Red Scare
Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews
From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible…[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end” (The New Yorker)—based in part on newly declassified sources.
Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with “scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses” (The New York Times Book Review), journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.
Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, courage, and delirium of those years. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and toward a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the Left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.
“Thorough, impassioned...detailed, [and] tension-packed” (Los Angeles Times), Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Even if you thought you knew the ins and outs of Senator Joe McCarthy’s malicious crusade against leftists in post-WWII America, this history book will surprise you. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Red Scare is an authoritative retelling of the McCarthyist witch hunts of the early Cold War, exploring how careerist politicians and wealthy conservatives aggrieved by the New Deal teamed up to get revenge by painting their adversaries as Communist agents. Journalist and author Clay Risen perfectly blends emotion and fact, channeling the paranoid atmosphere of the time while also matter-of-factly highlighting the futility of McCarthy’s inquisition. More than just a broad retelling, Risen homes in on the individual toll of McCarthyism and details the lives it ruined, from a charity worker who raised funds for Spanish Civil War victims’ healthcare to an actor reduced to working as a cashier after false accusations. This is a thrilling account of what intense beliefs unchecked by facts can do, offering valuable lessons for future generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aiming to understand how Americans got to "where we are today," journalist Risen (The Crowded Hour) dissects the history of anti-communist hysteria in this incisive account. The Red Scare was, in Risen's telling, a backlash to President Roosevelt's New Deal policies, which ushered in "dramatic social change" by catalyzing "an entire culture around the American worker" and opening doors to women and African Americans. This enraged capitalists, anti-feminists, and racists, who insisted that progressivism was an existential threat to America—the vanguard of "something sinister, something foreign" emanating from the Soviet Union. By the Cold War, the "romance of Communism" in the 1930s "looked naive" to many, not least because of new revelations about Stalin's totalitarian tendencies. Thus, the anti-progressives who had "spent the last decade shouting into the void" about subversion from abroad "suddenly had a ready audience"; they comandeered the House Un-American Activities Committee to "expose" a "Communist plot" behind the New Deal. Risen paints a vivid portrait of Joseph McCarthy, the committee's weird impresario who "salved his ulceric stomach with... half sticks of butter." He also perceptively points to how McCarthyism solidified a "passionate core of hard-right conservatives... who were prepared to believe the worst" and created a "lasting divide between moderates and progressives" on the left. The result is a rewarding examination of America's past that makes it relevant to present-day politics.
