Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, by Clay Risen, Scribner, 480 pages, $31
Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation's institutions mobilized against the Communists believed to be burrowing into American society. But his new book, Red Scare, doesn't stick to that era: It also aims to comment on contemporary American politics.
When wearing his historian hat, Risen blends an established academic understanding of the Second Red Scare, which he describes as "a long-simmering conflict in which social conservatives faced off against the progressives of the New Deal," with a popular recollection that it was produced by "the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War." This is a reasonable approach, though it has its limits: His thesis strains under the need to distinguish between the elements of the scare that were pure hysteria and the realities of Soviet espionage and influence. It also glosses over the ways the Red Scare was bipartisan.
