A review of RED SCARE: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen, 460 pages, Scribner NY (March 2025)

I. McCarthy, Hiss, and the Rosenbergs

The “Red Scare”—more commonly known as “McCarthyism” after Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin—captivated the United States from the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s until the end of the 1950s. McCarthy’s claim that numberless communist spies were embedded within the State Department spread panic throughout the country and caused many Americans to fear the imminent destruction of their country’s democratic experiment.

Most of the books written about this strange period of American history portray Joe McCarthy as a cheap demagogue whose inflammatory claims were nothing but a confection of hysterical smears, usually directed at mainstream liberals whom he portrayed as secret communist conspirators. A much smaller number of books by conservative authors portray McCarthy as a misunderstood man, defamed by writers who were either sympathetic to communism or at least naïve about the threat it presented. The truth was more complex than either of these versions of events.

There were, of course, many anti-communist liberals among the ranks of the Democratic Party—people like the late historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who despised McCarthy and McCarthyism but nonetheless acknowledged the danger posed by the Soviet Union and its American agents. And, naturally, American communists who were actually engaged in espionage for the Soviets were quick to claim that they were victims of defamatory McCarthyite attacks, and many succeeded in convincing liberal America that they were guilty of nothing more serious than dissenting from the Cold War consensus.

Clay Risen’s new book about the Red Scare arrives just as many journalists and historians—including Risen himself—are comparing McCarthy’s crusade to the demagogic second presidency of Donald Trump. In his introduction, Risen writes that he intended to resist “drawing parallels between the past and present,” but current events soon persuaded him to abandon that aim. In an article for Politico in February, Risen explicitly connects “the largest purge of ‘disloyal’ government workers in U.S. history” during the 1950s with the Trump administration’s “stated desire to check the excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion programs … to justify whirlwind firings and closures of entire federal offices.” The mistakes of the past, Risen argues, are being repeated by those unwilling to learn the lessons of history.

With that in mind, Risen provides a vivid and compelling account of McCarthy’s heyday, when he was making wild and promiscuous claims about communist infiltration and subversion in American public life. That period finally ended when McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee accused the US Army of being soft on communism after it promoted a left-wing dentist. The Army–McCarthy hearings were front-page news across the country. Television was still in its infancy, and America had never seen anything like this beamed into their homes. I remember cutting high-school classes to watch the proceedings. Others caught up with highlights of the day’s developments on the evening network news (at a time when there were only three channels to watch).

The spectacle finally turned the American public against McCarthy and his arrogant and belligerent young counsel Roy Cohn. “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” the Army’s attorney Joseph Welch told McCarthy at one point, and Americans found they were inclined to agree. McCarthy’s reputation never recovered from that exchange. As a result, Risen notes, President Dwight D. Eisenhower “was able to push out the hardcore anti-communist conspiracists who had, for a brief moment, captured the American imagination.” McCarthy died less than three years later, on 2 May 1957, aged 48.

Risen’s writing frequently sparkles as he provides us with the most comprehensive account of the hearings and their impact to date. He also offers a nuanced portrait of those Americans who willingly betrayed America on behalf of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The most famous of these men and women will be familiar to students of the era—Alger Hiss and his accuser Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Laurence Duggan, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Judith Coplon, and others. Some of these people—like Hiss, Duggan, Currie, and White—delivered information to the Soviet Union while they served in sensitive government positions. Others—like the Rosenbergs—were part of a spy ring established to obtain military and atomic secrets for Stalin.

For many years, it was widely believed that these people were the innocent victims of a Cold War witch-hunt. So, when the historian Allen Weinstein made the case for Hiss’s guilt in his 1978 book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, a storm of controversy erupted. Time magazine featured the book on its cover, accompanied by an unsigned editorial that began like this:

On a crisp day in January 1950, Alger and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhattan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A federal jury was ready to pass judgment on whether he had lied in denying that he had given secret State Department documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. Intoned the forewoman: “We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second.” Showing almost no emotion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out of the room, surrounded by a pack of lawyers and spectators.

Thus ended the great spy trial that pitted an elegant, aristocratic cynosure of the Eastern Establishment [Alger Hiss] against a rumpled, relatively obscure, former Communist [Whittaker Chambers]. For many Americans, the contest was an elemental struggle between good and evil, between leftist New Dealers and right-wing anticommunists. It divided the nation, set off widespread fears that the State Department was infiltrated by Soviet agents, and helped launch Joseph McCarthy on his hunt for Reds. 

Influential American intellectuals lined up on either side of the furious debate about Weinstein’s book and the Hiss case it reinvestigated. Some stubbornly maintained that Hiss had been the victim of a government frame-up and that Weinstein’s book was a shoddy and scandalous disgrace. Others were persuaded that Weinstein had proved Hiss’s guilt beyond doubt and that it was time for American liberals to acknowledge they had been wrong about him. But as Risen points out, both sides of the debate were fraught with ideological bias:

If one believed Chambers and not Hiss, then everything became clear: the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause, the venality of the left, the ingrained bias of the media and the political establishment. But if one believed Hiss and not Chambers, then the opposite became equally clear: that the right was fixated on destroying the left at all costs, that the forces of reaction in America were always ready to claw it back from progress, that the goodness of a man meant nothing in the face of such insidiousness. There was little room for middle ground...

Risen’s book is an attempt to reclaim that middle ground, and his analysis is unlikely to please partisans on either side. Most of the accused communists were indeed guilty, and Risen correctly treats the Rosenbergs as such. Like the Hiss trial, Risen notes that the Rosenberg trial became a “Rorschach test for one’s views on Communism, the Cold War and the Red Scare.” It either vindicated the belief that “Communism was a mortal threat to America and required every means available to repel it” or it proved “how far down the hole of political hysteria the country had fallen.”

Risen is a fine historian with no time for liberal shibboleths. He has read Allen Weinstein and knows that the evidence used to convict Hiss was sound. And he has read The Rosenberg File, the book I wrote with Joyce Milton (which he calls “a canonical account of the case”), and he acknowledges the Rosenbergs’ guilt too. Not only did Julius Rosenberg seek atomic bomb data, but his espionage network also “collected all manner of secret documents, including anti-aircraft radar systems and schemes for the P-80, America’s first regular-production jet fighter.”

Risen finds plenty to criticise on both sides of the debate about the Red threat, and in general, his careful analysis of the Hiss and Rosenberg cases holds up well. But Risen has a bias of his own—specifically the unshakeable belief that the anticommunist reaction was much worse than the threat it sought to expose and contain. And this bias leads Risen to make errors serious enough to undermine his wider argument.

II. Hollywood Reds

As the Cold War got underway, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to investigate actors, screenwriters, and film directors suspected of communist sympathies. And on 25 November 1947, the first Hollywood blacklist was created after ten directors and screenwriters refused to answer HUAC’s questions about their communist affiliations. They invoked the First Amendment to the Constitution as justification for their silence, were fined and jailed for contempt of Congress, and subsequently became unemployable in the American movie business.

The Hollywood Ten (as they became known) would later be lionised in Victor Navasky’s 1980 book about the blacklist, Naming Names, and a number of films and documentaries. There’s no question that they paid a steep price for their intransigence, but they were not admirable people and they certainly had no sincere interest in the rights and principles they said they were defending. They were all committed Stalinists, after all, and the only reason they refused to say so was that the Party had instructed them to hide their political affiliations and protest their innocence. So, rather than anger the Party and face condemnation from their radical friends and comrades, they elected to play the role of wronged martyrs standing up for their constitutional rights.

But as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo—perhaps the most talented of the Hollywood Ten—would later acknowledge, the Party’s insistence on subterfuge and duplicity probably made the Ten’s predicament worse than it might otherwise have been. Film-industry professionals subsequently called before HUAC invoked the Fifth Amendment instead, which allows a person to protect him- or herself from self-incrimination when testifying under oath. This spared them the prison time to which the Hollywood Ten had been sentenced, but it still burdened them with the same problems in the court of public opinion. If these people had nothing to hide, why were they invoking the Fifth, a tactic routinely employed by mobsters called to testify during investigations of organised crime?

Instead of simply declaring their membership of a legal party to which they voluntarily belonged, their deceit left the impression that they were concealing an ulterior and sinister agenda. “The question of a secret Communist Party,” Trumbo wrote in a article submitted to a communist publication called Masses and Mainstream in 1958, “lies at the very heart of the Hollywood blacklist.” America wasn’t Tsarist Russia, he went on, and Party members in America’s open political marketplace “should all have been open Communists, or they should not have been members at all.” The consequences of the Party’s pointless policy of secrecy were disastrous:

The moment of choice [for those called to testify] was delayed until the illusion of secrecy collapsed—and by then the quality of choice was radically changed for the worse. Instead of voluntary choice between party and career, they now faced compulsory choice between informing and blacklist. The number who chose the blacklist is impressive evidence of the honor and integrity which they brought with them into the Communist Party.

That they were never given an opportunity to face the first and real choice was a tragedy. Whichever decision they at that time might have made, they would have emerged from the past decade with more dignity ... than by submitting to a process that has separated them into informers on the one hand, and professional and social exiles on the other. In a certain sense even the informers can be counted among the victims of a policy which gave them no realistic moment of choice.

Unsurprisingly, the communist publication to which Trumbo sent this article declined to publish it. More surprisingly, Risen doesn’t mention it, preferring to lay almost all responsibility for the plight of the Hollywood Ten at HUAC’s door. Risen does acknowledge that screenwriter John Howard Lawson, the Communist Party’s leader in Hollywood, “decided to make [the Hollywood Ten’s] fight the Communist Party’s fight,” thereby embarrassing those who had backed them on First Amendment grounds. But he does not mention Trumbo’s further remarks about how the Hollywood Ten were used by the Party for political purposes, and in ways that did not serve their interests:

From 1948 to the present time, the most prominent of the blacklistees have been exploited for every left-wing cause that came down the pike, regardless of the effect such exploitation might have upon their own anti-blacklist fight. They have been consistently called upon to address public meetings on deportations, the Smith Act, the advancement of The People’s World, the Sobell issue, the atom bomb, disarmament, Soviet-American friendship, Harry Bridges ... Emmett Till, the National Guardian, and a dozen other just causes. ... Whether or not it was right that they should have appeared ... is beside the main point ... which is: the fact that they did appear increased rather than diminished their public disrepute, and rendered immeasurably more difficult the winning of their fight.

In 1952, Elia Kazan and his friend and former collaborator Arthur Miller both testified before HUAC. Miller refused to name names and received a suspended prison sentence; Kazan gave the committee the names of people who had been communists when he worked with them at New York’s Group Theatre back in the early 1930s. He did not name Miller. All the people named by Kazan were already known to HUAC and the FBI. Risen tells us that Miller “would barely speak with him afterward,” but does not acknowledge that they eventually reconciled and worked together again. (Miller and Kazan discussed Kazan’s testimony before he appeared at HUAC, although the accounts of that conversation in their respective memoirs are very different.)

Kazan’s 1954 docklands classic On the Waterfront, Risen notes, “was widely seen as an attempt to explain and valorize” his decision to cooperate with HUAC. The script was written by Budd Schulberg, who had also appeared as a cooperating witness before HUAC in 1951, and it tells a plausibly allegorical story of a dock worker who breaks his union’s code of silence by agreeing to testify against the mob. However, the film was actually inspired by an award-winning series of New York Sun articles about mob control of the waterfront unions, published in 1948. The first version of the script was written by Arthur Miller in 1951 before Kazan had testified before HUAC (Miller quit when an executive at Columbia Pictures suggested the gangsters be turned into communists). After Schulberg was brought onto the project, he spent two years researching the project on the New York docks and sitting in on the Waterfront Crime Commission hearings. He was always adamant that the script had nothing to do with communism.

As for Kazan, he had become disenchanted with communism when his artistic commitments conflicted with the Party’s political demands while he was at the Group Theatre. The Party humiliated him with a trial for insubordination and then ostracised him. “Everybody else voted against me,” he later reflected, “and they stigmatized me and condemned my acts and attitude. They were asking for confession and self-humbling.” Embittered by the experience, he resigned his Party membership. When the HUAC hearings compelled him to choose between his career and protecting communists, it was a straightforward decision. “I hate the communists,” Kazan told Arthur Miller, “and have for many years and don’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.”

Much of Hollywood never forgave Kazan. When the Oscars honoured him in 1999, many of the attending stars refused to applaud while others picketed outside. Risen’s reproachful treatment of this complex episode suggests he is not prepared to forgive Kazan either.

III. The Peekskill Race Riot and the Civil Rights Congress

In a short chapter discussing the August 1949 race riots that erupted in Peekskill, New York, Risen again forgoes a good deal of the story’s complicating nuance in favour of a simple story of anticommunist intolerance pitted against innocent idealism. Paul Robeson was a black bass-baritone, famous for his work in theatre and film, and a former all-American football star on the Rutgers University team. On 27 August, he was scheduled to headline a summer benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress near Peekskill. Robeson always denied that he was a communist but he was an unapologetic defender of the Soviet Union and spoke about Stalin as if he were a saint. It didn’t appear to worry him that most Americans despised Soviet totalitarianism and (correctly) believed the USSR to be an enemy of the United States. And while a sympathetic view of the Soviet Union didn’t matter much during the era of wartime American–Soviet cooperation, all changed with the onset of the Cold War.

As Risen puts it, Robeson became a “lightning rod” for anti-communists. The rural white working-class community in Peekskill already resented the wealthier New York City Jewish leftists who were buying up property in the area to set up “colonies” of small homes for a left-wing community. They were therefore enraged to discover that a communist-led concert and rally was about to be held in neighbouring Lakeland Acres. As attendees gathered before the concert, a mob of racist whites began attacking them with bats. As cars tried to leave the site, a white mob lined the road and pelted them with rocks. The state and local police stood by and did nothing. Robeson never even got near the stage.

This was the first instance of organised violence against leftists in America since the beginning of the Cold War. “[S]omething new was afoot in America,” Risen writes, “a paranoid viciousness born of the fears instigated by the Cold War and melded to longstanding prejudices.” The violence at Peekskill, Robeson and his comrades argued, had finally revealed the reality behind America’s liberal-democratic façade—the authentic face of the fascist Truman administration.

But Risen thumbs the scale by downplaying the radicalism of the Civil Rights Congress, for which the rally was supposed to be raising funds. The CRC, he says, was merely a “left-wing group that the Attorney General had labeled subversive.” That is a rather euphemistic description of a group placed on the attorney general’s list of “subversive and communist-affiliated groups” at a time when Americans had good reasons to fear communism. The CRC was a stigmatised body, and justifiably so. It was actually the Communist Party’s legal arm—a front created by Party lawyers to protect the Party whenever it came under attack. The money raised by the rally was to be used for the defence of Communist Party leaders being tried under the Smith Act at Foley Square in New York City.

None of which justifies the mob’s racist assault on concert-goers in Peekskill, of course. But Risen’s description of the event leaves the tendentious impression that Robeson and co. were holding a liberal civil-rights rally, unjustly targeted by the mob and the attorney general’s office alike in a fit of anti-communist hysteria. But neither Robeson nor the CRC was any friend of civil rights or liberalism, as the following story makes abundantly clear...

At the same time as the Smith Act trials were taking place in New York, a war veteran named James Kutcher and other members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party petitioned the CRC for assistance. Kutcher had lost his legs during WWII, and he had just been fired from a desk job at a local Veteran’s Affairs office because he belonged to a proscribed organisation. Kutcher needed funds so that he could sue to get his job reinstated. His fellow Trotskyists, meanwhile, had been prosecuted and jailed under the Smith Act for subversive activities during WWII and wanted the CRC to help quash their convictions. They had, in fact, been convicted with the same arguments now being used by the government against the Communist Party Stalinists at Foley Square.

A resolution was duly introduced and moved by the conference’s chair, calling upon the Civil Rights Congress to defend the formerly incarcerated members of the Socialist Workers Party and the legless veteran James Kutcher as well as the communists on trial at Foley Square. A heated debate ensued until a revealing moment occurred that is absent from Risen’s account of the Red Scare. Paul Robeson rose and condemned the SWP in his booming voice as the “allies of fascism who want to destroy the new democracies of the world” (by which he meant the new Stalinist states forged at gunpoint in Eastern Europe). “Let us not be confused,” Robeson proclaimed. “[Trotskyists] are the enemies of the working class. Would you give civil rights to the Ku Klux Klan?”

As expected, the resolution was defeated. “It was not,” comments Robeson’s biographer Martin Duberman, “his finest hour.” That is quite an understatement.

IV. Henry Wallace, Harry Bridges, and the Unions

Risen’s discussion of Henry A. Wallace’s campaign for president in 1948 on the pro-Soviet Progressive Party’s ticket is also misleading. Risen should have read Benn Steil’s definitive biography of Wallace (which I reviewed in these pages last April). Steil correctly describes the Progressive Party as “Gideon’s Red Army”—a movement organised and controlled by communists who insisted that it support and work on behalf of Stalin’s expansionist foreign policy in Eastern Europe and beyond.

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Risen suggests that Wallace did not realise how much control and influence the communists exerted over his party, only acknowledging that the Communists “played coy” about their work in the campaign. He could not, evidently, acknowledge the major role the CP played within the Progressive Party’s ranks:

How much did Wallace know about the Communists’ role in his campaign? He knew something—in rare moments of self-awareness, he bemoaned their self-destructive boasts on his behalf. At a press conference in Vermont, he conceded, “If the Communists would run a ticket of their own, the New Party”—an early name for the Progressives—“would lose 100,000 votes but gain four million.” In July he conceded, “There is no question that this sort of thing is a liability.” But he also agreed with much of what was handed to him, especially on foreign policy. When a New York Times correspondent asked how he squared his belief in Stalin as a peace-loving leader with the Soviet Union’s rampaging takeover of Eastern Europe, he said that it was only natural for them to want a cordon of allied states around their border.

This sounds a lot like the Republican Party’s alignment with Russia’s policy priorities today. In fact, Wallace is arguably a better analogue for MAGA than Joe McCarthy, especially the willingness to dress appeasement up as concern for peace. “Wallace may have been a tool of the Communists,” Risen writes, “but his race drew support from far beyond the party. He spoke for a legitimate, widespread, discombobulating fear that Truman was driving America into another war.” (That may have been true in 1946, but by the time Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign got underway, that extra support had evaporated.)

Risen keeps returning to the argument that Harry Truman played a major part in creating the Red Scare and “lending it a bipartisan cover.” He points out that Truman ordered loyalty and security investigations of government workers during his presidency. But those hearings—problematic though they certainly were—did not interfere in the lives of regular citizens employed in private industry, public education, or the theatre and arts. Moreover, Truman vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, a major piece of anti-communist legislation introduced by Republicans and eventually passed by Congress in defiance of his veto. The Act required all communists to register with the government, but its extreme measures were never put into practice and most of its provisions were quickly invalidated by the Supreme Court. 

The idea that McCarthyism should really have been called Trumanism has a long history on the political Left. But Risen’s inclination to see America’s communists as victims of oppression means he fails to make distinctions between principled liberal anti-communists and paranoid McCarthyites. So, he describes the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) as “dogmatic in their anti-Communism.” And he criticises the head of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, Walter Reuther, for trying to “rid the country of Communists altogether.” In fact, Reuther only sought to limit communist control over unions, including his own, in the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO). And for good reason—he understandably believed the communists posed a grave threat to a free trade-union movement.

When Risen turns to the role of the union led by Harry Bridges, the problems with his approach to this topic become apparent. Bridges was the Australian-born chief of the west coast’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the leadership of which was close to the American Communist Party. Even after the CIO expelled him from its ranks for running a communist-dominated group, the dock workers kept reelecting him to represent them until he retired in 1977.

Bridges was famous for leading a rare and successful general strike in San Francisco in 1934, which succeeded in closing down almost every port on the west coast for months. In 1937, he created the ILWU and affiliated it with the new industrial-workers national union, the CIO. Risen writes that the CIO welcomed the efforts of communists to organise industrial workers, since they “proved their worth in their zeal for organizing, planning and striking.” By the end of 1937, the CIO had some four million members, but Bridges was too radical even for the New Deal administration. The Justice Department tried four times to have him deported until the Supreme Court ruled in Bridges’s favour with a 5–3 decision on 18 June 1945.

Risen provides a balanced analysis of the Communist Party’s role in the labour movement. The Party claimed to support worker democracy but it took control of the unions wherever it could, ran them as a clique, kept the rank and file from making decisions, and of course, insisted that members endorse Soviet foreign policy. A fight between the centre and the Left was therefore inevitable, as the leaders of the CIO turned against the communists at the start of the Cold War. Since the Party controlled a third of the 42 affiliated unions, the CIO’s leadership worked to expel the Party-led unions from its organisation. Unions in which the Party was either influential or in control—like the East Coast National Maritime Union and New York City’s Transit Workers Union—broke with the Party when it insisted its members support the Wallace campaign for president in 1948, rather than Harry Truman and the Democrats. After Walter Reuther forced the communists out of his UAW union, the other liberal trade-union leaders followed suit.

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act included a provision requiring all union leaders to sign an affidavit affirming that they were not Communist Party members. Many of the Party-led union leaders refused to sign, but Harry Bridges signed it. As Risen recounts, Bridges went to a meeting with the leaders of the CIO’s anti-communist unions and assured them that he was not a Party member and that his members were not under communist control. This was certainly not the impression given by his leadership. Bridges and his union opposed the Marshall Plan for reconstruction of Europe while the CIO supported it. Bridges also refused to support Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign. He did what the Communist Party leadership told him to do and endorsed Henry A. Wallace and the Progressive Party instead.

Nevertheless, Risen seems to believe that Bridges’s politics were preferable to those of his liberal anti-communist enemies, and he defends Bridges from his critics. Risen argues that Bridges sought “independence and autonomy for longshoremen” while Reuther and other liberals only sought “centralizing power.” Risen does not seem to realise that it was Bridges and the other communist-controlled unions—like the United Electrical Workers—who bowed to Communist Party diktats and shattered trade-union solidarity. Bridges, Risen argues, believed that anti-communism was simply “an excuse to purge leaders who did not follow [CIO chief Philip] Murray’s agenda” because Murray believed the Party-led unions “were in the tank for Moscow.” Which of course, they were. It was the Communist Party, controlled by Moscow, that destroyed trade-union unity, not Philip Murray, Walter Reuther, and the anti-communist union chiefs.

The US Government pursued Bridges doggedly, insisting that he was “a top figure in the West Coast Communist Party.” He was eventually tried for perjury, convicted by a jury, sentenced to prison, and stripped of his US citizenship. In 1953, when the Supreme Court overturned that conviction and reinstated his citizenship, the Justice Department gave up. In Risen’s view, this was simply more anti-communist persecution. Bridges, he maintains, was actually more like “a British Labour Party leader or a German Social Democrat than a burn-it-down radical.” That might have been true when it came to negotiating a better deal for his membership, but it was not at all true when it came to the foreign policy his union supported.

Risen criticises Philip Murray for expelling the ILWU from the CIO, arguing that he had expelled one of the labour movement’s “most visionary leaders” who just wanted “a different social order.” (Soviet communism was certainly a different social order but it was not moderate British social-democratic governance.) The anti-communists were getting worked up about very little, Risen argues. Although some members of the ILWU “followed the Soviet line, very few of them, by 1949, were committed Communists. Most were like Bridges—admiring of Communists, but not party members, and not beholden to its dictates.”

This is nonsense—not only was Bridges definitely a Communist Party member, he also sat on the Party’s Central Committee, the body charged with ensuring that all members followed Moscow’s lead and toed the Party line. The evidence was first investigated in 1946 by the CIO itself, when its leaders began to wonder whether the ILWU was acting as a legitimate trade union responsive to the needs of its membership or if it was simply a propaganda conduit for Soviet policy and interests.

The CIO’s investigation concluded that the ILWU’s policies and actions were undertaken “for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Communist Party.” Not once did the union deviate “from the line of the Communist Party” and its programs and purposes were meant to advance the goals of the Party rather than those of the CIO. At the time, they were unable to prove that Bridges was actually a Communist Party member but they were able to establish that he participated “in Communist Party fraction meetings and did receive at these meetings instructions from Party representatives as to the line that was to be carried out not only in the ILWU itself but also within the CIO.”

Finally, in the Summer 1994 issue of the Labor History journal, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes revealed that Communist International files in the Moscow archives contained lists of all American Communist Party members. The lists used pseudonyms but members were readily identifiable by their accompanying biographies. The most influential member was given the codename “Rossi” and described as “President of the Dockers’ and Port Warehouse Workers’ Union.” Klehr and Haynes’s analysis confirmed what everyone already suspected: “Comintern documents would indicate that Bridges was, not only a member of the Communist party, but a member of its ruling Central Committee.”

In other words, Bridges repeatedly lied and perjured himself whenever he swore that he was not—nor had ever been—a communist. Risen’s claim that Bridges made union policy with the interests of his membership in mind is absurd given what we now know. He made policy favourable to the interests of international communism and Moscow. Contra Risen, the industrial union movement’s non-communist leaders were wise to expel Bridges and the ILWU from the CIO.

Had the communists continued to run many of the industrial unions, they may well have taken action and called strikes to oppose the Marshall Plan, NATO, and other policies intended to thwart Soviet interests. That, after all, is what one CP-led union did during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when it ran a political strike in a California plant that was manufacturing planes. As soon as the Soviet Union was invaded, however, the American Communist Party moved to support Stalin’s regime and fight for a no-strike pledge to ensure there would be no interference with war production.

V. Demagogy and Appeasement

The fundamental weakness of Risen’s book is that it doesn’t really follow the evidence. Although Risen acknowledges that some communists did in fact commit espionage for the Soviet Union, he prefers to emphasise the many injustices they suffered, which often requires him to minimise the true extent and danger of communist infiltration. This bias disfigures the historical record to which his book is a contribution.

Of course, persecution and over-reach by anti-communists damaged the country as well, but even by Risen’s own account, the number of government workers affected was quite small. Most of them did not go to prison, and they eventually obtained employment in new vocations. This was by no means trivial, but nor was it the national catastrophe it has become in America’s popular and cultural imagination. The damage inflicted upon America during the Cold War by communist spies, on the other hand, was much greater than Risen is prepared to admit. 

Julius Rosenberg, for example, stole a functional proximity fuse one Christmas Eve and passed it to his Soviet handler the following day in a cafeteria. This was the device the USSR used to bring down Major Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane during the Eisenhower presidency, an incident that led to the cancellation of a scheduled summit between the US president and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. The Rosenberg spy ring also stole the data that allowed the Russians to build the MIG 21 jets they used in the Korean war, along with other sensitive military secrets.

Risen also minimises the damage done by Soviet agents high in the Truman administration like Alger Hiss and Larry Duggan. And he hardly mentions the treachery of Harry Dexter White, the second-in-command at the Treasury Department who developed the postwar Bretton-Woods economic arrangement and later became head of the International Monetary Fund. It later emerged that White had given the Soviets the plates to make German occupation marks after the war, among other information he had passed to the Soviet Union for years. It is true that Soviet espionage efforts often failed, but it was not for want of trying.

Risen is more comfortable discussing the overreaction to the Soviet threat and the assault on American civil liberties that overreaction produced. But following the opening of the archives after the collapse of the USSR, we now know that Soviet penetration of Western societies was far more extensive than previously thought. Some of those who worked on Stalin’s behalf in the West still remain unknown all these years later.

Risen closes his book with a wry observation. Joe McCarthy may have ended his life in lonely ignominy, but that did not preclude the possibility that others like him would be thrust into positions of power and influence in the future. The future Risen feared is now upon us, but by indulging the victimhood narrative of America’s Cold War communists, he manages to miss the importance of the lesson he is trying to teach. Yes, Trump and McCarthy are both emblematic of the demagogue’s seductive allure, and both men learned a good deal about cynical ruthlessness from Roy Cohn. But the MAGA movement’s totalitarian appeasement more closely resembles the communist Left of the 1950s. Americans who want to resist this illiberal menace effectively should look to the liberal anti-communists that Risen spends far too much of his book disparaging.