Then U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin testifying against the U.S. Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings in Washington, D.C., June 9, 1954. McCarthy stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States. (Photo by Getty Images)

Driven by “a lineup of disgraceful racial bigots and American fascists,” a divisive political crusade by conservatives in the United States was “like a gigantic, tumultuous hurricane” that “dominated the thoughts and actions of the American people, disrupting their emotions, distorting their judgment ….” Those are the words of Michigan Republican Charles E. Potter, a member of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, who, in his 1965 book “Days of Shame,” repudiated the excesses of the McCarthy era.

I read Potter’s 60-year-old mea culpa in David Maraniss’s powerful personal history, “A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father,” (Simon & Schuster 2019), which traces the Maraniss family’s harrowing journey to Madison, Wisconsin. The anti-McCarthy Capital Times newspaper saved Maraniss’s dad, Elliott, giving him a job after he was blacklisted and then followed from town to town by federal agents investigating his political activities over “five years, five cities, four kids, eight homes, two papers that fired him, three papers that folded,” as Maraniss writes.

I binge-read the book amid a storm of news as the administration of President Donald Trump ramped up attacks on leftwing activists, Democrats, progressive nonprofits and the media, blaming them for the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, and vowing to attack what White House adviser Stephen Miller called a “vast domestic terror movement,” using the full force of the federal government to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks.” 

I reached out to Maraniss Thursday in Madison, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author grew up and still spends summers. ABC had just indefinitely suspended late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing the MAGA movement’s weaponization of the Kirk shooting. And Trump and his FCC chairman were threatening to yank broadcasting licenses from media outlets that criticize the president.

I wanted to ask Maraniss about the parallels he sees between the time he describes so vividly in his book and the current moment. 

“There are several obvious haunting similarities,” he told me on the phone, “the demonization of others, the calling of all opponents Marxist or communists or enemies of the state, the gross manipulation of truth, the use of fear to stifle dissent and pressure to silence the media or get the press to go along.”

“Back then,” he added, “most of the press did go along with McCarthy for a long time.”

The Capital Times stood out as an early critic of Wisconsin’s bombastic Red-hunting senator, Joseph McCarthy. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson was another prominent anti-McCarthy voice, along with Murrey Marder of the Washington Post and Edward R. Murrow — all mentioned in Maraniss’s book. “But you could cite many more that were going along with McCarthyism.”

The main difference Maraniss sees between the McCarthy era and today is that “McCarthy was only a senator, and now we’re dealing with the president, with full control of the levers of power which McCarthy did not have, ranging from the Justice Department to the military.”

McCarthy took aim at major U.S. institutions — from government agencies to  universities to Hollywood to mainline Protestant churches — but he overstepped when began attacking the U.S. Army, infuriating then-President Dwight Eisenhower. 

Another glaring difference between then and now, Maraniss added, “is that McCarthy did not have the full support of his own party, the Republican Party.” Today, “almost any Republican who opposed Trump is now no longer in office or in the party.”

It took a long time, however, for mainstream media and mainstream Republicans to turn against McCarthyism and for the public to swing from the distorted thinking former HUAC member Potter finally repudiated to the consensus that leftwing political ideology did not, in fact, pose an existential threat to U.S. national security.

Among the many echoes of Red Scare fever resonating through national politics today is the central issue of race. One of the most gripping scenes in Maraniss’s book is future Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the Federal Building in Detroit. Young, a World War II veteran, confronts the southern racists on the committee as they question his loyalty, repeatedly correcting their slurring pronunciation of the world “Negro.” Despite the committee’s high-handedness and multiple attempts to silence him, Young has the last word. 

“I fought in the last war and I would unhesitatingly take up arms against anybody that attacks this country,” he says. “In the same manner, I am now in the process of fighting against what I consider to be attacks and discrimination against my people. I am fighting against un-American activities such as lynchings and denial of the vote. I am dedicated to that fight and I don’t think I must apologize or explain it to anybody, my position on that.”

Reading about Young and the other brave souls who stood up to McCarthyism, including the elder Maraniss’s lawyer, George Crockett, who was jailed for contempt and returned to continue fighting, is inspiring and thrilling. 

In contrast, Maraniss traces the sordid history of U.S. Rep. John Stephens Wood, a Democrat from Georgia and chairman of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan (though he claimed he only went to one meeting). He lays out the evidence that Wood attended the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish industrialist who was accused of killing of a young, female factory worker in Georgia. Wood was the “wheelman” for Judge Newt Morris, his mentor, helping to collect the body from the lynchers and drive it to the morgue. 

White racists, as Potter later acknowledged, played a prominent role in the McCarthy era purges of “un-American” activists. These were the people who sat in judgment of civil rights leaders, Black unionists and activists for racial equality. Maraniss’s father, an antifascist who joined the Communist Party when he was in college at the University of Michigan, led an all-Black battalion in World War II, and dedicated his life to his idealistic view of America, was the target of people who had little respect for equal rights or the Constitution.

Who are the real patriots, Maraniss asks — a question that resonates today.

“Race is at the center of American life, then and now,” Maraniss said on the phone. “And what we’re facing this time is really an attempt to erase the civil rights movement.”

“The chairman of the House un American Activities Committee that went after my father was a Georgia racist who was elected in white-only primaries and opposed every civil rights measure, and he was the one defining what’s an American,” he said. “And you have a similar thing going on now where Charlie Kirk is celebrated on NFL stadium screens and people are being fired left and right, for criticizing someone who disparaged Martin Luther King.”

It’s important not to be cowed by the deliberate use of language as a weapon to promote misunderstanding, he said, “as they have with DEI. I mean, what is on its face wrong with diversity, equity and inclusion, you know? Think about it. I mean, the same thing with being antifascist. I mean, people should embrace those ideas and not run away from them.”

Of his parents, Maraniss writes: “They never betrayed America and loved it no less than the officials who rendered judgment on them in Room 740 of the Federal Building in Detroit. They were dissenters who believed the nation had not lived up to its founding ideals in terms of race and equality, largely because of the reactionary attitudes of self-righteous attackers on the American right.”

The book ends happily. The Maraniss family arrived in Wisconsin in time to watch the Milwaukee Braves play their way to a pennant and eventually beat the Yankees in the World Series. “McCarthy was dead. The Supreme Court had essentially overturned the Smith Act, ruling it was unconstitutional to bring charges against American citizens solely because of their political advocacy. … The world was opening anew.”

But there is, of course, no real end to the struggle. In an epilogue, Maraniss writes about Cap Times reporter John Patrick Hunter, who, long after the Red Scare was safely over,  typed up sections of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, combined it with a petition listing six of the 10 amendments to the Bill of Rights, along with the Fifteenth Amendment granting Black men the right to vote, then roamed a local park in Madison trying to collect signatures. “He gave the people the nation’s foundational truth and it did not go well,” Maraniss writes. “Of the 112 people he asked to sign the petition. Only one did. Twenty accused him of being a communist.”

“It is an endless struggle,” Maraniss said on the phone. “That’s what life is. And you know, it tends to go in cycles of reaction and counter reaction. This is a very, very difficult one of those cycles. But I’ve been an optimist my whole life. It’s being challenged like never before in my life. My father endured it and came out an optimist anyway, somehow. So to honor my father, I maintain my optimism.”