McCarthyism: The Fight for America
Why this book?
The fairest way to begin to explore the conspiracy McCarthy and his backers feared is to hear it from the Cassandra himself. Joe lays out his case in this thin volume.
The best books on red scares in the USA
By Larry Tye
Who am I?
Larry Tye is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book is Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. Before that, he was an award-winning reporter at The Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe’s environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter, and sports writer. Tye, who graduated from Brown University, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. He taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, and Tufts.
I wrote...
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy
What is my book about?
America’s first Red Scare happened in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution when there was a widespread fear that anarchism, radicalism, and revolution were spreading here. The second Red Scare, which was more pandemic and lasted longer, occurred in the wake of World War II and coincided with the launch of the Cold War. The terror this time was that communists were infiltrating our government and stealing not just the formula for the atomic bomb but America’s very soul. The backlash – to believers, it was pinpointing the risk, to foes, it constituted unfounded fear-mongering – became an ism named for its loudest tribune, Senator Joe McCarthy.
Our increasingly polemical and ideological domestic divides, and building tensions with China and Russia, suggest we could be in for a Third Red Scare, and that readers might want to bone up on the defining one from seventy years ago. Here are some books they might not know about, but ought to.
The books I picked & why
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The Age of Suspicion
Why this book?
Wechsler was the editor of The New York Post, a short-lived Communist and lifelong liberal, and a favorite target of McCarthy and McCarthyism. Wechsler’s razor-edged analysis of the era is the ideal counterpoint to McCarthy’s, and offers a lens into the scare’s flesh-and-blood victims.
Joe McCarthy And The Press
Why this book?
Bayley, a political reporter for the Milwaukee Journal during McCarthy’s rise and reign, offers riveting details about how the press enabled the Red Scare in a book that is at the same time dispassionate and telling for today.
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
Why this book?
Haynes and Klehr are two of the few Cold War scholars who could be considered neutral, which means they enrage both colleagues who see the second Red Scare as a paranoid reaction and those who see it as a Godsend. In this volume, Haynes and Klehr use newly-unveiled cables between Soviet spies and spymasters to unwind fantasy from reality in the charges leveled by McCarthy and his fellow alarmists.
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
Why this book?
Reds weren’t the scare’s only bogeymen, as historian Johnson makes clear in this best-ever telling of how McCarthy and his fellow travelers used their trademark tactics to ignite and sustain what became known as the Lavender Scare.
5 book lists we think you will like!
Interested in the Red Scare, communism, and McCarthyism?
5,888 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about the Red Scare, communism, and McCarthyism.
The Red Scare
Explore 4 books about the Red Scare
Communism
Explore 60 books about communism
McCarthyism
Explore 8 books about McCarthyism
And, 3 books we think you will enjoy!
We think you will like Joseph McCarthy, Triumph Forsaken, and The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams if you like this list.
Joseph McCarthy
From Neal's list on America’s path through the Cold War.
This is a balanced view of Senator McCarthy that, read in conjunction with Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, replaces the mendacity of historical orthodoxy with the truth, as columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman acknowledged in 1996: “Point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong, and yet he was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” The collapse of the Soviet Union opened both Soviet and American intelligence archives to Western scholars, if only briefly, and we now know that McCarthy’s charges were not, as we have been told for more than half a century, baseless, groundless, and irrational. Herman also reveals the dishonesty of Harry Truman and his enablers, who worked strenuously to obstruct investigations into Soviet espionage and poisoned political relations in this country.
Triumph Forsaken
From Neal's list on America’s path through the Cold War.
Moyar does an excellent job of debunking the myths surrounding this country’s failure to secure an independent, non-communist South Vietnam. From the “Bright and Shining Lie” of the vaunted Saigon press corps to the supposed incompetence of Ngo Dinh Diem, Moyar demonstrates that the orthodox narrative is false and that the loss of Vietnam was the result of decisions made in Washington rather than dysfunction in Saigon.
The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams
From Lillian's list on LGBTQ history.
Katz has done yeoman’s work in reconstructing the little-known story of Chawa Zloczewer, an immigrant who came to America in 1912, reinvented herself as Eve Adams, and lived the bohemian life of an anarchist and a lesbian. In the years after World War I, Adams was the proprietor of lesbian tearooms and literary salons in Chicago and Greenwich Village. Her radical politics, lesbian life, and publication in 1925 of a book she titled Lesbian Love led to her unrelenting persecution by the young J. Edgar Hoover (then head of the forerunner to the FBI). She was deported in 1927 and died in Auschwitz in 1943. A fascinating piece of lesbian history.