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- [00:00]
Dave Davies
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America. The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minute Women is one of many told in a new book by our guest journalist and historian Clay Risen. Risen examines the frenzy of anti communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. Risen describes the red baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail. And and he writes that there's a through line to be found from that era to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at the New York Times, now assigned to the obituary's desk. And he's the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey. Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is red blacklists McCarthyism and the making of Modern Americ. Clay Risen, welcome to FRESH air.
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Clay Risen
Thanks for having me.
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Dave Davies
There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti communist fervor. And one of the strands you say was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal, you know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the Social Security system, et cetera. Roosevelt was enormously popular really, as the result of these programs. What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
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Clay Risen
Yeah, I think it's important to remember that the New Deal was more than just a set of policies. It was a whole culture that was ushered in in the 1930s, one that was broadly progressive, cosmopolitan, pluralist. You saw rights advances for all sorts of people who up until then really hadn't had a chance. You know, the opposition was economic. There were certainly a lot of people who criticized Roosevelt on, you know, tax policy, regulation. You know, this tended to come from the usual suspects. But there was also a lot of cultural opposition, a lot of anger over the idea that America was moving away from a society that was rooted in they didn't say it this way, but a white patriarchy in a kind of vision of a small town America in a, you know, fundamentally religious, Christian, Protestant worldview. And, you know, this was all linked together for a lot of people, for a lot of critics, that it was both. You know, there was this culture, but there was also this economic change and government assertion going on through the New Deal. And so it became exacerbated or sort of blown up into, for some people, a monster that was taking over all of America.
- [03:31]
Dave Davies
Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union. And that was connected to a communist presence in the United States. And we should note that, you know, while Soviet style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right?
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Clay Risen
Yeah, absolutely. And another aspect of the 1930s that we was both motivating for a lot of people, but also ceding a backlash was that the left was very fluid. So that you had people toward the center as well as people on the far left, on the Communist Party and other radicals who saw themselves as part of a united front, a popular front. And whether that was in foreign policy, domestic policy, there was a sense that we're all working on this together. And so there was a lot of cross mixing. And that became a problem for the people who then went into government jobs. And after the war, when communism started to be seen as this threat, suddenly any affiliation that they may have had a decade earlier became this scarlet letter that could be used as a way of targeting them and blacklisting them, whether they were in the government or education or in Hollywood. I mean, name an industry or a sector, and there was an element of the Red Scare going on. But to your point, I mean, one of the reasons why the Red Scare happened when it did was that as much as there was a sentiment against New Deal America, New Deal culture in the 30s, it really didn't find a purchase. Roosevelt was very popular. The Depression was on, then the war was on. And it was really only after that when a lot of people wanted to get back to normal. There was a lot of fear over not being able to do that because of the communist threat abroad. And so it was sort of a ripe moment for opportunists and ideologues to pick up that culture conflict of the 30s and give it this injection of real fear of another world war.
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Dave Davies
I often think of the excesses of the Red Scare as being driven by congressional hearings, people demanding loyalty statements and the like. But Harry Truman, the Democratic president who followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was actually pretty active on this front as well. Tell us why he embraced this idea of asking citizens to commit to loyalty oaths and the like.
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Clay Risen
Yeah. Look, Truman, when he came into office, it was at the tail end of World War II. One of the first things he had to do was decide to drop the atomic bomb and then deal with Stalin. I mean, he was thrown right into the deep end. And there was an immediately obvious need to reinforce Europe, to commit billions of dollars to shoring up their economies and societies so that the Soviet Union couldn't continue its press westward and take over more countries than it had. And there was a pivotal meeting with key State Department officials, key Senate leaders, in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously told Truman that, hey, I'll do what I can. I'm gonna help you out, but you have to scare the hell out of him. Right. And essentially make Communism out to be the biggest baddie. And, you know, there was obviously a strong case for that. And so Truman gave a speech to a joint session of Congress where he explained what was ahead and made out a very strong case for a maximalist assertion of US Effort abroad. But part of that was also talking about the limitless threat of Communism. And so then it became incumbent on him to. To do something about communists domestically. And here he was sort of in a trap because he didn't really believe there was much of a threat. But there were particularly Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress who did say there was a domestic threat. And J. Edgar Hoover said there was a threat. And truth be told, there was very good evidence that there had been espionage in the US Government. Turned out to be true, that the Soviets were funneling money through the Communist Party. So Roosevelt, I mean, Truman, I think, implemented the loyalty oath largely because he thought it would be a sop to these folks and wouldn't do anything. It wasn't a big deal. He was wrong in that.
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Dave Davies
Right. I mean, it was interesting. He comes up with this loyalty oath that he expects government employees to swear to. People identified problems with this approach. What were they?
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Clay Risen
Well, there were a couple. First of all, is that when you hire the exterminator to come in, you really expect there to be rodents. Right. And there's something here, too, where once you set up these loyalty boards in all these government agencies, it's sort of incumbent on them to find something. And, you know, look, I mean, there's always something to be found in someone's background. And the FBI would investigate any rumors, and there was really no way for someone to fight back, you know, if it came up from an anonymous. There were a lot of anonymous sources in these investigations. You couldn't really challenge somebody. This wasn't a court proceeding. So people who found themselves targeted under these loyalty programs had very little recourse to clear their names. The other thing that was a real problem was that one of the sets of criteria for judging somebody suspect was a list of organizations that the attorney general drew up at Truman's, Truman's directive, that were deemed subversive. And it started off with a few dozen. It ended up being a couple of hundred. And some of them were anodyne, Some of them were by no stretch of the imagination a threat to national security. But if you had any connection, even secondhand, to one of these, your career was in jeopardy. And the list was not secret. The list got out, and so it then became something for the private sector, for state and local governments to start to use. It became viral in that sense. And the list became this test against which millions of Americans were judged.
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Dave Davies
So the organizations could have been civil rights organizations or people opposing Franco and spraying a whole lot of things which communists might or might not support, but which were not per se. Communist fronts.
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Clay Risen
Yeah, and look, I mean, some of them were fronts, but also some of the fronts were fairly anodyne. You know, if the communist party set up a club for writers and a writer joined it with no real interest in the communist party and maybe was in it for a year and then left and ended up in a government job somewhere, well, they would probably get fired years later for that. Had they expressed any connection to communism by doing so? No, they had simply done this during that fluid period of the 1930s when this was de rigueur for the left.
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Dave Davies
The dimensions of this program were astonishing when I read them. 4.76 million background checks, which resulted in more than 26,000 FBI field investigations, the result being 6,800 people who resigned or withdrew their applications for employment, 560 who were fired. And no spies identified, by the way.
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Clay Risen
No, no. You know, there were people identified and found out to have been spies for the Soviet Union, but not through this program. And, you know, the other thing that I think is important, and it's very. You can't prove a negative, but this was a real deterrent for anybody who might have something in their background or just someone who didn't want to be investigated that way to ever join the government. And this at a time when, when the government really needed smart, capable, motivated people to come in and commit to public service.
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Dave Davies
Did Truman ever express regret about this? As far as we know he did.
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Clay Risen
Oh, no, he did. In his memoirs he said that it was a mistake.
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Dave Davies
You know, some of the most memorable sounds and images of the Red Scare comes from hearings on the movie industry. You know, there's not a lot of espionage than Hollywood, as far as I know. Why was it such an early and attractive target?
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Clay Risen
There are a couple of reasons. The first is Hollywood like today, was super sexy. And it was a target for anybody who wanted to raise their own profile. And so the chairman of the House on American Activities Committee at the time, his name was J. Parnell Thomas from New Jersey. He thought this would be a great way to raise the profile of the committee. But he also had come to believe that Hollywood was this den of radical, subversive leftists. And it wasn't. There were a lot of left leaning people in Hollywood, but it was hardly a subversive hotspot. But you know, there was an active Communist party in Hollywood and it did. It also saw Hollywood as a great place to be to raise money and to raise its own profile. It was never very successful because if you're living in Hollywood and you're a star, who wants to go to a five hour meeting where you talk about Marx all night when you could go hang out at a club, or who wants to have to hand out communist newspapers on the street corner if you're a star? So it never really got far. But that didn't keep Parnell Thomas and his committee from making that target number one.
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Dave Davies
You know, these hearings were of the House UN American Activities Committee, were extensively covered by the media. And you know, you can see the film of this and like reporters jammed all around the witness table, you know, right in the faces of the witnesses. And, you know, TV coverage wasn't really a thing yet. But back then movies in theaters would often, before the movie is shown, open with newsreels of, you know, stuff going on. And hearings of the House UN American Activities Committee were appeared in them, which is why some of this film footage is preserved. And I thought we would listen to a little clip here. This is a piece of testimony from Hollywood screenwriter Howard Lawson. Let's listen.
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Howard Lawson
Are you a member of the Communist Party or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? The question of communism is in no way related to this inquiry, which is an attempt to get control of the screen and to invade the basic rights of American. The question here relates not only to the question of my membership in any political organization, but this committee is attempting to establish the right which is historically denied to any committee of this sort. We're going to get the answer to that question if we have to stay.
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Dave Davies
Here for a week.
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Howard Lawson
Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism. That's not the question. The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his. Then you deny. Absolutely invades. Then you deny to. You refused to answer that question. Is that correct? I have told you that I will offer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else to the American public. And they will know where I stand, as they do from what I have written. Stand away from the stand for Americanism for many years. And I stand away from the stand for the Bill of Rights.
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Dave Davies
And with about 35 wraps of the gavel there. Boy, intense stuff. This is the House UN American Activities Committee. Howard Lawson, who himself was actually a member of the Communist Party, right?
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Clay Risen
He was. He was. And that's why. Well, I mean, I think he stood on principle, but everyone knew what the answer was. He wasn't a secret Communist. Everyone knew that he was in charge of the Communist Party in Hollywood. But he refused to answer on principled grounds.
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Dave Davies
Right. And it was then that was not illegal to be in the Communist Party then?
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Clay Risen
No, not at all.
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Dave Davies
That would change.
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Clay Risen
No, no.
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Dave Davies
You know, it's fascinating to read how quickly this anti communist movement gained a momentum. And the events around this particular hearing are a case in point. You know, there were 10 witnesses who were all screenwriters, I think, who everyone knew were going to be really targeted by the committee. And they flew as a group from LA to New York to get ready for the hearing. And they met with their lawyers preparing. And one of the things that you write about in the book is that their lawyers met with Eric Johnston, who was head of the Motion Picture association of America, the chief industry trade group, who told the lawyers for these artists who were expecting a tough time before this committee, don't worry, there will never be a blacklist. Right. I mean, this is remarkable. But things changed.
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Clay Risen
Yeah. And they should have listened to the warning. So they also met with one of the leading, one of the most outspoken liberal members of Congress, Manny Seller from New York, who in the past had gone after HUAC and had stood up against anti communism. But they met with him and he said, look, I'm not gonna say anything about this. I wouldn't touch this issue with a 10 foot pole now because, you know, it's taking over. And then sure enough, you know, within months, Erik Johnson helped lead the creation of the blacklist.
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Dave Davies
Yeah. And what about the unions, the Screen Actors Guild, the Screenwriters Guild?
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Clay Risen
Yeah, they largely stood aside. Now, the Screen Actors Guild was run by Ronald Reagan, who by then had begun his transition from being what he called a hemophiliac liberal all the way to, you know, the conservative that he became. He testified in those hearings. He was actually came before the unfriendly witnesses, the writers, and he actually struck a note of caution. You know, he had said, look, there is communism in Hollywood and we don't want it there, but we can't go after people for speaking their minds. Other people were less guarded. But Reagan actually at the time was fairly measured. But what was striking was that the Screenwriters Guild, which had been a fairly progressive group, you know, started to give away very quickly and certainly by the early 50s, was a handmaiden of the red scare and the blacklist.
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Dave Davies
So it was hard to find friends if you were one of these actors or writers who was targeted.
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Clay Risen
Yeah, it was hard to find a lawyer because any lawyer was faced with, you pick this client and you will never have another client in this town. But even more bar associations were increasingly willing to censure or even to strip a license from somebody who took on an alleged communist or a subversive as a client. And so there were very few people and even, you know, groups that we think of today, like the aclu, they did not drape themselves in glory during this period. They also were largely quiescent or even supportive of the red scare because I.
- [19:12]
Dave Davies
Guess there was a national consensus that, you know, Soviet communism was a danger.
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Clay Risen
Yeah, I mean, one of the quotes, one of the many quotes that comes out of this era comes from Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice. And he was a very ardent opponent of all of this, a very strong civil libertarian. But in one of his dissents, he essentially said, we just have to accept that this is how things are. And hopefully as a court, we can come back in calmer times and offer redress to what's going on. But at the moment, there's very little that even we as the Supreme Court can do.
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Dave Davies
All right, let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with Clay Risen. He is a reporter and editor for the New York Times and the author of eight books. His latest is red scare, blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of Modern America. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH air. Going back to Hollywood for a moment, there was never a blacklist, exactly as you say, but as close as it came was a book called Red Report of Communist Influence on Radio and Television, produced by something called the American Business Consultants. Who were they? What did they do with this?
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Clay Risen
Yeah, so this is a fascinating sort of turn of events because it's a group of former FBI agents who did have experience hunting Communists and with this kind of they were also entrepreneurs and they understood that there was a thirst out there in the public for information on potential subversives, you know, that there wasn't enough to have the attorney general's list of subversive organizations. They wanted, you know, the next step, which was tell me who in in this case in Hollywood is suspect. And so the book had, you know, it's like it's just a directory. And you would go through and say, okay, well, Kirk Douglas, okay, what is his, you know, here, here and here? Aaron Copeland, oh, Aaron Copland was in the greeting committee for Dmitri Shostakovich when he came and toured the United States. While Shostakovich is a Soviet composer, that makes Copland suspect. And this then was sold. Anybody could buy it. I know people. I I need to find a copy myself. I mean, I've seen one, but I know people who have copies. It's kind of kind of a cool little thing. But that would then be used by local radio stations. It would be used by the American Legion. If there was someone in red channels, then they would be protested if they came through in a performance or appeared in a movie. And there was never really an investigation or people weren't curious about, well, how good is this information or what does it mean to be on the welcoming committee for Shostakovich? It was just taken like, well, therefore Copeland is suspect. And it was an important part. It became, as you said, sort of the de facto blacklist. What I found was interesting was then there were all these knockoff red channels that purported to tell the true story, that red channels didn't go far enough. And so you had these sort of second, third tier red hunters for hire.
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Dave Davies
Makes you think of social media today.
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Clay Risen
It does.
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Dave Davies
Somebody sees an opportunity. Yeah, let's push this farther.
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Clay Risen
And, well, it's like doxxing, you know, I mean, because sometimes now red channels didn't have addresses, but then people would take it upon themselves to draw up a list of addresses and say, okay, well, you know, here is where all of the, you know, subversives listed in Ranch Handles lives in your neighborhood. And people would get protested. Dalton Trumbo, who was famous enough, no one needed to tell anyone where he lived, but he found dead animals and a bag of feces floating in his pool. You know, people had windows shattered. There was, you know, there was, there was violence running through the Red scare at the, at the very grassroots level.
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Dave Davies
We haven't talked about Joe McCarthy. I mean, his story is better known than some of the others that we've talked about. But, you know, he was certainly, you know, the shining knight of the anti communist crusade. A senator from Wisconsin who made many speeches beginning in 1950, claiming to have lists of communists in the State Department or the Defense Department or whatever, but never really seemed to come up with much credible evidence. That run lasted until about 1954 when he was embarrassed in a really dramatic Senate hearing and was then censured by his colleagues at the Senate. It struck me when I read, particularly the way he interacted with Republicans, that this in some ways reminds me of Donald Trump. Not completely, but, you know, the firing from the hip with accusations that he couldn't prove, and the fact that Republicans, a lot of Republicans in Congress didn't particularly respect him, didn't think he was credible, but wouldn't challenge him. Right?
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Clay Risen
Yeah, I think for two reasons. I mean, first of all, he was useful to them. You know, he was willing to go after Democrats in a way that they didn't quite feel comfortable doing. There was still a real order of decorum in the Senate that he violated very clearly. And so you have someone like Robert Taft, who was the Senate majority leader, the Mr. Republican in the Senate, he would never do something like what McCarthy did, but he very openly defended McCarthy and coached McCarthy on how to perform. And, you know, he was just that guy who was willing to say things that no one else did and land punches. But at the same time, they were also a little afraid of him because if you turned against him, he would make an example out of you. You know, the best example of that is Margaret Chase Smith, who was a senator from Maine. And relatively early on this is in the summer of 1950, she gave a speech on the floor of the Senate and said, look, what he's doing is un American. This is Unacceptable. A senator, no one should be doing this. And she got a few people to sign on. Ultimately they all dropped out. And as soon as he could, McCarthy, I mean, McCarthy went after her immediately. But as soon as he got a committee position after 1952, she happened to be on his committee and he demoted her and sort of exiled her from any position of power. And that became, let's say, a cautionary tale for a lot of other senators. And it took a long time before anyone was willing to stand up and say, this man is unacceptable.
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Dave Davies
It was also striking that there would be hearings in which in some cases, the chair of the hearings thought, okay, we're going to get McCarthy on the record here and prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about. So he would make some charges and then witnesses would come in who would completely debunk the charges that he had made. But by then he'd opened up the fire on somebody else and had two or three more new charges and somehow just kept it rolling. And the media, I mean, he knew how to play the media. They would always report a new charge because oh my heavens, if this official really is a subversive, we don't want to miss that story. He really manipulated the media pretty effectively, didn't he?
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Clay Risen
Yeah. And it's noteworthy that McCarthy's first speech, the sort of debut of this at a Republican meeting in West Virginia came in January of 1950. And it was just weeks after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. We know now that Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union within the US Government. We know that Julius Rosenberg and his circle did steal atomic secrets and give them to the Soviet Union. We do know that the Communist Party of the United States facilitated a lot of this. But what we also know is that there weren't many aside from Rosenberg. They didn't have much impact. And most importantly, by the end of World War II, the Soviets had largely dismantled their espionage efforts. They didn't think they were worth it. They weren't happy with the results. They later restarted them, of course. But what's important is during the Red Scare, there wasn't really espionage going on. And yet that's what everyone was afraid of. And so after that, for McCarthy to come along and say, well, I have evidence of spies, it was hard, at least initially, for anyone to say he's completely wrong, because, hey, there's evidence that there were spies. But you're right that his ultimately as crazy as he was in terms of just not clinically crazy, but you know, his just shoot from the hip willingness to say anything, his manipulation, his understanding of how the media worked and his manipulation of the media was genius. And, you know, just for example, one thing he would do would be to wait until right before deadlines, right before you had to file a story. And this is back when there was only print, so there was no option other than you've got to get this story in. And he would identify the thirstiest, most driven reporters who, you know, all they wanted was that to get in that deadline, give me the scoop. And he would give, yeah, get that scoop, and he would tell them, you know, just the most outlandish thing that they didn't have time to fact check, that they couldn't start to call around and verify. And they were faced with choice. Do I print this scoop and hope that it's true or do I lose this scoop, someone else gets it and I look bad? More often than not, they went with the scoop. And more often than not, in fact, pretty much always it was completely fabricated.
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Dave Davies
Let's take another break. Here we are speaking with Clay Risen. He is a reporter and editor for the New York Times. His book is red blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of Modern America. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is FRESH air. You know, it's a fascinating story that you tell here, and it did kind of have an end, right? It lasted about a decade, I guess. And there are really two things that seemed to help close the door on this frenzy of anti Communism. One was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. What did he do?
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Clay Risen
You know, Eisenhower is an interesting character in this story because he definitely, I think, drew a line and said anything beyond this is unacceptable in terms of anti communist activity. And certainly McCarthy was in that beyond the pale category. But there were a lot of things that he did allow. And he had his own version of a much more aggressive loyalty test than Truman did. He also oversaw and reinforced what today is called the lavender scare, in which anti communism or fear allegations of subversion were used to fire hundreds of gay men from the federal government, mostly in the State Department. And so Eisenhower tolerated a lot of stuff that today we would look at and say that's disgusting, that he would be for that. But he should get some credit for saying, and I believe that, you know, there was a point at which this wasn't going to go further. And I think at least I make the argument that for him he was trying to essentially just dry out the red scare and run it out and that he believed, like Truman believed That fundamentally, you know, the American people were not radicals. The American people are pragmatic, centrist, and that they would come to their senses with good, strong hand at the tiller, very straight and narrow leadership that he would provide. That was his idea. And he also, behind the scenes, went after McCarthy. It took him a while, probably too long, but he ultimately did go after McCarthy and really cut his legs out from under him. And so Eisenhower is a big part of that story. He's not the only part. But I think it's important that he came along and it mattered that you had a Republican doing this, given that Truman and Roosevelt unfairly had been tagged as soft on communism.
- [31:55]
Dave Davies
We're going through a remarkable transition in national policy now with the Trump administration. And you write in the book that you think you see a through line from the events in the Red Scare to our current political moment. What do you see as the relevance of these events to. For us understanding what's happening now?
- [32:17]
Clay Risen
Yeah, well, I think first of all, it's just basic parallels. We see a lot of the same animus toward ideas we don't like. We see or that some people don't like. We see the same willingness to use oppressive measures to silence those views or to silence those organizations or people that we disagree with. And so it's a reminder that what happened during the Red Scare can be repeated. So I think there's that, but I think there's also something more causal in the sense that after McCarthy fell and after Warren pared back the tools of the Red Scare, there was still a lot of. There was a hard kernel of people who continued to believe in the cause. And these were people who funneled into groups like the John Birch Society and other sort of similar very far right organizations who believed that McCarthy was a martyr and that there was this cabal of anti American elites running the government. And that didn't stop just because the Red Scare did. And it pops up here and there throughout subsequent American history. And there's a through line. You can even, you know, you can chart organizational relationships, intellectual influences through the Goldwater movement, through the Buchananite populist movement of the 90s. And I think very clearly you can see it today, and whether it's explicit, I think some people do understand this legacy and do see themselves as the latest in this fight. Others implicitly, they may not necessarily understand the history, but they certainly see the situation in the same way. They believe that it's not just the government's too big or there's a lot of waste and bloat. They actually really believe that there is this deep state. They didn't say deep state in the 50s, but that's what they meant is what we mean today, this conspiratorial anti American radical core that's running everything and that we have to dismantle large sections of the government in order to get rid of them. And, you know, in some ways what we're seeing now is, I would go as far as to say the apotheosis of what guys like McCarthy and the people around him could only dream of in the 1950s.
- [34:47]
Dave Davies
What do you mean by that?
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Clay Risen
Well, I just mean that, you know, when they would talk about the need to root out this radical core, at the end of the day, they were not going to achieve that. The establishment was very strong and, you know, it was very easy to get up and rant about conspiracies and, you know, communist infiltration. But the idea that anything would actually happen to satisfy them was a fantasy. But that fantasy, I think at least so far, shows a good sign of being made reality today. I mean, we're still early in the administration and anything can happen. But certainly if you look at the way people in the administration or under Elon Musk talk about what they're doing, the kind of almost ideological fervor that they're bringing to this project of dismantling the federal government and going after enemies, I mean, those are two parts of the same project. And yet they aren't just echoes of the 1940s and 50s. They are, I would argue, an extension of what was first identified and codified as a project back then.
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Dave Davies
Clay Risen, thanks so much for speaking with us.
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Clay Risen
Thank you very much, Dave.
- [36:02]
Dave Davies
Clay Risen is a reporter and editor for the New York Times and the author of eight previous books. His latest is Red, Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America. This is FRESH AIR. Our TV critic David Biancooley has been impressed by two new TV series that tell their stories using time in a very inventive fashion. One is the new Max medical drama the Pit, which presents new episodes each Thursday through April 10th. The Other, now streaming in its entirety, is the four part Netflix series Adolescence, which follows the case of a murdered teen from several different perspectives. Here's David's review.
- [36:44]
David Biancooli
The normal way to tell a dramatic story on TV is to follow the characters and plots wherever they go in a straightforward fashion, focusing only on the most important parts. Sometimes, as on Law and Order, there are timestamps and music cues to move things along, but mostly the narratives move in a straight line and concise little scenes. On occasion, a TV show can play with time as well as space, offering plenty of flashbacks and flash forwards. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul did that. And the most recent season of Fargo threw viewers for a loop by a mid series change of setting title card that read 500 years ago. But when it comes to TV, telling a dramatic story by reflecting time in a different way, the biggest innovation until now came almost 25 years ago when the Fox network premiered 24. Each season was a self contained story spread across 24 episodes, telling of a single day in the life of government agent Jack Bauer. Each episode dramatized an hour of his day in real time. And the unrelenting intensity and momentum made 24 an instant hit. So now in 2025, we have two new series inspired by that radical real time approach. The pit. A Max series, streaming new episodes weekly, takes the 24 approach, using each hour of TV to present an hour in a long single shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room. The show's creator is R. Scott Gemmel, who was a producer on ER with John Wells. Wells is involved here too, as is ER veteran Noah Wiley, who is Dr. Michael Rabinovich is in charge of the emergency room, which is part of an overworked, understaffed, underfunded teaching hospital. The Pit never leaves the error what its nurses and doctors call the Pit. And the clock, like the action, never stops. Here's Wiley addressing his staff after the death of a young patient. It's a rare quiet moment, but it doesn't last.
- [38:51]
Noah Wylie
That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do? I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans. And day one, I got a kid, five year old boy, accidentally shot by his brother playing with dad's gun, worried he was gonna get in trouble right up until he coded and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night. I was walking and walking, walking. And I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery. And I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those Crips, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's what I need. I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings. We got patients throwing punches in chairs. Uh, okay.
- [39:53]
David Biancooli
Binge a few hours of the Pit. Back to back and you'll feel as exhausted as the doctors, nurses and interns look. But stick around and you'll come to know and love these characters, just as viewers of the original ER did, embracing such similarly talented and endearing young actors as George Clooney, Anthony Edwards and Noah Wylie. Adolescence, now on Netflix, is much shorter, only four episodes, but is even more intense. Each episode looks at a different point in time and point of view regarding the case of a murdered teen girl. There's the apprehension of the prime suspect, an investigation at the victim's high school days later, and then other jumps in the narrative to seven and 13 months later. Each of these episodes plays out in real time as on the Pit, but here it's filmed in one continuous take, in one seemingly uninterrupted, unedited camera move. It's like a live stage play. And even if part of your brain is aware of and impressed by the technical gimmick, your heart is pulled in by the gripping story and the astoundingly believable acting. Most of the third episode, for example, is a psychological interview between 14 year old Jamie Miller, awaiting trial for killing a female classmate and a court assigned therapist, played by Aaron Doherty. Jamie is played by Owen Cooper and their extended scenes together are amazing. This is Owen's first acting role on television and there's no doubt he's going to be a big star.
- [41:28]
Owen Cooper
How does your dad treat your mum? Are you trying to get at my dad again? No, not get at him. Dad's actually nice to mum. You did say he tore down a shed. Yeah, he just gets angry with himself, but he's never hit her. Does he speak to other women? What? Is he friendly with other women? No, he loves my mum. No, I'm asking whether any of his friends are women. No, his mates are his mates and they're men. Is that wrong? What does that mean? No, no, that's not wrong. I thought we'd done talking about my dad. Jamie, I'm just trying to understand. I know none of this has nothing to do with him. Okay, that's fine. Do you have any mates who are women? No. Like your dad, your mates are male.
- [42:21]
David Biancooli
Other prominent actors and characters in adolescence include Ashley Walters as the lead detective on the case and Stephen Graham as Jamie's father. They're acting in this like everyone's acting in. This is superb. And the real time narrative only enhances their effectiveness. And Graham, who co starred in A Thousand Blows and appeared in Peaky Blinders, gets extra credit here. He's co creator and writer of the series along with Jack Thorne. Adolescence is brilliant, the best TV series so far this year. I can recommend both it and the Pit as excellent TV shows that are exciting, enthralling and constantly surprising. Be aware, though, one thing they aren't is relaxing.
- [43:08]
Dave Davies
David Biancooli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the Pit on Max and Adolescence, now streaming on Netflix. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Seth Rogen, star and co creator of the new TV comedy series the Studio. It's about a freshly appointed movie studio head trying to keep the company afloat as Hollywood changes around him. Episodes include Martin Scorsese, Zoe Kravitz and Ice Cube playing versions of themselves. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram prfresh. Air Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krentzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show for Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley. I'm Dave Davies.