Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition: An Oral History by Griffin Fariello

From the Publisher

For many, the anti-Communist hysteria that began in the 1940s has been lost in the dustbin of history - an era remembered, if at all, by fading photograpbs of Joe McCarthy, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and J. Edgar Hoover. Red Scare is a remarkable document of an era that altered forever the American political landscape, a time when one's beliefs and associations could lead to financial ruin and a prison cell. Red Scare is a riveting portrayal of grim repression and stubborn resistance, narrated by veterans from both sides of the Inquisition. Here are bloody Peekskill, the infamous blacklists of Hollywood, and the tyranny of government investigators. Red Scare reveals how the hunt for the "disloyal" penetrated every rank of American life from professors and scientists to school teachers and union members and throughout all levels of government. Arthur Miller, Ring Lardner, Jr., Kay Boyle, and Pete Seeger join more than sixty others to reveal the terrible price extracted by the Cold War at home, ordinary men and women who braved ruination for their faith in America's ideals. Here too are the stories of the hounds who hunted them - the FBI agent, the paid informer, the security man - and of the children caught in the ideological cross-fire. Together they create a tapestry of historic importance, capturing firsthand the sorrow, the rage, and the heroism of one of America's darkest hours.

Publishers Weekly

Fariello exhumes the legacies of Senator Joseph McCarthy and company in an oral history in which people from both sides of the Communist witch-hunt offer their recollections. (May)

Library Journal

Journalist Fariello has compiled an oral history of the Red Scare that overwhelmed so much of American life in the wake of the Cold War. The low point came with the start, in 1950, of Sen. Joe McCarthy's five-year-long sweeping and highly publicized investigations that convulsed American domestic and foreign policy without ever documenting any Communist conspiracies. Here, in some 70 narratives, are the stories of the famous and the obscure who were the victims of McCarthyism-its indiscriminate allegations and unsubstantiated charges-as well as the stories of high government officials, FBI agents, and informers paid to finger Communists. A useful addition to the literature of the period; recommended for academic libraries.-Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York

BookList

It's said that the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s has been forgotten by those old enough to remember and is unknown by younger Americans. Fariello dons Studs Terkel's mantle to produce a worthy aid to recollection, a massive set of the testimonies of those personally affected by the era. Among the testifiers are old Communists, leftist labor union activists, radical teachers and civil rights activists, Hollywood writers and directors, actors and other performers, "atom spies" (who were supposed to have given nuclear secrets to Soviet intelligence), government workers whose careers were ruined, and the children of some of the most famous victims. Fariello is very much on his informants' side, which is almost always a justifiable stance (one exception: Alger Hiss, the weighty evidence against whom Fariello ignores), but he also lets some of the persecutors speak, and their stories--along with those of eventually "friendly" witnesses (i.e., those who gave investigators the names of other supposed Communists to obtain relief for themselves)--make some of the most enthralling reading herein.

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