The McCarthy Era in Perspective

This paper will review the book Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, written by Richard M. Fried. The first part will briefly describe the author and the book. The second part will present some criticism of the book, analyzing the author's use of sources and the presentation of his argument. The third part of the paper will compare five previous reviews of this book, focusing closely upon two of them.

Richard Fried is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in Twentieth Century American political history. He has previously written on Joseph McCarthy and the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. In his previous work, Fried portrayed McCarthy as a typical conservative Republican politician of the middle-part of the Twentieth Century. According to Fried, McCarthy followed political trends and his red-baiting was little more than mainstream partisan politics (Ribuffo 405).

Nightmare in Red discusses the background of the Red Scare in the 1950s, placing it in the context of the American political and cultural scene at that time. The basic theme running throughout the book is that Joseph McCarthy did not start the Red Scare, nor did he really lead it. Rather, he was the premier spokesman for the anti-communist forces for a few years in the early 1950s. Anti-communism was a trend which had begun during the First World War, reached a peak around 1920, and then

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pport his main idea: that McCarthy was no extraordinary demagogue who single-handedly turned anti-communism into national crusade. He simply followed the tenor of the times and was able to propel himself into the national limelight. Fried argues, as have several others, that McCarthy was a political opportunist. Communism was simply an issue which he discovered had an audience. When he first began proclaiming that there was a communist conspiracy in the State Department, he was not at all prepared to support the charges with facts. He fed upon the media response and took up the issue full time only when he discovered an audience. Fried finds McCarthy to be less a monster than a small-time politician and huckster who eventually went beyond his capabilities. The issue was so big and important to the American public that it demanded more from McCarthy than he could deliver. Fried points out that when McCarthy made his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he was relatively unprepared to start an all-out campaign against communism in the United States. Although he asserted that he possessed a list of names of persons affiliated with communism who were helping to shape American foreign policy, he actually had no such list.
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Approximate Word count = 2386
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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