Phillip Deery's Red Apple consists of five loosely connected vignettes: the surgeon Edward K. Barsky and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; the popular writer Howard Fast and professors Lyman Bradley and Edwin Burgum; the composer Dmitri Shostakovich; and the lawyer O. John Rogge. Deery's archival research is impressive and his prose clear and happily free of the obscuring jargon marring too much scholarly writing.

Deery sees his case studies as illustrating the heinous effects of McCarthyism. McCarthyism in Red Apple has little to do with the particular activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Rather, McCarthyism is Deery's catchall term for criticism and actions against domestic American Communists and their close allies in the late 1940s and 1950s. Deery asserts that “upon the altar of anticommunism, domestic Cold War crusaders undermined civil liberties, curtailed equality before the law, and tarnished the ideas of American democracy.” Deery sees a vast array of government...

You do not currently have access to this content.