This lively book offers a helpful introduction to Red Scare politics in the United States. As part of Routledge's Critical Moments in American History series, the book is aimed at school and university students and would serve as a useful teaching aid for an undergraduate course on the subject. It covers the key debates and subjects as well as offering the usual teaching paraphernalia, including “sidebar” boxes that explore a (slightly erratic) selection of subtopics, and a baker's dozen primary sources at the end.

After an introduction that discusses the historiography, the main text is divided into six chapters. The first four whizz through Red Scare politics from Haymarket to the 1940s. The final two focus on the McCarthy years, one covering it mainly from the angle of high politics and the other exploring conflicts over communism in particular sectors of American culture and society. A conclusion speculates on the impact of domestic anticommunism on US foreign policy and, through Vietnam, points to its longer-term role in polarizing American life. In terms of texts often used for teaching, this range places it somewhere between M. J. Heale's American Anticommunism (1990), which stretches back to the 1830s, and Richard M. Fried's slim volume Nightmare in Red (1990), more focussed on the 1940s and 1950s.

In a relatively short space, the text covers a great deal, but not in a way that would come across as overwhelming for a student first approaching the subject. Given that Red Scare politics has been characterized by chaotic diversity and the erratic fortunes of many of its key advocates, syntheses can easily slip into long lists of disaggregated grouplets and controversies; instead, Michaels provides broader contextualization and narrative detail to render his picture vivid. It is also commendably balanced. The subtitle's reference to “realities, delusions and politics” highlights the author's basic interpretive position, that while fear of communism may have sometimes been understandable, responses were rarely accurate or proportionate. The conflict between communism and capitalism therefore existed alongside, and did not always have much to do with, the politics of fear.

In moving at such a brisk pace, and in prioritizing accessibility, some precision is occasionally lost and specialists may wish for more nuance in some of the more tricky cases. Conservative ideology is not as fully explored as it might have been, which runs the risk of slightly reducing the complexity and range of anticommunist politics on the right. There are also a small number of factual errors, typos, and editorial missteps. Rather ironically, given the Senator's notoriety for getting his numbers wrong, the excerpt from McCarthy's Wheeling speech misquotes his estimates of the global communist and capitalist populations by several orders of magnitude (149). (This error seems to have originally come from an Essential Documents sourcebook; however, I say “seems” because the text does not always fully identify its sources in the footnotes.)

For a book called McCarthyism, the decision to devote roughly half the book to the pre-McCarthy period may seem odd. However, given the tendency over recent decades to stretch the subject back and to argue for a degree of continuity in Red Scare politics from the nineteenth century onwards, it makes sense. It also fits the likely structure of a teaching module on the topic. That said, it would have been good to have just a little more time devoted to the McCarthy era. The key chapter on the Second Red Scare is also structured in a slightly peculiar manner, beginning with a discussion of the Communist Control Act of 1954, then moving back to McCarthy's Wheeling speech in 1950, before jumping even further back to Yalta, then moving forward from the Hiss case into the Second Red Scare. This doesn't aid clarity. There is a bit of jumping around elsewhere, too. Elizabeth Dilling’s The Red Network (1934) is referenced on page 91, for example, but she and the book are only explained on page 199. And the “culture” chapter includes discussions of religion, education, consumerism, health care, homosexuality, and race (in the South), but less on gender or class, which mostly pop up earlier.

Putting such quibbles to one side, this book succeeds admirably at its core goal of providing an energetic and accessible introduction to the subject. Those teaching McCarthyism at school or university should give it a look.