Red Scare - by Clay Risen (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare--based in part on newly declassified sources--by an award-winning writer of history and New York Times reporter"--

Book Synopsis

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews

From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both "lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible...[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end" (The New Yorker)--based in part on newly declassified sources.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with "scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses" (The New York Times Book Review), 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, courage, and delirium of those years. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and toward 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.

"Thorough, impassioned...detailed, [and] tension-packed" (Los Angeles Times), 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.

Review Quotes

"As Clay Risen's meaty and powerfully relevant new book, Red Scare, makes clear, our own times are ringing with echoes of the clamorous battles of mid-20th-century McCarthyism...Risen tells his story with a punch and an economy that are at times almost Hemingwayesque... Some of Risen's scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses in the poorly air-conditioned committee room... Red Scare resonates because it speaks so directly to our current quandary."
--The New York Times Book Review

"[A] thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.S... Detailed, tension-packed...chronicles how national hysteria can take on a life of its own, like a deadly fever dream that overtakes the public consciousness."
--The LA Times

"Lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible...[Red Scare] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end."
--The New Yorker

"Scarily relevant...transports readers back to the witch hunts of the early 1950s...vividly recalls an era that may feel all-too-familiar."
--The Boston Globe

"Risen's fluent narrative...goes beyond the familiar Hollywood blacklists to reveal how conspiracy stories touched educators and people in various civil rights movements and led to the 'canceling' of individuals in business, government, and any sphere influential to the prevailing culture."
--Foreign Affairs

"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...His 400-page survey of mid-century America touches on so many of today's burning issues, including book bans, anti-immigrant racism, white supremacy, and anti-elitism."
--The Week

"Providing a wealth of engaging detail that underscores how different the mid-20th century was from today, [Clay Risen] tells his subject's riveting and shameful story from its origins after World War II to its demise in the late 1950s...Red Scare is essential reading today."
--The Nation

"In his meticulous and mesmerizing history Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, Clay Risen traces the cultural, political, and social forces that gave rise to McCarthy in 1950 and to his fall in 1954 ... By deftly toggling between the personal and national, Risen gives us a riveting and disquieting portrayal of our nation's recent past and, perhaps, its immediate future."
--Forward

"The central drama of the Red Scare played, writes Clay Risen, like 'a tragedy, a thriller, a Christian morality play, even a dark comedy.' In his hands those months also read like a fast-paced detective story, of the most chilling variety. A riveting, resonant account of how cultural and political anxieties combined to power a sort of ritual cleansing, as a group of hardened conservatives lost their heads and a country lost its way."
--Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches and The Revolutionary

"I thought I had read basically everything written on McCarthyism and the scars it left on America, but Clay Risen's deep, gorgeous new history is as revelatory to me as it is moving. This is political history, yes, but also a lyrical and sensitive tolling of what this monstrous type of politics does to the human beings in its way. Today especially, we need much more careful and important public history like Red Scare--bravo."
--Rachel Maddow, author of Prequel

"What a marvelous book! The story of America's postwar Red Scare has lost none of its historical importance or contemporary resonance, and Risen brings it beautifully to life in this deeply researched, incisive, and elegantly written work. The implications for today are all too clear."
--Fredrik Logevall, author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956

"In a narrative both eloquent and incisive, Clay Risen has produced the most complete history of the Red Scare that has ever been written. His judgments about the characters--both famous and obscure--who mattered in this low, dishonest era are always persuasive. While a delight to read, the book explains why the conspiratorial style of politics that dominated America 75 years ago is with us still."
--Michael Kazin, author of What It Takes to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

"[A] sweeping portrait of a nightmare moment when America lost its faith in itself is a vivid reminder of what happens when we trade our founding ideals for easy answers and false security. It's a troubling parable for our own perilous times."
--Todd S. Purdum, author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

"Clay Risen has written a gripping genealogy of the McCarthyist right and the Red Scare...American history [that] continue[s] to echo down to the present."
-- Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair, special correspondent

"Risen has written a fast paced morality tale for our troubled times. Narrative non-fiction at its page turning best, Red Scare is a flashing red light warning us of just how precarious our democracy is--and how we might safeguard it." --Kati Marton, author of The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel and True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy


"A sweeping history of the campaign to suppress liberal dissent via blacklisting and harassment...An exemplary work of political and cultural history that invites a gimlet-eyed look at our own time."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"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...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."
--Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. A member of the Society of American Historians, he is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.