Second Red Scare

The Second Red Scare was a climate of alarm over Communist influence and espionage in the United States that gathered force after the war and surged in 1949–1950. It drew strength from real international reversals and espionage revelations, but also from suspicion that outpaced the evidence. The fall of China, news of a Soviet atomic bomb, the case of Alger Hiss, and Joseph McCarthy’s shifting charges accumulated into a crisis of confidence; attempts to expose his claims instead helped make him a national figure.

A climate of suspicion

By the summer of 1949, anti-communism had become more urgent in public debate. After Alger Hiss was indicted for perjury in December 1948, the unresolved question of whether he had been a Communist spy fed a wider concern: how many others might be inside the government? The trial ended with a hung jury in July 1949, and a second trial was scheduled for the fall. Harry S. Truman urged reporters not to mistake anxiety for national collapse, saying that the country had endured such periods before. But, as the narrative observes, he failed to foresee that the issue would not go away.

The fear was not confined to one case. In August 1949, events in China and the Soviet Union shook the country, while the China Lobby accused the administration of having lost China to communism. The Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek was collapsing; in April, a Communist army of a million men crossed the Yangtze River. The administration released a 409-page State Department report, with another 645 pages of appended documents, intended to provide a frank record of American policy toward China. Dean Acheson argued that the United States had provided more than $2 billion in support for Chiang since V-J Day, but that internal corruption, poor leadership, and the Nationalist government’s failure to respond to the Chinese people had doomed the effort. Truman privately summed up the choice by saying, “We picked a bad horse.”

The report did not calm the dispute. For many Americans, China carried a powerful emotional charge: generations had supported missionaries there, readers had embraced Pearl Buck’s accounts of Chinese life, and Chiang and his wife had been wartime allies. The official acknowledgment that China was lost to communism therefore intensified anger instead of easing it. The New York Times called the report a “sorry record of well-meaning mistakes”; other critics called it a whitewash or an alibi for alleged pro-Communists in the State Department. Republican accusations, joined by some Democrats, treated the loss as the administration’s responsibility, as though China had been America’s to lose.

International shocks and domestic alarm

The anxiety deepened as several alarming stories broke in quick succession. News from London reported that Klaus Fuchs, a former scientist at Los Alamos, had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The Soviet atomic bomb and Hiss’s case added to the sense that danger was both foreign and already inside American institutions. Within less than six months, the country was confronting China’s fall, the Russian bomb, Hiss, and Fuchs. Senator Homer Capehart gave voice to the unease with the question, “How much are we going to have to take?”

Life sharpened the sense of vulnerability by comparing military strength. It reported a Soviet army of 2,600,000 against an American force of 640,000, thirty Soviet armored divisions to one American, and annual aircraft production of 7,000 to 1,200. It also said the United States spent 6 percent of national income on military strength, compared with 25 percent for the Soviet Union. Though the American Navy remained the strongest, the magazine warned that the Soviet fleet already exceeded Germany’s at the start of the previous war and included three times as many submarines as the American fleet. Its headline asked, “War Can Come; Will We Be Ready?” These figures belonged to a larger public argument, but they made fear tangible: the threat seemed measurable, and the apparent imbalance invited demands for action.

Inside the administration, Dean Acheson had already argued that Truman’s $13 billion ceiling on defense spending was no longer realistic. After Truman decided to proceed with the hydrogen bomb, he authorized a comprehensive review of military policy. Work began at the State Department and the Pentagon, where pressure over defense priorities contributed to worsening relations between Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. The bomb and the accusations of espionage thus reinforced one another: fear of Soviet power sharpened concern about American readiness, while fears of infiltration made policy disputes seem inseparable from questions of loyalty.

McCarthy turns suspicion into spectacle

Against this unsettled background, Joseph McCarthy found an issue that could propel him from obscurity. A Wisconsin junior senator with few allies, he had recently been judged the Senate’s worst member in a poll of Washington correspondents. Over dinner at the Colony Restaurant, Father Edmund A. Walsh suggested that he sound an alarm about Communist infiltration of government. On Lincoln’s Birthday, McCarthy claimed to have “here in my hand” the names of 205 “known Communists” in the State Department. The speech initially attracted little notice. At Salt Lake City and Reno, however, he repeated the charge with the number changed to fifty-seven, describing the supposed Communists as “card-carrying.” Back in the Senate, he spoke for five hours and claimed to have uncovered eighty-one names.

The changing numbers did not prevent the charges from gaining force. McCarthy portrayed Truman as controlled by people who concealed information from him and attacked Acheson in language that drew national attention. Acheson received so much threatening mail that guards were posted at his house around the clock. Some Republicans deplored McCarthy’s methods, but others supported him. Senator Robert Taft acknowledged that he was urging McCarthy to continue attacking, even if one case failed and another had to be raised. The accusations gave expression to Republican anger after Truman’s unexpected victory in 1948, while their sensational form kept attention fixed on the alleged threat.

The country’s fear was already so charged that, as cartoonist Herb Block recalled, “it took only a small spark to ignite it.” When he labeled an overflowing barrel of tar “McCarthyism,” he helped give a name to the political climate. The term captured more than McCarthy’s individual claims: it marked the way suspicion, anti-Communism, and public accusation could feed on one another, turning uncertainty itself into a political weapon.

Investigation and its unintended effect

Senate Democrats called for a full examination of McCarthy’s charges. A special subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Millard Tydings, began hearings in the Senate Caucus Room. The expectation was that public scrutiny would expose the weakness of the claims and bring McCarthy down. Instead, the hearings gave him sustained press attention and a stage from which to present himself as the target of a cover-up. He said the committee was trying to identify his informants so that they could be removed from the State Department.

By the end of March, six weeks after his first major speech at Wheeling, McCarthy had not named a single Communist. He then announced that he could identify the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States and accused Owen Lattimore, a scholar who had worked for the State Department for four months in 1946 as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan. The charge proved fraudulent: Lattimore was neither a Communist nor an influential State Department figure. McCarthy nevertheless presented the accusation as a decisive test, declaring that it would be the biggest espionage case in the country’s history and that he was willing to stand or fall on it.

The hearings therefore exposed a central contradiction of the Red Scare. Investigating accusations could establish how little evidence supported them, yet the spectacle of investigation could also magnify the accuser and prolong public alarm. Truman’s reassurance that national hysteria had subsided in earlier eras could not settle the matter; the Hiss retrial, the crisis over China, espionage disclosures, military fears, and McCarthy’s continuing performance kept the issue alive. The Second Red Scare grew not from a single revelation but from their accumulation—and from the political power of treating each new uncertainty as proof that the next accusation might be true.