Julie Salamon: Hi everyone, and welcome to our live bonus episode for the second season of the Wreckage. I’m Julie Salamon, your host for this episode, and I’m joined live at the Angelica Film Center here in New York City by Gemma Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society, and Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at the New York Times and author of nine books, roughly divided between his two Passions, history and whiskey.
In today’s episode, we’re doing history. Though this history may make you feel like taking a shot of whiskey. We’ll talk about the red scare that swept through the United States in the mid 20th century. Creating demagogues and destroying lives. It certainly is not solely a Jewish story, but many Jewish people were caught up in the movement as targets of suspicion and persecution, and in some cases, as allies of the tors.
And once again, for season two, the wreckage was narrated by Rebecca Naomi Jones, star of Broadway and off Broadway, and currently featured in Your Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV. Our thanks to the supporters of our series who made season two possible, including the Ford Foundation and Sid and Ruth Lapidus through their support of the American Jewish Education Program.
And I wanna give a shout out to Rebecca Miller and Melanie Myers at the AJHS, who provided a lot of support for this series. Clay, I just finished reading your excellent new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, which has been getting incredible reviews, one in the New Yorker, comparing you to Hemingway.
Tell us why you chose to write this book, which gives a fascinating new perspective on the history of the Red Scare. What inspired you to take on this era?
Clay Risen: Yeah, not, not Hemingway, I dunno about that was, that was a surprise, you know, for a lot of the works of history, at least that, that I’ve written. I try to draw on questions, themes, things that I’ve sort of tucked in the back of my head for a long time, and oftentimes these are things that I remember from childhood.
In this case, not because I have a direct connect, I’m a little young for the red scare, but growing up there were certain stories that stuck with me. One of them being my. From my grandfather, who was an FBI agent, and he would tell stories about how, you know, when he was a relatively young agent, he was involved in loyalty checks and interviews, you know, of tracking down accusations of subversion and things like that.
And he had one story that stuck with me. He said, uh, you know, there was a time he was living in Chicago and someone called him and said, you know, you need to, you need to check out Mr. Kaufman, he’s a communist. And, uh, so he’d go and he’d interview Mr. Kaufman. And Kaufman would say, what are you talking about?
That’s ridiculous. I have a store downstairs. I fly the American flag. Of course I’m not a communist. And he’d say, okay. And then Kaufman would say, but you know, you should check out Mr. Mueller over there, you know, across the street. He’s a Nazi. So, you know, my grandfather would go and he’d interview Mueller, and Mueller would say, ah, it’s ridiculous.
You know, I came here as a kid. My son served in the war. I hate Hitler, et cetera. And so then my grandfather, he went and interviewed neighbors, and the neighbors said, oh, Kaufman and Mueller, those guys hate each other. They’d been fighting for years. And, you know, he would, he concluded, well, you know, they were ratting on each other.
And, uh, it was a kind of a funny story and, and nothing happened. But there’s a dark side to that too, which is that, and it’s what I think kind of in, in, you know, a broad sense is the story of the red scare. You know, here were two guys who were using the tools and the fear of communism and anti-communism to attack each other and using the power of the state to go after each other.
And, you know, maybe nothing happened, but I. In a lot of other cases, things did happen. I don’t know. That story stuck with me. Uh, there were other things, like my high school when I was growing up, our mascot was the big red, you know, kind of like Harvard is the Crimson and Stanford’s the Cardinal. We were the big red, uh, we still are, but during the fifties we changed our name to the big maroon and, and that, and it was, you know, for obvious reasons.
And that stuck with me too. Like why would someone be so afraid of the color red that they feel the need to change something as just meaningless as the school mascot? But it reminded me, or it, you know, taught me, that’s the depth of the fear that was going through the culture. So, uh, you know, that, I mean, other things and, and of course I started working on this in 2019, but even then there was sort of a vibe I.
That things were not, uh, going in a good direction in terms of civil liberties and basic democratic discourse in this country. And, uh, so long story, but that’s how I decided to start writing this book.
Julie Salamon: Well, it’s a great story and your book is actually filled with great stories. And one of the things that I’d love for you to tell us about is how did you go about doing your research, gathering those stories?
Clay Risen: Yeah, so the way that I thought about the book, and this was really the tough part, was, [00:06:00] well, there are a couple of challenges. The first was telling this very pretty expansive story in a fairly tight narrative. There are only a few writers out there these days who can get away with 800 page books. So my editor was very clear at the beginning, regardless of how much material you have, this is not going to be an 800 page book, right?
Yeah. So I had to, so the first part was, okay, I’ve gotta tell this comprehensive story. There are only certain stories that I can include. So how do you pick and choose, and how do you tell it with an arc where there’s no main character, but there are a lot of, there are a lot of main characters and subsidiary characters.
How do you tell a story that is going to check all the boxes in terms of the names that people know? You know, you’ve gotta talk. If you’re gonna tell the story of the Red Scare, you’ve gotta talk about the Rosenbergs. You’ve gotta talk about Alger Hiss, you’ve gotta talk about McCarthy. So I knew I had to do that, but I also wanted to make sure that I told the story, you know, if that’s the story from the top down, I wanted to also tell the story from the bottom up.
This was a cultural grassroots story that not only brought in and sort of ensnared everyday people, but was also implemented by everyday people. And so I spent a lot of time looking for those stories going to, you know, look at individual, so PTA records, you know, where were there particular hotbeds of anti-communist hysteria in towns.
Turns out Westchester County had a bunch of, uh, people who were convinced that the school districts up in Westchester were full of communists and there were fights up there. That was really the, the, not the grunt work, but the hard furrowing that ended up really being productive because I could salt the story with these individual characters that no one’s ever heard of.
You know, these are not people who are, were even well known at the time, but their stories I think help really ram home how just. Thorough and pervasive. The Red Scare was,
Julie Salamon: so it’s really fortuitous to have you on this program today with Gemma, who wrote and produced season two of the Records, which is on the exact same subject, which is an incredible coincidence.
And having now listened to the podcast series and read your book, they really overlap and tell different stories and it’s really a wonderful thing to do in tandem read. Listen. And I guess with Gemma, because you are at the American Jewish Historical Society, you would think that the Wreckage series would focus mainly on Jews, and yet some of your main characters are not.
And sort of the similar question is, how did you decide who would be your stories? You know, you’re on a tighter schedule with podcasts. You don’t have as much room to add as many ancillary characters. So how did you decide how to structure you’re telling of this story?
Gemma Birnbaum: Well, so it’s interesting because I feel like, you know, I got one email that was like, “this episode only had like one Jew in it.”
And I was like, well, sometimes Jewish people talk to other people who are not Jewish. Sometimes their lives are impacted by that. And obviously we live in a multicultural society and have for many centuries. And so there was this idea that when you tell the stories through. The collection at the American Jewish Historical Society.
You don’t just have Jewish people, you have anybody who is part of a Jewish story that can range from some of the people who very willingly named names during the Red Scare, like Walt Disney kind of deciding this was sort of his, his time to shine in some ways, you know, using that as a sort of strike breaking method.
But then you also have somebody like Bayard Rustin, who is very heavily featured in a lot of our collections and is a big part of the Jewish story, but is not himself Jewish. But you’re talking about things like the Civil Rights movement and some of the overlaps there and the way that the, the Red Scare impacted those activists.
And so of course, that name comes up. And so when you’re trying to, you know, decide what makes it in and who’s worthy of, of their story being told, that’s a little bit harder. So there’s definitely been moments when we had to cut somebody and we’re like, oh man, like we really wish we could fit everybody.
That we wanted to enter the story, but it do, it just doesn’t work that way. But I feel like some of the strongest stories come out of only picking like one or two people really focusing on what happened to them and personalizing it for people. And you know, for people that a lot of people might have already heard about like, like the Rosenbergs telling it from a slightly different perspective.
So we’re not gonna talk about the Rosenbergs themselves alone. We’re also gonna talk about the Jewish judge who sentenced them to death and what that intercommunity conflict looks like.
Julie Salamon: The thing about the Red Scare, and maybe it’s just the way it gets told by historians, is it’s filled with a lot of great stories.
You’ve got your good guys and your bad guys. And it’s, it’s very dramatic and has been the subject of many films and you know, the front by, with Woody Allen and all these things. And Hollywood played a big role in it and I loved it. In, in your book Clay, when you talk about Hollywood, it was covered, the hearings, uh, with the Hollywood people was covered like a sele, you know, it was like a red carpet event.
And Gemma, you can chime in any time on this ’cause it also plays into, into the wreckage. But could you speak as to why Hollywood and many of the people in Hollywood were Jewish became such a target, and how did the blacklist come about and how was it weaponized?
Clay Risen: You know, the film industry then, as now was seen by, particularly by conservatives in America and in Washington as a big fat liberal target, just something they could go after.
Blame for everything that was wrong in this country, culturally, socially. And, and of course that was, you know, it was a trope throughout the thirties and, and, and forties and probably before that, but the Red Scare came along and gave an extra edge to these attacks because, you know, Hollywood had been, especially in the 1930s, a place where I.
First of all, you had a lot of folks from New York move, either theater people or writers or you know, anyone involved in kind of the entertainment industry because that was, things were not great in New York. Economically. Hollywood was one of the few places, one of the few industries that actually did pretty well during the Great Depression.
And these were people with certain skills that translated into Hollywood, whether they were, uh, executives or writers or stagehands. And, uh, a number of them brought their ideals. Uh, the theater world in New York again then is now was a, you know, place that was generally understood to be left wing. And so they, you know, brought those ideals to Hollywood.
One of the things I try to reinforce in the book is that, you know, that’s the image of Hollywood. Hollywood at the same time was not a liberal place in terms of the structure. It was run by companies that we’re not. Idealistic, were not interested in the kind of values that the celebrities necessarily espoused.
They were anti-labor, they were fairly conservative politically, so you had this weird sort of bifurcation. But a lot of these celebrities, they did support radical or left-wing causes in the thirties, and that made them a particularly juicy target for the House on American Activities Committee and, and Red Baters of all sorts.
Who understood that? You know, first of all, this was gonna play well with the public because Hollywood is always full of targets that you can say were, you know, radical un-American types at the same time it’s full of celebrities. So you, they could raise the profile of the committee by having these hearings and that’s exactly what happened.
So, uh, they called ultimately, uh, a group of what were termed friendly witnesses and then unfriendly witnesses. The Unfriendlies are the people we’ve come to know as the Hollywood 10. But the friendlies were people like Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers. Ronald Reagan was there. It’s interesting, there were a number of actors who were famous at the time, but are no longer remembered really.
And people lined up outside to see them. I mean, this was, uh, standing room only. And then some, it’s interesting, the coverage all talked about, as you said, these hearings as if they were theater or, or a movie production. And originally the, the studios and the studio, the organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America, they all stood behind the Hollywood 10.
They said, uh, you know, mostly because they didn’t want the government to come in and tell them what to do. But when it became clear that, well the government was going to, uh, that they found these guys, the Hollywood 10 in contempt, and that activated a grassroots. Anger against the studio system. They realized they had to do something if they wanted to salvage the image of movie theaters, especially as television was kind of looming on the, on the horizon.
There were concerns that movies would no longer be as lucrative as they had been. So they created What was the black list? The black list was never literally a list. Uh, there was no black list that you could look at. There was a statement, uh, the, all the Hollywood executives gathered here in New York at the Waldorf Astoria a few weeks after the hearings.
And they came to an agreement and they issued what’s called the Waldorf Statement. And the statement says, first of all, these 10 people will never work in Hollywood until they have completely purged themselves of their sins. I mean, that’s not literally what it said, but that’s the idea. But then additionally, anybody else who we decide.
And we will decide has crossed a line. They also are not gonna work in Hollywood. And then it kind of became this whisper situation where the executives would talk to each other and they would say, you know, this guy over here, Walter Bernstein, for example, who is a, a famous screenwriter, former New Yorker writer who became a screenwriter.
We think he might’ve been in the Communist Party at one point. And he, he was associated with some sketchy characters, so don’t hire him anymore. But they didn’t tell him that suddenly he stopped getting work. And you know, he had to ask around and find out. And finally a junior executive said, okay, meet me at this bar at 11 o’clock in the morning, we’re gonna go into a booth.
And he said, look, you can’t tell anyone I told you this, but you’re on the blacklist. And that’s how it operated. And that happened countless times to people in the industry. I mean, Hollywood really became a very conservative place. One additional detail that I think is just really telling Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher slash screenwriter slash novelist, she was a big part of this and she wrote a manual of things you’re not allowed to do if you want to write American movies.
And there are things like, don’t valorize the common man. Don’t dump on rich people. And it became a manual that everyone took literally, and it defined Hollywood films for many years after that.
Julie Salamon: Fascinating. So one of the thing, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the difference between telling this history for reading and telling this history for hearing.
So for the podcast, Gemma, when you were considering conceiving something to talk about the Hollywood part of this story. You need things that people can hear. So how did you decide what to include in your story of the Hollywood 10 and everybody else involved in the Blacklist?
Gemma Birnbaum: So if you’ve ever watched a Cold War in a or Red Scare documentary, you’re probably looking at footage from the Hollywood 10 hearings because it was one of the only ones that were recorded or televised.
It was actually the easiest episode because there was so much footage that it was actually really hard to cu down what we wanted to use every other time that you’re sort of like digging around and going like into like university archives and things aren’t digitized, but the Hollywood 10 footage, even if you didn’t know, you saw it, you saw it.
I like the drama. And so I just started picking out all of the clips of people yelling because I was like, oh, I wanna get to the points where it’s really contentious. ’cause nobody wants to sit there and listen to somebody just kind of have a really calm testimony. But you definitely wanna hear like John Howard Lawson like yelling and getting dragged out of the room, which feels really visceral when it’s like in your earbud.
Once, once I decided to only look at the parts where people were yelling, I was like, oh, now I’ve only got like three hours of footage. This is great. And that made it a lot easier to kind of call it down to the, the main story.
Julie Salamon: So as you’re talking, I’m thinking culture wars. Now we’re gonna talk about education.
Some of these themes, which we’ll talk about a little bit more later on, sound a little familiar probably to people listening to this podcast. But it was really fascinating to read about how educators became such a target during the Red Scare down K through 12. Not just universities, but universities as well.
And some of the more poignant stories that appear. In the book have to do with, like you said, the little people who you may not know, but who, for the people whose children they’re teaching are very big people. Yeah. And they ended up getting targeted so horribly and unfairly. And maybe in talking about that, it might be worth reminding people of how a lot of people may have been communist in a somewhat innocent way as young people.
And how that played into this whole madness really.
Clay Risen: Yeah. So just on, on that point, it’s one of the things I tried to do, uh, assiduously in the book was to make clear that there was a, there, there, right, there were people who spied for the Soviet Union. Uh, there were elements of the Communist Party, particularly in the leadership that were beholden to the Soviet Union and, and facilitated espionage.
But also there were lots of people who had varying degrees of. Commitment or relationship to the Communist Party. Much of which was, I think, fair to say, innocent, that maybe they respected the Communist party because in the thirties they were some of the only people outside of the NAACP who were speaking up for civil rights or for women’s rights or labor rights.
They might believe that basically, you know, not that a revolution was necessary, but the vision, the [00:21:00] ideal of a society that didn’t have oppressive capitalism in its core was something in the depths of the depression. That that made sense. And you’re right, there were some people who then joined the party.
The amazing thing, uh, there’s never been, there are no communist roles. We don’t know who was in the party as a whole. One thing we do know is that there are, even at that time, lots of ex-communist, right? So there are a lot of people who joined the party and then realized this is kind of a drag. If you were a member of the party, you had to go to these long meetings and sit through Leninist indoctrination seminars, and so people would drop out and uh, but they still had their ideals.
So, uh, this happens and it happened a lot in the thirties, and then by the time the Red Scare comes along, uh, you end, uh, there were a lot of people who had this in their past but had moved on Vivian Gornick in her book, uh, the Romance of American Communism, uh, which is a wonderful kind of mixed oral history and personal history, a memoir.
You know, she compares it to the way that someone might look back on a, you know, a first boyfriend or girlfriend and be kind of embarrassed that they ever dated that guy. But, you know, they moved on and they’re married with kids and they just kind of don’t talk about it. But, you know, that was kind of how it was.
But now to suddenly be confronted with it and not just confronted in an embarrassing, like, I can’t believe you dated that guy, but like, you’re gonna go to prison because. Of that past Dalliance was a central experience of the Red Scare. And, and it happened a lot with teachers. It’s no surprise, right?
First of all, teachers tend to be idealists, and idealists tend to gravitate toward teaching because it is a way that you help spread values to the next generation. And not because you’re a communist, but because you have certain ideals about America, about equality. And this became a way of lashing out by anti-communist, by Red Baters.
And New York was a central, real hotbed, a a locus of this. Going back to the early forties. This was long before kind of the, my book picks up there was anti-communist witch hunts in the New York school system. And then it really picked up again in the late forties. And one of the characters that I focus on is he’s a Slovak immigrant named Julius Ti.
And he came as a child. He grew up on the Lower East Side, very poor. Uh, but he was brilliant. And he came up through City College and went to teachers college at Columbia and he ended up as the chairman of the math department at Bronx Science. And he was widely regarded as one of the best math teachers in America.
He was a specialized in geometry. He wrote a book about geometry, just geometry problems. That was in all the schools, right? Every school had this book he was called before Joe McCarthy’s, subcommittee on Government Operations Investigations. And they tore into him and said, you know, where, have you ever been [00:24:00] a communist?
Were you a member of the Progressive Party? Where are you all this? And he, you know, he said, look, I’m not gonna talk about my politics like I’m a teacher, I teach math. What you’re asking is my personal political opinions. He’s, that has nothing to do with what I’m doing. But, and this is in 1953, so it was pretty clear what was happening.
And he said, look, I know exactly what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna go back to New York, and this is basically the end of my career. And, you know, you guys are, have destroyed me. Sure enough, you went back to New York, the Board of Education called him, said, look, you weren’t very nice in Mr. McCarthy’s hearing, uh, you’re fired.
And just for good measure, his wife who taught up in New Rochelle, she was fired too from her teaching job. And she, this is, there was actually a New York Times article about this, about her being fired. And it had her closing comments to her students. And she said, look, you know, we’re entering, we’re in this period when you’re going to have to be careful.
And I don’t know when this is going to end, but whatever you think, you have to be careful who you tell, who you reveal that to. And that’s a, a tragedy in American life. One final embarrassment, or, or not embarrassment, but just sort of injustice to lavati, honestly to American students. His book was then removed and banned.
From schools around the country and from state department libraries around the world. And he, he wrote a very caustic letter to the editor at the New York Times and said, apparently I have been teaching communist geometry. Right? Or, or, you know, it just, but in the context of the Cold War especially, you know, he really drew a beat on the idea that, you know, they are, they’re getting rid of people like me at the exact time when you need them.
And for what, why is this happening? And that’s the insanity. And I’ll just add one more thing, that this is the chapter. I think that more than anything resonates today because you look at so much what, of what is happening in terms of our school systems and our libraries [00:26:00] and how we engage with children.
And, you know, you can have a reasonable debate about what belongs in a curriculum, but I think so much of what’s happening now is driven by fear that is manifested in a fundamentally anti-education stance. And, and it’s so analogous with what happened in the Red Scare and I don’t know where that ends today.
Julie Salamon: Well, that leads me to a question I wanted to direct to both of you, which is when you both started these projects, we hadn’t yet entered this political era. I mean, you started your project in the first Trump presidency, but it was a different era than what we’re in now. And we now had the federal government facing off against private universities and targeting certain groups and cutting any age grants and all these things that were already, not new grants, but grants that had been already entered into it and in agreement.
And so I guess the question, and we’ll start with you, Gemma, is. I guess two, two part question. What did you think you were doing when you started this series and what has it turned out to be given the current situation and where do you see them as similar and where do you see them as different for better and for worse, I guess
Gemma Birnbaum: Julie, um, you know, when I started I wanted to make a Cold War story because I walked by a fallout shelter sign about a block from the Center for Jewish History where our offices are.
And I was like, that’s still on that building, and I just thought that was so cool. That was like a nice. You know, sort of nod to that era. I was like, wow, that’s still just sit sitting there, you know, however many decades later, you know? And our collection was just so rich with material of people who, uh, I felt like hadn’t necessarily gotten the same attention as some of the more famous kind of people caught up in it.
You know, we don’t have Joseph McCarthy in our collection. But we do have, you know, Morris Shoppe, the educator, who is one of one of the other educators who was targeted. And so I just wanted to highlight people that I felt like hadn’t really gotten their attention, the attention that they, that they maybe deserved in history, which I think is like the mission of our, of our archive, right?
Like, tell stories that people haven’t necessarily heard before. Collect new ones so that future generations can, can do the same thing. But there’s also this, like, there’s the desire to tell a story that is relevant and that people find resonance with. I don’t necessarily think it would maybe hit the same way, um, if things were different, but I also don’t think people wouldn’t find resonance with it regardless of whatever administration is there.
I think sometimes those parallels just become very, very blatantly obvious, um, in ways that, you know, we don’t necessarily, uh, always get, but I think it also makes the storytelling feel. I. Both more fraught and more important. Like at the same time, one of the things that has started to happen to me is anytime I go to like a dinner party or a birthday party, people will ask me like, well, when will like this end?
And I was like, what do you mean when will it end? I’m like, well, you know, like every day I wake up and there’s bad things in the news, I’m like, oh, I have really bad news for you. That’s never gonna be over. Um, you’re just gonna start to care less if it doesn’t necessarily impact you every day. But there are a lot of people every single day regardless who, who go through terrible things.
And, but as a historian, I find it very grounding to sort of go back and see, it’s not that what we’re going through today or you know, what I have to go through as a nonprofit head or whatever, doesn’t feel unique. But a lot of these things have happened before and people have come out the other side, not everybody.
And I think that’s important to note. But there is definitely this, I think this like knee jerk. Reaction to try to compare things, which I totally get, and I do it all the time, but I don’t necessarily know how helpful it really is long term.
Julie Salamon: Well, it’s interesting you said that, ’cause I actually felt, and maybe this is just wishful thinking, but both listening to the podcast and reading Clay’s book, I felt somewhat hopeful in that way as, okay, people have survived very dark times where people were really hurt.
And also, and Clay, maybe you could speak to this too, as you answer that question, I, I think in my mind the Red Scare was a much shorter period of time, but it was actually a quite long period of time. And if you could talk about that as well.
Clay Risen: Yeah, I, I largely agree with what Gemma said, both in terms of sort of the weird resonance of this project in 2025.
It’s not something I really expected, but also in the use of. My book for drawing parallels. I mean, there’s certainly all kinds of things that happen every day. I wake up every morning and there’s some new story where I think, oh, that’s kind of like this thing that happened 80 years ago, or 75, and that’s useful or it’s interesting.
But I think the other thing and is that it’s also useful to think about how it’s different and history is useful, not only because we can learn from certain parallels, but actually I think it’s more useful when we learn about how things are different and we can use sort of the negative space of history to teach us what are we not repeating, right?
I mean, I don’t think history repeats itself, but you can certainly say, okay, we’re, you know, here’s how things today are different from the red scare, and maybe that helps you better understand our current moment. Even though of course history does filter down and there is a genealogy. That, uh, connects us to the past.
But when I think about, you know, how does this end, I mean, I think you’re right that everything changes, whether that is an end is hard to say. I tell the story in my book roughly for about a decade from 1946 to 1957, and you know, I think it’s fair to say that 46 is kind of the beginning. 57 things happened in 57 that definitely marked the end of a certain era.
McCarthy died. Supreme Court rolled back a lot of the architecture of the Red Scare, but they didn’t get rid of all of it and who act continued and there continued to be, uh, people found in contempt. There continued to be red baiting on through the 1960s. But you know, there was, I think also a general turn in the public.
People stopped being afraid in the way that they had been, and that meant something for. The way HUAC was received, you know, there was, it was called Women for Peace, a group that was called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in, in the early sixties. And the say, you know, they were given the same treatment as everyone else had been, but they just refused to go along in a way that previous groups had, not except the Hollywood 10.
And, uh, they were found, uh, you know, some of them in contempt, but the Senate largely, or the, the house as a, as a body just refused to go along. So the temperature changed. And where did that happen? Is, is very hard to say. How you put your finger on a moment when an era passes is tough. And I think it’s all, uh, that’s the unhappy answer that I give.
Right. When will this end? It will end, but we won’t know when that is.
Julie Salamon: Well following up on that, Gemma, it’s interesting because the book ends pretty much in the late fifties, whereas in the podcast series you go all the way up in a very riveting episode about the 1968 political convention in Chicago and link it to the Red Scare, and I thought that was so fascinating just to listen to as an episode.
But also I’d love for people to hear about what was your thought process in extending it up into 1968 when the Vietnam War was heating up and all of that.
Gemma Birnbaum: I mean the, the big reason is, while this is largely about the Red Scare, it’s really about subverting the government, right? And those attempts. So that’s why, you know, we call the season American subversives versus something that’s more specific and trying to tell a very long history That puts it into context.
So starting in 1938 when the Dies Committee is first, you know, kind of formed, that becomes the House on American Activities Committee, you know, in name was very deliberate because what I really wanted to show people was that even at the height of this, like. Looming war in Europe and this rise of fascism, that was very terrifying.
You couldn’t even get the committee to focus on that for more than like a year. And then they were immediately going into these sort of anti-communist proceedings pretty early on to the point where there were people on the committee who were like, we kind of should probably focus on the, the fascists.
And they’re like, no, no, no. We’ve got all of these other things to worry about. There’s this growing communist sort of menace. And, you know, and, and first of all, more than one thing can be bad at the same time, but there were repeated decisions by the, by the committee to not focus on those fascist movements, not just in 1938 when they, you know, when they’re formed, but like.
Throughout the entirety of UX existence, you know, and saying, you know, not investing, getting the KKK when they had the opportunity to and things like that. And so telling the longer history allowed for one for the demise in a way that I just really thought was very poetic and dramatic, which is like you keep accusing people of being communist, but at that point, if you, the person you’re accusing is showing up to their hearing, wearing basically the equivalent of a t-shirt that says, yes, I’m a communist.
What power does your committee have anymore? But you’re still doing it for like, for a pretty long time. And so getting to the point where we could include Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the yuppies was the bookend for me of like that 38 to 68 period. And some of it is also just the cumulative story.
In our next season, we’ll talk about the Soviet Jewry activist movement, which largely kicks off in the 1970s. There’s things that happened before, obviously it doesn’t just show up in a vacuum. And I wanted to make sure that by the time we got to that story that people understood how we got there. Both with the relationship with the USSR, but also with the state of activism in the United States and what that looked like.
And for us to get there, we had to, you know, address the war in Vietnam. We had to address the counter protesting, and then we had to make it be over so it had to end. And so that’s where we kind of cut it off.
Julie Salamon: So throughout both the book and the series, we had these themes of antisemitism and white supremacy, which seem to be the themes that keep recurring in maybe not just American history, but in history period.
And so. I’m wondering where were the cross sections between anti-communism, white supremacy and antisemitism? Was it surprising that that happened at all? Or were there, were there places where it was surprising or was it always just business as usual dressed up in another guise?
Clay Risen: It’s a good question.
It’s sort of everywhere and nowhere at the same time. There were any number of instances where this sort of, the curtain was pulled back, right? So I think about the Rosenbergs, and on one level, the Rosenberg story was, surface level was not at all about antisemitism is about them being communist spies.
For example, whenever there were protests against their treatment or the execution, there were often mobs that would show up and shout gross anti-Semitic things about the protestors, about the Rosenbergs, and it was that sort of, oh, so even if it’s not completely about that thing, that thing is still going to get in.
Right. There was a concert up in Peekskill where Paul Robeson performed, and uh, there were a lot of black people up there. There were a lot of Jews. I mean, this was drawing from the progressive world of New York and a mob showed up and, and attacked them. Uh, this happened twice actually. And again, antisemitic slurs being shouted as the mob is attacking the concert goers.
And so it’s, it’s there as an undercurrent. But you know, it’s also difficult because, as you said at the beginning, you know, there were. Jews on both sides, I guess you’d say. I mean, it’s sides. It’s just very complicated. So, you know, you had characters, you know, let’s, let’s say like Walter Bernstein or the Rosenbergs or whatever, any number of Jews who were the target of the Red Scare.
But then you had Roy Cohn for example, and you had any number of Jews who lined up on the other side. And I’m reminded, and I include this in the book, my colleague Sam Roberts ha, he wrote a wonderful book about the Rosenbergs and about David Greenglass, who is Ethel’s brother. And he remembered being a kid during this.
And he wrote about, you know, this sense of growing up, you know, being in the Jewish community in New York as the trial was going on. And he said there were two sentiments that people had to deal with. And on the one hand it was, how could America do this to us? Right. You know, this is the land of opportunity.
This is the land that maybe didn’t do the best in during the Holocaust, but it was certainly, uh, refuge. And you know, this is a place where we, we can be open and, and free and, and feel safe. And yet here we are being, Jews are being targeted. And, but he said on the other hand, how could we do this to America?
Right. That was the other sentiment. And some people lined up directly on one side, some people directly on the other, but a lot of people were in the middle and just couldn’t really decide what was, you know, where do you sit? And especially if you lived in a community like the type that Vivian Gornick described where just communism was just part of your world.
If you grew up in the 1930s, even if you weren’t a communist, you might have some positive feelings about it. And then suddenly to be told, no, this is black and this is white, and if you’re on this side, then you’re all these terrible things. Well, it was hard for a lot of people to then disaggregate that from their Jewish identity.
- Because so much of what they had been taught was to align, you know, that certain things lined up. You know, it becomes this incredibly complex story that I had to decide at a certain point. Was that something I would deal with head on, or kind of allow it to suffuse and pop up at certain points in my narrative?
And ultimately I chose that because I think that in some ways reflects the feeling of the time, what it must have been like. There’s no definitive answer, and yet, you know, there’s something there that is un not really even under the surface.
Julie Salamon: Right. And so that complexity, as you can imagine, probably gets a lot more complex if you’re the executive director.
Oh God, the American Jewish Historical Society. Yeah. And you have to look at this material dealing with a lot of Jews in this. There were definitely Jews on all side. And I’m, when we talk about Jewish values, well, whose Jewish values are we talking about? And in terms of telling that part of the story in your story, how did you think about it?
Gemma?
Gemma Birnbaum: I mean, I feel like there is this sort of stereotype of what a Jewish person is, and it’s like, it’s a New Yorker from the Lower East side with a little bit of an affectation, and they’re, they’re gonna be liberal and that’s who they’re gonna be. And, and that’s just really not true. And it, it never really was.
I kept thinking about, like, when we were writing one of them, I kept thinking about like the Simpsons episode. Where like Crusty the clown is like, oh, I grew up on the lower East side of Springfield or whatever. And like, you know, in the, and I’m like, okay, well that’s just, I mean, that’s an important story, but it’s not the only Jewish story and it’s certainly just be, even if you come from that kind of background, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna become a certain kind of Jewish person.
I liked the conflict that was within the Jewish community that comes out of it. I liked the idea that not everybody agreed with each other, and that made it, I think, more interesting. And so one of the things that didn’t necessarily, not all of it made it in, but in the episode with Jelani Cobb talking about both Jewish and African American activists and the sort of complexities of those communities, one of the things that we didn’t get to use was he was telling me about like the, you know, Zora Neal Hurston writing letters of support to Joseph McCarthy, telling him like, I support everything you’re doing.
It’s gonna be okay. And I was like. Zora Neal Hurston, like, I didn’t believe him. I was like, oh, he must be misspeaking. He goes, no, no, no. Like it’s Zora Neal Hurston. She was a, a, a very anti-communist and she was very pro Joe McCarthy. And I found that to be fascinating and you know, and I was like, how do you even explain that?
He goes, I don’t know. We contain multitudes as people. Like, that’s the only thing I can really tell you. Trying to navigate some of that was, I think, the thing that made it an interesting story.
Julie Salamon: Yeah. You know, it, it’s, it’s, uh, interesting. We’ve talked about this here and there, but it might be interesting to just focus on it for a second.
Clay, you chose to end the title of your book with the Making of Modern America. So how did the two of you see this era, which is a fairly long period of time, is shaping modern America? Because I think one thing people should remember is we’re living in a much more liberal society generally now than the society at large was.
Back then, and it would be interesting to see how many people today who are staunch conservatives might have been considered liberal back then because things have changed so much. So how do you see this year as paving the way for Modern America? Or did your publisher put that?
Clay Risen: No, no, that was all my fault.
No, I think, look, I think there are, there are a lot of ways, but there are a few that I would highlight. You know, the first is that it really sort of locked in place a cultural sociopolitical spectrum that today we take for granted, but was looser back then or before the red scare. This idea that liberals, democrats, progressives all line up in this way.
In each of them, they’re sort of ordered in a row and then conservatives, it all kind of works this way. Republicans far right, all this. Not to say that that kind of spectrum didn’t exist before the Red Scare, but things were looser and, and also that that lined up with certain cultural values. If you are a Christian or you know, strongly religious, you’re going to be on the right side.
If you’re secular, you’re gonna be on this side. If you’re Jewish, you’re gonna be on this side. Right. Uh, these things came out of the red scare, this idea that there is something rotten at the heart of the federal government. This conspiracy theory that animated so much of the red scare, that there is this cabal of elitist of liberals, of anti-American radicals at the heart of the government.
And we have to take desperate measures to get them out. Uh, that animated a lot of the red scare. It continues to animate. I mean, I’d say today it’s even more prevalent, uh, than it was during the Red Scare. That idea. It’s given more credence. It’s, I think, driving a lot of our, our news, frankly. And one other thing though, and this is maybe the positive side, well positive with an asterisk, is that the, the experience of the Red Scare.
Also gave shape to the modern progressive slash liberal world, right? Civil libertarian groups did not really do a great job during the Red scare. Uh, a lot of law firms, a lot of the ACLU did not really stand up when it should have. And not to say that everyone is doing great today, but I think there is that legacy that continues the importance of civil liberties.
You know, you see the ACLU is doing, I think a wonderful job today of standing up in defense of the civil liberties of people who are, who are seeing their rights violated even, you know, I say not so much current events, but coming out of the Red Scare was a new appreciation, I think, on the left, at least for the rights of women, the rights of people of color, labor rights had always been an important thing.
But the embrace of these things as core values. Of obviously the left, that was always kind of true, but, but of democrats and, and the modern democratic party, right. That, that was, those were central. But the other, the asterisk is that during the Red Scare, there was a real, there was a civil war on the left between liberals and let’s say broadly progressives.
And some of it was justified, some of it was not. Some of it was the red scare in a nutshell. But coming out of it, and, and I think even today, you know, there is a line, uh, liberals tend to look [00:47:00] ance at progressives. And there there is a fear that progressivism is dangerous to the electoral outcomes. And maybe that’s not completely out, you know, out of bounds.
But there is that fear and that animosity toward the left that. Draws a direct line back to the Red Scare and that, and that kind of existed before that. But the Red Scare really underlined it, right? And said, look, there’s a line over which you can’t cross. And so in the 1960s this happened over and over, right?
Martin Luther King was told There are certain people that the government will not let you work with, that the government will not tolerate you having in the SCLC because we think they’re communists and Baird Rustin, right? Baird Rustin is not to be trusted. He is not to be included. If we are going to work with you, these lines were drawn.
And you know, Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t pull out of Vietnam because, well, that’s what the progressives want. I don’t wanna be associated with those views. I have to be strong. So these things have [00:48:00] this distortive effect, and it’s curious today, I wonder if that’s starting to break down new generation coming along, people who don’t necessarily think see things that way.
I think it’s one bright spot of, uh, the American political scene today.
Julie Salamon: So I’m curious, Gemma, so for you, in terms of the making of Modern America, could you talk about that a little bit, but with a special focus on how this experience changed or didn’t change the Jewish community in America?
Gemma Birnbaum: Well, I think that the whole era was the Jewish community was changing a lot and some of this goes back to season one.
Like it really starts with that generation of like the GI Jews and the post-war and what that starts to really look like. And you know, there’s both a sort of moving into middle class life that a lot of American Jews had not experienced in the same way before. That also sometimes gets confused with assimilation, but also sometimes is assimilation.
One of the things I found really fascinating is that. A lot of the stories within our archive and that we used in the series kind of upend that, that these are not people who necessarily were interested in assimilation. You know, John Howard Lawson, his family changes the name to sound, you know, sort of more Anglican.
That didn’t really help. I mean like everybody, he still experienced all of the antisemitism at Williams. He still struggled with his Jewish identity and what that looked like. And then by the time you get to the sort of tail end of the series with people, like nobody is gonna think that like Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman are not Jewish.
We have Rebecca Jones narrate, like clarifying who were Jewish. And I’m like, did we actually need to do that? They’re walking around with like giant stars of David on their t-shirts to make a statement and things like that, uh, among many other things, not to mention like the affectations and the sort of their names like.
And so, uh, uh, what I found really interesting was the further into the series we got and the further the decades went. I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like people got [00:50:00] more Jewish in a way that I found really fun and really comforting as a person who has, you know, thought about my own Jewish identity and what that really means.
And I think there’s this idea that when it’s good to be Jewish, you sort of blend in. But then there were all of these people who, who we feature, who are like, it’s good to stand out. And that’s where we kind of end it with. And I, and I liked the idea that, that there were a lot of people who, regardless of the rising antisemitism of the era, regardless of what was happening with some of these more sinister elements, and you know, like American Nazi party members showing up to all these HUAC hearings, like supporting them and things like that, it like made people double down on that identity of Judaism rather than hide from it.
And I, I really appreciated that as somebody who, who’s had those kind of thoughts. And like, if I could just hide, I’m like, I’m not gonna, there’s nowhere for me to hide, but I shouldn’t want to. And I think that’s, that’s what I started to take away from it. Separate from the sort of politics of what I [00:51:00] got from like from plays book and from other things.
Julie Salamon: So you talked a little bit about what you left on the cutting room floor, but for both of you, what were favorite things that you would’ve liked if you had that 800 page book? What would you have liked to have included that you couldn’t, why did you decide not to include it?
Gemma Birnbaum: There were a couple of things I really wished we could have included most of them for the last episode.
One was, you know, the yuppies are responsible for the pie in the face. Like Phyllis Schlafly and all these other people getting pied in public and like that did not fit. That started happening later. But there’s like 10 minutes of, of audio from the interview talking about the impact of, of the pie and that like people like Andy Warhol, ’cause he has like dinner with a war criminal and is like, why am I getting hit in the face with his pie?
And we had to cut all of that out. I, I wish we could have fit that. And then it’s in there for like three seconds. But you know, at the 1968 convention, at the protests, the yuppies bring a pig called Pigasus and they’re like, this is our Democrat who’s gonna run for president. Pigasus, Pigasus gets arrested too.
Like, so like they’re all hauled away. He goes to like, you know, animal control. He eventually, like he’s okay, Pigasus is freed. But like we could have done like a whole episode just on free Pigasus. We could have done a whole episode on Pigasus.
Julie Salamon: I’m kind of sad that you didn’t, that sounds really crazy.
Gemma Birnbaum: It was really cute too. Like spots.
Clay Risen: One thing, and this was not a huge section, but it, I, I get asked about it sometimes and that is the relationship between Roy Cohn and Robert Kennedy because both of them were brought in in 1953 to work on the McCarthy committee or work in his office. So I worked for Joe McCarthy and they had a very weird relationship.
First of all, Joe Kennedy. Joseph Kennedy was a big McCarthy supporter, really thought he was doing a great job. This is the, you know, the father, the patriarch, thought he was doing a great job, gave money to not just McCarthy, but also Nixon. And, you know, John F. Kennedy was not as liberal, especially at the time as people like to remember in retrospect.
And neither was Robert F. Kennedy. And, and they were very close with the McCart. McCarthy was up at Hyannis Port often. He was there for Robert F Kennedy’s, you know, his marriage to Ethel. But when they got into the committee or into McCarthy’s office, they sparred and they grew to really dislike each other.
And a lot of it was pure careerism that McCarthy ended up liking and trusting Roy Cohn more than he trusted. Bobby Kennedy and, and made Roy Cohn, his chief counsel, which is essentially making him, you know, I comparing he’s sort of CEO of McCarthy Incorporated. He really, you know, was then effectively the guy who gave shape to what had been a pretty messy operation.
And, you know, Bobby Kennedy was boxed out a little bit. Both of these guys, you know, both Cohn and, and Bobby Kennedy were incredibly aggressive. Not just alpha male types, but they wanted to be that guy. So they, you know, would spar and Bobby Kennedy didn’t talk about it that much afterward, but, but Roy Cone did, and Roy Cohn had all these stories that are really interesting in oral histories about his confrontations with Bobby Kennedy.
But unfortunately, that became something that my editor and, and I thought, eh, you know, we need to save about 2000 words. Let’s just cut that. So, oh yeah, I, I, you know, I occasionally think, well, I’ll put out a director’s cut of the book someday. Maybe I’ll just put it online. My publisher would not like that, but somehow I could get out these extra sections.
Julie Salamon: But, so as we’re getting close to the end, I did wanna ask you kind of a personal question, clay. So your book is great and I think it would’ve attracted a lot of attention anyway, but it’s probably getting a lot more attention now because every [00:55:00] review I’ve read of it pays a lot of attention to the parallels between then and now.
And so I was wondering how does that make you feel?
Clay Risen: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of like, reminds me, there should be a curse, sort of like, may you live in interesting times. Sort of like, may your book get a lot of buzz, but you know, only because the country’s falling apart. And you know, so that’s kind of how it feels like.
I don’t know how many, how many book sales would I be willing to just cross out if I could let you know if the, if we could just reset things. I don’t know, probably a lot frankly. But, you know, it is what it is and uh, you know, I hope people take something away from the book and, and reading it. That gives them some perspective.
I’d hate to say definitely not solace, but perspective.
Julie Salamon: Perspective is a good thing to have. Yeah. And, um, I think we have time to take some questions.
Gemma Birnbaum: Yeah. We’ve got time for like two questions. So from the audience, does any, I’m gonna come up to you, so if you have a question just raise your hand. There is a hand.
Okay. Hold on.
Audience Member: Thank, this is a wonderful, uh, exchange. Just wondering if there were any noble politicians that come out of this and anyone worth sort of discussing even behind the scenes that really tried to do the right thing and did.
Clay Risen: I think it’s easier and, and more honest to you can always say who the bad guys are.
It’s often very hard to decide in any story who are the good guys, right? But I do think, I mean, there are a couple, I mean the first I would say is Margaret Chase Smith, who in June of 1950 was the first. And for a long time, really the only politician who stood up and said in public Joe McCarthy is dangerous.
He’s dangerous for the Republican party, he’s dangerous for the Senate, he’s dangerous to America. And uh, she caught a lot of flack for it. She was essentially kind of demoted within the Republican ranks. That was pretty, uh, pretty gutsy of her was another four years before any of her colleagues in the Republican [00:57:00] party joined her in denouncing McCarthy.
So I think she gets a sterling kinda grade a. Another one is, I think Earl Warren is a, is a hero in my book. Uh, he came in. Eisenhower appointee. He was a Republican, the Republican governor of California, but also a real law and order guy. Uh, someone who had sided repeatedly with the FBI, with police. Uh, he was not someone that you would expect to almost, not literally overnight, but pretty quickly become a major, I mean, the bastion of civil liberties in the American Jewish prudential system.
You know, he allied himself with Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, who had been, uh, kind of voices in the wilderness and started to stand up almost systematically for civil liberties and civil rights. We remember him, obviously for, for getting a nine oh, you know, unanimous agreement or decision on Brown versus Board of Education.
We remember him for, you know, the Miranda Rights and, and a variety of cases in the sixties, but he was also very animated. And disturbed by the Red Scare. And throughout the 1950s, there was both his kind of conversion to civil liberties and fighting back the Red scare, and then a series of decisions that, that he masterminded.
And he picked things that would kind of build up the case so that in 1957 he could issue what was effectively the legal neutering of the red scare, uh, pulling back in a series of decisions, various tools that Congress and, and, uh, the FBI had used to, uh, to prosecute the red scare. So I think he deserves a lot of credit, especially because he was someone who thought this through and, and came to this conclusion that this was wrong.
There are, there are other figures I think, who deserve credit, but, [00:59:00] but those are two of the, unfortunately, few and far between who really stand out. I.
Julie Salamon: Thank you so much, Clay. Thank you, Gemma. You guys did a wonderful job today. For a transcript of this episode and additional show notes, visit ajs.org/podcast and please be sure to leave us a review on your preferred podcast platform.
Finally, our thanks to Adept word management for providing transcription, our producers at Sound Lounge and to the Angelika Film Center in New York City for hosting us. And don’t forget to join us again in September for the final season of the wreckage. Open up the gates and don’t forget to read Red Scare by Clay Risen.
Thank you.
Clay Risen: Thank you.
