Volume 51, Number 2 · February 12, 2004
Spy Fever
By Thomas Powers
Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America
by Ted Morgan
Random House, 685 pp., $35.00
No big industrial nation was less troubled on its home soil by the birth, rise, and collapse of communism as a political movement than the United States. Of the millions killed in the Gulag or in back alleys, only a handful were Americans. Communist parties strained social and political life in Germany, Italy, and France for decades and sometimes even threatened outright revolution and takeover, but in the United States Communist presidential candidates were a joke, Communist unions were strong in few industries, and then only briefly; and Communist front groups backed the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War to modest effect, and otherwise supported mainly a kind of earnest vanilla activism on matters of race, social justice, and public welfare.
Review, 4442 words
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