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 were dismissed, thousands experienced long, drawn-out and humiliating investigations, many found their careers blighted by suspicions that could never entirely be erased, and thousands more resigned rather than face the intense pressures that resulted from fighting charges laid, often anonymously, at their door.

As anticommunist fears intensified, suspicion was placed not only on individuals who were considered a danger because of their supposedly doubtful loyalty, but also on those considered security risks by dint of personal habits that were believed to leave them open to blackmail or exploitation. This turned a process supposedly designed to root out agents of a foreign power into a powerful tool for promoting conservative social and political values. Indeed, for many investigators, if the effect of widening the net was to discipline noncommunist left-wingers and liberals who advocated what they considered to be “communistic” ideas – ranging from redistributive economic policies to social and culturally liberal practices in their private lives – then so much the better.

Here is where we see the first of the two major contributions of Storrs's account. We have long known the ways in which investigations were used disproportionately to punish labour and civil rights activists, but less has been written about the degree to which left-wing women, especially those associated with the early consumer movement, were also subject to investigation. Since left feminism so often overlapped with these other categories, it is virtually impossible to isolate exactly why particular people were targeted. Nevertheless, Storrs argues that powerful women were disproportionately singled out, despite occupying a disproportionately low number of senior positions, and the gendered presumptions revealed in both Congressional hearings and executive-branch loyalty investigations leave little doubt that part of their presumed offence was to defy conventional assumptions about the role of women. While some targets attempted to defend themselves by playing up to their accusers and stressing their conventional “womanliness,” even this strategy was not a guaranteed route to safety, since the prevailing views of women's susceptibility to male domination marked them out as supposedly more likely victims of communist exploitation. Moreover, because few sought to draw attention to the gendered element of the accusations levelled against them, the anti-McCarthy backlash of the later 1950s tended to downplay this subtext compared to the role of anti-civil rights or anti-labour politics.

This is an important addition to our understanding of Red Scare politics, and is supported by other recent studies on the role of antifeminist thinking in mid-century conservatism. It confirms the basic thrust of much recent literature in the field, suggesting that we should see loyalty investigations as less “paranoid” and more discriminating (and discriminatory) – designed not just to discharge latent anxieties but also to isolate a cohort of left-wingers in government who had formed an important subelement of the New Deal coalition but now were to be written out of history.

This is Storrs's second major theme. Paralleling the work of Gerald Horne and others on the way in which radical contributions to the early civil rights movement were hidden by Cold War political imperatives, Storrs shows how many targets responded to attack by rewriting their personal histories, downplaying their youthful radicalism and moderating their political views. Storrs uncovers pages torn out of books, narratives distorted, and archives missing great chunks of paper: amounting to a systematic rewriting of history that downplays both the vibrancy and the radicalism of a socialist and social-democratic tradition in New Deal policymaking circles, as well as hiding the extent to which this tradition was closed off by the traumas of the Red Scare.

Ironically, this seems to confirm that conservatives were right about at least one thing: that many of their targets were more radical than they admitted, even if they ignored the reasons why individuals felt compelled to hide their politics. Such manoeuvres often achieved little in the short term; indeed, as with the more famous case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, sometimes efforts to cover up a prior history of radical engagement seem to have actually heightened the suspicions of federal investigators who were quick to spot evasions. In the longer term, though, they may have enabled ambitious and hard-nosed operators to remain in Washington as political players, and in this sense not all of the subjects of this study can be seen only as uncomplicated victims. However one interprets it, though, this pattern of rewriting history has undoubtedly distorted our understanding of the shifts that took place in US policies in the 1950s and 1960s by representing certain coercive changes in the realm of political debate as consensual ones.

Inevitably, the extent of the loyalty programme's impact is hard to determine and remains open to debate. Although careful to couch the argument within a web of caveats, Storrs clearly believes that, absent the loyalty investigations, left-wing ideas would have had a more substantial influence on a wide range of US policymaking areas in the Cold War. There is room for debate here, since many of these policies were being challenged on other grounds in these years anyway, and not only from the right. Not all Cold War liberalism can be understood as a response to conservative assault. Nor should social-democratic propositions be seen, even in their heyday, to have been more popular than they actually were.

Nevertheless, it seems clear at least that, through repression and self-censorship, important advocates for radical policies within the federal apparatus were either silenced or lost to politics altogether. In this sense, Storrs is undoubtedly right to suggest that, “like other markets, the marketplace of ideas was not really a free one” (176). An exceptional piece of detective work, The Second Red Scare is one of the finest books written on the McCarthy era in the last decade and raises important questions that will no doubt be debated at length in the decade to come.