Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (Global Issues Series)

"Red Hunting ..." is a very thoughtful and intellignet book. It makes the case that American anti-Communism was a unique historical phenomenon caused by the nature of this country as a relatively new nation with no long standing traditions; a nation based on a revolutionary ideology and subject to rapid change and constant re-definition. The US need to define itself AGAINST something; and in the late 1800s and on that something became Communism (the British Empire no longer aroused the old hatred)--another new ideology that could serve as an ideal rival. For Americans, Communism became the dark Other, standing out there is the shadows waiting to devour us. American ideas about Communism were often vague and contradictory. Anything that Americans feard at any given moments became associated with Communism whether there was a real life association or not--- modern art, jazz, non-white races, Jews, Catholics, European high culture, psychiatry, pornography, drugs, whatever. Kovel contrasts the more rational approach to Communism by the other Western democracies who suppressed violent radials while tolerating non-violent expressions of Communist sympathy, freely admitted that some of Marx's points were valid and worked toward greater social and political equality in a way that diminished the possibility of violent revolution by giving dissenters and poor people a respectable voice in society.