Red Scare Revisited: McCarthyism, Fear, and Power in America

Agenda:

6:00 pm – Registration & Networking

6:30 pm – Program

Award-winning historian and New York Times reporter Clay Risen presents a timely examination of McCarthyism, laying out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible and describing how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end – based in part on newly declassified sources.

For the first time in a generation, Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

Beginning with the origins of the era after World War I through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, courage, and delirium of those years. He takes audiences beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists toward a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the Left, and what Americans were capable of doing to each other as a result.

Risen’s presentation reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment.

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. A member of the Society of American Historians, he is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.

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