A TIME OF FEAR

This history built around the rise and decline of the Communist Party of the United States of America is a case study in what happens when ideologies clash.

Developing the thesis that ideologies, no matter their actual tenets, tend to promote intolerance, injustice, and lockstep thinking, Marrin charts in his usual thoroughly documented way the upheavals in this country’s political and social climates between the Bolshevik Revolution and the meteoric rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy. He focuses particularly on the role of the CPUSA, characterizing it as an organization of idealists who, he asserts, did promote pacifism, women’s rights, and racial equality—if only to cause disruption and ease the spread of Communism—while turning stubbornly away from the brutal realities of Soviet society under Stalin (“…truly a monster,” the author writes with characteristic verve, “among the worst two or three humans who ever lived”). But, amid accounts of watershed events from Red Scares in 1919 and in the 1940s-’50s to the trials of the Scottsboro Boys, of rampant midcentury Soviet espionage, and the homophobic Lavender Scare purges of the McCarthy era, he also presents an only slightly less critical view of how anti-communism spurred government, business, the press, and organizations from the KKK to the ACLU to react (often badly) to the perceived threat. Readers will be gripped by the drama of past events that offer present-day lessons. Illustrations include photographs and printed propaganda.

Absorbing, comprehensive, and timely.