The War at Home

There have been multiple Red Scares in American history. The first began shortly after World War I, in response to the anti-war protests and militant labor movements of the 1910s. Between 1919 and 1920, the United States government rounded up and arrested thousands of socialists, anti-war protesters, and labor organizers, perhaps most famously during the Palmer Raids that began in the fall of 1919 and concluded in January 1920 and that saw hundreds jailed and as many denaturalized and deported. Like this first Red Scare, the second also emerged out of a war—World War II—but it lasted considerably longer, as liberals and conservatives began to turn their attention away from a global fight against fascism to one against communism. Reviewing a new history of this second Red Scare, by Clay Risen, David Cole argues that the book “shows how populist scapegoating can take hold of a nation and pose real dilemmas for the many who get caught in its web.” For as “the FBI developed extensive files on suspected reds, including many Americans who simply advocated for racial justice or workers’ rights,” many private actors in Hollywood, at universities, and involved in other non-state organizations “cooperated in the suppression, barring suspected communists from their employ.” While the persecution of radicals in the United States today has not yet reached the same fever pitch, Cole notes that this does not mean it might not in the future. For while “Trump’s initiatives, as devastating as they have been, do not yet come close to matching the range and depth of the Red Scare.…he’s only getting started.” Read “Red Scares, Past and Present”

In Touch With the Galaxy

Throughout a career spanning nearly four decades and encompassing a formidable number of mediums (photography, conceptual practices, collage, sculpture, and now painting), Lorna Simpson has created works of art that resist quick-and-easy reads. A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Lorna Simpson: Source Notes,” presents a group of paintings and related works created by Simpson during the past decade—and offers an opportunity to reflect on the conceptual practice she developed during the 1980s and ’90s. Reviewing the exhibition for Books & the Arts, Rachel Hunter Himes writes that the show illustrates how Simpson has developed “a body of work that…bridges the particular and the universal, exploring the human experience of self-fashioning by inhabiting the specific space of a selfhood constructed out of the signifiers of Black American identity.” In the end, her work interrogates something even more allusive and profound: “Whether we can make any claims to knowledge at all.” Read “The Art and Genius of Lorna Simpson”