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The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?' Joe McCarthy and the road to Trump
On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question, the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives. 'Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,' Welch said, as millions watched on TV, as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy's sights. 'Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?' As Clay Risen writes in his new history, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America: 'McCarthy, it seemed, did not.' The public listened. McCarthy was abandoned by those in power. McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm, President Dwight D Eisenhower joked. The senator died three years later, aged just 48, firmly in disgrace. Risen published his book last week, to glowing reviews, smack in the middle of another dramatic Washington moment, full of drama, replete with disgrace, in which many have compared McCarthy and Donald Trump, a Republican president pursuing his own purges and persecutions. Government workers are in Trump's sights. So are protesting students and anyone or anything he deems representative of progressive values – of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump's political enemies are best defined as anyone he thinks wronged him in his first term, his defeat in 2020, his four criminal cases and in the election last year. 'McCarthy was not a lone wolf,' Risen said, 'but he was willing to go and say things. No one knew what he was going to say. There was something Trumpian in that regard.' Asking historians to discuss their subjects in light of modern figures and events is a journalistic cliche. But it seems fair when talking to Risen. He has addressed the question, writing for his employer, the New York Times, about the Trumpist 'New Right' in a piece illustrated with a picture of McCarthy in a red Maga cap. Given McCarthy was finally brought down by a simple appeal to decency, could that possibly happen, one day, to Trump? 'I think that's been the question since 2015,' Risen said. 'I remember when he went crossways with [the Arizona senator] John McCain, and everyone said, 'Well, that's the end, because you say something like that about a war hero … ' But remember, Trump said right around the same time, 'Look, I go walk out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and my supporters will still be with me.' And it's funny: so many things he's been wrong about, or incoherent about, but in that he was right.' Reading Red Scare, it seems inconceivable such hysteria could have lasted so long, stoked by postwar paranoia about agents of the emerging Russian enemy, reaching sulfurous heights in years shot through with nuclear panic. It seems inconceivable ordinary Americans could have allowed it. To Risen, it's not inconceivable at all. 'The way I always explain it is, 'Look, America is a big place, and most Americans don't pay any attention to politics. They have no idea. Most of their interpretation at least of national politics is strictly economic.'' The 1950s were boom years. Now, since Trump's return to the White House, the economy is shaky but the president has not shouldered the blame. 'There are ancillary things,' Risen said. 'Immigration as an economic issue. Occasionally a cultural element comes in. Abortion is obviously part of that. But most people, when they think about 'What does the federal government mean to me?', they think in economic terms.' As the red scare raged, most Americans simply did not care. Now, Risen said, many persist in thinking: 'Well, shouldn't we have a businessman running the country?' 'So that raises the question: now the economy's tanking, or the markets are tanking, and we may find ourselves in recession, do those people move away from Trump? Or do people go with it?' At long last, sir, have you no currency? Could happen. Risen is 48. He worked at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the New Republic, then at the Times he edited opinion and politics before switching to writing obituaries. Somehow he has written nine books, five on American whiskey and four histories: of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr; of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; of Teddy Roosevelt at war; and now Red Scare. 'Postwar American politics and political culture is sort of my lodestone. The red scare seemed a natural fit.' Sign up to First Thing Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Risen spoke from the Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan. Further uptown, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, protesters rallied for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student with a green card and an American wife, arrested for his role in anti-Israel protests. Spirited to Louisiana, Khalil was charged with no crime. Instead, he was held under an obscure law – from 1952, the heart of the red scare – that allows for the deportation of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy. Many fear Khalil is a test case for purges to come. Risen said: 'The way they have gone after him, even the tools they're using, are one and the same with the way they tried to get Harry Bridges, who was an Australian-born labor leader of the west coast longshoremen' in the early 1950s. 'Personally, I think Bridges is a hero … He was detained without cause at the start of the Korean war because he was considered a threat to national security. His case went to the supreme court, he won, and he lived a long time. 'Obviously there are some differences but it's hard not to see the same stories playing out now. The Department of Education recently announced a tip line where if you're a parent and you think some teacher or some librarian is, I don't want to use the verb, 'DEI' … Essentially, it's: 'If you just have a complaint about a teacher, in this vein, let us know.' 'The same thing existed during during the red scare. The FBI had the Responsibilities Program, where they would take input from grassroots organizations, veterans groups, concerned parents groups, and then they would share information with PTAs, with local school boards. You know: 'This teacher has a background that's kind of suspect,' 'Here's a list of books that you want to remove from your library.' It's just the same playbook. It's terrifying to see it play out. And in fact, in some ways, I think it's much scarier now.' After the red scare, Republicans marched ever further to the right. There was Richard Nixon, who cut his teeth questioning suspected communists as a congressman in the 50s, scenes retold in Risen's book. There was Ronald Reagan, who testified before the House un-American activities committee and flirted with extremists. There was Pat Buchanan, who challenged the establishment from the far right, and there was Newt Gingrich, who polarized and radicalized Congress. But, Risen said, 'despite everything, there were safeguards' that had ultimately withstood the red scare. 'We had a center-right establishment of the Republican party that tolerated but ultimately moved on from the red scare. We had a fairly established media that was credulous and made a lot of mistakes but ultimately was not taken in by the red scare and was willing to call some of the worst red scarers to account. One of the things that came out of the red scare was a stronger awareness of the importance of defending civil liberties. The ACLU and the American Bar Association did not cover themselves in glory during the red scare. But ever since then, groups like that have been much more present and aggressive in terms of defending civil liberties, and so we see that today. 'Hopefully it's enough. I think a lot remains to be seen whether what we're going through now will be worse than the red scare, but I'm not at all hopeful.' In that fateful hearing in 1954, Joe McCarthy's own counsel sat at his side. It was Roy Cohn, a ruthless New York lawyer who later became mentor to a young Trump. Risen sees plenty of other parallels between McCarthy and Trump. 'I spent a lot of time looking at the encomiums to McCarthy when he died, and letters his friends were sharing, and so much of it was the sentiment that McCarthy was the ultimate victim, because McCarthy was the guy who was willing to say the truth, and he was destroyed for it.' Trump also presents himself as both victim and avenger, promising revenge and retribution. 'There was around [McCarthy] this idea that it wasn't enough just to replace the leaders. It wasn't enough just to control spending. Reform was not enough. The fundamental core of the New Deal' – Franklin Roosevelt's vast modernization of the US state, from the 1930s – 'needed to be thrown in the garbage, and anybody ever connected to any of that needed to be banished.' In the 1950s, that effort failed. In the 2020s, Trump and his mega-donor and aide Elon Musk are trying again – it seems with more success. Risen said: 'When you look at not so much Trump but at some of the more systematic thinkers around him, like JD Vance and his circle, like Kevin Roberts, Stephen Miller, I think some of these guys do have a sense of history.' 'I don't think Elon Musk does, necessarily, but he is saying those same things about 'We need to go in and dismantle, essentially, the New Deal architecture.' And it's not just because it's expensive, it's because it's [seen as] un-American and a rot on society. In the 1940s and 50s, the name for this was 'communism'. In that sense, communism was a red herring. It wasn't really about communism. It was about progressivism. It was about the New Deal. It's about this culture in America that was more tolerant, pluralistic, in favor of labor rights, women's rights, civil rights. That was the target.' During the red scare, in what came to be called 'the lavender scare', gay men were ensnared and ruthlessly ruined. Risen said: 'Today, it's DEI or woke or whatever. But it's the same thing. It's not that they're getting rid of DEI programs, whatever that might mean. They're mainly getting rid of fundamental civil rights protections or offices that protect civil rights, that are nothing about what they charge. 'That is the real game, at heart. It's what was going on in the red scare.' Red Scare is published in the US by Scribner
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How American Bureaucrats Became Public Enemy No. 1
The following essay is based on Clay Risen's new book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, out from Scribner on March 18. On April 28, 1948, a physicist named Edward U. Condon took the lectern at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington. If not as famous as his former boss at the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Condon was held in nearly equal esteem by his scientific colleagues: A pioneering figure in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and radar before World War II, he was now director of the Bureau of Standards, the forerunner to today's National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he was helping construct the federal government's sprawling research infrastructure, an astounding outpouring of public resources that would lead to everything from GPS and the internet to the COVID-19 vaccine. But Condon's speech that day was focused on a dark vision about America's future. 'There is growing in this country a wave of anti-intellectualism which is violently opposed to free speech and free expression,' he said. Thousands of government scientists, economists, and other experts were being investigated, and in many cases fired, in the name of anti-communism and national security—a campaign that Condon compared to ideological purges by the Nazis in the early days of the Third Reich. 'The last decade alone provides for us too many examples of nations where the people ignored the symptoms of totalitarianism until it was too late,' he warned. 'Anti-intellectualism precedes the totalitarian putsch, and anti-intellectualism is on the upswing here.' As his audience undoubtedly knew, Condon spoke from painful personal experience. A year earlier, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had begun a sustained campaign against him, first in magazine articles, then in a March 1948 report that called him 'one of the weakest links in our atomic security' and accused him of 'knowingly or unknowingly' maintaining ties to Soviet spies. In Thomas' telling, Condon was part of a cabal of liberal, technocratic elites who ran the inner workings of the federal government and, out of naivete or treachery, were now fatally undermining their country in the face of the Soviet threat. Thomas' attacks were baseless, and both Condon and his boss, Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman, resisted them. But the assault continued, and in 1951 Condon decided he had had enough. He quit the Bureau of Standards to take a job in the private sector. Still the attacks came: In 1954, when his employer, Corning Glass Works, submitted a bid for him to work on a sensitive military project, the Navy revoked his security clearance. (This also reportedly came at the urging of Vice President Richard Nixon, who wanted to undermine Harriman, who was running for governor of New York.) Rather than continue fighting, Condon left his job at Corning and spent the rest of his career teaching. The Condon Affair, as it was known, has been largely forgotten. But it bears all the hallmarks of the worst of the Red Scare era: knee-jerk anti-intellectualism; a baseless conviction that an elite, anti-American conspiracy was pulling the strings in Washington; and a willingness to abuse the levers of political power with little foresight about the unintended consequences. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk attempt to dismantle the federal government in the name of rooting out the so-called deep state and the supposed horrors of 'woke,' they are drawing on a line of thinking that has long animated the Republican hard right. It goes back to the founding of the modern federal bureaucracy in the 1930s. Far from being a new phenomenon, paranoid anti-elitism in America has a long and surprising pedigree. The Red Scare was about many things, but broadly speaking, it arose from the intersection of two powerful impulses that coursed through American society after World War II. One was a backlash to the massive federal intervention of the New Deal. The other was the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War, with its prospects for a nuclear-tipped global conflict. Together, these impulses unleashed an unprecedented period of political hysteria about the hidden motives of government officials—which led to the blacklists, loyalty tests, and witch hunts that defined the era, most famously under Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The Great Depression had shocked millions of Americans into action. Between 1929 and 1933, nearly 9,000 banks failed, manufacturing output dropped by 30 percent, and a quarter of all workers had been left unemployed. In response, a new spirit of political engagement swept across the country, much of it rallying to the vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His domestic agenda delivered hundreds of thousands of public jobs, billions of dollars in economic support, and above all, a 'New Deal' for the American people, asserting the power of the government to create guardrails around the economy. The combination of the Great Depression and the New Deal, wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had 'made men of intellectual ability available as never before; and the government had never been so eager to hire them.' The writer Sherwood Anderson, visiting the capital in 1933, encountered several old acquaintances at the Department of Agriculture: 'I stood there in the office a few minutes and at least ten of my old western friends came in, old radicals, young ones, newspaper men etc. … There is certainly a curious exhilarating feeling.' The bureaucratic influx was thick with graduates of the nation's best universities. Rexford Tugwell, Felix Frankfurter, Adolf Berle—acolytes of the brain trust that encircled the president—were plucked from schools like Columbia and Harvard. 'Unless an applicant can murder the broad A and present a Harvard sheepskin, he is definitely out,' complained one Michigan congressman, a bit of hyperbole about the new government elite that nevertheless revealed some truth about the high intellectual character of the expanding federal bureaucracy. Another called the New Deal a 'Phi Beta Kappa Tammany Hall.' Even as many Americans banded together around Roosevelt and the New Deal, anger was brewing. Employers resented Roosevelt's pro-labor stance, as well as his fighting words attacking 'economic royalists.' Farmers appreciated government support but hated being told when and what to plant. Southern politicians loved the outpouring of federal aid but detested the possibility that those funds might benefit Black neighborhoods. And all of them loathed the hundreds of thousands of government regulators brought in to operate an alphabet soup of new federal agencies. The impression that the New Deal was being run by the East Coast elite fed into conservative attacks on the Roosevelt administration as un-American. Later generations would call it the 'deep state,' but the suspicion was the same: that underneath the layers of elected officials and public figures who supposedly ran the government lay the real power, a vast cadre of anonymous bureaucrats. Conservatives accused these bureaucrats of answering to some foreign nation or ideology. One Republican congressman from Pennsylvania said the president's National Industrial Recovery Act 'Russianizes the business of America.' In 1934 Hamilton Fish, who represented Roosevelt's home district in New York's Hudson Valley, said, 'This administration has copied the autocratic tactics of fascism, Hitlerism and communism at their worst.' This conflict between New Deal progressives and anti-Roosevelt conservatives hummed on the edges of the 1930s and the war years of the early 1940s. But it took on a new, frightening resonance with the onset of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union replaced Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as America's main enemy. The Cold War was an ideological battle; it would, many argued, necessitate an unblinking effort to root out domestic subversion and dissent. Spies were obviously a threat, but so too were those who advocated for, sympathized with, or even merely tolerated political beliefs that might offer an opening to communism at home. Sleepless diligence had been the watchword of the previous war; now that paranoia turned inward. In 1947 President Harry S. Truman instituted a loyalty program requiring every federal employee to be screened for possible 'membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association' with one of the more than two dozen organizations deemed 'subversive' by the attorney general. Affiliation could mean anything: a few dollars into a collection plate at a rally, a name absent-mindedly scribbled on a petition, an innocent friendship with the wrong sort of person—all were now considered in the worst possible light. There was every reason for the government to worry about Soviet espionage, and even Condon, in his speech to the American Physical Society, praised Truman's loyalty program. But as Condon also pointed out, the rush to absolute security was emboldening conspiracists and anti–New Deal Republicans who had spent the past decade shouting into the void about communist subversion. Suddenly they had a ready audience who may not have always believed their accusations but was now unwilling to stand in their way as they charged through liberal bastions—Hollywood, Washington, schools, civil rights groups, and unions—looking for evidence to support their allegations. Such hunts easily spilled over into attacks against everything Roosevelt had built. During his 1946 Senate campaign, McCarthy—then a small-time Wisconsin judge—ran an ad asking, 'Tired of being pushed around? Do you like to have some government bureaucrat tell you how to manage your life? … Who's to blame for all this? Nobody but the New Deal.' He won his race handily. By 1953 the Chicago Tribune, the largest-circulation newspaper in the Midwest and the country's leading voice of the right, was openly railing against the 'Communist-controlled New Deal.' Scientists, especially physicists, came in for particular attention. On the one hand, their contributions to stunning wartime technological breakthroughs—radar, sonar, rocketry, and above all the atomic bomb—had transformed them into an intellectual clerisy, holding the keys to the nation's future. On the other hand, many of them subscribed to the progressive politics of the New Deal era, contributing money and prestige to left-wing causes that, a decade later, made them suspect in the eyes of Red Scare vigilantes. Condon, who had stayed largely apolitical during the 1930s, was outspoken in his belief in civilian control over nuclear power; even this belief was treated like a prelude to subversion. In theory, there were legitimate concerns. Where to draw the line between security and intellectual freedom, between diversity of ideas and unity of purpose? In practice, the concerns became excuses for wholesale attacks on America's technocratic elite, at a time when the country needed strong intellectual leadership. Nebraska Sen. Hugh Butler, a close ally of McCarthy, summed up the attitude in a 1950 speech against Dean Acheson, Truman's patrician secretary of state: 'I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, 'Get out! Get Out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!' ' In a 1964 article in Harper's, the historian Richard Hofstadter outlined what he called 'the paranoid style' in American politics. Witch hunts and conspiracy theories had a long history, he said, going back to 17th-century Salem and the 19th-century Know Nothings. 'But the modern right wing … feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind,' Hofstadter wrote. 'Their predecessors discovered foreign conspiracies; the modern radical right finds that conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home.' By the time Hofstadter wrote that, the Red Scare had subsided, its loudest voices pushed to the fringe of U.S. politics. But the animating spirit remained, ready to be exhumed by future generations of conspiracists and political opportunists. Now, 70 years later, we are seeing another frightening revival. This time the alleged enemy is not Soviet communism but 'woke' ideology and DEI policies. In both cases, the primary targets have been the rank and file of the vast federal workforce, especially the seasoned lawyers, scientists, and policy experts who make and direct critical decisions affecting everyone in this country. As was the case with Condon, they have been accused, often without evidence, of being beholden to an anti-American ideology—Trump calls it 'illegal' and 'evil.' It is too early to say which moment of empowered anti-government hysteria will have the more lasting impact. During the Red Scare, thousands of workers saw their lives pulled apart by FBI investigations; hundreds lost their jobs and even went to prison. But the nation also came to its senses, and by the mid-1950s the Red Scare had effectively ended. Today, two generations later, thousands have already lost their jobs, though the courts have yet to determine how extensive those cuts can be. That the Trump administration was voted into office to enact a reactionary agenda just a few years after a series of heroic but invasive governmental interventions halted the deadly spread of COVID-19 is not a coincidence. Though hundreds of millions of lives were saved by the fast-tracked vaccine and lockdowns, the implementation of various protocols was swift, alarming, and, to many thousands of people, overzealous. School closures caused students to fall behind in school. Unemployment rates spiked. Conspiracy theories, especially about vaccines, spread like wildfire. In other words, the backlash created an ideal political climate for anti-intellectual extremists like Musk and Trump to take power. The real question is how it ends, if at all. The centrist establishment—not just in politics, but in the media, business, and civil society—is much weaker today than it was in the 1950s. Anti-government sentiment remains widespread and visceral. Anti-intellectualism and a hostility toward federal bureaucracy pervade every corner of the Trump administration. The chances of one, two, many Edward Condons to come remains a frightening possibility. Condon himself did live to see a reemergence of trust in the federal government, at least for a time. After leaving Corning, he went to teach at Washington University, then the University of Colorado. In the mid-1960s he was put in charge of a comprehensive review of UFO sightings, funded by the U.S. Air Force, a sure sign that the government no longer considered him a dangerous figure. In 1968 he authored the project's final report. 'Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,' he wrote—in other words, that these sightings were complete bunk. So were allegations of government cover-ups: 'What has been miscalled secrecy has been no more than an intelligent policy of delay in releasing data so that the public does not become confused by premature publication of incomplete studies of reports.' It was, finally, one conspiracy theory that Condon was able to bring to an end—at least for the time being.
