Regin
Schmidt Red Scare: FBI & The Origins of Anti-Communism in the
United States (University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000).
The young lack a sense of history-of the Cold War, of anti-communism, of the vibrancy of progressive movements in the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, older activists discoursing on their history at first engaged in long needed self-criticism. The self-criticism then shifted, however, to blanket rejection of our progressive pasts-our victories as well as our defeats, our brave and honorable moments, and particularly a recollection of the hegemonic power of the U.S. state as a primary cause of our defeats. Plainly, the horrific record of state repression in America is being forgotten by the older radicals and is unfamiliar to the younger ones.
The young lack a sense of history-of the Cold War, of anti-communism, of the vibrancy of progressive movements in the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, older activists discoursing on their history at first engaged in long needed self-criticism. The self-criticism then shifted, however, to blanket rejection of our progressive pasts-our victories as well as our defeats, our brave and honorable moments, and particularly a recollection of the hegemonic power of the U.S. state as a primary cause of our defeats. Plainly, the horrific record of state repression in America is being forgotten by the older radicals and is unfamiliar to the younger ones.
Regin Schmidt’s book can
help enormously in revisiting and reconstructing the role of state repression
in manipulating, subverting, jailing, deporting, and killing leftists in the
twentieth century. Schmidt has provided us with a data-rich account of how the
Federal Bureau of Investigation took on its special role in crushing the left
in America. His book is about the origins of the FBI in the old Bureau of
Investigation in 1908 and its transformation into a state weapon in the
struggle against perceived Bolshevism, anarchism, and communism in the
aftermath of World War I. It is also about the continuity of state repression
from the era of the Palmer Raids to Cold War America.
Schmidt argues that
recently declassified information points to new explanations for the FBI’s rise
to prominence. Some researchers view the agency’s rise as a response to mass
hysteria, placing the root cause of anti-communism in the public at large.
Schmidt, however, shows how popular attitudes about the Bolshevik/communist/anarchist
threat emerge only after Attorney General Palmer and the FBI launched their
campaigns of harassment, arrest, and deportation. In short, anti-communism as a
public ideology was the creation of state institutions.
Another body of scholarly
and journalistic literature places primary, indeed sole, responsibility for FBI
misdeeds on the shoulders of its long-time director, J. Edgar Hoover. While
Schmidt sees Hoover as the major protagonist in the FBI drama, he grounds
Hoover’s conduct in the context of state policy and bureaucratic interest.
Further, most studies of
the FBI emphasize its role in shaping anti-communism after World War II.
Schmidt, however, takes the reader back to the first Red Scare and the Palmer
Raids for the origins of anti-communism. And, he claims, the campaign was
constant from then through the Cold War period. The FBI and anti-communism are
less visible from the mid-1920s until the depths of the Great Depression only
because of the diminution of radical activities.
Schmidt clearly states
his central thesis early in the book and demonstrates its accuracy through
historical examination.
Just as the mushrooming
federal agencies, bureaus, and commissions were employed to regulate the
economy and ameliorate the most severe social consequences of
industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, [so also] the state during
the first decades of the century increasingly used its resources to control,
contain, and, in times of crisis, to repress social unrest and political opposition.
Thus, the institutionalization of the FBI’s political activities from 1919 was
at bottom a part of the federalization of social control in the form of
political surveillance.
This book provides an
engaging, rich, detailed history of how the FBI served the social control
functions of the state: harassing the left, supporting federal, state, and
local politicians in their anti-communist campaigns, and responding with
sympathy to corporate requests for assistance. It covers the campaign against
the IWW, the 1919 strike wave, the Palmer Raids, the Seattle General Strike,
and the deportation of radicals.
Red Scare is an important
book. It should be read by older progressives to refresh their memories of real
state repression in the United States. The book should be passed along to young
activists, most of whom were not old enough to remember FBI harassment of
Central American solidarity activists in the 1980s. And this book should be
included as supplementary reading in university classes on U.S. history, American
politics, and social movements.
Finally, the book makes
crystal clear an important reality of struggles for social change. Social
movements do not fall apart solely because of ideological rigidity or
factionalism or egotism. The errors that come from our ranks have to be
understood in the context of a continuous pattern of state repression. The
sorry record of the FBI in the United States must not be forgotten. Red Scare
will help us remember.
Reviewed by Harry Targ,
Department of Political Science, Purdue University
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
