A Time of Fear: America in the Era of Red Scares and Cold War by Albert Marrin (review)

To assume that this title will deliver a rehash on Russian spies, Joseph McCarthy, and the Hollywood Ten is to underestimate Marrin's ability to reposition the historic lens for a perspective that drills into ethical issues applicable to new times. Marrin discusses the Russian Revolution, the populist influence of Lenin and Stalin, and the rise of the Communist Party and its collateral branch in America, the CPUSA. That organization, tightly controlled from the Kremlin, drew in true believers ready to violently usher in a new age but also persons of conscience who appreciated CPUSA as a domestic political party supporting the interest of struggling workers and minorities. Since membership in the CPUSA would often become the basis for investigations and prosecutions during Red scares, examination of how the USSR viewed its members (often as useful dupes) becomes as instructive as how the U.S. government viewed them. It sets the stage for the final act—the CPUSA's precipitous decline when Premier Khrushchev publicly exposed Stalin's atrocities and all but the most avid of America's card-carrying Communists could no longer keep their blinders in place. Marrin's ultimate indictment, suggested at the opening and confirmed at the conclusion, is ideology itself, and it doesn't demand much of a leap to reexamine how ideology may influence behavior in the here and now: "Humans seem … to have an innate capacity for wishful thinking and clinging to fantasies." Notes, bibliography, and photographs are included.