Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, by Richard M. Fried
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 attained its greatest force in the ten years following the Second World War. It was a popular movement which was joined by members of both mainstream political parties. Fried asserts that the framework for the anti-communist measures in the late 1940s and early 1950s was actually constructed by Franklin Roosevelt, who expanded the powers of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to root out disloyal elements in American government and society in the late 1930s and ea...