In a 2015 review in the journal Labour History, Nick Fischer argued that the history of anticommunism before the McCarthy era required a sustained and “thematically integrated” historical synthesis to show why the events of this earlier period were important, and “why they should lead historians and the general public to reassess the significance of Cold War anti-Communism” (review of Little “Red Scares”: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946, Labour History, no. 109: 221). In Spider Web, he seeks to deliver on this request. Fischer offers a clear and punchy account of the history of anticommunist politics in the United States reaching back to the later nineteenth century, with early chapters on the Gilded Age, the First World War, and the Great Red Scare, before turning to his primary focus on the 1920s. He concludes with chapters that speculate on the cultural impact...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
