Drawing upon a rich selection of documents, this book provides a detailed account of an extraordinary period of time when Americans were routinely persecuted because they were suspected of being insufficiently patriotic in the struggle against Communism, in particular, the Soviet Union. The persecution took various forms, from imprisonment to the purging and blacklisting of untold thousands. Fried demonstrates how the end result was to consign the American radical left to irrelevancy. Documenting both the persecuted and the persecutors, this book is the definitive reader on McCarthyism, and the American Red Scare, a period which spanned from the late 1940s to to the mid 1960s.