The Fear Within: Spies & Commies Author Reading | Haight

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Sixty years ago political divisions in the United States ran even deeper than today’s name-calling showdowns between the left and right. Back then, to call someone a communist was to threaten that person’s career, family, freedom, and, sometimes, life itself. Hysteria about the “red menace” mushroomed as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong rose to power in China, and the atomic arms race accelerated. Spy scandals fanned the flames, and headlines warned of sleeper cells in the nation’s midst, just as they do today with the “War on Terror.”

In his new book, The Fear Within, Scott Martelle takes dramatic aim at one pivotal moment of that era. On the afternoon of July 20, 1948, FBI agents began rounding up twelve men in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit whom the U.S. government believed posed a grave threat to the nation–the leadership of the Communist Party-USA. After a series of delays, eleven of the twelve “top Reds” went on trial in Manhattan’s Foley Square in January 1949.

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