Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America

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. (May)