RED SCARE by Clay Risen

RED SCARE by Clay Risen. Publisher: Simon & Schuster

In 1938, the US Congress interrogated theatre directors who produced plays for President Roosevelt's Federal Theater Project. The project was a New Deal initiative supporting the arts, providing employment and lifting spirits during the Depression and its aftermath. A congressman asked a director about his decision to perform Dr Faustus. "You are quoting from this Christopher Marlowe. Is he a Communist?"

According to Clay Risen, the red scare of the 1950s was the right wing's pay back for FDR's policies improving the lives of America's poor, thereby raising taxes and introducing regulations that protected workers and consumers. "Red Scare" captures the paranoia and intensity of 1950s politics. Thousands of careers were ruined as politicians searched for Communists. Those accused had no right to see the evidence against them and most were shouted down, making it impossible to present their defence. Books were burned and people were refused bank loans or employment on the strength of a rumour.

Risen makes the point that the hysteria gripping the country was not simply due to Senator Joseph McCarthy: the fear of "un-American" behaviour had wide and deep roots throughout society. You couldn't get a fishing license in New York state in the 1950s without pledging that you were not a Communist. Scout groups and estate agents' conferences had to swear their loyalty.

The author writes, "At issue, really, were two ideas about America: one built on an expansive vision of government as the guarantor of the rights and welfare of all its citizens; the other built on a retrograde nostalgia for an America built on privilege and exclusion." Risen does not need to draw parallels with the current political scene because so much of Senator McCarthy's language is familiar now. Hollywood, the business community, the judiciary and newspaper editors all bowed before him.

McCarthy's significance "lay in his unique ability to braid the two strands of the Red Scare - the culture war and the politics of the Cold War - into a single cord….he rattled off cases but no names, describing lurid instances of dangerous subversives, but offering no way to fact check him….he knew how to stoke the ardour" of the media. Under attack were the Voice of America, the Army, people of colour, women who dared to have careers, intellectuals, academics and homosexuals. But, as Risen makes clear, McCarthy was reflecting the public mood rather than imposing new ideas.

This is a fascinating book which leaves the reader wondering if history is a circle, rather than two steps forward and one step back.