Children of people who were targeted during the 1950s McCarthy-era Red Scare say they remember the constant sense of surveillance they felt, even as they tried to live normal lives.
On March 3, Michael Meeropol (son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), MaryLouise Patterson (daughter of civil rights activists Louise and William Patterson), and Molly Jong-Fast (granddaughter of blacklisted novelist Howard Fast) came together at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to talk about their experiences during the Red Scare, a time when the government made their ordinary lives feel unsafe.
The event, moderated by historian Beverly Gage, was part of the Columbia University Department of History program titled “Confronting McCarthyism: Generational Lessons from Families who Resisted the Red Scare.” It looked back on the surveillance climate of the 1950s and related it to what we’re living through today.
Meeropol remembers that his parents — Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were charged with and executed for espionage — were not simply talked about in the news, but turned into national symbols. As a child, he said, this was a frightening time: “It was scary, we were isolated. The media was against us.” At one point, he remembered discovering “one wonderful newspaper” that supported his parents and then trying to share it with the people around him. “One mother was very nice to me, and another mother threw me out of the house because she thought I, an eight-year-old, would contaminate her son,” he told the Amsterdam News. “That was a pretty scary thing for an eight-year-old.”
MarynLouise Patterson’s mother, Louise, was a labor activist who fought against the low wages and systemic discrimination faced by Black workers. She also worked with Harlem Renaissance artists to promotensocial justice through art. Her father, William, led the Civil Rights Congress and edited the “We Charge Genocide” petition that was submitted to thenUnited Nations in 1951. Both Louise and William Patterson were members of the Communist Party USA and were persecuted by McCarthy and the FBI.
The normality of racial segregation when MaryLouise was a child, in some ways, she said, protected her from the full-on affronts she later realized her parents were going through. “In African American communities, there might’ve been a little bit more protection against McCarthyism by the mere fact that we were segregated,” she said. “There really was a love…for [my family’s] history of struggle and our history of fighting against racism. So that tended to protect us.”
Patterson does remember that there was always a car parked across the street from her home. “I remember the standard, dark Ford car across the street from the house with four white men in it, all in…dark suits,” she said. One detail that stuck in her child’s mind was their shoes, “black and shiny,” without decoration. “Anytime I saw a white man who was dressed in a dark suit and with those shoes, I knew…he was an FBI agent or an agent for the government.”
MaryLouise Patterson and Michael Meeropol discuss McCarthyism in the 1950s and in the present day.
MaryLouise’s family was, she believed, constantly watched not only so the government could gather information about them, but also so that they could isolate them. They “were trying to intimidate the neighbors and distance them from us,” she said, adding that agents may have also been attempting to recruit informants. “Who knows? I mean, they did all kinds of stuff.”
But Meeropol says that kind of pressure led him to a decision not to be scared. “The experience of losing my parents and growing up with that legacy…certainly made me a radical,” he said. “It made me want to fight back.”
Today, as the United States faces a right-wing turn in its politics, Meeropol and Patterson said the 1950s and the present are starting to look similar. The same methods of creating fear are in use: public demonization, state power, and pressure on communities to turn inward. Meeropol said he sees it in political messaging that portrays certain groups as threats to the nation itself, and that tries “to convince people that you’re fighting the good fight to…protect America” and in language about the country’s “blood” being “poisoned” by immigrants. This, he noted, is part of a longstanding pattern within U.S. history of targeting newcomers.
Asked what advice they would offer people feeling overwhelmed by today’s right-wing political atmosphere, Patterson rejected the idea that surviving this period would require retreat. “This is our country,” she said: “It was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and then African Americans and workers from other countries who were seeking a better life, who came poor, with nothing other than a bundle and their clothes on their backs. That’s who built this. It belongs to us. So, to run, I don’t think. … Well, I know it’s not the answer. Not for me. And I don’t think it’s the answer, really, for anybody else.
“I think we’ve got to find people who think like us, who are trying to stay and fight for this. It doesn’t belong to the people who didn’t labor. I mean, the ruling class never labored. We’re the ones who labored and built this. So, this is ours, and we need to fight for it.”
“I can’t stress enough how much I agree with what MaryLouise just said,” added Meeropol. “You’ve got to keep fighting no matter how hard the odds are. All the evidence indicates that the majority of people are rejecting the ICE Nazis on the street. They are rejecting Trump’s ridiculous pro-billionaire economic policies. It would be wonderful if there were a coherent, unified opposition party that would sweep it all away. But you know what? It’s a broad coalition, and some of it includes people that I agree with 100%, and some of it includes people that I will hold my nose and vote for.
“I hate to say it. It’s not as simple as this, but one thing everybody’s got to do is everybody’s got to vote,” Meeropol continued. “And everybody’s got to fight for the right to vote because they’re going to try to suppress the vote this time around. They’re going to do every trick in the book, and we have to remind ourselves that we are the majority. And if we stick together, and if we don’t give up, we will prevail.”