Red Scared! The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture

by Steven Heller, Michael Barson

Not long ago, Communists seemed to be everywhere: among our politicians, neighbors, favorite actors--even in our drinking water. Red Scared! is a wry tour of the frosty decades of Soviet and American adversity, when anti-Communist hysteria produced fairly hysterical pop-culture items. The voluminous propaganda that the United States produced to combat the Red Menace--not only officially, but in books, films, magazines, games, and more--is explored and vibrantly reproduced here. With a colorful text that serves as a useful historical overview, daring tales from government agents, plot synopses and lurid covers of unintentionally funny pulp novels, and much more, Red Scared! brings the Cold War back home again--this time around with humor (and relief)

Genres: History, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

Steven Heller writes a monthly column on graphic design books for The New York Times Book Review and is co-chair of MFA Design at the School of Visual Arts. He has written more than 100 books on graphic design, illustration and political art, including Paul Rand, Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design Second Edition, Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age, Graphic Design History, Citizen Designer, Seymour Chwast: The Left Handed Designer, The Push Pin Graphic: Twenty Five Years of Design and Illustration, Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits, The Anatomy of Design: Uncovering the Influences and Inspirations in Modern Graphic Design. He edits VOICE: The AIGA Online Journal of Graphic Design, and writes for Baseline, Design Observer, Eye, Grafik, I.D., Metropolis, Print, and Step. Steven is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the School of Visual Arts' Masters Series Award.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of bright colors, weird hysterical comments about commies by respectable people during the Cold War, lots of bad movies about commie conspiracies.

They also cover the short period during World War Two when the Soviet
Union was an ally and Joe Stalin as a kindly uncle.

In 1948, 'Look' magazine had a big article called "Could the Reds
Seize Detroit?" The city is next to Canada. "Red agents can shuttle
back and forth, as rum runners did during Prohibition days." Three to
six thousand "sinister" Communists live in Detroit. "...(T)heir ranks
would quickly be augmented, it is suggested, by the prisoners of the
Wayne County Jail, who would be freed, recruited, and armed within
minutes of the 'blitzkrieg-style' attack."

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ignore the text - there are no footnotes, the research is correspondingly bad, and it tries so desperately to be funny it‘s embarrassing - but the images, articles and movies themselves are really well curated, giving a good overview of official and public opinion. It also goes into the more fascinatingly obscure facets of the Cold War.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Red Scared was a fun read. Barson and Heller did a great job of curating a lot of material from American pop culture during the Soviet era. Especially useful were the timeline sections that began each chapter that listed chronologically actually events in history that helped to fuel American fears. Though some critics might argue that the structure within the chapters was a bit confusing, I might concede that it may have been a bit weak. The authors attempts however, at a format that integrated the look of the chapters into pages filled with the glitz and color of pop culture advertising I saw as an attempt to reflect the pop culture content. So bravo to them for that. Also, the reader must keep in mind that the authors were attempting to condense and display a period from 1848 - 2000 and have it remain informative and entertaining to a general audience. The key word is GENERAL AUDIENCE. This is a fun book. Maybe not deep, but I don't think it was supposed to inspire radical changes of thought. It read somewhat like a travelouge of American pop culture regarding the Soviets. For this, it is a fun read. For the historians, the timelines were rather good.

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

A catalog of America's 20th Century obsession with the communist menace as reflected in the popular media.

The overall organization is terrible and the correspondence between the images and text is awkward, but there is a lot here to enjoy for pop culture aesthetes. The greatest strength of the book are the overview sections, which pull together a considerable amount of material and synthesize a thematic category. The greatest weakness of the book are the review sections that try to provide a synopsis of major or most representative works in each category, largely because they come before the synthetic chapters and also because the blurbs are just not helpful.

Fun but not useful.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's nothing especially wrong with this book: it's an entertaining read and the snippets of source material (old movie posters, exerpts from anti-Communist propaganda, etc.) are fantastic. It's just that, on the whole, maybe the whole thing lacks a cohesive structure. I ended up feeling like I'd read it in random order, even though I hadn't. Still, definitely a fun book to noodle through - flip open to any page, and there's something there to go "Holy crap, I can't believe how insane this country is!" at.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Communist Kisses!"
"By one estimate, some six thousand different romance comic books were published from the late Forties and Fifties, the heyday of the genre. Understandably, the Red Menace was not one of the issues commonly dealt with…But every now and the , the Communist threat did sometimes interfere with the love lives of characters within these magazines… The anguished cry of a character in o e of the stories- 'I'm not going to let myself fall in love with a rotten Communist! I'm not! I swear it"- expresses an emotion so many of us romantics have experienced, at one time or another."

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this and I would definitely recommed it to anyone who would like an interesting look into the cold ware and all the propaganda surrounding it.

[Ashley Morissette]

I don't particularly like the internal design of this book; it's cluttered and the contrasting colors make it difficult to read.

[Juan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful. Something that can only be told in lots of glossy pictures.