Red Scare Blacklists, McCarthyism and the making of modern America

Throughout Red Scare, Risen sets a thoroughly fraught scene. A time of political and social upheaval, the era known as the Red Scare spanned from the 1920s through the 1950s, a time when enemies, saviors, and victims coagulated, all somehow marked by a manifest paranoia, clawing toward some version of the truth. The players are all there: Nixon, Truman, Oppenheimer, the Rosenbergs, Roy Cohn. The stage swings between senate offices, cramped hearing rooms, and the secrets apparently hiding in so many American homes. At the center of the maelstrom, an unlikely main character emerged in the abrasive backbench: Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy's so-called blacklist came to represent the combatively misguided approach to rooting out Communism. Risen's feverish prose perfectly captures the chaos of McCarthyism, from the book bans to the power grabs to the lives forever altered in the scuffle. He plumbs this well-trod territory with verve and achieves angles not previously seen. In examining this turbulent era from the vantage of our own charged moment, Risen goes beyond the spectacle to arrive at the gritty center. Frightening yet thoroughly affecting, Red Scare is propulsive history at its most striking.

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)

A sweeping history of the campaign to suppress liberal dissent via blacklisting and harassment. As Risen, whose histories have ranged from whiskey to the Rough Riders, writes, "There is a lineage to the American hard right of today" in the Red Scare of old. In fear that communists were everywhere in American society, police agencies went overboard to prove it, usually to no effect. For example, Risen writes, the FBI conducted 4.76 million background checks and investigated 26,236 individuals who held or applied for government jobs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, suspecting them of espionage. "Most were eventually cleared, but 6,828 people resigned or withdrew their applications, and 560 were fired. Not a single spy was ever discovered by the program." Just so, while the House Un-American Activities Committee made news every day, as well as making household names of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, little evidence of spying and Soviet subterfuge ever emerged. In his deftly written history, Risen attributes the rise of anti-communist paranoia to an atmosphere of isolationism and conspiracy theory--there's that lineage to today--as well as to an anti-labor movement that expelled leftists from the union rank and file and leadership alike; the postwar right also militated against gay rights and civil rights for Black Americans, and the "conservative turn that followed put a brutal end to those small hopes." In his wide-ranging account, Risen portrays blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, notes the rise of militaristic toys such as little green Army men, examines anti-communism in popular culture (with Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer mowing down 40 communists, crowing, "I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it"), and closing with the pointed thought that the Red Scare was the product of fringe politics that somehow took center stage in American life. An exemplary work of political and cultural history that invites a gimlet-eyed look at our own time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.