As a Marxist historian, a partisan of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and a longtime opponent of anti-communism, I thought that I should both add to and expand upon Len Yannielli’s excellent review of author Clay Risen’s book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Risen’s work has received extensive attention on Network television and on internet websites for its relevance to Trump and MAGA’s politics today.

However, the picture Risen has painted largely repeats what has become the “post Cold War” conventional wisdom. Instead of condemning the CPUSA as a tool of Soviet power and espionage, he largely ignores the party and sees the history in terms of liberal heroes and rightwing villains.

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of historians began to write detailed narrative histories which looked at Communist Party activists’ important role in advancing the struggle to build industrial unions and fight against racism and fascism. These works were challenged by a fierce right wing backlash, which revived the stereotypes of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), former Sen. Joe McCarthy, and first FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Erasure

In the 21st century, Risen’s work reflects a restored conventional wisdom, which makes the CPUSA’s history invisible without demonizing that history.

For example, the book presents Joe McCarthy as an arch villain who was defeated on television — first by broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, and then in the televised Army–McCarthy hearings. It was then, at last, Risen posits, that the U.S. people saw him for what he really was, thanks to the good work of U.S. mass media.

That CPUSA activists publicized McCarthy’s lies while the mainstream media simply repeated them is not mentioned. Nor is the central role of J. Edgar Hoover, who fed disinformation to the mass media, HUAC, and McCarthy himself, a feature of Risen’s historical accounting. That attorneys for the CPUSA had their offices ransacked and their phones bugged is likewise scrubbed from the story.

Former Chief Justice Earl Warren is given credit for the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision challenging school segregation and the later decisions restricting the anti-communist provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, the McCarran Internal Security Act, and the so-called “Communist Control Act” of 1954.

But the role of Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black in dissenting from the Dennis v. United States decision — which upheld the Smith Act and sentenced 12 Communist Party leaders to prison — is not analyzed. Douglas and Black contended that the Court upheld the prosecution’s use of statements from the Communist Manifesto and the writings of Lenin decades earlier as evidence of CPUSA leaders’ “conspiring to teach or advocate the violent overthrow of the government.”

Also nonexistent in Risen’s work is the important role of CPUSA activists and longtime supporters, both white and Black, in the Civil Rights movement. The international Communist movement publicized the “legal lynching” of Emmett Till and the subsequent Montgomery Bus boycott. Risen’s work leaves all of that out.

Anti-communism and racism

Risen does not see that anti-communism was and is connected with the racist roots of U.S. capitalism.

As Yannielli notes, the first attacks on socialism and communism were made by Senators from the slave states in the early 1850s who connected socialism and communism with “abolitionism,” calls for land reform, and free public education. Though, of course, many 19th Century abolitionists and opponents of Jim Crow were not socialists or communists, it is true that communists have long opposed racism and often led wider struggles against it.

Supporters of the Communist Manifesto and the revolutions of 1848 who fled to the United States became active and influential in a new political party, the Republican Party, as champions of abolition and a fuller, anti-racist, working-class democracy. Among these was Joseph Weydemeyer, a Prussian-born and later German member and organizer of the League of Communists who visited and corresponded with Karl Marx both before and after his eventual move to the U.S. in 1851. In the U.S., Weydemeyer was instrumental in organizing German immigrants into the fight against slavery, joined Lincoln’s election campaign, and would eventually rise to the position of colonel in the Union Army.

The same year Union troops were withdrawn from the South, betraying Black Reconstruction, federal troops were used to smash the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the first national strike in the U.S. Out of that strike, the word “communism,” which had already started being used in threatening tones widely after the 1871 fall of the Paris Commune, filled the press. The word was further advanced and demonized by Allan Pinkerton, founder of the strike-breaking Pinkerton Detective Agency, in his book Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives.

Again, the Palmer Raids of the “first” Red Scare — carried out in the wake of the October Revolution in Russia, the November Revolution in Germany, and the Seattle General Strike — were accompanied by the “Red Summer” of 1919. Here, the federal government refused to provide protection for African Americans from an explosion of white supremacist terrorist violence. These racist riots, taking place as African American soldiers returned home from World War I, were compared abroad to the massacres launched against ghettoized Jewish communities in the Czarist Russian Empire a few years before.

Class and democratic struggle

Failing to see the relationship between anti-communism and racism, it should be perhaps unsurprising that Risen’s work also ignores the achievements of the CPUSA in the 1930s and 40s. More than any other organization, the party put particular emphasis on the relationship between the organization of the workplace and the fight for racial equality. The party’s determination in fighting for integrated unions and in linking labor and community demands were cornerstone policies which enabled it to play an outsized role in the development of the U.S. labor movement.

On the question of Unemployment Insurance, Communists organized and led Unemployed Councils, which led marches and demonstrations throughout the country, demanding public jobs and funds for the disabled and women with dependent children unable to work. The Unemployed Councils also developed in 1932 the idea of Unemployment Insurance for those out of work. Unemployment Insurance was so much identified with the CPUSA that the conservative-dominated American Federation of Labor (AFL) voted it down, denouncing it as a Communist program.

Communists further played a leading role in the great 1934 San Francisco General Strike, unique among general strikes in U.S. history in that the unions won their demands, efforts to break the strike failed, and it encouraged militant action on the part of other unions, leading to the establishment of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This strike was instrumental in pushing the New Deal government to enact its labor and social welfare legislation.

In 1935, Communists joined with United Mine Workers of America leader John L. Lewis and others to build the CIO and its industrial unions. CPUSA activists Bob Travis and Henry Kraus developed the strategy and policy which led directly to the victorious 1936–7 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan.

The work of the party helped bring about the organization of industrial unions, the tripling of union membership, and much of the New Deal era reforms, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. This became the foundation also for other New Deal era reforms, including social security, unemployment insurance, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which outlawed child labor and established the minimum wage and the forty-hour workweek. These are still among the most important pieces of social legislation in U.S. history, all under attack now, as are the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

Communists played a most important role in this period organizing against the brutal repression and oppression of African Americans, through organizations like the International Labor Defense (ILD). The ILD took the case of the Scottsboro Nine and prevented their execution. The National Negro Congress, which included Communists within its leadership, fought together with the CIO against disenfranchisement and segregation, and for the enactment of a national anti-lynching law.

It was through his experience as defense attorney for Angelo Herndon that ILD lawyer Benjamin Davis was inspired to join the party. Herndon was a young Black Communist who had been charged with “attempting to incite insurrection” in Atlanta, Georgia. Later, after moving to Harlem, Davis would become the second African American elected to the NYC Council, under the city’s then-used proportional representation system. Shortly afterward, Tammany Hall waged a racist and anti-communist campaign to repeal proportional representation.

In his memos to President Roosevelt and later Truman, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover characterized all these anti-racist campaigns as Communist conspiracies. First recruited by Attorney General Palmer in 1919 to head the Department of Justice’ General Intelligence Division, compile lists of radicals, and identify immigrants for deportation, Hoover was perhaps the most important anti-communist figure of his time. The extent of his personal corruption and outright criminal activities has been well documented over the years.

More than a cultural phenomenon

Anti-communism certainly made use of mass media and mass culture to advance, but it was never merely a cultural phenomenon as Risen contends. It was not simply a response by opportunistic politicians and officials to public opinion.

It was and is a foundation of the class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, between the defenders of capitalism against those who struggle to win support for socialism. The CPUSA was attacked not because of its “dictatorial tactics,” but because of its achievements in advancing the security and rights of all working people.

There are many works that fairly represent the work of the CPUSA. These include Roger Keeran’s The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions and Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. In many ways, the work of the party recounted by Kelley planted the seeds for what would later bloom into the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

The Communist Party has survived 106 years of state repression and subversion by a powerful ruling class and its servants who denounce the party as an agent of repression. Its important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and in the peace movement from the 1960s to the present have yet to be written.

Clay Risen’s Red Scare is not a step forward in the development of that history or of the history of anti-communist backlash and reaction.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Images: Red Scare book cover / Book review design (Fred Barr / CPUSA); Robert Thompson and Benjamin Davis surrounded by pickets as they leave the Federal Courthouse in New York City by C.M. Stieglitz / World Telegram & Sun photo (Library of Congress)