WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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We’ll say goodbye to the “Red Scare Next Door” in Evansville, Indiana and travel East to the Green Mountains of Vermont where it turns out that even Republicans can be Red-Baited. We can turn the page in the anti-labor playbook but all we’ll find is the same old story featuring Henry Wallace, the Communist Party, red-baiting politicians, and smear tactics aimed at the heart of Academic freedom as another university professor bites the dust. But there is one new imposing element to the story, Mao’s China, seen through the amazing Hinton siblings, Joan and William; Joan was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project; and William documented the unfolding of China’s cultural revolution in Long Bow Village, published in 1966 as Fanshen. Both were, of course, targets of HUAC, The House Un-American Activities Committee
Our GUEST tonight is Rick Winston whose new book, Red Scare in the Green Mountains, explores some forgotten history as we see how a small, rural “rock-ribbed Republican” state with a historically libertarian streak handled the hysteria of the time.
Now, as we again experience a political atmosphere charged with intolerance, condemnation, and widespread falsehoods, Winston’s Red Scare in Vermont, like that in Evansville, Indiana, shows us that truth is the first victim of power.
Historian of the Left Paul Buhle writes that the book takes us back to the dark days of the downward turn of American politics toward repression and persecution, but also of extreme bravery of many of New England’s best, under terrible political pressure.
We begin with Winston’s parents who, to use the words of Philip Roth in memory of a blacklisted mentor, were impaled on their moment in time, caught in the trap set to ruin so many promising careers of that American era — a casualty like thousands of others of the first shameful decade in his country’s postwar history — expelled as a political deviants, dangerous to let loose on the young.
RELATED
The Red Scare Next Door: Anti-Communism in Evansville, Indiana
The Bluff of the Century: Nixon, Alger Hiss, and the Cold War
Tracking Subversives: Alan Wald On the Development of the Literary Left
In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor by Philip Roth
MUSIC
“Unwelcome Guest” by Billy Bragg
“Joe McCarthy’s Band” by Joe Glazer
“Days Like These (DC Remix)” by Billy Bragg
“I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” performed by Barbara Dane
“Hell is Chrome” by Wilco
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Editor: Rob Schoon
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
