This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minut Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America.

The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells

and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers

or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the minute women is one of

many told it a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen.

Ryzen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War,

most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist, and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

Ryzen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes

that there's a through line to be found from that era to our current political moment.

Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at the New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk,

and he's the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.

Before writing obituaries, Ryzen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage,

and before that, an editor on the opinion desk.

His new book is Red Scare, Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of

Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to fresh air.

Oh, thanks for having me. There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture

sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor.

And one of the strands, you say, was a culture war, a long-simmering resentment among

conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal,

you know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system,

et cetera.

Roosevelt was enormously popular, really, as the result of these programs.

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