Red scare

Few people today remember much about the wave of anti-Communist fear that swept America beginning in the 1940s. Most recall only a handful of images: Joseph McCarthy, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and J. Edgar Hoover. This book returns to that period, when holding certain beliefs or joining certain groups could cost a person their livelihood and their freedom.

The book is built from the recollections of people who lived through it, on both sides of the conflict. It covers the repression and the resistance, including the violence at Peekskill, the Hollywood blacklists, and the heavy hand of government investigators. The search for suspected "disloyal" Americans reached professors, scientists, schoolteachers, union members, and officials at every level of government.

Among the more than sixty contributors are Arthur Miller, Ring Lardner, Jr., Kay Boyle, and Pete Seeger, who describe what it cost ordinary men and women to stand by their belief in America's ideals. The book also gives voice to those who hunted them, including an FBI agent, a paid informer, and a security officer, and it looks at the children caught in the ideological struggle.

Taken together, these firsthand accounts record the grief, anger, and courage of a painful chapter in American history.