Red Scare:FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States

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.