★★★★★ 4
A well-lively account of a recent and unsavory period of American history, roughly 1946-1955.
Format: Hardcover
Red Scare is a well researched and a very readable account of a significant moment in post-World War II American politics. The author situates the rise of the Red Scare in a right-wing reaction to the New Deal, the labor unions, and any forward progress towards civil rights for black and other non-white Americans. The Red Scare gathers force in the Republican Party following a long frustrating period in which the Democratic Party coalition led by FDR remained in power and reshaped the federal government to counter the Great Depression and then mobilize the nation for total war on multiple fronts in Europe and the Pacific.
At the beginning of the Cold War, politicians like the young ambitious Richard Nixon find Red-baiting the Democratic Party opposition leads to electoral success in post-war Congressional races. The Republican Party secures a majority in the Senate and the House following the midterm election of 1950.
Risen shows a reactionary movement gathering momentum from the Cold War geopolitics that shattered expectations for the peace and security that Americans had hoped for when the war ended in victory. In the wake of the defeat of the Axis powers, Americans felt threatened by the spread of Communist-backed and Communist-inspired regimes, first in Eastern Europe and then in China, then the Korean peninsula. Although the US and Russia were ideologically distinct, they cooperated during the War to defeat their common enemy, namely Hitler and Nazi Germany. But the conclusion of the war brought a decisive end to that cooperation. Instead, there was a series of confrontations in Greece, a divided Germany, and the Eastern European bloc of nations that the Red Army occupied and kept tightly controlled.
Roosevelt’s coalition had embraced progressive and socialist proposals like Social Security and the Wagner Act that protected workers’s right to organize and collective bargaining. The Red Scare marked the beginning of a reactionary response to roll back those policies. Meanwhile, the elaborate security apparatus of the Federal government that was empowered during World War II was re-directed against left-wing groups that FBI Director Hoover targeted as “unAmerican.” There was also justifiable alarm that people like Klaus Fuchs spied for the Soviets and passed them much of the secret sauce in the technology developed at considerable expense around the atomic bomb.
Risen’s book plays all the hits from that ignominious period: the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), the Hollywood 10, the Alger Hiss affair, the China Lobby, the Smith Act prosecutions against the American Communist Party leaders, the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, loyalty oaths and blacklists, the persecution of J. Robert Oppenheimer. They are all here. The book chronicles the rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the colorful personalities around his political career including the attorney Joseph Welch that the Army hired to confront him, the TV personality Edward R. Murrow, and his ruthless and feckless henchman Roy Cohn. He sees McCarthy more as a symptom than a cause.
Risen shows how Eisenhower, elected President in 1952 on the Republican ticket, co-opted and ultimately blunted the anti-Communist crusade in favor of a less confrontational, more moderate approach. Eisenhower also had a visceral reaction to personal attacks carried out on the integrity of George Marshall for “losing China,” having served under Marshall during the height of his military career. The book also highlights the Supreme Court’s decisive change of heart, under newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, that reasserted 1st Amendment and 4th Amendment rights against guilty by association prosecutions.
In many places of the book, the author empathizes the many continuities between the rabid anti-Communist rhetoric and tactics of the early 50s with the right wing politics of the present day, particularly in the area of Public Education.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2025
