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Clay Risen, "Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
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A
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Experian hello everybody.
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A
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Praveen, and I'm the founder of the Choice Told Podcast. Today we'll be speaking to author and editor Clay Risen about his latest book, red scare, blacklist, McCarthyism, and the making of Modern America. Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at the New York Times, is the author of the Crowned Hour, a New York Times notable book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilderman Lehman Prize in Military History. A member of the Society of American Historians, he is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American A Nation on Fire and the Bill of the Century. His latest book, Red Scare, came out in March 2025 and is published by Simon and Shuster.
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B
Hi, thanks for having me.
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C
So the concept behind Twice Told is that as an author, you had an idea or perhaps a set of ideas that you were thinking about, which took their expression in the form of your book. That is the first time that this idea got expressed. Now, as a reader, I formed a set of impressions while reading this book, and I had a couple of questions and doubts. Clarify. Now, in this interaction between author and reader, we both get to rehash. We are revisiting the idea. Hopefully we're rehashing it, both of us hopefully learn something new. I undoubtedly will be learning something, which is how and why the concept behind Twice Told.
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B
Okay, that sounds great.
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C
Thank you. So my first question is going to be about yourself. Tell me about yourself growing up in America and how was politics in the family back then?
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B
Good question. So, you know, when I was. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a, you know, Southern city. At the time, it was not as conservative as it is now, or Tennessee as a state was not as conservative. And, you know, my family politically was pretty moderate. My grandparents were Republicans. My parents were Democrats. Not particularly extreme in either way. So I grew up in that. And Nashville has always been a pretty. Or has always recent decades, you know, a pretty moderately blue city, so usually with a Democratic mayor and. But a lot of different constituencies. So, you know, it was very middle America. There was a phenomenon that. I don't know if it still happens, but back when I was growing up, Tennessee or Nashville was one of the markets where the fast food companies and others would test market products. So we had for a while McPizza. It was a pizza product that McDonald's was thinking about selling. They never did, only in our city and some others. But the idea was that Nashville was so typical of the rest of the country that, you know, if it worked in Nashville, it would work elsewhere. So I guess it didn't work in Nashville. I don't know. I never had one, but I remember it being on sale. So that's kind of what it was like. Yeah. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, so I think led a pretty typical life for a kid in that era. I was probably a little more aware politically than your typical kid. I followed news pretty closely, really wanting to be a journalist from an early age. So read all the magazines, newspapers that my parents got, followed TV news, and just kind of drank in what was going on in the world. I was on the debate team in high school. So that really put me into sort of a pattern of doing a lot of research and learning about current events and really doing deep Dives into different topics that really, in a way, set me up to do the work that I ended up doing as a journalist and as a historian. Most of the people who do that kind of debate become lawyers, which I was not interested in doing, but very few of them actually become historians, which I find curious. And. Yeah, otherwise, you know, I think the biggest thing when I think about particularly this book and where it might have come from as I was growing up was, you know, just the context of the Reagan era and the sort of resurgence of Cold War rhetoric. Now, there wasn't anything like the McCarthy era or the Red Scare in the 1980s, but there was a lot of pretty heated rhetoric about the evil empire, the Soviet Union, a lot of rehashing of old debates about political allegiances in the United States. And I absorbed that without really knowing everything that was going on. But it became kind of a, a base layer for me of knowledge and of sort of cultural cultivation that, that I later drew on.
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C
Understood. Now, I like how you open the book with the HUAC trial of Helen Reed Bryan. I somehow could see parallels between this and the Salem witch hunts. Was this by design that you decided to open with this?
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B
In some ways, I think you're right that when I conceived of that, I wanted it to be something that was a very specific story, but also was something that people could immediately frame in their own minds. Right. And whether they drew on more recent events or the Salem witch trials, I mean, that in some ways is the prototypical witch hunt. Right. And so, you know, having a story built around Helen Reed Bryan doesn't have to make any explicit reference to have that emerge in people's heads. So. Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that because that was certainly my hope in writing it that way. Among other things, you know, I wanted people to really kind of understand the context of the time and what it must have been like to be someone like her who had fought, you know, for so many decades as a progressive and suddenly to be. Be imprisoned essentially for her beliefs.
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C
Could you tell us about America's tryst with communism, socialism or Leninism, Marxism? Because it seems even when you read the book and also when you evaluate American politics through over time, what you essentially have is a center left party and not truly a hard left. So could you guide us?
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B
You know, it's, it's curious because as much attention as people would pay to communism and socialism in the United States, it really as a whole, you know, let's say the progressive far left contingent in American politics is very Small. And you're right that it's very much a kind of adjunct, tiny adjunct to the Democratic Party, which is center left. And, and also, you know, a difficult relationship between the Democratic Party and those parties to the further left. You know, most Democrats reject very aggressively any connection with communism and for good reason. You know, many of them reject a connection with socialism as well. And communism never really had the purchase among the mainstream, even a portion of the mainstream that you know, it had in other countries. Communist party, except in a few instances, in a few elections at very local levels, never won elections, really was never a force outside of certain communities in Chicago, Brooklyn, a few other cities, you know, strong left leaning sentiment as a more general idea certainly did have more purchase, especially in the 1930s. And that's where, you know, you talk about things like, you know, fellow travelers and communist sympathizers because there are people who didn't agree with the party in general. They didn't want to be members of the party, but they might sympathize or agree with certain platforms and certain ideas that they were act that they were pushing. So, you know, it's, it's interesting to see how much focus was put on the Communist Party despite all of that. And you know, there's a good reason. You know, I think there are two reasons. And the first is that, you know, we do live in what I think is, you know, generally a center right country. And, and we always have, or we have for a long time. And you know, it's very easy to pick on people who don't fit that mode. And it's very easy to use an extreme set of beliefs to target a more centrist, you know, broader party. Right. So you could use the threat of communism or the specter of Communism to go after Franklin Roosevelt or the New Deal and accuse him of being a Communist or accuse the New Deal of being Communist. And that was unfair and, and certainly a smear, but it nevertheless, you know, had a purchase. People, people bought into that. Not everybody, but a lot. The second thing is that, you know, there, there really were reasons to be concerned about the Communist Party as. Sorry about that. As a function of the Soviet Communist Party, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, that they did take money from the Soviet Union, from the Communist Party or the Communist government in the Soviet Union really did try to follow the orders of Lenin and Stalin. And you know, that relationship is complicated and has its own history. But you know, it's not irrational for people in the United States to worry about what it means to have A group of people in the United States who are of divided loyalty. And where I think, you know, the, the nuance has to come in is looking at where does that become a danger to the country and what is the proper response that still respects civil liberties and, and people's basic constitutional rights. And I think that's what got out of hand during the Red Scare.
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C
So what do you think were the reasons that the Red Scare became what it eventually did, ballooning into witch hunt? Was this Lenin, Stalin's political, devious political mechanisms? Had the. So had Soviet Russia been governed by a different person, do you think America may have responded differently?
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B
Oh, that's a good question. I'm not really sure. I think it certainly would have changed the shape of things, certainly, because after a big part of the driver or a big driver behind the Red Scare was the Cold War and the aggressiveness with which Stalin and the Soviet Union pursued their own interests after the end of the Cold War, at the end of World War II, and the aggressiveness with which the United States and the west answered that challenge. And, you know, the Cold War set in very quickly, very with, with great force. And it scared, scared people. It scared Americans. And, you know, so had things gone differently? Had there been a different leader, someone not Stalin then? Yeah, I think that could have been a different. We could have seen a different outcome. Now. I still think that there are other forces that, domestic forces that took advantage of the Red Scare or took advantage of the Cold War and really had a strong interest in demonizing progressive values and progressive policies and progressive organizations after World War II, and they probably would have done that anyway. But, you know, it's interesting to think they had been doing that for a long time. I mean, in the 1930s, the New Deal and Roosevelt faced lots of attacks from right wing groups who said, this is all a communist front. These people, I mean, Helen Bryan knew that very well. And the difference is that the context changed and the Cold War set in. So. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting to sort of play through that as a counterfactual, but I think what it does is highlight the importance of the geopolitical context for the, for the Red Scare and why that mattered and why. You have to understand how that all worked together.
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C
Understood. Now it's interesting to note that when Europe was dealing with the Red Scare, its own version of the Red Scare, beginning with Italy, who then responded immediately with Benito Mussolini and his fascists in putting down the communist uprising in Italy and America, somehow, seemingly the Red scare kicks off 20 years after the New Deal has started to produce benefits. So is it true to say that when the Great Depression was playing out, all these people were happy to mooch off its benefits?
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B
I mean, I think there's a complicated way of saying something similar to that, you know, which is that, look, I mean, the Great Depression was terrible experience in the United States, and it truly proved that the form of federal policymaking that we had up until 1933 was not going to work, that we literally needed a New Deal to deal with things like depressions and, you know, the impact that had in an industrial society like ours. And broadly speaking, it worked. You know, the New Deal had a lot of failures, but generally speaking, it was the right set of ideas and a lot of really good policies that benefited a lot of people. And so, yeah, I mean, most. Look, most people are not political, and they're only political when they're told that something is an immediate threat to their. To. To their status quo. People like the way things are, and they tend to go with the flow. And, you know, they might hold to a certain set of political values that set them to vote for one party or the other, but they don't think about it that much. And, you know, so during the 1930s, yeah, most people supported Roosevelt because he was helping them out. In the late 40s, a lot of people were still Democrats, I mean, or supported. You know, fewer people supported Truman than supported Roosevelt, but they still supported the idea of the New Deal. But they were more open to the idea that in the context of the Cold War, there were other more pressing things to worry about. And honestly, they didn't see the attacks as necessarily an attack on the New Deal itself. They might have seen these attacks more as, you know, the need to root out communist corruption. One of the things that was important to note is that a lot of politicians who were very successful during this era, like Richard Nixon as a young senator, he was very careful not to go after the popular parts in the New Deal. Right. And to always talk about the excess, not to say the root is the problem, but the excess or the corruption or what have you. It's just like today when you have conservative fiscal hawks who want to cut back on Medicaid. They know not to say they want to cut back Medicaid. They put it in the context of, we want to trim fraud and waste and abuse, and we want to make people put people on work requirements. These all make sense to someone who wants to preserve Medicaid. At the end of the day, Medicaid shrinks, so they get what they want, but there's that coded language. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's not as easy just, it's not so simple just to say that people changed their minds. It's more that the context changed and most people thought about it only to the extent that they needed to.
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C
That's unfortunate.
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B
Yeah, yeah. But I think that's just how people work. I mean, one of the ironies, I think, of American, of the New Deal is that it was so successful that it allowed people not to think about politics. And but as a result, you have an apathetic public that is more open to political opportunism and to lazy claims about conspiracy theories. I mean, I think that's really our problem today more than anything is that, you know, America is by and large a fairly successful society, and so successful that most people don't think about politics in the kind of urgent way that I think we always should, and now more than ever. But most people don't see it that way.
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C
Spot on. This is exactly the same theory that I see layout in countries apart from the United States as well. For example, in India, the period after independence until 2014, created a middle class largely apathetic toward politics, but sufficiently wealthy such that they could leave the country and make their wealth, but at the same time also provide sponsorship to right wing political groups who then played upon their fears, which were historic fears, and helped bring in a far right government into power.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And, and in some ways that's the curse of success, because of course, it's a, it's a great success that India created a vast middle class that was able to unfortunately do all those things. But that is, you know, you wouldn't want the opposite. And yet the consequences is, is ironic.
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C
Absolutely. Now, returning to Truman and his loyalty program, was this an executive order? Because a program of this nature otherwise would have been debated or probably shut down in the Senate, right?
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B
Well, that's a good question. I'm not sure. I think it would have been more thoroughly deliberated. It would have probably been a better program if more people had been able to take a look at it, because even Truman admitted that it was a rush job. And a lot of the details about it ended up becoming serious bugs in the program. And had enough people been able to take a look? I mean, one of the things that's striking is how many legal experts and scholars also were brought in or they were aware of the program when it was being designed and even when it was announced. They didn't understand all the implications. They didn't see how this would turn into these witch hunt courts going after people with anonymous evidence and, you know, people not being able to challenge their accusers. This was. It was not obvious to these experts. And yet, having seen how it played out, it's hard to imagine how that's not possible, because it's very much what the executive order called for. But Truman thought that it would be a very small program, and, you know, it. It ended up becoming this enormous program that. That constituted a major part of the Red Scare, understood.
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C
Was there a real left, that disloyalty program and the HUAC in conjunction aimed to root out, or were these just phantoms in the room?
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B
I mean, by the end of the 1940s, not really. You know, there. I mean, there was a real left in America, but it was you know, not as. It basically split. You know, where in the 1930s, there was a very broad left, the Popular Front, that, you know, constituted everything from liberal and progressive Democrats all the way to communists. And they didn't agree on everything, and they didn't always get along, but they generally did, and they generally supported the same broad vision. But by the end of the 1940s, that Popular Front had really split in two and. Or at least two. On the one hand, you had people who said, look, you know, we need to rally behind the Democratic Party. We need to make sure that the Democratic Party remains liberal. This was the vision of Americans for Democratic Action, and a lot of union leaders felt that way. But on the other hand, a lot of people went the other direction and said, democratic Party is too conservative. It is. You know, the Popular Front no longer works. We need to have a strong populist, progressive movement separate from all of that. And that's really what the 1948 election highlighted was, you know, Harry Truman not only running against a Republican, but running against, you know, a progressive party led by, you know, his former. Former vice president or by the former vice president that made a real challenge to the Democratic Party. But, you know, the results in that election were they spoke for themselves. I mean, the progressives got 1% of the vote in most states. No one voted for progressives. So, you know, to speak of a real left in the late 1940s in the United States is. Is difficult. It was very much under attack, but it was shrinking on its own accord. I mean, it's also because, you know, the country was. Was really hitting its stride in terms of prosperity and growth. And, you know, it's very Hard to be someone who believes fundamentally that everything has to change when everything's going really well. You know, every, you know, so a lot of people who are former progressives simply said no, you know, we're actually pretty happy with the way things are working.
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C
Understood. Now, how did these progressives, especially the left leaning progressives, deal with Soviet double speak or double standard?
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B
So to say, how did they, I'm sorry, what?
- [26:17]
C
How did they deal with Soviet double standards?
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B
Yeah, so, you know, that was the other split was a lot of, A lot of people starting in the late 1930s split with the Communist Party. They were either, you know, had been members or they were sympathetic and they split over the Soviet Union and they split over that kind of double speak they came to understand was very much at the heart of what the Soviets were talking about. And so when they talked about freedom, it was clear they really meant oppression. When they talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, it really meant a totalitarian government. They split over the, the Stalinist pub. Stalinist trials and, you know, massive mass political executions, the purges of the late 1930s. They split over Stalin's pact with Hitler in 1939. They split over the decision by the Soviet or by the Communist Party in the United States to, after the war to redouble its adherence to the Soviet Union. Right. To say we are rejecting our usual, our previous coalitions with other more centrist parties and we're going to go back to whatever Stalin says. And so you saw more and more people who had been sympathetic start to keel off and say, either I'm going back to the Democratic Party or toward the center. Some people went full bully to the other side and became conservatives. Many simply drifted and felt like they didn't have a home politically because they didn't want, they didn't, they weren't conservatives, they weren't liberals, or they were liberal progressives, but they didn't find a place for themselves. So, you know, it's, it's really, it's a, it's a sad outcome for what had been a very vibrant left of the 1930s.
- [28:29]
C
It's interesting that every time there's a split, it's always within the left, the lift. It loves to turn, turn into itself and start to bicker and break up, especially when even the slightest amount of pressure is applied to it from outside.
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B
Yeah, that's true. And I think it's one of the lasting consequences of the Red Scare. You know, there is part of this story that I tell in the book is about the fight within the left between liberals and progressives and people further to the left over this question. And I think that that ended up becoming this litmus test for a lot of people in the party, the Democratic Party that continues up until today. And this rejection of progressive values and anything that is tagged as the left, I do think that that might be changing among younger voters. I think when you look at the success of Zoran Mandani here in New York, I think that's. And you look at how widespread his support is, as well as the support for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and some other progressive Democrats who have managed to carve out. They're not just speaking to their own people. They actually do a good job, I think, of broadening their appeal, and their appeal reaches people, or it draws in people who I think in the past might have been turned off because of that split. That said, anything that is labeled progressive or left is toxic, is dangerous. And you can see that with older voters in the United States and here in New York as well, there still is this belief that anything that's beyond a certain line is toxic. And therefore any politician who promotes it is toxic. And I think that's, you know, that is a legacy of this era that I wrote about. And, you know, we'll see. I mean, I think the next couple years, we'll see whether that wall, that line falls apart.
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C
Was there ever before the Red Scare, obviously, about an armed uprising within the United States, especially around the time of.
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B
The Depression, perhaps, You know, certainly not nationally. There have been lots of armed uprisings in the United States historically. And you can look at uprisings by, you know, enslaved people before the Civil War, uprisings by white people against the Reconstruction government, governments in the south after the Civil War, you know, labor riots, riots during the 1960s. But these were very local. And by and large, well, the riots. So the slave riots and. And white riots definitely had a political goal in mind. And, you know, the white riots or the riots by people against, you know, by white supremacists, against reconstructing governments, they were successful. I mean, they were. They managed to overturn local governments. But, you know, those were. Generally speaking, these are not successful in the United States. And, you know, they have, again, very limited goals, very local goals. There's never really been a national effort, a national uprising. Certainly the Communist Party was never anywhere close to, even if it wanted to, the Communist Party was never close to being able to even dream of something like that. There was never the possibility that something like what happened in, in Russia or, you know, Germany had a communist revolution, other countries had communist revolutions. There was no chance of something like that happening. I mean, I think one of the reasons why politicians like Harry Truman and, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were largely skeptical of these claims about, you know, brought on by the Red Scare is because they fundamentally didn't think that communism was a threat. They believed that Americans were really too pragmatic, too fundamentally personally conservative, too committed to the present system for that ever to happen. And I think one of the things that caught them, I mean, that's one of the reasons they were surprised by the Red Scare. Both of them really came into office thinking that it would pass. Eisenhower simply thought for a long time he thought McCarthy, Senator Joseph McCarthy would fall apart. And it took four years, really, well, two years for Eisenhower really to come around to seeing that he had to do something that he wasn't. McCarthy was not going to go all the way on his own.
- [33:52]
C
Understood. Now, do you believe that the HUAC is nothing but a professional step ladder for the GOP and the GOP candidates to take a jab and perhaps win?
- [34:03]
B
I think at times it certainly served that purpose. You know, it served that purpose for Democrats when they were in charge. You know, it was a tool for conservative Democrats to go after the Democrat, the mainstream Democratic Party to, you know, it was often the Democrats who wanted to be on the committee were often Southern Democrats and conservative Democrats, pro segregation, white supremacist Democrats who understood that the part that the committee was a powerful tool to raise their own profile, but also to go after elements of their party that they thought were, were too liberal on race issues. But then, yeah, I think, you know, I think for Republicans, it was a mix of both a real ideological commitment. I mean, people there were true ideologues on, on the committee, but there were others like, like Nixon who I think understood that the committee was a great way for him to raise his, his personal profile, his political profile. And it did. It made him a national figure.
- [35:16]
C
Understood. Now, figures such as Yoga Cartier making oftentimes baseless allegations, why was there no systematic or legal pushback by way of filing libel against him or suing him for defamation?
- [35:31]
B
So he was very careful and, you know, a lot of his. So senators can't, they can't be sued for things they say in their, in their official capacity in Congress. So if they're standing, speaking to reporters or they're sitting behind, you know, their days at a committee, what they say is protected. And McCarthy was very careful about what he said. And, you know, he, he was also, you know, someone who moved so quickly that, you know, you might be able, you might find an opportunity to sue him, but he would move on so quickly that, you know, it would take years for a lawsuit to work its way through. I mean, it's a good question why no one ever really sought out legal action against him. You know, I think he was, he was very savvy in, in, in a lot of ways. You know, he was a buffoon in many ways, but he was also very careful. And his defense was always that, look, if I got something wrong, it's because the evidence was wrong. You know, I thought I had it right. I thought the evidence was right. And you know, that was a slippery thing to deal with.
- [36:55]
C
So in my mind, when I was reading through the book, all it occurred to you, why did someone not challenge him and the basis of his evidence and just keep piling these cases upon him until he just eventually gives up? Because the weight of it is too much. It's not worth the hunt.
- [37:10]
B
Yeah, so there were some senators, Democratic senators who tried to call him out, but you know, it, people were afraid. They were afraid of his power, they were afraid of what he would do to them, the accusations against them. There was one sender from Connecticut, Senator Benton, who, who did call him out and McCarthy then sued him and you know, helped contribute to his loss in, in, in his re election. The same thing happened to, you know, Senator Scott Lucas, who is the House Majority Leader. He lost his race in 1950 because he had led the opposition, the early opposition, to McCarthy. And McCarthy campaigned against him and not only got him defeated, but the guy who replaced him was a McCarthy ally, Everett Dirksen. And so there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of fear and there were a lot of people on, particularly in the Republican Party who didn't like him, but they liked what he was doing and they liked the impact that he had. You know, they, he was a useful idiot or, you know, maybe he was crazy, but he was, he was there crazy. And, and so there wasn't really an incentive for them to say anything. Margaret Chase Smith, who is a senator from Maine, you know, she got up in mid-1950, in June of 1950 and gave a speech that said, Look, McCarthy is dangerous and McCarthy is going to destroy our party and he is doing great harm to the country. And she said, I, I challenge everybody in the Senate to sign up with me to, you know, this is my statement. And only a handful of people came along with her. And within a couple of Weeks, all but one of them had. Had withdrawn their names because they were afraid of him. And it's. It's one of those things. It's sort of hard for someone who wasn't in the middle, including myself, to imagine, you know, how could you not stand up to that? And yet, at the time, the incentives and the context were such that it took an enormous amount of courage to get up and say something. And, you know, that's. That was what McCarthy banked on.
- [39:54]
C
So was McCarthy setting the stage for what we see today in terms of political extremism?
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B
I mean, in some ways, I think, you know, I think McCarthy's. The trail of McCarthy is. Is a long one. And the McCarthy. McCarthy's tactics, McCarthy's ideology, McCarthy's very cynical view of the way politics works and the way the Congress works, you know, still still exists today. You know, one of the things that McCarthy had as a fundamental principle was a complete lack of respect for norms and for traditions and for his colleagues. He simply didn't care. And that's one of the reasons also why it took so long for opposition to gain against him, because he was operating in a way that no one else was used to. And I think that is very similar to what we've seen in the last several years. It's just a context, a political context where, you know, we relied on certain norms and certain limits to the way that political combat works or doesn't work. And just like McCarthy did in the 1950s, we've seen certain people really just tear those norms apart and just walk right over them. And it takes a minute for everybody else to look and say, well, now we're playing by new rules, or we're not playing by any rules. And what does that mean? How does that operate now? And in the meantime, great destruction is done.
- [41:42]
C
And you've not learned anything from history.
- [41:45]
B
Unfortunately, I don't think so.
- [41:48]
C
Now, you mentioned that Truman's loyalty program was an executive order. After his subsequent re election, why did he not suspend it?
- [41:57]
B
That's a good question. I think it took him a while to really understand the impact that it was having. It did have some benefits for him. I mean, the thing is that one of the reasons why he created it was to give him cover, right? To give him the opportunity to say, see, I am doing something about Communist subversion. I am hunting for Communists in the government. And as the Red Scare picked up, he really couldn't afford to pull back on that. If he had suddenly gotten up after his reelection and said, well, now we're done with that. I'm going to withdraw this. This program. He would have been just destroyed politically. And yeah, he would have stayed president, but he wouldn't have been able to do very much. And of course his party, you know, needed to be re. You know, they had midterm elections two years later. I mean, it wasn't just about him. So I think he really just had no choice but to stay with it.
- [43:07]
C
Understood. So clearly this was a demon nobody, nobody could control once it was.
- [43:11]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [43:14]
C
Now, speaking of peak skill as an example of an older animus playing out racial insecurities, are we seeing old ghosts getting exercised in the name of fighting communism in the.
- [43:26]
B
You mean during the 1950s?
- [43:28]
C
Yes.
- [43:29]
B
Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that clearly emerged during the Red scare or that the Red scare era made clear was that, well, first of all that that old unreconstructed anti black racism was not unique to the south and that it was powerful in places like Peekskill. Maybe it had a different shape a little bit, but it was still very much prevalent. But also that civil rights as a political cause was also unpopular in a lot of the north and was very, very much linked in the minds of racists and whites or just honestly everyday whites to communism. And this had been one of the main lines of attacks during the 1930s. And there's a strong civil rights movement in the 1930s that had a lot of support from the Communist party, but also a lot of criticism, mostly unfair or, you know, outright smears that civil rights was simply a front for communism. Right. And so, you know, people heard that and whether they believed it or they just thought it was a good excuse, they acted on it. And so in a place like Peekskill, you saw that really come. Come to a head where people acted on their racist beliefs. They used their anti communism as an excuse to. To play out their racist beliefs. And you know, a lot of people got hurt because of that.
- [45:24]
C
I'm just.
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A
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C
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A
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B
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C
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B
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C
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B
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- [46:24]
C
At the Home Depot. Now, could you tell us about Harry Bridges and other labor activists like him who needlessly sacrificed at the altar for make belief, make believe reasons.
- [46:40]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, Harry Bridges is a fascinating character. He was very, very left wing, right. Whether he was a communist or not, he always insisted he wasn't. To this day, there are people who insist that he was. But, you know, he ultimately was just a very strong, very committed union leader who saw communists. He certainly, he was friends with communists and he agreed with a lot of what they were doing. But ultimately he did it, he took those positions because he was. Thought it was right for the labor movement. And you know, he ended up making two kinds of enemies. The first was the government and, and here, you know, not the, not a republican government, but the, the, the Roosevelt government. He was a labor leader who did not agree with everything Roosevelt wanted. He was not. He was a maverick and he was someone that made things difficult for them. He didn't go along with everything that Roosevelt said. And so they targeted him and tried to get him deported. And he fought for the better part of 17 years to not be deported, which is an amazing, insane, insane amount of time to have to deal with that accusation. But the other side was other labor leaders. And there was a real fight, a pretty decisive fight among labor leaders after the 1948 presidential election between those who really wanted to create a party, a movement that was very much in line with the Democratic party and others who wanted, like Bridges, who wanted an independent movement that was, you know, maybe often in line with Democrats, but was more progressive, had a different vision. And, you know, this came to a head on a lot of issues, a lot of national security issues. Frankly, Bridges was not, was not invested in the cold war in the way that a lot of leaders more to the center like Walter Reuther were. And you know, as a result, they pushed Bridges out and they, along with about a million other union members, you know, they're pushed out of the. What was then just the cio. Today it's the AFL cio, But they were kicked out. And you know, some of them had legitimate criticisms of some party, some union leaders. There were some union leaders who were very openly communist and very openly more loyal to the party than to the unions. But guys like Harry Bridges were not. You know, Harry Bridges ultimately was loyal to his union, but because he was not willing to play along with the powers that be, he was punished. One thing that I think is. Is noteworthy is he. He didn't disappear. You know, he stayed in charge of the longshoremen along the west coast for decades afterward. And he lived a long time. He lived long enough, I think, to see, to some extent, a vindication of what he had said. He lived to see the end of the Cold War and to really see that maybe he was right, understood.
- [50:32]
C
How many other selection did we lose during this time?
- [50:35]
B
Well, I mean, it's, you know, that's. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and it's very hard to put a number on anything because in a. In a meaningful way, I mean, you can look at the number of people who were fired from their jobs in the federal government, you know, and that's a. Explicitly for. Com. For loyalty issues. Several hundred or several thousand. Sorry, but not tens of thousands. But then there are people who were never hired, and those numbers are not anywhere to be found. They're not kept. There are any number of people who simply resigned. That's also, you know, people don't give reasons why they resign. And then there's. And this is true for. You can then go through all kinds of fields, teachers, same thing where teachers and professors were booted out of their profession, or either not cooperating with investigations or not willing to sign loyalty oaths or etc. And, you know, those numbers, again, it's probably impossible to say nationwide how many here in New York. You know, there were a couple of hundred teachers who were fired from public schools because of some affiliation with some sort of questionable organization. I put that in quotes. Questionable. You know, the blacklist in Hollywood is also amorphous. I mean, you can. There was never an official blacklist of names. There's just an understanding that you were on the blacklist and that, you know, you might say a few thousand people were on that list. So. But then there are other people. There are. There are people who really only exist in anecdotes, people who didn't get bank loans because their names appeared on some list that was. That was circulating. And there were lots of different lists of people with questionable backgrounds. And so it's hard to say. Tens of thousands of people in a, you know, broadly speaking, were affected negatively in some way by this period.
- [52:58]
C
Justice delayed is justice denied. So many thousands of people. America's future essentially was jeopardized because of petty fears and baseless allegations.
- [53:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's really a self inflicted wound for sure. I mean, I go back a lot to the number of people in the State Department who were pushed out for baseless reasons. But because of that we, and a lot of them were Asia experts. And as a result, we didn't have the depth of experience that we really needed in that region in the 1950s and 60s. And we had a lot of people who, even though they stayed in the State Department, were very cautious about saying anything that might come across as dissent or criticism of the current, of a current policy. And of course that's, you know, broadly speaking, how we got into disasters like Vietnam. So no one people knew that there were, that it was a mistake, but they weren't willing to stand up and say it because they had seen what happened to their colleagues who had done that during the Red Scare. And so, you know, that's one example of many places where, you know, we punish dissent and we demand loyalty and sometimes because we think we're doing the right thing and the consequences is enormous and in some ways incalculable. I mean, who can say for sure what the consequences are? But I think it's hard to deny that we did great harm to ourselves as a country.
- [54:41]
C
Understood. Now I'm remembering Willard Edwards statement, McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled up.
- [54:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a strong sentiment that runs through to today and it's a, you know, a very narrow minded view of Americanism and professions of loyalty. And you know, part of what I think he meant by that was that, you know, McCarthyism is, is very performative. You know, it's, it's all about declaring a very aggressive loyalty to the United States, a very aggressive identity in that, in that Americanism and in a real, you know, a form of jingoism, a form of chauvinism that says, you know, I'm right and you're wrong and if you don't agree with me, I'm gonna punch you in the face. Right. That's sort of, that's kind of what McCarthyism did. And, and that's what, that's what that sentiment was. You know, I think McCarthy in a way spoke to the way a lot of Americans felt. Even if they didn't, even if they weren't happy with the way they felt, you know, they understood that there was a, a crass form of Americanism that, that they understood and agreed with. And you know, you kind of see it today. I mean, I would say in some ways. Hulk Hogan was a. Was a great exemplar of that. You know, someone who really only showed his most aggressive side and, you know, was. Was hyper masculine and hyper patriotic and. And that's an identity for a lot of people, and they're proud of that. And they don't do with nuance or. Or complexity very well.
- [56:41]
C
Why was this never called out in national debates or televised debates or something such? Or has it already been? You expose them as buffoons, you're clearly making mountain out of a molehill. Where is the evidence?
- [56:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's a.
- [56:58]
C
It's a good question.
- [56:59]
B
I think a lot of it is just because it's asymmetric warfare in some ways. You know, there are people who. That's the way they want to talk, and that's the way they want to act. And the people that they're attacking, that's not the game that they want to play. That's not the way that they think politics should be done. You know, McCarthy and so many people after them, all they did was take the low road. And oftentimes the reason they can succeed is that the people opposite them are taking the high road. And, you know, those two things don't really work together. And unfortunately, most of the time, if your enemy, your opponent is taking the high road and you take the low road, you're going to win.
- [57:46]
C
Understood? There's clearly, there's a poverty of imagination that you can see here, because there are bigger issues, bigger threats to focus on. My next question is going to be about patronizing Chiang Kai Shek and ignoring the threat that was Mao. And why not follow the model that was followed with Joseph Tito, that is, you play Mao and turn him against Stalin. Because by now the United States had understood what Stalin was, and it was only a matter of time that any communist leader would sooner or later decide to become an island rather than ally with the Soviet Union.
- [58:24]
B
Yeah, I think my reading of that is that, first of all, Chiang Kai Shek and his wife were incredibly charismatic figures who had managed to persuade a lot of elites in America that they were the answer. Right. Tito didn't have that. There was no counter Tito in Yugoslavia to speak of. And so, you know, there was this hope, this belief that. That Chang was a very good proponent of, you know, that he could win. And also there was a real orientalism among American conservatives about China and this belief that China was theirs to control. And. And that had been around for a long time. Alfred Kohlberg, who's one of the figures in the book, you. He's a great example of this. You know, he believed that. He believed in China as it was, and he had this firm commitment that we have to be able to. We, the United States, have to use our power to force China to go back to the way it was. You know, a way a country that was a great source of wealth for they. Or for, you know, for goods and services are goods and, and, and, and also markets, but one that was really pliable to our interests. And, you know, they demonized Mao to such an extent that it was impossible to even conceive of working with Mao or splitting Mao off from China or from Russia. You know, it's. I mean, ultimately, that is what Nixon achieved, but it took, you know, 25 more years for that to happen.
- [60:14]
C
And this is in part because those Asia experts were fired from the Bureau.
- [60:18]
B
I mean, I would say they were fired as a consequence of having supported this other strategy. You know, they were, they were the ones who said, look, we should, you know, Chang is a lost cause. Mao is the future. Here's how we deal with them, and here's maybe how we can play them off. The Soviet Union. And they were. I mean, in the long and the short of it is they were fired for that. And. Yeah, and then as a consequence, there was no one in the State Department or in the federal government who was going to really express the idea that we should go back and try to work with, with Mao. But look, after the Korean War, there was really such a wide gulf between the Chinese government and the American government that it, it was just going to take a long time for, for any kind of rapprochement to, to be possible.
- [61:18]
C
Understood. You let me straighten to my next question, which is about Joe McCarthy and Hugh Scott and other Republicans making sweeping allegations against the US Military in the House. You mentioned that senators cannot be held responsible for what they say. But wouldn't this be a line too far to cross?
- [61:38]
B
I mean, it was for, for Eisenhower. You know, that's really where Eisenhower, when they started attacking George Marshall and other. Other military leaders and an attack in the US army generally, that's where Eisenhower really decided to stand up and to take on McCarthy. And, you know, I think he did a good job of doing so without leaving his fingerprints all over things. But yeah, and it's really where McCarthy went too far. You know, he couldn't be held liable for in a legal sense, but he was definitely liable politically. And a lot of people by 1954 felt that he had gone too far in attacking the military. And that was really the beginning of the end for him.
- [62:36]
C
That would be my last question, the most satisfying part. The fall of Joe McCarthy. How did that come about? No other passage in the book made me feel as happy as that court case where the rug was simply pulled out from McCarthy's feet, eventually leading to his exile and loneliness. So how did this come about, finally?
- [62:58]
B
Well, I think one of the things, you know, there were. There were two people who realized something very important about McCarthy, and that was Edward R. Murrow and Joe Welch. Edward R. Murrow, obviously was the broadcaster who famously in. In 1954, showed a. A whole episode just allowing Joe McCarthy, just putting him on camera, I. Putting him, you know, running footage of him. And, and he showed Americans a side of McCarthy that they hadn't really come to appreciate. And that was, you know, just how much of a bully he was and how, you know, McCarthy had benefited a lot from not being on camera. You know, people knew what he looked like in photographs, but he was often treated very well, and they knew him through reporters and through writing, but they didn't, hadn't really seen him very much until, Until Murrow presented him. And to be fair, or not to be fair, to be, to be. Put it all out there, you know, Murrow did a very good job of spinning McCarthy to put him in the worst possible light. So it wasn't like he was just presenting random clips. He really showed him in the worst possible way. And then Joe Welch, who was the lawyer in the Army McCarthy hearings, he understood something similar, which was that, first of all, whatever they called the hearings, it ultimately was a performance. And Welch was a great actor and he understood that courts are often stages, and here was an opportunity where millions of Americans were going to be watching what was going on and for him to show McCarthy in his worst possible light. And so, you know, Welch set a trap for McCarthy and he baited him into attacking one of his assistants. And that allowed Welch to then turn around and give, you know, what is, you know, one of the famous sort of speeches in American politics, which he presented as spontaneous, but I think he had a pretty good idea of it in his mind, but, you know, where he said, you know, have you no decency at long last? And, and that really, that really hurt McCarthy and, and that, you know, and it went on. And in the book, I really kind of give the whole picture, the whole scene, because it, it wasn't just one statement. It went on and on, and they're, they're back and forth. And that was really what. What Welch wanted. He wanted not just to. Not just to get McCarthy on the bait, but really to pull him in and allow people to see just how. How disgusting he was. And of course, it made a huge difference. That made all the difference, that at the end, the audience. I mean, the audience, the people in the viewers. So the people in the room who are watching, they all started clapping, and that just put a pin into this, into the show, and McCarthy never recovered from that. It's really. It's a pretty dramatic moment, and I think, really, people need to understand just how pivotal that was.
- [66:25]
C
I believe you have outlined the solution for how disgusting and lowballing politicians ought to be dealt with. This is a fantastic example which should have ideally been played out. But do you think. Sorry, this should have been my last question, but I'm tempted to throw one more.
- [66:43]
B
Go ahead.
- [66:43]
C
Do you think people have now become too desensitized toward this kind of disgusting politics?
- [66:50]
B
Possibly. Possibly. I mean, I think that I like to believe that there is an opportunity for someone, for a new kind of Edward R. Murrow or Joe Welch to come along, you know, in 2025. I don't know if that means, um, it's a politician or a lawyer or a journalist. You know, it could be just someone on social media who suddenly goes viral because they understand the moment. But it's going to be, if that happens, it's going to be someone who understands the moment, who understands exactly how social media and in our current culture, political culture operates and. And they're able to very effectively call out those sorts of politicians. I don't know. I don't know. That's. That's a very optimistic way of thinking, but it might happen.
- [67:47]
C
We'll see where the chips land. But thank you for authoring this book. This was.
- [67:52]
B
Oh, thank you.
- [67:53]
C
Whirlwind, wonderful tour with which got done in three days. And that's because I had to divide time between reading and work. If I just sat down to read it, probably to finish it in a day.
- [68:03]
B
Oh, well, that's very kind of you to say. I appreciate it, and thanks for having me.
- [68:08]
C
The pleasure is mine, Clay. Thank you.
- [68:11]
B
All right, Take care.
- [68:12]
C
You too. Take care.
- [68:14]
B
Bye.
- [68:14]
C
Bye. Bye.