Civics: Total Literary Awareness: How the FBI Pre-read African American Writing

William Maxwell:

Ellen Schrecker, liberalism’s semi-official chronicler of McCarthyism, hints that this dark episode of modern American history deserves a name change. “Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] opened the [FBI’s] files,” she speculates, “McCarthyism would probably have been called ‘Hooverism.’ ”[1] Schrecker’s case depends on a high regard for the functioning of J. Edgar Hoover’s charismatic bureaucracy—the FBI’s design, management, and marketing of a “machinery of political repression” able to install anticommunism as a touchstone of good government during the Cold War.[2] Providing undercover informers to Smith Act prosecutors set on jailing Communists was just one part of this machinery. Under a secret “Responsibilities Program,” established in 1951, the Bureau also dispatched file-based, not-for-attribution blind memoranda to governors and other “appropriate authorities,” warning of possible Reds on the payroll.[3] Well-honed Bureau techniques for indexing dissent directly fed the classic sin of the blacklist, fingering over 400 public employees for firing, most of them school and university teachers. The names the FBI could not legally communicate to state officials it delivered to the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, and other wholesome quasi-publics. At least until 1953, when Hoover began to fear the senator’s sloppiness, the FBI supplied Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee with everything it could: