In the history of post-World War II America, one of the darkest periods unquestionably was the decade of the Red Scare --- the fanatical hunt for Communists whose alleged presence in both government and private life posed an existential threat to the country. In RED SCARE, New York Times reporter and editor Clay Risen (THE CROWDED HOUSE) provides a balanced and thoughtful narrative history of the era, while suggesting that some of the malign spirits of that age may yet stalk the land in our own day.

For many possessing only a casual acquaintance with this history, the Red Scare is synonymous with the scourge of McCarthyism. That period of political terrorism, named for Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, began with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, in which the ruthless, publicity-seeking lawmaker threatened to expose 200 purported Communists in the State Department. It climaxed in his dramatic humiliation at the hands of wily Boston trial lawyer Joseph Welch during a televised congressional committee hearing in June 1954. Throughout those four years, McCarthy was a superstar of Republican Party politics, but he became so problematic for Dwight Eisenhower that the GOP president quietly and skillfully became one of the important agents of his undoing.

"...a balanced and thoughtful narrative history of the era... Anyone looking for a comprehensive, intelligent survey of this deeply unsettling period in American history need look no further than RED SCARE."

But as Risen makes clear, the Red Scare extended far beyond McCarthy’s reckless assault, sweeping through government at all levels, labor unions, schools, religious institutions and social organizations, often pitting neighbor against neighbor as conspiracy theorists fanned the flames of suspicion directed at thousands possessing even the slightest progressive sympathies.

Relying, in part, on newly declassified sources, Risen covers all of the major stories of this period --- the perjury conviction of diplomat Alger Hiss, the Hollywood blacklist that enmeshed famous names like actor Edward G. Robinson and Academy Award-winning director Elia Kazan in controversy, the stripping of Manhattan project leader Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union.

Risen also explains how the era fueled the rise of several characters whose deeds and misdeeds had a profound impact on American history in the ensuing decades. Among others, it turbocharged the political career of Richard Nixon, brought to prominence an unscrupulous young New York lawyer named Roy Cohn, and allowed longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to quietly build his massive surveillance network. Its power extended well into the era of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War.

Even as he recounts in an efficient and highly readable style the details of these well-known events and the people who drove them, Risen does not neglect the often tragic tales of ordinary citizens swept up in the cross-currents of anti-Communist fear and paranoia. These many victims too often found their personal and professional lives permanently damaged for, at most, a youthful flirtation with Communist ideology, and sometimes little more than entirely innocent associations with progressive causes that were anathema to those engaged in the anti-Communist witch hunt and culture war.

Representative is the story of Helen Reid Bryan that bookends the volume. Summoned in 1946 before the dreaded House Committee on Un-American Activities, the body that acted as a sort of Spanish Inquisition of the times, she declined to produce the records of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, an organization that provided relief to victims of the Spanish Civl War. After she was cited for contempt of Congress, she fought her conviction all the way to the Supreme Court over the next four years. It was upheld there, resulting in a prison sentence that shadowed the remainder of her life.

Without overemphasizing the point, Risen makes no effort to conceal his intention to suggest parallels between this era and some of the cultural and political currents roiling American society today. In his assessment, the Red Scare was fueled by two intersecting impulses --- “the long-simmering conflict in which social conservatives faced off against the progressives” and “the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War.”

Thus, even as the era ended relatively quietly in June 1957, with a quartet of Supreme Court cases undermining some of its key legal underpinnings, the “nostalgic, resentful, cultural paranoia that had arisen in response to the New Deal, and that finally found purchase during the dawn of the Cold War, remained burning in the hearts of millions of Americans.”

And so it is, Risen argues, that while neither the origin stories of Trumpism and the MAGA movement nor their content are coextensive with McCarthyism and the radical right John Birch Society, “there is a line linking them.” And while the Red Scare indisputably must be understood in its historical context, a task he achieves admirably here, he insists that “knowing where we are today requires understanding where we were then.”

Anyone looking for a comprehensive, intelligent survey of this deeply unsettling period in American history need look no further than RED SCARE. Appreciating that history, Risen suggests, may alert thoughtful readers to the symptoms of similar infections in the American body politic and perhaps prompt a quicker and more effective immune response if a terrifying epidemic like the one it triggered sweeps through the country again.