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Red Scare



  • Whittaker Chambers's Odyssey from Communist Spy to Conservative Hero

    by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

    Praised by the right and loathed by the left, Whittaker Chambers entered the public eye when he accused State Department worker Alger Hiss of being a Communist. But his story before and after reveals much more about the political history of midcentury America. 



  • When McCarthyism Hit Small-Town Vermont

    by Rick Winston

    The events that roiled one small town in 1950 showed the courage and integrity of newspaper editors who resisted a "red scare" but also the harm inflicted on a community by weaponized suspicion. 



  • Economism as a Red Scare Legacy

    by Landon Storrs

    An economic historian traces the rise of neoliberal political economy to the post-WWII Red Scare, when Keynesians were driven out of government service under suspicion of disloyalty. 



  • Blacklisted Actress Marsha Hunt Dies at 104

    Hunt's participation in the Committee for the First Amendment, which questioned the activities of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, led to her blacklisting. 



  • Law Enforcement Has Long Practiced Double Standards for Activists

    by Denise Lynn

    Nobody should be shocked that the FBI has aggressively surveilled Black Lives Matter organizers while deciding that the online organizing of the January 6 attack on the Capitol was protected speech; this double standard has characterized law enforcement's approach to racial justice protest. 



  • What the FBI Had on Grandpa

    by Molly Jong-Fast

    "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."



  • How Eisenhower Secretly Pushed Back Against McCarthyism

    To the end of his life, David A. Nichols says, “Eisenhower never admitted that the White House was behind this.” Yet he couldn’t help but gloat a bit in private. On at least one occasion, he reportedly repeated a joke that “it’s no longer McCarthyism, it’s McCarthywasm.” 

  • The Case for Sparing the Rosenbergs

    by Lori Clune

    Credit: Wiki Commons.Sixty years ago this week, Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the same electric chair that killed her husband Julius moments before. Her gruesome death ended the spy case that captured worldwide attention. Julius Rosenberg had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, specifically passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets.FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had also ordered the arrest of Julius’ wife Ethel, hoping to use her as a “lever” to get Julius to name other spies. He never spoke. They both died instead.The grisly executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 made their sons orphans and shocked the world. The Rosenbergs remain the only married couple executed for a federal crime and the only civilians killed for spying.