Book reviews: ‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ and ‘How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998’

A political ‘witch hunt’ and Helen Garner’s journal entries

Anti-communist protesters in 1949 New York City
The Red Scare “may be the closest parallel to what we are seeing today”
(Image credit: Getty Images)

‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ by Clay Risen

“As a scholarly subject, the Red Scare has never quite experienced its moment of glory,” said Beverly Gage in The New Yorker. Though many stories have been told about the Hollywood blacklist and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s fearmongering, the broader subject for decades was too divisive to generate levelheaded analysis. Clay Risen of The New York Times aims to fill the gap, and his new history of the scare “documents the fear and suffering of those who bore the brunt of it” and shows how it remade every institution in American life, including the nation’s churches and schools. Russia did have spies inside the U.S. government from the 1930s on, and when conservatives seized on the issue in 1946, Democrats, including President Truman, quickly tried to show they were just as anti-Communist. By 1947, “the Red Scare had begun.”

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