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The film Oppenheimer has awakened interest in this vital period of American history. Now, for the first time in a generation, Red Scare presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, coupled with the terrifying onset of the Cold War. This defining moment in American history, unlike any that preceded it, was marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, 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, opportunism, courage, and delirium of those years through the lives and experiences of a cast of towering historical figures, including President Eisenhower, Roy Cohn, Paul Robeson, Robert Oppenheimer, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Richard Nixon, and many more individuals known and unknown. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists to 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.
An urgent, accessible, and important history, 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 18, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781982141820
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781982141820
- File size: 35554 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 1, 2024
Risen (The Crowded Hour, a NYT Notable Book), a reporter and editor at the New York Times, considers the anti-Communist fervor that gripped the United States following World War II. Drawing on newly declassified sources, he explores the politics and historical figures of the era, including Joseph McCarthy, President Eisenhower, Robert Oppenheimer, and more. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 1, 2025
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.COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from February 15, 2025
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(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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