The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal—so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover’s rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director’s domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the growing power of his office to subvert the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and redirect the trajectory of U.S. culture away from social democracy toward a toxic brand of neoliberalism. He did so with help from Republicans who opposed organized labor and Southern Democrats who supported Jim Crow in what is arguably the most culturally significant documented political conspiracy in U.S. history, a wholesale domestic propaganda program that brainwashed Americans and remade their politics. Hoover also forged ties with the powerful fascist leaders of the period to promote his own political ambitions. All the while, as a love letter to Clyde Tolson still preserved in Hoover’s papers attests, he strove to pass for straight while promoting a culture that demonized same-sex love. The erosion of democratic traditions Hoover fostered continues to haunt Americans today.

In the aftermath of 9/11, and in response to complaints about the nation's intelligence gathering (which might have prevented the terrorist attack), the Bush administration granted expanded powers of surveillance to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The aim was to enable these agencies to uncover terrorist plots before they could be executed. In short, the agencies were to become more pro-active in preventing criminal actions, rather than simply investigating them after the fact. This expanded authority necessarily rekindled a perennial debate in American history: the proper balance between national security and civil liberties, between the government's need to know and its citizens' right to basic freedoms of privacy and thought. In this provocative essay, the foremost historian of the FBI considers the record of the past to assess the results of the broadened powers of the present. Surveying the experience of World War II and the cold war, and comparing them with present-day activities, Athan Theoharis concludes that Americans may feel marginally safer, but at a dangerous cost to their freedoms and to the tenor of our political dialogue.

Several years ago on a whim, Culleton requested James Joyce's FBI file. Hoover had Joyce under surveillance as a suspected Communist, and the chain of cross-references that Culleton followed from Joyce's file lead her to obscenity trials and, less obviously, to a plot to assassinate Irish labour leader James Larkin. Hoover devoted a great deal of energy to keeping watch on intellectuals and considered literature to be dangerous on a number of levels. Joyce and the G-Men explores how these linkages are indicative of the culture of the FBI under Hoover, and the resurgence of American anti-intellectualism.