Reply To: TBC: The novel is set against the backdrop of the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
Mrs. Nilsson goes through the suitcases of those renting her rooms, looking for evidence of the renter using dope, being a floozy or a Communist; she views her establishment as more refined because of the name Briarwood House. Otherwise, she pretty much ignores anything that doesn’t directly impact her life.
Arlene has the latest gossip about who are named Communists. She leaves a copy of Red Channels for Pete’s mother. Arlene sees reds everywhere which Grace identifies as paranoia. Probably because of the war games in her hometown where she slept with the “enemy” and her work for the House Un-American Activities Committee.
For Nora, working at the National Archives and everything it protects (especially The Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) give her hope in the beginning of a new decade.
Grace’s illegal TV provides an outside view and, I think, for Grace, allows her to keep track of what McCarthy is doing and how that might affect her day-to-day life. She names the orange cat Red. Although Grace is Comrade Galina Stepanova of the USSR, she comes to realize that she did not have it in herself to harm people in the US. All the propaganda she had been fed were lies. So, she walked away with a new identity and made a home in a room with green walls and Thursday night suppers with friends.
Reka was a “card-carrying member of the Communist Party in Germany before the war.” She says that “Communists are as dangerous as garden snails. Just college boys who think quoting Marx and drinking vodka makes them rebels.” They thought that the children who were starving deserved more than they were getting. The Communists and Socialists were the first rounded up by Hitler. Reka is fired from her job at Smoot Library because of Communist sympathies, but it motivates her to go after what had been stolen from her.
Fliss, Grace and Claude Cormier are in an unsegregated club when a riot spills into the club and the word COMMUNIST is painted on the windows. Fliss wonders why. “Because Communist is the ugliest insult we Americans seem to know right now, Grace said. Thank you, Senator McCarthy.”
Claire coped with Senator McCarthy by keeping out of his way and not sticking out her neck. “You didn’t square up to bullies and spit in their eye; you let them careen on past you waving their list of enemies and Communists and what have you.” It is Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s speech standing up to the bully McCarthy that finally motivates Claire to help the woman she loves to stand up to her bully husband.
