03775oam 2200409 450 991076571830332120230617034342.0(CKB)3450000000002780(EXLCZ)99345000000000278020121018h20042000 fy| 0engurm|#---|||||txtrdacontentcrdamediacrrdacarrierRed scare FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943 /Regin SchmidtCopenhagen, Denmark :Museum Tusculanum Press,2004©20001 online resource (391 pages) digital, PDF file(s)English revision of thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Copenhagen, 1995.8763500124 Includes bibliographical references and index.The anticommunist crusade of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its legendary director J. Edgar Hoover during the McCarthy era and the Cold War has attracted much attention from historians during the last decades, but little has been known about the Bureau's political activities during its formative years. This work breaks new ground by tracing the roots of the FBI's political surveillance to the involvement of the Bureau's predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BI), in the nation's first period of communist-hunting, the "Red Scare" after World War I. The book is based on the first systematic and comprehensive use of the early BI files from 1908 to 1922, which have only survived on difficult-to-read microfilms deposited in the National Archives, as well as numerous collections of personal papers. The FBI's political surveillance was not a result of popular hysteria, such as scholars used to claim, or a rational response to communist spying and the Cold War confrontation, such as a number of historians have recently argued. Instead, it was an integrated part of the attempt by the modern federal state, rooted in the Progressive Era, to regulate and control any organized opposition to the political, economic and social order, such as organized labor, radical movements and African-American protest. The detailed reconstruction of the BI's role in the Red Scare during 1919 and 1920 shows that the federal intelligence officials played a crucial role in initiating the anticommunist hysteria in the United States. Despite its small staff, the BI was able to influence national events by exchanging information with a network of patriotic groups, assisting local authorities in drafting antiradical legislation and prosecuting radicals, and using congressional committees to spread its message. The Bureau also strove to discredit the strike wave and race riots of 1919 as the work of communists. The account also throws new light on such dramatic and controversial events as the Seattle General Strike, the Centralia Massacre, and the deportation of the famous anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The book shows how entrenched political surveillance had become by the early 1920's and how it continued until World War II and the Cold War.Anti-communist movementsUnited StatesHistory20th centuryIntelligence serviceUnited StatesHistory20th centuryInternal securityUnited StatesHistory20th centuryUnited StatesPolitics and government1919-1933United StatesPolitics and government1933-1945Anti-communist movementsHistoryIntelligence serviceHistoryInternal securityHistory364.1/31Schmidt Regin876293UkMaJRU9910765718303321Red scare1956930UNINA