If you look at the Hollywood hearings, they were purely performative—and ironically, in Hollywood. Whether there had been a Communist Party presence or not didn’t matter. These were high-profile people, and it’s what the public wanted at the time—people ate it up. You had actors and actresses called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and pressured to name names. After a while, everyone was naming the same names. If they refused, they were blacklisted. And if they named names, they were shunned and felt terrible, because that’s a form of collaboration.
The committee got to look righteous and the actors were degraded. There was certainly a strong element of performance running through much of the Red Scare.
MP: You highlight—something I hadn’t known before reading your book—that this Red Scare in the 1940s–50s was actually the second Red Scare. Could you speak a little more about the difference between the two and why you chose to focus on the second?
CR: The first Red Scare, in many ways, was a predicate to the second. It was relatively short and took place after World War I in the U.S., sparked by a series of anarchist bombings—including one at the attorney general’s home. That led to a crackdown, particularly by what was then called the Bureau of Investigation, which became the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. They rounded up hundreds of mostly immigrants considered “radicals,” “anarchists,” “communists,” or “socialists,” intending to deport them. Only a few hundred were actually deported before cooler heads prevailed.
There are parallels between the two scares—mainly the fear of radicalism expressed through targeting vulnerable populations. But the first focused more on immigrants, partly because they were easier to deport. In the second Red Scare, due to immigration restrictions in the 1920s, the focus shifted.
One key point I try to make in the book is that, even though the first Red Scare ended, its architecture remained. The FBI formed during that time, and Hoover wanted it to be an internal police force. He later changed the language, but he still wielded it like one.
There was also a broader societal stance against “radicalism”—a vague term encompassing any idea outside the mainstream. And during the Cold War, national security became paramount. Anyone seen as even remotely threatening could be targeted. It wasn’t just about what people did—it was about their ideas, their associations, and their speech.