The basic idea behind this collection of narrowly focussed but illuminating essays is to broaden the “traditional confines of political history” (4) by bringing to bear textual analysis and the insights of social and intellectual history. In her contribution on the meaning of the term “anticommunism” and the contest over control of information in the hands of the executive branch in the late 1940s and early 1950s, editor Kathleen G. Donohue argues that Senator Joseph McCarthy “transformed what had been a bipartisan national security effort into an intensely partisan conflict” (45). “Anticommunism,” once a word synonymous with patriotism, also came to signify “below-the-belt-political gamesmanship” (46). Not only did McCarthy leave the cause of anticommunism weaker; also his efforts undermined the case for legislative access to privileged information and strengthened the argument for an executive capable of resisting the demands of prying investigators. These conclusions, although not earth-shatteringly original, are thought-provoking in light of recent executive–legislative battles over the right to know.

Landon R. Y. Storrs's essay on the loyalty investigations of Mary Dublin Keyserling, wife of Truman administration economic adviser Leon Keyserling, shows how a progressive activist felt obliged to airbrush her curriculum vitae and move toward the political center in response to persistent accusations of communist leanings. Storrs concludes, “In forcing a generation of left-feminists to disappear, or to reinvent themselves as liberals, the red scare left a gendered legacy that constrained both social policy and modern feminism” (79). This may be attributing more significance to Keyserling's case than it deserves, but Storrs's research has allowed her to recount a facinating story in admirable detail. Andrea Friedman writes deftly about the case of another target of loyalty investigators, the African American community organizer and one-time Communist Party member Annie Lee Moss, and the way in which McCarthyism pressured blacks to toe the patriotic line. Called before McCarthy's committee, she allowed the Senator's opponents to cast her in the role of innocent and hapless target of the Senator's mendaciousness and ineptitude. Moss, Friedman observes, “did triple duty within Cold War rhetoric: appearing as the perfect victim of McCarthy's evil, a symbol of the imperviousness of African Americans to the Communist party's enticements, and a sign that the nation was committed to uplifting the Negro” (112).

The volume's kaleidescopic approach to early Cold War-era politics includes revealing essays on the role of television (David Greenberg); the postwar religious revival (Kevin M. Schultz); the musical activism of Pete Seeger (Grace Elizabeth Hale); and the misleadingly named “consensus” scholars of the 1950s, Leo Marx, Louis Hartz, and Richard Hofstadter (Howard Brick). The book's final section (“Rethinking the Cold War State and Economy”) features, among other interesting contributions, Jennifer Klein's essay on the development of “welfare capitalism” – including private, job-based health insurance – in the early 1950s. Klein demonstrates how this approach “emerged from the political offensive of American business after World War II and the attempt to appropriate security and shift its emphasis away from the state to private, individual economic relationships” (355). In a concluding essay, “Corporate Culture, the Cold War, and the American South in the 1950s,” Kari Frederickson looks at the ways in which the Du Pont Company's massive Savannah River Plant, built to produce tritium and plutonium for the hydrogen bomb, transformed the backwater town of Aiken, South Carolina. Among its other effects, the influx of an elite, civically active workforce helped to break a traditional Democratic Party monopoly and contributed to the rebirth of the Republican Party at the grassroots level in the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to Frederickson, the switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party in 1964 of the popular Senator Strom Thurmond, a signal event in southern political history, was motivated in part by “changes in the political terrain wrought by the Cold War [and Du Pont's arrival]” (376). This is no doubt the case, but the reader would like to know why the highly educated scientists and engineers (many presumably from outside the South) arriving by the thousands to work at Savannah River threw their weight behind candidates opposed to the burgeoning civil rights movement. Did their appearance on the scene herald, as the author argues, “the beginning of a process to break down the political parochialism” of the region (376), or did the new arrivals adopt the conservative attitudes toward race that they encountered in the South?