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: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.
Risen applied the “Page 99 Test” to Red Scare and reported the following:
Page 99 of Red Scare drops the reader into the early days of the Hiss-Chambers scandal. In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a journalist and former spy for the Soviet Union, accused the diplomat Alger Hiss of being a Communist, and later of being among his highest-level contacts in Washington. The scene on page 99 is dramatic: Chambers has just told a closed session of the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss was a party member. Richard Nixon, then a young representative from California, and others decide to move to an open session, for the press to see. By the end of the day, these once obscure men were household names, and the fear of Soviet subversion was ratcheted up even further.Visit Clay Risen's website.
A casual browser of page 99 would, I hope, get a sense of the drama that drives the narrative arc of the book. It is full of action and thick description, something I tried to spread across every page. While the story I tell is complex and no single page can reveal it all, page 99 is representative of its flavor and energy.
The book itself is a narrative history of the second Red Scare, showing how anti-Communist hysteria reached into every corner of American life. The Hiss-Chambers affair was high political drama playing out in Washington, but it also showed how the fears inherent in the moment could elevate obscure figures like these two men to fame or infamy.
The Page 99 Test: A Nation on Fire.
--Marshal Zeringue
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