Bowing to the Right: Red Scare Politics in the McCarthy Era

It is impossible to compute with any confidence the number of Americans who lost their jobs during the McCarthy era witch-hunting. One estimate has put the number of dismissals at 8,850 from 1947 to 1956, under federal programs alone. To this would need to be added the untold thousands in state and local government, voluntary agencies, and the private sector. For many victims, their lowly status meant that they had limited resources with which to confute the charges against them. As so often in worldly conflict, it was "the poor bloody infantry" who were most exposed to assault, their legions obscured by the occasional spotlights trained on such celebrated figures as Alger Hiss and J. Robert Oppenheimer. But those of higher rank were targets too, and the consequences of decimating and silencing this class are difficult to gauge. For a library assistant to lose her job may mean deep personal and family distress, though the ripples did not stop there—for neighbors and colleagues of suspects worried about their own security too. The intimidation of a Supreme Court justice or a senior public servant, however, could mean not only personal tragedy and pervasive anxiety, but also far-reaching consequences such as profound changes in public policy.

These two books do not have a great deal in common, but both, for the most part, focus on figures highly placed in the U.S. polity as the McCarthyite campaigns got under way. Robert Lichtman is concerned with their impact on the Supreme Court, whose members were subjected to intense criticism—as well as the threat of legislation to abridge their powers—for some of their decisions. There were also mutterings about impeachment for such controversial figures as Earl Warren and William O. Douglas. Lichtman has identified every "Communist" case that came before the Court between 1949 and 1962—just one hundred as it happens—and has subjected them to careful analysis, particularly with a view to establishing whether and how far the Court bent to the pressures of public and congressional opinion. In the course of these years, sixteen men served on the Court (counting Arthur Goldberg, who joined as the era under review was ending). Lichtman examines their opinions and decisions in meticulous detail, bringing a lawyer's eye to every procedural shift and legal nuance. Landon Storrs' dramatis personae is somewhat larger: middle and high-ranking persons in public office subjected to loyalty proceedings between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, among them such well-known figures as Leon Keyserling and Caroline Ware. From some 600 federal loyalty cases she selected forty-two for whom the available sources have allowed in-depth investigation. As a historian, her perspective is different from that of Lichtman, as she reflects on the implications of her findings for American political culture in all its complexity. Where Lichtman expertly charts the impact of the postwar Red Scare on the Vinson and Warren Courts (which, in turn, did have repercussions for the larger polity), Storrs seeks to throw light on the dismantling of the New Deal Order and, more than that, on the closing off of roads not taken. The turn to the right of modern American politics is often associated with Ronald Reagan, but critical decisions were arguably taken decades earlier.

A range of influences governed the Supreme Court decisions studied by Lichtman, but two of the most important were the Court's composition and the pressures to which it was subjected by Congress and the media. The deaths in 1949 of two justices appointed by Franklin Roosevelt meant that President Truman was able to replace liberals by men of more moderate disposition. So by the time...