100 Years of 100 Things: McCarthyism

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show, on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We started this last July, and now, we have reached thing number 80. It's 100 years of McCarthyism, from a century ago to today. Just as an example of how contemporary the notion of McCarthyism still is, just yesterday, a group of Columbia University faculty members sued the Trump administration over the $400 million in medical research and other grants Trump is withholding until the university satisfies Trump's demands on various things.

While referring to the suit, teachers union President Randi Weingarten called what Trump is doing modern-day McCarthyism. Here we are, with that word still in play for things that are at least allegedly going on right now. Our guest for this 100 Years segment is New York Times correspondent Clay Risen, who also writes books about history and has a new one that plays right into our 100 Years hands, called Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

Clay, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Clay Risen: Oh, thanks, Brian. It's an honor to be here.

Brian Lehrer: People who know about McCarthyism from Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, usually think of it as a Cold War, 1950s phenomenon, but your timeline does go back a full hundred years to shortly after World War I. Why start there?

Clay Risen: Well, yes, there really were two red scares, separate, but connected. The first one began right after World War I and involved the rounding up and, in some case, deportation of people who were considered radicals. These were not only communists, but anarchists and union activists. It was a relatively brief period of time, but it saw the creation of an architecture of anti-radicalism in the United States.

Part of that was the FBI and the mandate of J Edgar Hoover. He got his start there. That's what set the template for the post-World War II era that I focus on in the main, in my book.

Brian Lehrer: In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, I guess that's Red Scare One, capitalism is failing the United States, and there is a communist movement, among many other things that were happening. How do you address that in the book?

Clay Risen: Yes, for me, that's so important to understanding what happened by the time you get to McCarthy, because in the 1930s, there was a very broad movement on the left that involved communists, but also New Deal Democrats, socialists, people of all kinds of beliefs. It's called the Popular Front and it was not unique to the United States. This was really a worldwide movement. Divisions mattered less than goals, so you saw Communists supporting Roosevelt.

Roosevelt, not so hot on the Communists, but a general understanding that there was a new America, a new consensus around activist government, pluralist politics, women's rights, and civil rights. That was emerging, and that really set up a cultural conflict with conservatives that simmered until the onset of the Cold War. That's, for me, really the explanation for why the second phase of the Red Scare took off when it did.

Brian Lehrer: Was Joe McCarthy on the scene yet, at all, in the 30s, or just started later? He must have at least grown up in that environment that you were just describing during the Depression.

Clay Risen: He did. Like a lot of people who were anti-communists, aggressively anti-communist, like him, he was not so clearly in that mood in the 30s. He was growing up and setting himself out. It was only in the 40s, when he started to look toward national politics, that he started to harden his anti-New Deal position, but also his message that-- like other people, he said communism is everywhere, it's in our housing projects, it's in our local governments, it's in the State Department.

After 1946, when he joined the Senate, you can start to see the Joe McCarthy we knew, or we know, emerging, but it's really not until 1950, well into the Red Scare, that he jumped onto the scene and really took over.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as usual, in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, we invite your oral history calls, so in this case, who's old enough to remember Joe McCarthy, or know anyone affected by McCarthyism at the time, in stories handed down, or Red Scare politics stories or questions from any time in the last hundred years? We're going to go through Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, Richard Nixon, we're definitely going to talk about today. 212-433-WNYC, but your oral history call is going as far back as you can go.

Who has the longest memory on this listening right now, or a story that's been handed down from a parent, a great-grandparent, or anyone? 212-433-WNYC, call or text. 212-433-9692. It's 100 years of McCarthyism, with Clay Risen, from The New York Times, whose new book is Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay, I pulled several history clips here, so as we jump ahead to the actual McCarthy era of the 1950s, here he is, just 12 seconds, to give our 21st-century listeners a taste of his enemies within rhetoric.

Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy: Our nation may well die. Our nation may well die, and I ask you, who caused it? Was it loyal Americans, or was it traitors in our government?

Brian Lehrer: Traitors in our government. Sound familiar? Talk about Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. Who was he? What was his project that came to be known as McCarthyism?

Clay Risen: McCarthy was the junior senator from Wisconsin. He was elected in 1946. He had been a judge before that, and he ran on a pretty strongly anti-communist platform, as did a lot of people. Richard Nixon was elected to the House that year. There was this wave of young men. McCarthy was very young, even when he died, a decade later. These young men, a lot of them came out of the war and they grabbed onto this message of wanting to fundamentally change Washington.

We know this story from recent history, and it happens, but McCarthy landed in Washington, he couldn't really get his feet planted. He didn't fit in with the Senate. He had a rough edge to him, and a lot of people in the Republican Party looked askance at him. They thought, "He's the beta wolf, and he'll be gone after one term," but in 1950, the Red Scare was really picking up steam.

One thing that brought it to a point for a lot of Americans was the Hiss-Chambers scandal, in which Alger Hiss was accused, and ultimately, essentially convicted of espionage. That came down in January, 1950. A few weeks later, McCarthy stood up, of all places, in a West Virginia women's Republican club, and said, "I have in my hand a list of 200 State Department officials who are communists," and it went from there. The media ate it up.

Republicans and Democrats alike didn't know how to handle this. Within a couple of weeks, he was dominating the news, and controlled it for four years.

Brian Lehrer: How much was the issue that he made up, people's association with the Communist Party, how much was that list, or anything else he asserted, real or fake? How much is the real importance of this, that it was an attack on something we hold dear in this country, the right to dissent and have different politics?

Clay Risen: Yes, I think it's all of that, and I think it's important that he struck when he did, because like I said, Hiss had just been found guilty. There were a lot of people who might have otherwise been skeptical, but people had talked about Hiss as a future secretary of State, so if he was considered a spy, well, maybe what McCarthy is saying is right, and maybe, we need to be skeptical of people who claim to hide behind dissent as an excuse for radicalism.

There was a lot of insecurity. We think of the 1950s, the post-war era, as a time of confidence and growth. It eventually was that, but those first years after World War II were very insecure. The Cold War was setting in. People were trying to get back to normal. McCarthy took advantage of all this at the moment, and we know, and even at the time, people knew that most of what he said was not true, and that maybe there was a kernel.

The list that he said he had, there was a list, in the sense that there had been a list drawn up, years before, of some potential security risks at the State Department. Most of those people are gone. They weren't security risks because of their political ideology. A lot of them had been alcoholics or other reasons. McCarthy wasn't lying that he had a list. He was just lying about what the list meant. That was how he worked, right? There was always some kernel, or often, there was some kernel that he could point to.

People, they were naive, they were insecure, or he took advantage of this moment to kind of stretch the truth as far as possible. It's amazing how few people were willing to stand up to him and say, "You are not just lying, you are greatly damaging the American civil society."

Brian Lehrer: Here's Robin, in Long Island City, with an oral history call. Robin, thank you for calling in, you're on WNYC.

Robin: Hi. My dear friend Stephen Carnovsky, whose father and mother were famous actors from the Group Theatre of the 30s and 40s, they were Phoebe Brand and, of course, Morris Carnovsky, whom you still can see in films that he did before Phoebe and Morris were blacklisted. It changed Stephen's life, because he grew up not having a lot of money. Morris and Phoebe could only do theater. Hollywood went along with Joe McCarthy, so he couldn't do-- especially Morris, who was even more famous than Phoebe.

He couldn't do movies anymore. It changed his life for the 12 years that Morris and Phoebe were blacklisted. People must know about this in the world of theater and the arts, people were blacklisted, who were actors. You know this, right?

Brian Lehrer: Of course, Robin. Thank you. Clay, talk about that a little more. People got hurt.

Clay Risen: Yes. This is an important point. I'm really glad that Robin brought this up, because it was very separate from McCarthy. The story of the Hollywood blacklist begins really in 1946, 1947, with The House Un-American Activities Committee deciding to target Hollywood, and the famous Hollywood Ten testimonies were covered, wall to wall. There were more journalists in the room than there were politicians. Everybody who's anybody was there.

Ronald Reagan, studio executives, 10 writers and producers who refused to discuss their communist affiliations, or any of their affiliations. They all went to jail for this, and they were then blacklisted. The studios got together in what was probably an anti-competitive cartel and said, "We will not hire anybody who follows their lead," and as a result, as Robin said, hundreds of people, famous actors down to stagehands and writers, were effectively banished from the movie industry.

She raises an important point too, that this was not necessarily the case on Broadway. The blacklist had a big effect on television. It had a big effect on Hollywood and in other entertainment fields, but the playwrights around Broadway and the theater world largely resisted. There are various reasons why, but it's a very interesting phenomenon, I think, and probably just because, honestly, theater was not considered a big enough target.

HUAC, The House Un-American Activities Committee, went after them a little bit, but not in a sustained way, like they did with Hollywood, because there weren't that many famous people, that most of the country recognized.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another oral history call. Sonia, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sonia.

Sonia: Hi. Okay, I'm going to have to turn off my radio, I think. Hold on a second. Okay. All of my grandparents were immigrants and they were also pro-Soviet. One grandfather was a union organizer with the Fur and Leather Workers Union, and also eventually became an officer in the 1940s, when I was just a small child. He had to take early retirement. There was something going on that I didn't understand, except they were talking about affidavit. I thought this was a person who I'd never heard of before.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] "David who?"

Sonia: "Affidavid?"

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Exactly.

Sonia: Right. What it was was whether he was going to fight having to sign this affidavit that he had, because he had been a member of the Communist Party, he couldn't have signed it, but if he didn't sign it, then he'd be fired from his job as an organizer. He just retired so that he didn't have to fight it. My father, after World War II, didn't have a regular job for about 10 years. I didn't really understand what this was all about.

We moved around a lot because he was an engineer and he just had a bunch of temporary jobs. It was because we believed things differently than everybody else around us, except that I couldn't talk about it and my parents didn't really talk about it that clearly either, so I didn't understand, for a long time, that I was a red diaper baby.

Brian Lehrer: And that your grandfather, if I'm understanding it right, or your father, was literally blacklisted.

Sonia: He didn't have a job. Yes. Now, he never said that he was blacklisted, but right after the war, he was hired to work with someone he'd worked with during the war, and then at some Johns Hopkins research lab, then he said the FBI came and said he was a security risk. When I asked him, as a grown-up, what that was all about, and he said-- I asked him if he was a member of the party, and he hedged.

Then he said he belonged to a political discussion group in Washington and some member of the group talked to the FBI, but that's all the details he would go into.

Brian Lehrer: Sonia, thank you so much. One more in this set. Rhoda in Hicksville, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rhoda.

Rhoda: Hi, how are you? Thanks for taking my call. I was hired by a national broadcasting company, not the NBC, in 1960, and I worked at Standards and Practices, and you know what that's all about. We had a woman who had a room the size of a closet, with all these card files, not regular business files. She would get calls from producers, directors, writers, whatever, to see whether any person was on the blacklist. She had the file that she would open, and check and see if their names were on the black list.

Brian Lehrer: Well, how did it manifest, Rhoda?

Rhoda: I have no idea, because we were not to ever-- Well, she locked her office all the time. Even if she went to the ladies room, the office was locked, but she would talk to even our vice president of Standards and Practices, and whisper that somebody called about a name. That's all we could ever decide until she was fired or they got rid of the blacklist. Then that office was-- people came to take all the files out, and--

Brian Lehrer: That was the end of that era.

Rhoda: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Rhoda, thank you very much. Chilling, and really interesting. Now, speaking of the major networks, by 1954, Joe McCarthy got widely discredited, including in a tough interview by Edward R Murrow of CBS News. Here's Murrow afterwards, reflecting on the McCarthy era as it died.

Edward R Murrow: No one familiar with the history of his country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of Communism.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember, always, that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

Brian Lehrer: Chillingly contemporary thought, I'm sure many of you are thinking, as is this, from a few seconds later, as Murrow continued his commentary.

Edward R Murrow: The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. Whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck.

Brian Lehrer: Again, Clay, very briefly, the kind of thing that a lot of people will hear as-- Oh, yes, didn't start this. This existed in the people, and he exploited it. Very contemporary thought.

Clay Risen: Yes, absolutely. Murrow is someone I've been thinking about a lot, and discuss in the book. Unlike a lot of other people, he, first of all, was willing to stand up as a dissenter from McCarthy, but he also understood something about his medium, and what it meant for McCarthy. McCarthy was a newspaper guy. He really understood how to manipulate the print press and deadlines, and how to get the best image of himself into the paper, but he didn't understand television, and Murrow did.

One of the brilliant things about that broadcast is that a lot of it is just extended clips of McCarthy talking. It gave people, for the first time, an unfiltered view of what McCarthy looked like, what he sounded like in the flesh, how he really came across as a bully, and how there was really no there there. Essentially, Murrow allowed McCarthy to indict himself. That commentary at the end simply sews it all up and explains to people what they'd been looking at. It helped ruin McCarthy that year, 1954.

Brian Lehrer: Moving up the timeline, the 1960s, McCarthy is long gone, but the Soviet Union is still considered a frightening adversary. There are follow-on groups to McCarthy, like the John Birch Society. Also, Martin Luther King got tarred by some opponents of civil rights as a communist in that decade. Then we get to Richard Nixon. Here's a clip of another former CBS News correspondent, Daniel Schorr, looking back years later. Some of you know he was also a news analyst for NPR after his CBS career.

Daniel Schorr tells the story of learning live on the air that he was on Richard Nixon's enemies list. It's 1973. There had just been a Watergate hearing in Congress. The depths of Nixon's paranoia and anti-democracy instincts are being revealed, including that Nixon has an actual enemies list. Schorr describes the moment he was going live on the air and is handed that list.

Daniel Schorr: I was on the air live. I didn't have time to look at this document before I started reading it live. I said, "All right, here is the first of the--" There are 20 names numbered, and let's see, it is from John Dean to H R Haldeman, subject, on screwing our political enemies. I began to read down the list until I came to number 17. 17, Daniel Schorr, notation, a real media enemy.

Then I don't know how I looked at it, I've never seen the tape, but I felt as though I was going to gulp and collapse. I did manage to say number 18, Paul Newman, number 19, Mary McGrory, number 20, and now back to you.

Brian Lehrer: Now back to you, Clay Risen, author of the book Red Scare, very briefly, because we're starting to run short on time. Reflection on that?

Clay Risen: Yes, look, the Red Scare ended, effectively, by the late 50s, but it echoed down through the decades. You mentioned the John Birch Society. These were people who thought McCarthy was right, and if anything, McCarthy didn't go far enough. That's stayed as a theme in American politics, this conspiratorial belief, but also this belief of weaponizing the tools of law enforcement and of government to go after one's enemies.

Nixon was a great example of that, but he's not alone. Nixon came up through the Red Scare and he saw firsthand how this was done. It's really no coincidence that he would, as president, use some of those same tools.

Brian Lehrer: Here's one final clip. This is actor Jeremy Strong in the movie that came out last year, The Apprentice, about how Joe McCarthy ally attorney Roy Cohn became a mentor to the young Donald Trump, including teaching Trump his three rules of politics. This is from the trailer for the film. Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn.

Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn: You want to know how to win? I'm going to let you in on a little secret. There's rules. Roy Cohn's three rules of winning. The first rule is the simplest. Attack, attack, attack. Rule two, admit nothing, deny everything. Rule three. This is the most important rule of all, okay? No matter what happens, no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Never admit defeat. Donald, you want to win? That's how you win.

Brian Lehrer: Clay, can you make the McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Donald Trump connection for us? I've read that those three rules were real in real life. Many could hear that clip and think, "Wow, that's exactly how Donald Trump plays the game."

Clay Risen: Well, I can definitely speak to McCarthy. Roy Cohn came in in 1953 to work for McCarthy, and really gave shape to McCarthy. I think of him as sort of the CEO of McCarthy Incorporated. He ran the office, he directed the attacks, but he also gave shape to McCarthy's wild allegations. Those three rules defined how McCarthy-- I think Cohn both learned from McCarthy, but also helped implement them in McCarthy's operation.

Look, that became the defining character of Cohn after he left Washington, came back to New York, and eventually met up with Donald Trump. I think anybody who listens to that and then looks at the way the President operates today will see a strong similarity. There are lots of threads that come down from the Red Scare today, and I think that's a really important one.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, a couple of credits on the clips that we played. The Daniel Schorr clip came from the Television Academy Foundation, an interview that they did with Daniel Schorr. The McCarthy clip that we played at the beginning came from something called the Cold War on TV: Joseph McCarthy vs. Edward R. Murrow, from RETRO REPORT. One last thing before you go. When we think about connections between then and now, what was the place of rhetoric connecting communism to homosexuality?

That was a thing, right, as the so-called Red Scare connected to the so-called Lavender Scare? Today, the "enemies list" includes anybody who's trans or non-binary, who they're trying to say do not exist.

Clay Risen: Yes. There's a chapter on this in my book, because I think it's a really important part of this story that's often underappreciated, during the Red Scare, and this was very much a part of McCarthy's attack, was to go after mostly gay, lesbian, queer people in the government. There were allegations that the State Department was run by a cabal of gay men. Obviously not true, but the worst of the homophobic instincts came out, and hundreds of people were fired over this.

The allegation was that if you were gay, you could be blackmailed, or you were inherently pro-communist. Don't get me started. It was very similar to other attacks that we've seen throughout the years. It's very easy to go after people who are, in some way, the most vulnerable. Either they have a secret, or their identity is controversial for some people. You tar them, and then that's a door to get in, to go after other people.

It's really sad that the Lavender Scare was so easily forgotten by a lot of people, or maybe they never knew, because I think you're right, the playbook is being used again today, in a very scary way.

Brian Lehrer: Let's end this segment by giving our last minute to one more oral history caller. Carol, in Purchase, in Westchester. You're on WNYC. Hi, Carol. I really have to limit you to one minute, so tell us your story.

Carol: Okay. Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Carol: I was born in 1940, so I went through all of it, unfortunately. My father was, like an earlier caller, a union organizer, but he was very pro-Roosevelt. There was no communism, none of the Soviet stuff, so he was appalled by what was going on. When I was a teen, a young teenager, he sat me down in front of the television set and said, "I want you to watch this, this is not America," and as I listened to the hearings just last year, I thought, "Where's my father now?" This is history repeating itself, and horrible history, besides--

Brian Lehrer: Carol, thank you so much. A good way to end, connecting how she was sat down in front of the television watching Joe McCarthy then, to what she was thinking just last year. And we thank New York Times correspondent Clay Risen, who also writes books about history and has a new one that played right into our 100 Years of 100 Things hands, called Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay, thank you very much.

Clay Risen: Thanks, Brian. It was a pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: That was thing number 80. Coming up after the break, thing number 81, on a lighter note, sort of. Stay tuned.

 

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