History Courses For

Select Bibliography on McCarthyism and the Red Scare

American Communism

• Brown, Anthony Cave and Charles B. MacDonald. On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II. New York: Putnam, 1981.
• Caute, David. The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
• Davis, Hope Hale. Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1994.
• Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia. New York: Vintage, 1960.
• ___. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking, 1957.
• Dyson, Lowell K. Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers. Lincoln: Nebraska, 1982.
• Fast, Howard. Being Red: A Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
• Gornick, Vivian. The Romance of American Communism. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
• Healy, Dorothy and Maurice Isserman. Dorothy Healy Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party. New York: Oxford, 1990.
• Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.
• Johanningsmeier, Edward P. Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster. Princeton: Princeton University, 1994.
• Kaplan, Judy and Linn Shapiro, ed. Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. Champagne: Illinois, 1998.
• Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
• Klehr, Harvey and John Earl Haynes. The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself. New Brunswick: Twayne, 1992.
• Koch, Stephen. Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West. New York: Free Press, 1994.
• Kraditor, Aileen S. "Jimmy Higgins": The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930-1958. Westport: Greenwood, 1988.
• Ottanelli, Fraser M. The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1991.
• Ryan, James G. Earl Brown: The Failure of American Communism. Tuscaloosa: Alabama, 1997.
• Scales, Junius Irving and Richard Nickson. Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers. Athens: Georgia, 1987.
• Shannon, David A. The Decline of American Communism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1959.
• Taylor, S. J. Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow. New York: Oxford, 1990.

Anti-Communism

• Bentley, Eric. Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968. New York: Viking, 1971.
• Broadwater, Jeff. Eisenhower and the Anticommunist Crusade. Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 1992.
• Goodman, Walter. The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1964.
• Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004.
• Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990.
• Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
• Latham, Earl. The Communist Controversy in Washington from the New Deal to McCarthy. Cambridge: Harvard, 1966
• Leffler, Melvyn P. The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
• Lewy, Guenter. The Caused That Failed: Communism in American Political Life. New York: Oxford, 1990.
• O'Neill, William L. A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalin and the American Intellectuals. New York: Simon and Schuster,1982.
• Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New York: Free Press, 1995.
• Steinberg, Peter L. The Great "Red Menace": The United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947-1952. Westport: Greenwood, 1984.
• Stephan, Alexander. "Communazis": FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers. New Haven: Yale, 2000.
• Zeligs, Meyer A., M.D. Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. New York: Viking, 1967.

The FBI

• Hack, Richard. Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. Beverly Hills: New Millennium Press, 2004.
• Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
• Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987.
• Stephan, Alexander. "Communazis": FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers. New Haven: Yale, 2000.
• Theoharis, Athan and John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Inquisition. Philadelphia: Temple, 1988.
• Theoharis, Athan, ed. From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991.
• ___. Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence But Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
• Ungar, Sanford J. FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975.

General Biographies and Autobiographies

• Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. New York: Random House, 1952.
• Davis, Hope Hale. Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1994.
• Lattimore, Owen. Ordeal by Slander. Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1950.
• MacKinnon, Janice and Stephen R. MacKinnon. Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. Los Angles: California, 1988.
• May, Gary. Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington. New York: Oxford, 1994.
• ___. China Scapegoat: The Diplomatic Ordeal of John Carter Vincent. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1979.
• Rittenberg, Sidney and Amanda Bennett. The Man Who Stayed Behind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
• Tannenhaus, Sam. Whittaker Chambers. New York: Random House, 1997.

Hollywood, Culture, and the Literary World

• Barzman, Norma. The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of Hollywood Expatriate. New York: Nation Books, 2003.
• Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
• Ceplair, Larry and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960. Los Angeles: California, 1979.
• McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.
• Mitgang, Herbert. Dangerous Dossier: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors. New York: Donald Fine, 1988.
• Robbins, Natalie. Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression. New York: Morrow, 1992.
• Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991.

Internal Security

• Freeland, Richard M. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948. New York: Schocken, 1970.

McCarthy and McCarthy Biographies

• Anderson, Jack and Ronald W. May. McCarthy: The Man, The Senator, The "Ism." Boston: Beacon Press,1952.
• Buckley, William F. Jr and L. Brent Bozell. McCarthy and His Enemies. Chicago: Regnery, 1954.
• Cohn, Roy. McCarthy. New York: New American Library, 1968.
• Fried, Richard M. Men Against McCarthy. New York: Columbia, 1976.
• Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. Lexington: Kentucky, 1970.
• Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press, 2000.
• Hoffman, Nicholas von. Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn. Garden City: Doubleday, 1988.
• O'Brien, Michael. McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin. Columbia: Missouri, 1980.
• Oshinsky, David M. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement. Columbia: Missouri, 1976.
• ___. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Free Press, 1983.
• Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography. New York: Stein and Day, 1982.
• Rovere, Richard H. Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959.

McCarthy Affair

• Adams, John G. Without Precedent. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.
• Bayley, Edwin. Joe McCarthy and the Press. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
• Ewald, William Bragg Jr. Who Killed Joe McCarthy? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
• Straight, Michael. Trial by Television. Boston: Beacon Press, 1954.
• Watkins, Arthur V. Enough Rope: The Inside Story of Censure of -- Senator Joe McCarthy by his Colleagues -- the Controversial Hearings that signaled the end of a turbulent career and a fearsome era in American public life. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969

Novels

• Buckley, William F Jr. The Redhunter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.
• Fast, Howard. The Pledge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
• Mailer, Norman. Barbary Shore. New York: Vintage, 1951.
• Pearson, Drew. The Senator. Garden City: Doubleday, 1968.
• Roth, Philip. I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
• Shaw, Irwin. The Troubled Air. New York: Random House, 1951.
• Trilling, Lionel. The Middle of the Journey. New York: Viking, 1947.

Old China Hands

• Clubb, O Edmund. The Witness and I. New York: Columbia, 1975.
• Kahn, E. J. Jr. The China Hands: American Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. New York: Viking, 1972.
• May, Gary. China Scapegoat: The Diplomatic Ordeal of John Carter Vincent. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1979.
• Newman, Robert P. Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China. Los Angeles: California, 1992.

Red Scare

• Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
• Cook, Fred. The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Random House, 1971.
• Haynes, John E. Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996.
• Holmes, David R. Stalking the Academic Community: Intellectual Freedom and the Firing of Alex Novikoff. Hanover: New England, 1989.
• Faulk, John Henry. Fear on Trial. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
• Fariello, Griffin. Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
• Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford, 1990.
• Kutler, Stanley L. American Inquisition. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. (See Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 7)
• Lattimore, Owen. Ordeal by Slander. Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1950
• Navsky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Viking, 1980.
• Rittenberg, Sidney and Amanda Bennett. The Man Who Stayed Behind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
• Schrecker, Ellen W. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford, 1986.
• ___. Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.
• Wechsler, James A. The Age of Suspicion. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1953.
• Ybarra, Michael J. Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great Communist Hunt. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004.

Soviet Espionage

• Albright, Joseph and Marcia Kunstel. Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy. New York: Times Books, 1997.
• Bentley, Elizabeth. Out of Bondage: The Story of Elizabeth Bentley. New York: Devin-Adair, 1951.
• Brown, Anthony Cave and Charles B. MacDonald. On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II. New York: Putnam, 1981.
• Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. New York: Random House, 1952.
• Costello, John and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Revels Stalin's Master Spy. New York: Crown, 1993.
• Craig, R. Bruce. Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case. Lawrence: Kansas, 2004.
• Feklisov, Alexander. The Man Behind the Rosenbergs. New York: Enigma Books, 2001.
• Field, Hermann and Kate Field. Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family. Los Angeles: California, 1999.
• Gazur, Edward. Alexander Orlov: The FBI's KGB General. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002.
• Herken, Gregg. Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.
• Hiss, Alger. In The Court of Public Opinion. New York: Knopf, 1957.
• Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb. New Haven: Yale, 1994.
• Kessler, Lauren. Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
• Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson. The Soviet World of American Communism. New Haven: Yale, 1998.
• Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. The Secret World of American Communism. New Haven: Yale, 1995.
• Klehr, Harvy and Ronald Radosh. The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism. Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 1996.
• Koch, Stephen. Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West. New York: Free Press, 1994.
• Krivitsky, Walter G. In Stalin's Secret Service. New York: Harpers, 1939. (Republished by Enigma Books, 2000).
• Lamphere, Robert J and Tom Shachtman. The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's War. New York: Random House, 1986.
• May, Gary. Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington. New York: Oxford, 1994.
• Mitchell, Marcia and Thomas Mitchell. The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heart of the Cold War, The Judith Coplon Story. Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2002.
• Morgan, Ted. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. New York: Random House,1999.
• Nizer, Louis. The Implosion Conspiracy. Garden City: Doubleday, 1973.
• Olmsted, Kathryn S. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 2002.
• Radosh, Ronald and Joyce Milton. The Rosenberg File: A Search for Truth. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983. (See also the 2nd Edition published by Yale, 1997).
• Roberts, Sam. The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case. New York: Random House, 2001.
• Schecter, Jarrold and Leona Schecter. Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History. Washington: Brasseys, 2002.
• Smith, John Chabot. Alger Hiss: The True Story. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1976.
• Straight, Michael. After Long Silence. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.
• Sudolatonov, Pavel and Anatoli Sudoplatonov. Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.
• Theoharis, Athan. Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence But Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
• Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.(See Also the Second Edition, 1997)
• ___. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era. New York: Random House, 1999.
• West, Rebecca. The New Meaning of Treason. New York: Viking, 1964.
• White, G. Edward. Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Cover Life of a Soviet Spy. New York: Oxford, 2004.

Venona and Secrecy

• Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven: Yale, 1999.
• Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Secrecy. New Haven: Yale, 1998.
• Romerstein, Herbert and Eric Breindel. The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors. Washington: Regnery, 2000.
• West, Nigel. Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.