The Red Scare—the era from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s during which fears of domestic communism became one of the major issues in American political life—has generated innumerable books and articles dedicated to documenting its alleged victims and searching for those ultimately responsible for the harm it inflicted and the ways in which it distorted American culture. During the 1960s and ’70s the dominant motif was that hysteria and fear had demonized American communists and their supporters,