Richard M.Fried's Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective
Ribuffo, Leo P.
NIGHTMARE IN RED: THE MCCARTHY ERA IN PERSPECTIVE, by Richard M. Fried. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xi + 229 pp. $22.95. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy described McCarthyism as...
...Yet even though McCarthyism has been studied as thoroughly as any post–World War II domestic issue, we still do not know how far the roots extended...
...Vital center" liberals have been unconvinced by the revisionist scholarship and, as Professor O'Neill's complaint suggests, appalled by the memoirs...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 407...
...What limits...
...Although Fried offers no startling new interpretations, Nightmare in Red stands out as an evenhanded account of an extraordinarily controversial subject...
...In 1944, Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey accused the Roosevelt administration of harboring communists...
...The fall of China, conviction of Alger Hiss, and the Korean War helped Republicans take it back...
...Unfortunately, Fried never explicitly treats the Communist party's impact on American life, perhaps because he believes—rightly—that nothing the Communists did justified the second red scare...
...purges of unions, universities, and professional societies...
...He succinctly analyzes the major Supreme Court cases, explains how loyalty-security checks actually operated, and follows the investigative escapades of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...
...There were state and municipal red scares...
...As a prelude to cold war countersubversion, Fried discusses Communist party activities between the wars, cultural legacies of the first red scare, and the widespread fear of radical and fascist "fifth columns" during 1939-41, a fear that eased passage of the Smith Act and creation of a permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC...
...For them the second red scare was primarily the work of Americans anxious about their rising or falling status: displaced elite WASPs, sunbelt millionaires, and Catholic ethnics like McCarthy himself...
...Then too, even seething mass men and women get bored...
...In 1950 a make-believe communist coup in Mosinee, Wisconsin, received respectful attention in national news media...
...In 1950 McCarthy emerged from obscurity and gave the era its name...
...Senator Joseph R. McCarthy described McCarthyism as "Americanism with the gloves off," but few students of this century's second red scare have been satisfied with his definition...
...Diverse historians, including Richard Fried, Thomas Reeves, and David Oshinsky, portrayed McCarthy as a standard-issue Republican conservative whose rise and fall were part of mainstream partisan politics...
...From Fried's account, we learn again what should be obvious, that McCarthyism narrowed political debate, curbed labor militancy, slowed the civil rights movement, helped discredit feminism, ruined careers, and destroyed lives...
...World-class sleaziness made McCarthy first among equals...
...Fried remains properly skeptical of the Eisenhower revival currently sweeping the historical profession...
...And President Roosevelt was no card carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...This conclusion is not only questionable, but Fried's own evidence prompts questions about it...
...Moreover, even with Eisenhower heading his ticket in 1952, McCarthy received only 54 percent of the vote against a weak opponent...
...Nor was the second scare primarily the work of "extremists...
...Following standard scholarly accounts, Fried shows that the notorious senator from Wisconsin baited reds and nonreds as early as 1946, shrewdly manipulated the press, and benefited from the cowardice and ineptitude of his foes...
...Since the late 1970s, debate about the meaning of the second red scare has intersected with an equally volatile debate about American communism...
...Simply put, McCarthyism was a militant version of Americanism, what proponents of the first red scare in 1919-20 called "100% Americanism...
...Beyond the federal government, he shows that fervent anticommunism had "deep roots in American culture...
...He says that some Truman administration actions, including loyaltysecurity checks and Smith Act prosecutions, propelled the second red scare, yet slights the effect of Truman's words, including the bitter attacks on Wallace in 1948...
...We need a better understanding of the various cultures of anticommunism— including displaced elite WASPs, sunbelt millionaires, and ethnic Catholics...
...He finds Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg guilty as charged...
...According to Fried, the proximate origins of McCarthyism lay in the "grievances and ambitions" of conservative politicians, but the second red scare extended "well beyond the antics of Senator McCarthy—indeed, well beyond the boundaries of conventional politics...
...Ironically, traditional American apathy about public issues, condemned as a national character flaw by liberal cold warriors, conservative red baiters, and distinguished social scientists alike, may have mitigated the effects of the second red scare...
...In this context, Richard Fried's attempt to put the McCarthy era "in perspective" is especially welcome...
...Fried confronts other continuing controversies head on...
...As that scare ebbed in the mid-1950s, the earliest serious students of the subject, a group of pluralist social scientists led by Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Seymour Martin Lipset, interpreted McCarthyism as a movement of the far right...
...No intellectually interesting defense of conservative anticommunism has appeared since William F. Buckley, Jr., and L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies in 1954...
...By the late 1970s an alternate interpretation had gained a significant academic following...
...Dewey convinced only the party faithful, but lesser Republicans, reorchestrating this allegation after the cold war began, won control of Congress in 1946...
...Perhaps they should turn some attention to the enemy...
...Fried treats even more generously those liberals in Congress who voted for the Internal Security Act of 1950, the Communist Control Act of 1954, and other legislative abominations...
...O'Neill not only complains that revisionist accounts in the 1970s obscured the merits of "vital center" anticommunism, but also suggests that the scare harmed few Americans, many if not most of whom deserved what they got...
...Even Nixon now uses "McCarthyism" as a synonym for smears...
...One more thing: a less pragmatic, more absolutist civil libertarian position would have been right...
...In their memoirs, many ex-Communists and Popular Front liberals expect to be loved for the enemies they made, notably McCarthy and Nixon...
...The second red scare had begun...
...Undoubtedly anticommunism had deep roots in American society, as Fried says...
...Signs of subversion were found in zoning ordinances, children's books, Kinsey reports, abstract murals, realist murals, and the Cincinnati Reds (briefly born again as the Redlegs...
...and ad hoc countersubversive "festivals...
...Historian William O'Neill represents the latest interpretive turn...
...Practitioners of the "new social history" (which, as intellectual trends go, already seems thoroughly middle aged) have by now studied virtually every heroic Populist, Socialist, and ante bellum artisan...
...Expanding the wartime loyalty-security program, Truman temporarily recaptured the issue of domestic subversion and used it against "Henry Wallace and SUMMER • 1990 • 405 Books his Communists" during the 1948 campaign...
...Here Fried underestimates the impact a strong president has on the nation's political style...
...Furthermore, the second red scare left an infrastructure for the third, which began with President Lyndon Johnson's harassment of antiwar groups and ended with the Watergate scandal...
...Nevertheless, there is no scholarly—let alone popular—agreement on the meaning of the second red scare...
...Cer406 • DISSENT Books tainly devotion to the abstract principle of free speech was rare, but matter-of-fact tolerance seems to have been more widespread than these scholars recognized...
...He doubts that a "less pragmatic, more absolutist civil libertarian position would have brought benefits...
...As Buckley and Bozell maintained in 1954, McCarthy's propensity for wild charges shared more common ground with Truman's oratorical excesses than most liberals liked to admit...
...The Republican administration elected in 1952 not only adopted a "laissez-faire approach" to McCarthy, but also continued Smith Act prosecutions and made the federal loyalty-security program, never a model of due process, even less fair...
...Nightmare in Red reflects thorough research and judicious judgment...
...As he demonstrates, Truman's attempt to outflank the Republican right with anticommunist speeches and loyaltysecurity investigations ultimately failed...
...Efforts to take the Mosinee morality play on the road encountered apathy and hostility in other communities...
...On the contrary, some decent teachers, lawyers, and trade unionists vilified their colleagues, and mainstream politicians believed—or professed to believe—cruel absurdities...
...Sometimes Fried tries so hard to be judicious that his judgments seem murky...
...the Rosenbergs were cold war "scapegoats, but not innocent ones...
...yet this century's second red scare also encompassed Richard Nixonism, Karl Mundtism, and, some scholars added, Harry S. Trumanism...
...Pluralist interpreters of McCarthyism postulated a seething population of mass men and mass women vulnerable to demagogic appeals...
...A less scholarly version of this argument also marked the memoirs of former communists and Popular Front liberals...
...According to the pluralists, this "extremist" anticommunism differed qualitatively from the sensible version promoted by President Harry S. Truman and fellow adherents to the "vital center...
...Everyone was against communism," Fried writes, "but there were limits to the exertions the average citizen was willing to invest in that sentiment...
...Such able scholars as Maurice Isserman and Mark Naison have removed the Communist party from the realm of demonology and stressed rank-and-file commitments to the labor movement and racial equality...
...As Fried shows, FDR promoted the fifth column scare of 1939-41, expanded J. Edgar Hoover's power, and used the FBI for political surveillance...
...In particular, Athan Theoharis and Richard Freeland stressed that Truman's rhetoric and his loyaltysecurity program opened the way for McCarthy's rampages...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
