Latham's book stands out as a learned and sharply analytical study of the Communist activity in the federal government from the beginning of the 1930s to the sudden demise of McCarthyism with the condemnation of the Wisconsin Senator by the Senate for unsenatorial conduct on December 2, 1954. Latham does not assert that McCarthyism was nothing more than a narrowly political phenomenon but he does make a very convincing argument for the proposition that it was a political phenomenon, and that as such it was largely an agent of fundamentalist conservatism, long frustrated in its search for power. The book challenges the tiresome and "status revolution and " explanations, and argues that the roots of this curious phenomenon were essentially political. McCarthy was the agent of a powerful and traditional faction within the Republication party, clinging to a potpourri of nineteenth-century virtues Latham terms and "fundamental conservatism and ". Latham's work principally assesses the problem of Communist influence and power at the highest governmental levels and seeks to explain the dramatic importance of the Communist question in the early 1950s, an importance which, in Latham's judgment, it never deserved.