Clay Risen: On Being Vigilant Against History Repeating Itself

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century, as well as his most recent book on McCarthyism, Red Scare. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.

Name: Clay Risen
Book title: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
Publisher: Scribner
Release date: March 18, 2025
Genre/category: History
Previous titles: The Crowded Hour, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century
Elevator pitch: My book is a comprehensive history of the Red Scare, the decade of anti-Communist hysteria following World War II. I look at both the famous names – Joe McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, Richard Nixon – and the countless everyday Americans who defined the era, as well as the ways in which the Red Scare permanently altered America’s political landscape, with echoes reverberating even today.

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One of the nice things about being a non-academic historian is that I don’t have to keep myself tied to a specific subject area, but instead can range widely, exploring whatever interests me. I’ve been fascinated by the Red Scare ever since I was a teenager, when learned that my very conservative, all-boys high school changed its mascot, the Big Red, to the Big Maroon in the 1950s to avoid being accused of communist sympathies. If even my school was afraid of red-baiting, then clearly the Red Scare left a deep imprint, one whose legacy we still don’t quite understand. Given the way our national politics has been headed for a while now, I thought it was a good idea to explore that legacy further.

I first pitched it to my agent in mid-2018, so it took almost seven years to come to print. Some of the long gestation had to do with the pandemic, which cut off access to archives for a year or more. But I also had a lot of material to absorb—not just archives but whole libraries of secondary sources. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to touch on every single facet of the Red Scare, I wanted to make sure I was at least aware of the whole story. I have a hard time writing if I don’t read everything I can on a subject; the even harder part is then deciding what to leave out.

Up until now, all my books have been focused on specific, relatively brief episodes in American history: the Spanish-American War, the fight over the Civil Rights Act. It was an immense and at times almost overwhelming challenge to fit the entirety of the Red Scare into a relatively manageable number of pages, and to tell the story in an engaging way. Learning how to do that was the greatest challenge of my career. My first draft was a mess—too long, too many rabbit holes, too many darlings that needed to be killed. Fortunately, I have a great editor, Kathy Belden, who patiently showed me how to wield the blade.

This was the first time I took a leave from my day job to write a book. I’m a newspaper journalist, so I’m used to writing on a tight deadline. And it turned out that the extra time didn’t help—I wasted a lot of it, and ended up with a flabby, boring draft. I needed the time pressure to write efficiently. Not surprisingly, when I had to revise the book, in the evenings and on weekends after returning to work, things went much better.

I hope that people concerned with the present state of the country will see that on the one hand, we’ve been through similar trials before. But also, on the other hand, I hope they will see that there are certain themes in American history, like demagoguery and the abuse of power and political fear, that recur again and again, and that we have to remain vigilant against them.

When you’re writing your first draft, never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or even the good enough. Just write, even if it’s ugly. If you’re diligent with your edits, almost everything in that first draft will change anyway. It’s like dumping puzzle pieces onto the table: You need to get ideas on the page before you can shape them into a clear picture.