The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
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Who were the Minute Women of the USA?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America. The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutewomen is one of many told in a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen. Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes that there's a through-line to be found from that era up to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at The New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey. Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor. And one of the strands, you say, was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal.
You know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc., Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs. What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
Yeah, I think it's important to remember that the New Deal was more than just a set of policies. It was a whole culture that was ushered in in the 1930s, one that was broadly progressive, cosmopolitan, pluralist. You saw rights advances for all sorts of people who up until then really hadn't had a chance. And You know, the opposition was economic. There were certainly a lot of people who criticized Roosevelt on, you know, tax policy, regulation. You know, this tended to come from the usual suspects. But there was also a lot of cultural opposition, a lot of anger over the idea that America was moving away from a society that was rooted in—they didn't say it this way, but a white patriarchy in a kind of vision of a small-town America—
in a fundamentally religious, Christian, Protestant worldview. And, you know, this was all linked together for a lot of people, for a lot of critics, that it was both, you know, there was this culture, but there was also this economic change and government assertion going on through the New Deal.
Yeah.
Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union. And that was connected to a communist presence in the United States. And we should note that while Soviet-style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And another aspect of the 1930s that was both motivating for a lot of people but also seeding a backlash was that the left was very fluid. So that you had people toward the center as well as people on the far left, on the Communist Party and other radicals who saw themselves as part of a united front, a popular front. And whether that was in foreign policy, domestic policy, there was a sense that we're all working on this together. And so there was a lot of cross-mixing. And that became a problem for the people who then went into government jobs.
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