The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left by Landon R.Y. Storrs (review)

Focusing on the Loyalty Review Board’s investigations of government employees in the post-World War II period, Landon Storrs has written a comprehensive account of the short and long-term consequences of the right’s rise to power during the postwar Red Scare. Especially convincing is the heretofore untold story of the ways in which conservative politicians targeted “leftist” women who had forged successful careers during the New Deal, poised to become influential policy makers after the war. Storrs argues that these influential women’s independence, as much if not more than their seemingly “Communist-oriented” concerns about wages, working conditions, racial equality, and economic conditions, made them targets. They, and their husbands who often held leftist views of their own, spent the rest of their lives denying their leftleaning beliefs and formulating policy that was overtly anti-communist (i.e., that disavowed any structural component to inequality).

Before detailing the devastating effects of Cold War politics on these women, their husbands, and the policies they tried to implement, Storrs paints an interesting portrait of their early years. Women who had been relegated to “helping” their influential husbands draft the policies that historians had associated primarily with the husbands of the pair, become the architects of many of those policies. Mary Dublin Keyserling (Leon Keyserling), Elizabeth Wickenden (Arthur Goldschmidt), Catherine Bauer, Esther Peterson (Oliver Peterson), Frieda Miller, Caroline Ware are given their “due” in Storrs telling. Lawyers, social workers, economists, all of them dedicated their lives to thinking through solutions to the key problems of their era. In the context of the Depression and with the support of Congress and President Roosevelt, they drafted policies on housing, labour, unemployment, and agriculture, all with some attention paid toward racial and ethnic equality.

Storrs took pains to look for evidence of either “spy” or subversive activity. She found none. Rather, these policy makers tried to find ways to institutionalize a kind of social democracy, leaving capitalism regulated, but intact. While this broad interpretation is not necessarily new, Storrs offers several correctives, one of the most important of which is that these influential women drew the ire of conservatives in Congress who disapproved of the influential role they, as women, were playing at the highest levels of government. Storrs’ work also makes use of evidence not consulted previously arguing that, due to the intense and damaging experience of the Cold War investigations, these women and their husbands extricated important material from their papers upon donating them to archives, thereby contributing to historians’ skewed interpretations. By looking both at women as the central actors and by privileging material that had been expunged purposefully, Storrs reveals important correctives to our understanding of these women, the policies they crafted, and the response by conservative Republicans whose sole purpose was dismantling their work and ruining their careers.

Storrs makes a compelling argument about the long-term consequences of the McCarthy era. The Congressional inquisition, we have known from the work of David Oshinsky, Mary Dudziak, Ellen Schrecker, and David Johnson, among others, represented a kind of power play by anti-New Deal Republicans who stopped at nothing to dismantle the New Deal policies and blacklist its policymakers so that nothing similar could be implemented again. All of this was done in the name of a kind of hyper-masculine, white, pro-business conservatism. What Storrs tells us is that the very nature of what we understand to be postwar liberalism was directly influenced by what amounted to self-censorship. In order to continue earning a living, these influential women adjusted the policies they advocated to de-emphasize anything that smacked of a redistribution of wealth which, they knew after the grueling investigatory process, was what conservatives conflated with communism. “Redistribution” of wealth included any policy that promoted more equitable distribution of wages, that regulated business in anyway, and/or that highlighted the economic consequences of discrimination. Cold War liberalism emphasized...