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Landon R. Y. Storrs , The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2013, £27.95). Pp. 404. isbn 978 0 6911 5396 4 .
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The first Red Scare in the United States, in the aftermath of World War I, was characterized by a broadly conservative effort to use the power of the state to discipline groups on the margins of society and to reinforce the existing social order. However, the Second Red Scare after World War II was in many ways a far more radical project, as McCarthyite crusaders sought to use fears of sedition to discipline groups operating within the state structure itself. The federal government, greatly expanded by the events of the New Deal and World War II, changed from being a source of countersubversive policing to a venue in which such operations played out.
At the centre of this effort lay more than a dozen years of federal loyalty/security investigations, initiated during World War II and reaching their peak in the early Cold War years. Although much has been written about these programmes, our knowledge has been clouded by restricted access to the sensitive material produced during the investigations themselves. Following recent declassifications, however, much of this has now been opened to researchers. Based on the examination of more than six hundred such cases, alongside copious work with material obtained from private sources, Storrs has produced a book that augments our understanding of the loyalty-investigation process and offers provocative claims about its damaging consequences for American political life.
Reacting to Republican accusations of "softness" on communism, Truman implemented Executive Order 9835 in 1947, establishing the system of mass loyalty investigations for employees of sensitive federal agencies. This was expanded to all offices of government by Eisenhower in 1953. Between 1947 and 1956, roughly five million federal workers underwent screenings, and although comparatively few people...