Reviewing Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition (August 2025)

This collection of oral histories of the Second American Red Scare(1) is now 30 years old, but it is an important part of American history that must be remembered. Accordingly, Griffin Fariello includes the following epigraph authored by the Czech dissident, Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In the Preface, Fariello calls his book a book of memories . . . memories of more than 60 individuals who lived during the Red Scare, a period he marks as beginning in 1945 and ending roughly in 1965. He describes his book as

an attempt to rescue a chapter of history from our habitual “forgettery,” a mosaic of voices from both sides of the Great Fear. Here are ordinary men and women—Communists, progressives, and New Dealers alike—as they recall their lives under the Inquisition. Here also are the hounds that hunted them—the Attorney General, the union boss, the FBI agent, the security officer, and the professional informer.

By way of introduction, he continues,

From the hunted who cooperated, there are regrets and confusion, and earnest explanations. After more than forty years, they still struggle to be understood. From those who resisted, there is pride in having behaved well in difficult times. There is anger and sorrow aplenty for the friendships betrayed, the lives and careers cut short, and the resulting years of struggle. Laughter comes into play too, as dark as it may be, for every Inquisition is at its core an enormous absurdity, and the relief of humor is as evident today as it was then.(2) Ultimately, however, this is a story of America at midcentury when, at the pinnacle of national strength, we turned in fear to strike down our own.

Fariello takes care to explain that McCarthyism, which is what most of us think of when we think of the Communist Scare post-World War II, is only part of a much larger phenomenon of a government seeking to change the trajectory of the nation’s purpose and control any incipient dissent. With the other great powers severely politically and economically exhausted by the world war, America, an emerging great power whose homeland was relatively untouched by the destruction of war, was destined to lead the world.

According to Fariello, Britain’s cession of its sphere of interest in Greece to the U.S. marked a decisive point in international relations. With the war over, and the alliance with the U.S.S.R. ended, America took its role in Greece quite seriously, essentially framing the Cold War Truman Doctrine from its newfound foreign policy objective of containing the spread of Soviet Communism. The Red Scare is the domestic policy tailored to correspond with America’s new world mission.

Truman articulated the business case for the Truman Doctrine at Baylor University in an address on March 6, 1947. In the speech he referred to three freedoms: “Freedom of worship—freedom of speech—freedom of enterprise.” For any who might be tempted to think of Communism as a viable political option, Truman observed that “It must be true that the first two of these freedoms are related to the third,” for “peace, freedom, and world trade are indivisible.” But he knew that would not sell his foreign policy to the American public, as it “made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus.” He, therefore, concluded that the new policy had to be marketed differently, emphasizing the theme of a global contest between Democracy and Communism, the free world and totalitarianism.

To facilitate the conditioning of the American mind to the new world order and America’s new role therein, Fariello writes,

President Truman brought his anti-Communist war home to America. On March 25, 1947, he put his signature to Executive Order 9835 and launched the Federal Employees Loyalty Program, the most sweeping loyalty inquiry in the nation’s history. E.O. 9835 authorized investigations into the beliefs and associations of all federal employees. This first such peacetime program was so vaguely worded that in time every aspect of an employee’s personal life would be opened to federal scrutiny. Moreover, the accused would not have the right to confront the accuser or, in almost every case, even be privy to the accusation.

In this view, Truman was the initiator of the Second Red Scare. McCarthy was not on the scene, and in fact, his entire raison d'être had not yet been created. As Fariello writes, “While McCarthy made the notion of security risks in the federal bureaucracy a national obsession from 1950 to 1954, the ground in which he flourished had been well prepared before his arrival.”

According to Fariello, Truman set the stage. “The public, rather than question the loyalty program, naturally assumed the existence of the disloyal and the subversive—for why else would there be a program to uncover them?” Truman’s belief in the urgency combating subversive dangers at home motivated Congress, in the person of McCarthy to expand the purges and investigations. Eisenhower followed up with his version of citizen loyalty, arguing that Truman had been too lax in ignoring the security threat from loyal employees.

Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 mandated immediate suspension without pay for “any behavior, activities, or associations which tend to show that the individual is not reliable or trustworthy.” No provisions for hearings were made, leaving it up to the discretion of the agency or department head. . . . Now employees would be summarily sacked for pleading the Fifth Amendment [right against self incrimination] before a congressional committee.

The famous loyalty question was this: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? If one answered ‘Yes’, then names of associates were expected and failure to provide them would be regarded as contempt of Congress, a jailable offense. A ‘No’ answer would usually not be believed, and further interrogations and investigations could be expected. Many of the voices in this collected oral history corroborate this, describing the extremes of FBI harassment and intimidation practices.(3)

So, far the Red Scare has been mostly framed in terms of its impact on First Amendment free speech activities. Fariello and several of the oral histories testify to an even more insidious effect. First, the Red Scare can be considered a repudiation of FDR’s New Deal and government’s new activist role in promoting social justice. Second, the Red Scare can be looked as a cover for denying civil rights to Blacks, especially in the Southern states. New Dealers and civil rights activists could be cast as Communists and that was often enough to instigate surveillance, interrogations, investigations and even violence (e.g., the Southern predilection for cross-burning, church-burning and lynching.)

In the following, a few oral histories will be referenced and quoted in part in order to give a flavour of the work.

M. Wesley Swearingen was a special agent of the FBI from 1951 to 1977. He was involved in ‘political’ work, such as surveillance, illegal break-ins, and maintenance of the Security Index. (The Index was a list of Americans who were to put in concentration camps during a national emergency.) Referring to his work as a case agent when he was not doing bag jobs (covert and often illegal), he relates that

I’m reading their speeches and what they write and listening to what they say, and I’m thinking, “Gee, this isn’t all that bad. They want equal rights in the union for minorities and blacks and equal pay for women. What the hell is wrong with this?” And I couldn’t find that anybody was breaking any laws. Maybe someone would get a parking ticket, but that happens to anybody. . . . As far as I could see, they just wanted to have things a little bit better and that’s all.

And then recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis, he states that

[W]e were within a hairbreadth of actually activating a roundup [using the Security Index). We knew darn well that when the first missile comes flying from Cuba, we’re going to be out there throwing people in a camp. . . . I don’t know where in Chicago we were going to throw them. One time, I figured out the only place we could put so many people would be in Soldier Field.

And he concludes with the following overall assessment of the national security value of his work in the FBI during which he only made one arrest,

It strikes me now, and it struck me then after a few years, that it was a waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ money. But it contributed to my total years of retirement and pension, so you look back and it’s not all that bad, because I have a real nice retirement. But that’s about the only benefit I can see out of it.

Arthur Miller was one of America’s most famous playwrights. He was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names, but his conviction was overturned and he never had to serve prison time. Though best known for Death of a Salesman, the play, The Crucible, ostensibly about the Salem witch trials of 1692 is a parable for America during the Red Scare. His political analysis of the Red Scare is briefly summed up in this quote,

I think the roots of all this lie in that the Right had been out of power since 1934, and the prospects were bleak that they’d ever get back into power on the presidential level. They were defeated time and again, and this was a terrific way of reversing the whole liberal trend in the United States, which they succeeded in doing. They managed to create this atmosphere, which was basically a ploy by the right wing of the Republican Party from the outset, and also some of the Democrats, to turn the country to the right. They managed to turn back everything that had happened since Roosevelt started the New Deal. It was basically a domestic political struggle, which they won for a long time.

Claire Hartford was the Midwest regional director of the American Communications Association, a union that was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). She describes herself and her husband as trade unionists who happened to be members of the Communist Party. She cites the 1939 Nonaggression Pact between Russia and Germany, which was promptly followed by their joint invasion and partitioning of Poland, as her first disillusionment with Communism. She recalls that it was particularly bitter for her as a Jew, but they did not leave the Party. And for that they paid as she tells in her own words,

I think if we didn’t have the children, we would’ve been less fearful. If you starve it’s one thing, but if you have kids, you constantly feel that responsibility. But it didn’t stop us from doing what we believed in. We lost jobs, we were hounded from pillar to post. We watched friends of ours in the most awful situations—a lot of them went to jail. I think we survived pretty well emotionally. But we felt this terrible rage at what was happening, that we couldn’t stop it, that it was going to be a long time before people woke up. It was sickening, it destroyed you in so many ways. But you had to live. You picked yourself up and went looking for jobs again.

She recalls having used their home to allow doctors from the community medical clinic where her husband worked, a Communist health organization according to the California State Un-American Committee, to stay to avoid being served with a subpoena. (It was legal to dodge a subpoena, but once served with a subpoena one was obligated to appear before the committee.)

Her concluding assessment of their experience during the Red Scare seems eerily prescient. (Remember that this book was published 30 years ago.)

I know that my trust in the government vanished. I always feel that it can happen again, and that we’re never very far from it. I don’t think [sighs] that our elected officials really believe in the democracy that we’re supposed to be. I feel that corruption has taken over, that morals and principles can be abandoned. A demagogue like McCarthy could come into power again; we’re not immune to a Hitler. It’s being proved every day. Violence is rising; hatreds and ethnic divisiveness are escalating.

There are many more oral histories that could have been selected for this review, but hopefully, those presented in this review will spark the reader’s interest in having a look through the larger collection. For those who have enjoyed Studs Terkel’s oral histories of America, Red Scare will be a familiar and welcome read.(4)

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Endnotes

The centerpiece of the post-World War One Red Scare, the Palmer Raids were a nationwide roundup of nearly ten thousand citizens and immigrants on the night of January 2, 1920. Sponsored by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and orchestrated by his young subaltern J. Edgar Hoover, the raids were noted for their conspicuous brutality and a virtual absence of due process. In the ensuing backlash, Palmer and Hoover partly justified their actions against the aliens in purely racist terms, saying that “from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type."

By 1956, with the Communist Party down to less than five thousand members, one out of every three members was an FBI informant. So riddled was the CP that informers named other informers, and many a meeting was held where the majority worked for the government.

Agents burgled, tapped, and bugged, suborned perjury, intimidated and blackmailed. During this period, the Bureau stockpiled more than 25 million files on American citizens. From 1941 to 1975 virtually every civil rights group, left-of-center labor union, and left-wing political organization (approximately 13,500 in total) was monitored by the FBI.

Martin Luther King, Jr., recipient of the Nobel Peace in 1964 and leader of America’s civil rights movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s up until his assassination in 1968, was one of Hoover’s long-term targets.