Most of us are familiar with the general outlines of US anticommunist hysteria from the 1930s into the 1960s, and particularly Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). We know that entertainers were blacklisted, workers lost their jobs, quite a few people were imprisoned, and at least two (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were executed.

But Congress was only one slice of a much deeper attack on freedom of belief. The FBI was another big prong. I, for one, didn’t know that the FBI actually drew up lists of people who would be rounded up and detained on command—and those lists included some of our best-loved entertainers, among them Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Bess Lomax Hawes (co-author of the MTA song, a/k/a “Charlie and the MTA”). Interestingly, Leonard argues that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, though a virulent anticommunist, disliked McCarthy and opposed his methods.

In a year that started with an armed coup attempt inside the US Capitol against the elected US government, it is worth remembering three key points:

1. All but one of the mass domestic terrorist incidents I can think of were conducted by right-wingers: the January 6th insurrection, of course–but also Oklahoma City, 9/11, Pulse Nightclub, El Paso, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church… (The exception is the 1954 Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on the Capitol.) Yet the government has historically focused its energies on the little sliver of far-left agitators.
2. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have clean hands in suppressing dissent or in harnessing state terror just to show power. Though they continued into the Eisenhower administration, the FBI abuses against suspected Communist Party members and sympathizers mostly took place under Democrats FDR and Truman. FDR’s other shames include authorizing the Japanese internment and turning away Jewish refugees, while Truman’s including deploying two atomic bombs against a Japan that was already about to surrender—with the apparent purpose of telling the USSR not to mess with us. And of course, LBJ and Nixon were both in charge during the suppression of leftists in the 1960s. This makes it even more urgent to organize and make sure Biden keeps his progressive campaign promises (as I write this in September, he’s failing badly on several, including immigration justice, climate change, and voting rights).
3. It is absolutely important to curtain domestic terror. However, there are plenty of ways to do it that don’t involve “othering” and repressing a portion of the population. We are all entitled to our beliefs, no matter how far outside the mainstream. But none of us are entitled to wage violence in the service of our beliefs, and the government needs to keep those elements in check.

Personally, I’d love to see the government embrace alternative strategies to war and violence both in containing terrorism and in furthering democracy around the world. A good first step would be establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, as proposed by former Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

The book is impeccably researched, with a seven-page bibliography and discography, 50 pages of end notes(!), and a 15-page index. However, the writing is less than stellar, and the editor or proofreader should have been fired. Still, I will put up with bad writing to get important information (or a good story). I didn’t plan to review this as I read it, and only realized as I finished the main text and began going through the notes that there was relevant wisdom to my newsletter readers. Thus, no page citations this month.