This latest addition to the growing corpus of studies on US anticommunism sets out to prove a novel and intriguing proposition. The author, Australian scholar Nick Fischer, maintains that anticommunism was the pre-1917 creation of a small interlocking “spider web” of business organizations allied with military and other federal intelligence services, right-wing patriotic societies and veterans’ and vigilante groups, state militias and police Red Squads, the courts, and most of the bourgeois media. It was neither a truly popular movement nor a response to any actual Soviet subversion or military aggression, but an ingenious ideological cover for business attempts to divide and suppress organized labour, left-wing political parties and ethnic minorities at home in the United States.

In its long-sustained “political terror” (205), Fischer maintains, this “political–military–industrial complex” (263) employed methods identical to those of the Soviets – the creation of front organizations; the use of show trials; “rhetorical, judicial, and physical violence” (25); and the infiltrating of federal, state and local government with its agents. Its ends were also identical with Soviet ones, undemocratic and authoritarian to the core. It, rather than the tiny and inconsequential Communist Party of the USA, was, according to Fischer, the true threat to US democracy.

It is unexceptional enough to note that there was more to anticommunism as an ideology and a movement than opposition to the real existing Communism of the Soviet Union. Both the ideology and the movement have long since been traced to the decades before the Bolshevik Revolution and to domestic US struggles between labour and employers. Where Fischer does add to existing knowledge in significant ways is in his detailed sketching of the networks of public–private collaboration that he sees as the actual founders and founts of anticommunism. The chapters dealing with John B. Trevor and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and with the Better America Federation business lobby are particularly illuminative of the multiple linkages that clearly existed between private and public actors, and they offer new and valuable information. Others have not paid sufficient attention to this aspect of the story.

Unfortunately, however, Fischer ends up with a highly reductionist argument that fails to appreciate the immense complexity and multivocality of anticommunism either before or during the Cold War. Everything in this book is ultimately traced back to a “conspiracy against American democracy” (xiv) by a malevolent entity that Fischer calls either the “business lobby” (144), “big business” (152) or “high finance” (71), or simply “capital” (26). Opportunistic, manipulative, secretive and authoritarian, only interested in maximizing its profits and class privileges, this entity's war on organized labour is what equals anticommunism in Fischer's account. Alternatively and contradictorily, he regurgitates the banal polemics about psychopathology, “the paranoid personality,” and status anxiety that used to inform many a scholarly discussion of these issues in the age before identity politics and rational-choice theory. Catholic, Protestant or Jewish forms of anticommunism aren't even mentioned, nor are socialist ones, and labour anticommunism is reduced to abject collaborationism with the class enemy born of fear. It is as if Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, H. M. Hyndman and John Spargo never existed.

Most of the time this book reads, in fact, like an ideological screed masquerading as a scholarly study. The tone is moralistic, shrill and hectoring. Before long, one tires of hearing for the umpteenth time that “anticommunism was fundamentally a device … for perpetuating and then reviving prejudices, fears, and doctrines that America's powerful have used since the country's foundation to protect their social, political, and economic control at the expense of the great majority of its citizens” (279). Characterized by “ferocity, ignorance, viciousness, vengefulness, and incapacity for reflection,” and by “intellectual, moral, and psychological paralysis” (255), we are to believe that each and every anticommunist suffered from some grand “denial and delusion” (246) regarding the “patent injustices created or worsened by unmediated capitalism” (254).

Fischer claims to be offering the first-ever study of US anticommunism before the Cold War. Not so, and unlike this book, the others have been based on a wide range of archival sources. While this installment offers an intriguing argument worth a hearing, there is no way it will supplant those documented earlier accounts; nor should it. When read in tandem with the others, the student of the United States can certainly learn from it. But on its own, it is highly misleading and unsatisfactory, since it deals with only a very thin slice of the anticommunist movement yet makes gross generalizations that don't stand up to critical scrutiny.