Supreme Court also dampened the fervor of the
anticommunist crusade. Four justices were replaced between 1953 and 1957, and under
Chief Justice Earl Warren the court issued several rulings that limited the mechanisms
designed to identify and punish Communists. In 1955 and 1956, the court held that the
federal loyalty program could apply only to employees in sensitive positions. In 1959, the
court struck down the program’s reliance on anonymous informants, giving defendants
the right to confront their accusers.23 Meanwhile, on a single day in 1957, the court
limited the powers of congressional investigating committees, restricted the enforcement
of the Smith Act on First Amendment grounds and overturned the convictions of fourteen
members of the Communist Party of California, and reinstated John Stewart Service to
the State Department, which had dismissed him on loyalty grounds in 1951. Members of
the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) accused the Supreme Court of
weakening the nation’s defenses against communism, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
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angrily labeled June 17, 1957, “Red Monday.” Civil libertarians, by contrast, welcomed
the rulings but regretted that they were based narrowly on procedural questions rather
than on broad principles.24
With McCarthy’s disgrace and the Supreme Court’s restrictions on its machinery, the
second Red Scare lost much of its power. One government personnel director opined in
1962 that 90 percent of the people who had been dismissed on loyalty grounds in the
early 1950s would have had no difficulty under the same circumstances a decade later.
Even so, the damage lasted a long time. The applicant pool for civil service jobs
contracted sharply and did not soon recover. Former loyalty defendants, even those who
had been cleared, lived the rest of their lives in fear that the old accusations would
resurface. Sometimes they did; during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, many
talented people were passed over for appointments, not because hiring officials doubted
their loyalty, but because appointing them risked politically expensive controversy.25
The loyalty programs and blacklists wound down, but anticommunism remained a potent
force through the 1960s and beyond. After court rulings limited the usefulness of state
and national sedition laws against members of the Communist Party, FBI director Hoover
launched the secret COINTEL program to monitor and disrupt Communists and others he
deemed subversive. Targets soon included participants in the civil rights, anti–Vietnam
War, and feminist movements.26 Well into the 1960s, local Red Scares waxed and waned in
tandem with challenges to the local status quo, above all in southern contexts where
white supremacists battled civil rights activists. Segregationists such as Alabama
governor George Wallace and Mississippi senator James Eastland—who not incidentally
chaired SISS from 1955 to 1977—routinely linked race reform to communism and
charged that “outside agitators” bent on subverting southern traditions were behind
demands for integration and black voting rights.27
Discussion of the Literature

Scholarship on the second Red Scare has emerged in waves, responding to the
availability of new sources, changing historical methodologies, and shifting political
contexts.28
Initial debates centered on assessing the causes of, or motivations behind, the
anticommunist furor. Richard Hofstadter’s influential interpretation explained McCarthy’s
popularity in psychological terms as a manifestation of the “status anxiety” of those who
resented the changes associated with a more modern, pluralistic, secular society.
Treating McCarthyism as an episode of mass irrationality, Hofstadter argued that its “real
function” was “not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge
resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere
than in the Communist issue itself.”29 Subsequent scholarship demonstrated that
Hofstadter’s view neglected the role of elites, from congressional conservatives to liberal
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anticommunists to the FBI, in orchestrating the second Red Scare. Some accounts
emphasized the partisan pressures from Republicans and southern Democrats on the
Truman administration.30 Others placed a larger share of the responsibility on Cold War
liberalism itself. Some of these scholars wrote from a critical stance influenced by the
Vietnam-era disillusionment of the New Left, while others applauded liberal
anticommunism and focused on how McCarthy had discredited it.31 After the post-
Watergate strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act made FBI records accessible,
attention shifted to the repressive tactics of J. Edgar Hoover, who put citizens under
illegal surveillance, leaked information to congressional conservatives, and stood by
informants known to be unreliable.32
In depicting a top-down Red Scare orchestrated by elites, historians writing in the 1960s
and 1970s were out of step with their discipline’s shift toward social history. That
disjuncture was soon mitigated by an outpouring of studies of Communist activity at the
grassroots, in diverse local contexts usually far removed from foreign affairs.33
The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new
evidence from Soviet archives and U.S. intelligence sources such as the VENONA
decrypts. That evidence indicated that scholars had underestimated the success of Soviet
espionage in the United States as well as the extent of Soviet control over the American
Communist Party. Alger Hiss, contrary to what most liberals had believed, and contrary to
what he maintained until his death in 1996, was almost certainly guilty of espionage. A
few hundred other Americans were secret Communist Party members and shared
information with Soviet agents, chiefly during World War II.34 Some historians interpreted
the new evidence to put anticommunism in a more sympathetic light and to criticize
scholarship on the positive achievements of American Communists.35 Others concluded
that the reality of espionage did not lessen the damage done in the name of
anticommunism. The stakes of the debate rose after the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the United States produced the Patriot Act, which rekindled ideological disagreement
over the proper balance between national security and civil liberties; commentators who
feared that the “war on terrorism” would be used to quell domestic dissent cited
McCarthyism as the relevant historical precedent. The new evidence did not resolve
scholarly differences, but it produced a more complicated, frequently less romantic view
of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). The paradoxical lesson from several decades
of scholarship is that the same organization that inspired democratic idealists in the
pursuit of social justice also was secretive, authoritarian, and morally compromised by
ties to the Stalin regime.36
The opening of government records also afforded a clearer view of the machinery of the
second Red Scare, and that view has reinforced earlier judgements about its unjust and
damaging aspects. In addition to new books on Hoover and the FBI, scholars have
produced freshly documented studies of the Attorney General’s List of Subversive
Organizations (AGLOSO), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and leading
anticommunists and their informants.37
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Scholarship since the late 20th century has tried to transcend the old debates by turning
to new approaches. Comparative studies have been useful in exploring the interaction
between popular and elite forces in generating and sustaining anticommunism. Michael J.
Heale’s analysis of Red Scares in three states identifies a common denominator in the
role of political fundamentalists who feared the trend toward a “pluralistic order and a
secular, bureaucratizing state.” But local power struggles shaped the timing and target of
anticommunist furor. Detroit’s Red Scare erupted as the city’s manufacturing leaders
tried to defend their class prerogatives from unions; in Boston, conflict between Catholics
and Protestants fueled red-baiting, while Atlanta’s Red Scare became most virulent later,
as civil rights activists threatened white supremacy. These and other local- and state-level
studies demonstrate that the intensity of Red Scare politics was not a simple function of
the strength of the Communist threat. Rather, Red Scares caught fire where rapid change
threatened old regimes. Varying mixtures of elite and grassroots forces mobilized to
defend local hierarchies, whether of class, religion, race, or gender.38 International
comparisons are bearing fruit too, not least by bringing into sharper relief distinctive
aspects of state structure and political development that encouraged or restrained Red
Scares.39
Attention to gender as a category of historical analysis has added another dimension to

our understanding of the second Red Scare. The “containment” strategy for halting the
spread of communism abroad had a domestic counterpart that prescribed rigid gender
roles within the nuclear family. Domestic anticommunism was fueled by widespread
anxiety about the perceived threats to American masculinity posed by totalitarianism,
corporate hierarchy, and homosexuality. Congressional conservatives used charges of
homosexuality—chiefly male homosexuality—in government agencies to serve their own
political purposes. High-ranking women in government too were especially frequent
targets of loyalty charges, as conservative anticommunists tapped popular hostility to
powerful women to rally support for hunting subversives and blocking liberal policies.40
A related trend in the literature situates McCarthyism within a longer anticommunist

tradition. In addition to looking at 19th-century antecedents, early-21st-century work
explores the political and institutional continuities between the first and second Red
Scares and also notes how conservatives’ deployment of anticommunism to fracture the
Democratic Party’s electoral coalition along race and gender lines prefigured the New
Right ascendancy under President Ronald Reagan.41 This longer-term view also has
invited further attention to variations within anticommunism, yielding a more nuanced
portrait of its diverse conservative, liberal, labor, and socialist camps.42
Even as they continue to debate the second Red Scare’s origins and sustaining
mechanisms, scholars are paying more attention to its effects. Aided by newly accessible
materials such as FBI files and the unpublished records of congressional investigating
committees, historians are documenting in concrete detail how the fear of communism,
and the fear of punishment for association with communism, affected specific individuals,
organizations, professions, social movements, public policies, and government agencies.43
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The drive to eliminate communism from all facets and arenas of American life engaged
diverse players for many years, and scholars continue to catalogue its direct and indirect
consequences.
Primary Sources
In a useful 1988 survey of archival sources on McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker suggests
looking for evidence created by various categories of players: inquisitors, targets,
legitimizers, defenders of targets, and observers.44 It is with regard to the first two
categories, especially, that new sources have become accessible. FBI files on individuals
and organizations are revealing both about the targets and the inquisitors; some
frequently requested files are available online, and others can be obtained, with patience,
through a Freedom of Information Act Request. Washington, DC–area branches of the
National Archives hold records of surviving case files from the federal employee loyalty
program (Record Group 478.2), the Subversive Activities Control Board (Record Group
220.6), the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its predecessor (Record
Group 233.25.1, 233.25.2), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (Record Group
46.15), and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Record Group 46.13). The
rich papers of anticommunist investigator J. B. Matthews are at Duke University. The
Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries hold relevant collections on
each administration’s handling of “the communist problem.” The Library of Congress
holds the papers of Supreme Court justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas and of
Truman’s attorney general James McGranery, while the papers of the many U.S. and state
legislators who were prominent among the accusers and the accused can be found in
various archives in their home states. Records of the American Legion can be found at the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Bentley Historical Library, University of
Michigan.
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University holds
the papers of the prime target of the second Red Scare—the Communist Party USA—as
well as many related collections. The Fund for the Republic studied McCarthyism and
subsequently became a target; its papers are at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library
at Princeton University. Also at Princeton are the papers of Paul Tillett Jr., a political
scientist who in the 1960s collected but never published a wide range of data on
McCarthyism, and American Civil Liberties Union papers. Because so many groups and
individuals participated in the second Red Scare in one role or another, manuscript and
oral-history collections in archives all over the country hold relevant material. Good
examples include the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, which holds the records of the
Americans for Democratic Action, Highlander Folk School, and United Packinghouse
Workers Union, among many other pertinent collections; the National Lawyers’ Guild
papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; the papers of the Civil
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Rights Congress at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York
Public Library; and labor movement records at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University, and the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives, University of Maryland.
Among the many published memoirs of participants, see Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by
Slander (1950); Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952); Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public
Opinion (1957); Peggy Dennis, Autobiography of an American Communist (1977); and
John J. Abt, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer (1993).
Links to Digital and Visual Materials

• The Hollywood Ten (1950 documentary)
• Point of Order (1964 documentary with footage of 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings)
• Dies Committee hearings, 1938-1944 (University of Pennsylvania online gateway to
Internet Archive and Hathi Trust)
• Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the
Committee on Government Operations (McCarthy Hearings 1953–1954)
• Online Documents about McCarthyism at the Truman Presidential Library
• Online documents about McCarthyism at the Eisenhower Presidential Library
• “M’Carthy Charges Reds Hold U. S. Jobs,” Wheeling Intelligencer (WV), Feb. 10,
1950
• Excerpts from February 1950 Senate Proceedings on Senator Joe McCarthy’s Speech
Relating to Communists in the State Department
• Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (American
Business Consultants, 1950)
• Edward R. Murrow, See It Now: A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (CBS-TV,
March 9, 1954)
Further Reading
Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Goldstein, Robert Justin. American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive
Organizations. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. 2d ed. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
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Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That
Shaped American Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Heale, Michael J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–
1965. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in
the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Olmsted, Kathryn S. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005.
Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown,
1998.
Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Theoharis, Athan G., and John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the American
Inquisition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.
Notes:
(1.) Joan Mahoney, “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War: The Role of the Central
Government,” American Journal of Legal History 33, no. 1 (1989), 53–100; Markku
Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War (New York:
Routledge, 2001); and Michael J. Heale, “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy’: Anticommunism
and the Historians,” in Melvyn Stokes, ed., The State of U.S. History (New York: Berg,
2002), 131–153.
(2.) On Communist Party membership, see Soviet and American Communist Parties, in
Revelations from the Russian Archives, Library of Congress. For an introduction to the
vast literature on the Communist Party, see Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American
Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Robin D. G. Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The
Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997); and
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s
Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
(3.) Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton,
1991), 442; and Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 40th anniversary
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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(4.) Ellen Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston:
Bedford, 1994), 3; see also Michael Kazin, “The Agony and Romance of the American
Left,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995), 1488–1512. Since the opening of
Soviet archives at the end of the Cold War, an outpouring of scholarship has elaborated
on both sides of the paradox—on one hand, the American party’s complicity in espionage
and with the Stalin regime, and on the other hand, its vital role in democratic social
movements. For skepticism of this dualistic assessment of American communism, see
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San
Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 134–139.
(5.) Chad Pearson, “Fighting the ‘Red Danger’: Employers and Anti-communism,” Athan
Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism, 1920–1945,” and Michael J.
Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders: Anti-communism at State and Local Levels, 1921–
1946,” all in Robert Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares”: Anti-communism and Political
Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). See also Kim
E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red
Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001).
(6.) The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Minneapolis sedition law in 1920. Heale, “Citizens
versus Outsiders,” 46–47.
(7.) Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders,” 53.
(8.) Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1998), 67.
(9.) Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders”; Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-
communism.”
(10.) Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 44; Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and
the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 53–
85, 88.
(11.) Eleanor Bontecou, The Federal Loyalty-Security Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1953); and Rebecca Hill, “The History of the Smith Act and the Hatch
Act: Anti-communism and the Rise of the Conservative Coalition in Congress,” in
Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares,” 315–346.
(12.) Dies was not alone; in 1944, Governor John Bricker of Ohio, who was the Republican
nominee for vice president, claimed that Communists ran the whole New Deal. Storrs,
Second Red Scare, 79–81, 251 (quotation), 287.
(13.) Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program; Storrs, Second Red Scare.
(14.) Storrs, Second Red Scare (program statistics, 292).
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(15.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 111, 286–292. On the dismissal of homosexuals, see David
Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the
Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
(16.) Storrs, Second Red Scare. For different interpretation of the relationship between
anticommunism and liberalism, see Jennifer Delton, “Rethinking Post–World War II
Anticommunism,” Journal of the Historical Society 10, no. 1 (2010), 1–41.
(17.) Ralph S. Brown Jr., Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).
(18.) Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film
Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980); Victor S. Navasky, Naming
Names (New York: Viking, 1980); Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A
Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); and Gerald Horne,
The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
(19.) Navasky, Naming Names; Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, 54–61; and Alice Kessler-
Harris, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2012).
(20.) Robert Justin Goldstein, American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of
Subversive Organizations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
(21.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 186–189.
(22.) Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Steven Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led
Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
(23.) Peters v. Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955); Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956); Green v.
McElroy 360 U.S. 474 (1959); and Vitarelli v. Seaton, 359 U.S. 535 (1959). In the early
1950s, by contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court had helped legitimize the Red Scare. Dennis
v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), for example, upheld the Smith Act; Bailey v.
Richardson 341 U.S. 918 (1951) affirmed a lower court’s ruling upholding the federal
loyalty program.
(24.) Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957); Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298
(1957). See Michal R. Belknap, The Supreme Court under Earl Warren, 1953–1969
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Arthur J. Sabin, In Calmer Times:
The Supreme Court and Red Monday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999); and Robert M. Lichtman, The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One
Hundred Decisions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
(25.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 203–204.
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(26.) Early-21st-century scholarship on COINTELPRO includes David Cunningham,

There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The
FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Picador, 2013).
(27.) Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the
South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); and George
Lewis, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and
Massive Resistance, 1945–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004).
(28.) For a more comprehensive discussion, see Ellen Schrecker, “Interpreting

McCarthyism: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, and Heale,
“Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy.’” Also see John Earl Haynes, Communism and Anti-
communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (New York:
Garland, 1987).
(29.) Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963),
41–42. See also his essay, “The Pseudo-conservative Revolt,” in Daniel Bell, ed., The New
American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955).
(30.) Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to
McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); and Alan D. Harper, The
Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946–1952 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1969).
(31.) See Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of
McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971). By contrast, see Richard Gid Powers, Not
without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995).
(32.) Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red
Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); and Athan G. Theoharis and John
Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1988).
(33.) Examples include Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The
Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987);
Robbie Lieberman, My Song is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and
the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe; Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots,
1928–35 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore,
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008).
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(34.) Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in
America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999); and John Earl Haynes and
Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1999). These findings stimulated a long list of case studies of various
spies and alleged spies, including Harry Dexter White, William Remington, Philip and
Mary Jane Keeney, and of course Alger Hiss.
(35.) John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and
Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); and Haynes and Klehr,
In Denial. Haynes and Klehr acknowledged McCarthyism’s abuses, but bestselling
popular interpreters of the new findings did not; see, for example, Ann Coulter, Treason:
Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers,
2004); and M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe
McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Three Rivers, 2009).
(36.) For a discussion of these debates, see Ellen Schrecker, “Soviet Espionage in
America: An Oft-Told Tale,” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010), 355–361.
(37.) For example, John Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the
Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Athan
Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the
Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002); Goldstein,
American Blacklist; Christopher John Gerard, “‘A Program of Cooperation’: The FBI, the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Communist Issue, 1950–1956” (Ph.D.
diss., Marquette University, 1993); Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator
Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004);
Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen,
Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2008).
(38.) Michael J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation,
1935–1965 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998). See also Don E. Carleton, Red
Scare! Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas
Monthly Press, 1985); Philip Jenkins, The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in
Pennsylvania, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Don
Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of
Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Colleen
Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2013).
(39.) Mahoney, “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War”; Ruotsila, British and
American Anti-communism before the Cold War; and Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin,
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and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Transnational Anti-communism and the Cold War: Agents,
Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
(40.) Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New
York: Basic Books, 1988); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making
of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kyle A.
Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York:
Routledge, 2005); Johnson, Lavender Scare; and Storrs, Second Red Scare.
(41.) Michael J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–
1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert Justin Goldstein, Political
Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman,
1978); Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares”; Alex Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty: American
Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2013); Storrs, Second Red Scare; and Doody, Detroit’s Cold War.
(42.) See Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anti-communism: Labor and Civil Liberties between
the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ruotsila, British
and American Anti-communism; and Judy Kutulas, The American Civil Liberties Union and
the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006).
(43.) A sampling of this early-21st-century work includes, in addition to works cited

above, Phillip Deery, Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), on the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee
Committee; Clarence Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the
New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Alan M.
Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Edward Alwood, Dark Days in the Newsroom:
McCarthyism Aimed at the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); David H.
Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist
Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Amy Swerdlow, “The
Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in Linda K.
Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History As Women’s
History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995),
296–312; Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, eds.,
Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the
Story” (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Aaron D. Purcell, White Collar Radicals: TVA’s
Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 2009); and Susan L. Brinson, The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal
Communications Commission, 1941–1960 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).
(44.) Ellen W. Schrecker, “Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism,” Journal of
American History 75, no. 1 (1988), 197–208.
Page 24 of 25
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Landon R. Y. Storrs
Department of History, University of Iowa
Page 25 of 25
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The Red Scare

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McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American

Summary and Keywords

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The American Communist Party

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The Formation of an Anticommunist Coalition

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The Federal Loyalty Program

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The Fear Spreads

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of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. It listed 151 writers, composers,

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McCarthy’s Fall and the Waning of the Second

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Discussion of the Literature

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Attention to gender as a category of historical analysis has added another dimension to

A related trend in the literature situates McCarthyism within a longer anticommunist

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Links to Digital and Visual Materials

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(7.) Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders,” 53.

(13.) Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program; Storrs, Second Red Scare.

(14.) Storrs, Second Red Scare (program statistics, 292).

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(21.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 186–189.

(25.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 203–204.

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(26.) Early-21st-century scholarship on COINTELPRO includes David Cunningham,

(28.) For a more comprehensive discussion, see Ellen Schrecker, “Interpreting

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(43.) A sampling of this early-21st-century work includes, in addition to works cited

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Department of History, University of Iowa

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