Hegemony and the Far Right: Policing Dissent in Imperial America

Mark Rupert
Syracuse University

Often characterized as the lunatic fringe, an enigmatic aberration, a small dark moon in
distant orbit around the sunny mainstream of American political life, I want to suggest
instead that the far-right is as American as apple pie. The far-right has deep roots firmly
anchored in cultural traditions of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, nativism,
masculinism, and the enduringly resonant political language of producerist populism.
Some versions of this right-wing populism explicitly posit a nefarious conspiracy
perpetrated by a manipulative, deceitful, and incorrigibly evil sect whose goal is the
destruction of the American constitutional republic and its subsumption within an
atheistic, socialistic, one-world government. To prevent such an outcome it is necessary
to identify disloyal and treacherous Americans the enemy within who are deliberately
betraying our constitutional rights and liberties.1

As historian Samuel Brenner has argued, the boundary between far-right and mainstream
conservatism has been more indeterminate and permeable than is commonly recognized:
the extremist ultralibertarian, ultraconservative, anticommunist conspiracists (or, as
they labeled themselves, Americanists) embraced a coherent ideology that actually had
a great deal in common with the ideology that motivated more mainstream
conservatives and, for that matter, that would in large part be recognizable to significant
numbers of mainstream conservatives in the United States today.2 Survey evidence is
suggestive of how widespread such far-right beliefs are within American political culture.
According to a 2013 survey by Public Policy Polling, 28 percent of voters [34 percent of
Republicans, 35 percent of independents, and 15 percent of Democrats] believe that a
secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world
through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. Accordingly, many
believe that the federal government with its secret security apparatus and its expansive
powers is instrumental to the conspiracy, integral to an emerging tyranny. So perhaps it is
not so shocking that researchers found 29 percent of Americans [44 percent of
Republicans, 27 percent of independents, and 18 percent of Democrats] think an armed
revolution in order to protect rights and liberties might be necessary in the next few
years.3

I want to argue that ideological tropes of militant Americanism with their narratives of
disloyalty and betrayal by an enemy within -- have not been limited to the precincts
officially designated as far-right, and have shaped the historical structures of US global
power by policing dissent, marking the limits of acceptable American political discourse
in ways involving both coercive power and ideological consent. Defining a normative
Americanism by reference to an enemy within as well as without, the disproportionate
cultural influence of far-right ideology has been integral to the construction of hegemony
underlying American power and structures of global hierarchy spanning a half century or

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more. Before I sketch the outlines of my historical argument, I need first to clarify the
conceptual vocabulary I am using to make sense of the American far-right.

I. Popular common sense: Americanism, Un-Americanism, and the Far-Right

By far-right, I want to indicate a culturally venerable family of political ideologies

constructed and re-constructed around a social identity and corresponding political
project at once domestic and international -- identified with militant Americanism.
An ideology of Americanism is not just whatever Americans happen to believe, but
involves fidelity to particular ways of being American, such that nominal Americans who
deviate from this standard are construed as essentially un-American and potentially
threatening to Americanism.

Brenner, historian of Americanist movements, identifies five key elements of right-wing

Americanist ideology: traditional constitutionalism, libertarian individualism, religion,
anticommunism, and conspiracism, with the latter two especially prominent.4
Sociologist Sara Diamond has identified the American right-wing with a characteristic set
of preoccupations, not necessarily congruent, but finding sufficient common ground in
militant anti-communism and support for U.S. global hegemony:

Protecting the free market or libertarian capitalism; promoting anticommunism

and, generally, U.S. military hegemony over much of the rest of the world; [and]
preserving traditional morality and supreme status for native-born white male
Americans and for the nuclear family. Libertarianism, anticommunist militarism,
and traditionalism have been the three pillars of the U.S. right.5

In his compelling survey of the cultural history of U.S. foreign policy, Walter Hixson
identifies an animating ideology of Americanism with deep historical roots in such
preoccupations: [U.S.] Foreign policy flows from cultural hegemony affirming
America as a manly, racially superior, and providentially destined beacon of liberty, a
country which possesses a special right to exert power in the world. Hegemonic national
identity drives a continuous militant foreign policy, including the regular resort to war.6

The world-view of the far-right, I suggest, articulates such Americanist ideologies with
central aspects of what Roger Griffin has identified as the mythic core of fascism,
which he terms palingenetic ultra-nationalism.

The mythic core that forms the basis of my ideal type of generic fascism is the
vision of the (perceived) crisis of the nation as betokening the birth-pangs of a
new order. It crystallizes the image of the national community, once purged and
rejuvenated, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of a morally bankrupt state system
and the decadent culture associated with it. Within the shell of their utopianism
lies the seed of a totalitarian nightmare for all those who in one way or other are
not deemed to belong within the regenerated national community or fit into the
new order.7

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A central element of fascisms political culture, then, involves a mythology of national

degeneration and crisis, catastrophes recent or imminent attributable in large part to the
active presence of alien bodies within the corpus of the nation, weakening the nation and
leaving it profoundly vulnerable. These alien elements may be foreigners or they may be
fellow citizens who have effectively betrayed the national community and its unifying
values: non-conformists, iconoclasts and dissidents, religious, ethnic or racial minorities,
cosmopolitans and effeminate over-indulgent liberals, polluters of the nations culture,
sowers of division, destroyers of national unity, purpose and power. The project of
radical national renewal then requires the marginalization, silencing or removal of those
whose softness, deviance and disloyalty would emasculate the nation. Reaffirmation of
national identity and purpose entails the destruction of the enemy within, as well as
confronting enemies without.8

Here I dont wish to be understood as straightforwardly equating the American far-right

with fascism. The latter is not simply a way of thinking or feeling politics, but an
extraordinarily complex, multidimensional social phenomenon which can arise in
particular kinds of historical contexts involving a crisis of liberal democratic capitalism, a
potentially revolutionary challenge from a mobilized working-class left, and a counter-
revolutionary, anti-democratic, and violently authoritarian form of social reconstruction
and state-building. However, I will claim that some of the ideological elements necessary
for a fascist political project are a familiar presence in American political culture and are
repeatedly rearticulated in the rhetoric of the far-right. These rearticulations may not have
given rise to a fascist state in the U.S., but they have been politically consequential far
beyond the margins of political discourse often dismissively labeled the lunatic fringe.

Borrowing from the conceptual vocabulary of Antonio Gramsci, I wish to suggest that
far-right ideology resonates in American political culture, and has had powerful political
effects well beyond the immediate influence of far-right spokespersons or organizations,
because it draws on, adapts, and constructs its political vision out of elements that have
an enduring presence in popular common sense. For Gramsci, popular common sense is a
ground of political struggle because it is not univocal, coherent, or determinate, but is
rather an historical repository of various socially significant meanings and associations,
popular beliefs and social mythologies. As such, popular common sense represents a
reservoir of often contradictory cultural fragments, a chaotic aggregate of disparate
conceptions, open to multiple interpretations and potentially supportive of very different
kinds of social visions and political projects. In the process of political-ideological
struggle, social forces will draw upon these cultural resources, recombine and reinterpret
them in ways that seem appropriate to a contemporary context, that assign political actors
a socially meaningful identity and mission, and orient action toward a political horizon
that makes sense in terms of this ideological (re)construction.9

As I have argued previously, Far from being essentially aberrant or marginal, the
Americanist preoccupations of the far-right have longstanding residence at the very
core of political culture in the U.S., and speak in a voice already familiar to most
Americans.

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We cannot afford to assume that only the most ignorant or delusional would see
the world in this way, that the broad American public is somehow inoculated
against far-right ideologies by virtue of the pervasive influence of liberal
democracy (which is itself, after all, profoundly contradictory), or that these kinds
of doctrines will disappear with the fading visibility of particular individuals or
groups, for ideologies of Americanism are deeply rooted in popular common
sense and continue to provide a reservoir of resources for the articulation of
nationalist, racist, and masculinist political projects.10

Popular ideologies of militant Americanism, predicated upon the identification and

neutralization of un-American elements presumed to be essentially alien or disloyal, are
endemic to the world-view of the American right. When these themes are articulated with
a proto-fascist mythology of national crisis, calling for authoritarian national renewal and
purgation of enemies within, we may speak of a far-right family resemblance. The
official Americanism propagated by government authorities and their anti-subversive
allies has created an hospitable environment for the un-official Americanism promulgated
by persons and organizations conventionally associated with the far-right, even as official
Americanism sought broader popular legitimacy by attempting to distinguish itself from
its more strident ideological cousins. Official and unofficial Americanisms have co-
existed in a kind of symbiotic relationship. On this view, what is often called the far-right
isnt an aberration of American political culture; rather, it is a particularly vociferous
articulation of the popular common sense of Americanism. I will now suggest that
narratives of Americanism, its betrayal by un-American elements within the country, and
national renewal through purgation of the disloyal or the deviant, have played significant
roles in policing dissent and enabling US global hegemony over the last half century or
more.

II. Americanism, Red Scares and hegemony

During most of the twentieth century, when American state managers and capitalists were
constructing the bases of their global power, the internal/external enemy most feared by
the hegemonic forces of Americanism was the Communist movement. Bourgeois fears of
red revolution, especially associated with labor unrest, long predated the founding of the
Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1919, but afterward the Communists
became a particular focus of official fear and loathing.11 Initially a tiny sect, CPUSA
membership and influence expanded greatly during the 1930s due to a confluence of
world-historical processes. The apparent successes of the Soviet Union in building a
modern industrial society on non-capitalist foundations seemed to many radicals around
the world to provide a model for a possible communist future. The increasingly dark
shadows cast by the rise of fascism in Europe occasioned a major change in Communist
strategy, as the Party moved from a hard-line left-sectarian stance toward a Popular Front
(1935-39, 1941-45) in which Communists were encouraged to make common cause with
social democratic, liberal, and pro-democracy forces in the common struggle against
fascism.12 At a time when the communist movement appeared as the only significant
social force dedicated to confronting fascism on an international scale, many American

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communists volunteered to join the International Brigades defending the Spanish

Republic against the murderous forces of Francoist reaction. Almost three thousand
Americans joined the 40,000 international volunteers fighting the fascists in Spain, and
about a third of them died there.13

Nazi Germany and the fascist geopolitical project arose in a context of severe global
economic crisis. In the U.S. the mass suffering caused by the greatest of capitalisms
recurrent crises called into question the hegemony of the business class (apparently rock
solid in the 1920s) and potentially the legitimacy of capitalist institutions and structures.
Dire circumstances and greater popular receptivity to radical ideas and organizations
created spaces in which the CP might work effectively. Communists actively organized
among the poor, unemployed and homeless, and advocated racial equality at a time when
the Democratic Party was still in thrall to southern segregationists. In these ways, the
CPUSA won some legitimacy as defenders of those most historically disadvantaged in
American society as well as those most heavily impacted by the depression. Radicals of
all stripes were integral to the rise of a powerful industrial union movement calling into
question capitalist control of the labor process in key industries.14 CPUSA members were
among the most dedicated and diligent union activists, and their influence within the
movement was disproportional to their actual numbers. Under the slogan Communism is
Twentieth-Century Americanism, the CPUSA made important contributions to the
causes of fighting fascism, advancing racial equality, and building industrial unionism
during the 1930s, broadening its appeal well beyond its earlier sectarian roots. During the
Popular Front period its membership trebled, as people were attracted to the Party for a
variety of reasons. At its peak in 1939, the Communist Party of the United States had
around 75,000 members. Communists were an important presence in the industrial union
movement (CIO) and were a significant political force especially in New York &
California. Some communists and sympathizers had joined the federal government under
the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt, or during the WWII struggle against
fascism.15

During the 1930s and 1940s, some of these people were engaged in espionage activities,
passing industrial or government secrets to Soviet intelligence. There were perhaps 100 -
300 Soviet intelligence sources in the U.S. during this period. Their motives were
generally political rather than mercenary. They wanted to contribute to the global fight
against fascism and anti-Semitism, to aid a wartime ally or to promote US-Soviet
cooperation as the basis of a more peaceful and equitable international order, or to
promote the cause of Communism in which they saw the germ of a more just world. For
reasons such as these, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall passed atomic bomb secrets from within
the heart of the Manhattan Project, Harry Gold acted as industrial spy and courier of
atomic secrets, and New Deal officials such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White leaked
confidential government information to the Soviets. Top leadership of the CPUSA
facilitated such espionage activities. The scope of this spying was not established until
post-war defectors and decrypted Soviet cables revealed it.16 However, by the time
Senator Joseph McCarthy made a national reputation by claiming pervasive communist
infiltration of the federal government, Soviet espionage networks had been disrupted or
disbanded. Indeed, a 1951 KGB memorandum lamented the absence of significant

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intelligence assets in the U.S.: the most serious drawback in organizing intelligence in
the U.S. is the lack of agents in the State Department, intelligence service,
counterintelligence service, and other important U.S. governmental institutions.17

My point in summarizing this history is to suggest that the CPUSA was a profoundly
contradictory phenomenon: both an expression of indigenous social conditions, struggles
and progressive possibilities, and an undemocratic instrument of Soviet policy. Ellen
Schrecker aptly summarizes the animating tensions of the CPUSA during the Popular
Front period:

Was the party a progressive political reform movement or a revolutionary Soviet-

led conspiracy? In fact, of course, it was both and more. On the one hand, the
CP was a highly disciplined, undemocratic outfit that tried to apply Soviet
prescriptions to American ills. On the other hand, it was also a genuinely forward-
looking organization that stimulated many of the most dynamic social movements
of the 1930s and 1940s. And it was often both at once.18

In the official ideology of Americanism, however, this ambiguity was displaced by a

Manichean vision of communism as the antithesis of Americanism, often explicitly
grounded in a theology of American Exceptionalism. According to the House Committee
on Un-American Activities (1939), In the first place, Americanism is the recognition of
the truth that the inherent and fundamental rights of man are derived from God and not
from governments, societies, dictators, kings, or majorities. These rights and liberties
include freedoms of worship, speech, press, assembly, but also entail the bases of
capitalist class relations: freedom to work in such occupation as the experience, training,
and qualifications of a man may enable him to hold, as well as freedom to enjoy the
fruits of his work, which means the protection of property rights. The Founders drafted
the foundational documents of American politics in order to limit governmental power
and provide the maximum safeguards for these God-given rights. Insofar as these
provisions protect sub-groups from tyranny, the essence of Americanism is class,
religious, and racial tolerance. It follows, then, that the man who advocates class hatred
in plainly un-American even if he professes racial and religious tolerance. Since it
incites class hatred and aims at the abridgement of God-given rights in order to construct
a planned economy, communism is diametrically opposed to Americanism.19
Defenders of Americanism were concerned about threats more insidious than spying or
sabotage. Among their darkest nightmares was the possibility of Communist propaganda
making inroads into American political culture, radicalizing labor, seducing progressives,
metastasizing and engulfing the body politic.

J. Edgar Hoover, for more than half a century Americas pre-eminent red hunter, had his
own vision of 20th Century Americanism in which the FBI and an aroused public
identified, marginalized and purged suspected radicals and subversives who may have
burrowed into both the private and public sectors. Hoover represented the CPUSA and its
Marxism-Leninism as the antithesis of Americanism: it stands for the destruction of our
American form of government; it stands for the destruction of American democracy; it
stands for the destruction of free enterprise; and it stands for the creation of a Soviet of

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the United States and ultimate world revolution. Hoover described the activities of the
CPUSA in explicitly conspiracist terms, as the diabolic machinations of sinister figures
engaged in un-American activities. Hoovers understanding of the CPUSA was
premised upon a Manichean world view in which essentially alien and irredeemably evil
enemies within plotted secretly to manipulate and deceive the American public.
Especially worrisome to Hoover was the liberal and progressive who has been
hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists as the latter work
toward the ultimate destruction of Americanism. Herein lies the greatest menace of
Communism. For these are the people who infiltrate and corrupt various spheres of
American life. 20

The world-wide dangers of the communist conspiracy started with the Russian
Revolution of 1917. There and then, for the first time, a communist party seized
control of a nation. Almost immediately this conspiracy spread to the United
States, seeking to take root by undermining our institutions and traditions. How
can communism be American when it employs every form of treason and trickery
to bring about ultimate domination of the United States by a foreign power?
The Communist Party USA is a weapon of attack. [It] has been and is
engaged in an all-out war against American freedom.21

Something utterly new has taken root in America during the past generation, a
communist mentality representing a systematic, purposive, and conscious attempt
to destroy Western civilization. Communist thought control, in all its various
capacities, has spread the infection, in varying degrees, to most phases of
American life. This mentality, imported to our land for the purpose of eventually
leading to a destruction of the American way of life can destroy our
constitutional republic if it is permitted to corrupt our minds and control our
acts.22

In apocalyptic terms, Hoover assured his audience that a climactic battle was approaching
and, increasingly desperate, the forces of evil sense their impending doom at the hands of
the defenders of Americanism: the Communists know that today it is a fight to the
finish and that their backs will soon be to the wall.23

For decades Hoover would use legal and illegal means in his effort to put them against
the wall.24 Routinely resorting to warrantless wiretaps, buggings, and burglary-searches,
Hoover and the FBI dedicated themselves to the collection of domestic political
intelligence which (if gathered through illegal means, as much of it was) would not be
admissible in court and was not intended for the prosecution of criminal activity. In
effect, then, the FBI became a secret political police in the guise of a law enforcement
agency. Beginning in 1939, with World War II looming on the horizon, Hoover secretly
ordered the FBI to compile a list of thousands of people whose liberty in this country in
time of war or national emergency would constitute a menace to the public peace and
safety of the United States Government. Under this Custodial Detention Program
persons of German, Italian, and Communist sympathies would be arrested in secret
without due process and detained indefinitely in military stockades.25 When Hoovers

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secret program for extra-legal mass arrest and detention was discovered by Attorney
General Francis Biddle in 1943, he immediately ordered its abolition, but Hoover quietly
defied the order, intensified his institutional secrecy and continued the program, which he
now called the Security Index. He refocused it almost exclusively on leftist radicals and
Communists. In the event of an unspecified national emergency, Hoover would ask the
President to issue an emergency order suspending Habeas Corpus and ordering the mass
arrest and detention of everyone named on the Index under a single master warrant. By
the mid-1950s, Hoovers Security Index would contain the names of over twenty six
thousand people who may have committed no crime, but whose political loyalty the FBI
considered to be suspect. Among the Security Index subjects were students, professors,
union members, and longtime radicals26

Under the rubric of its Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO in Bureau-speak)

in 1956 the FBI began targeting suspected subversives for harassment and disruption.
Armed with the intelligence gathered through break-ins, bugs, and taps, COINTELPRO
began to attack hundreds, then thousands, of suspected Communists and socialists with
anonymous hate mail, tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service, and forged documents
designed to sow and fertilize seeds of distrust among left-wing factions. The goal was
to destroy the public lives and private reputations of the members of the Communist
Party and everyone connected with them27 Eventually, the FBI would launch multiple
COINTELPRO operations, some of which would target radical right organizations such
as the Ku Klux Klan, but the most consistently vigorous repression was aimed at the left.
As did much of the radical right, Hoover identified the civil rights movement with
Communist agitation and subversion. Accordingly, the FBI kept close tabs on African-
American political organizations, and by the 1960s was illegally bugging and wire-
tapping Martin Luther King, whose recorded sexual liaisons they used to attempt to
silence him.28

In addition to domestic spying, disruption and harassment, and planning mass arrest and
incarceration of suspected subversives, Hoover also actively promoted public exposure
and quarantine of those he considered subversives and misfits. He secretly leaked FBI
information (often gathered illegally) to Congressional red-hunters who could use that
information (on condition of strict confidentiality as to its source) to intimidate and
publicly discredit suspected radicals.29 State and local loyalty boards also conducted
hearings using information provided by the FBI and local Red Squads. Under its
Responsibilities Program of the 1950s, the FBI provided to state and local
governments, as well as schools and universities, confidential reports impugning
employees the FBI saw as potentially subversive, often prompting their dismissal.30 At
the same time, on the presumption that communists and gays shared an affinity by virtue
of their putative moral corruption, as well as secret lives lived within clandestine
networks which made them natural secret agents and traitors, the FBI launched its Sex
Deviates Program seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government,
higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation.31 Persons identified as communists,
former communists, associates or sympathizers, as well as those whose sexual orientation
was suspect, often saw their livelihoods destroyed as employers fired them and finding
new employment became difficult.32 In addition to the cooperation of employers eager to

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demonstrate their Americanism and prevent challenges to their own workplace authority
by purging suspected radicals from their workforces, Hoover could count on the
enthusiastic cooperation of patriotic veterans organizations such as the American
Legion, as well as business and religious organizations.

In 1919, the same year as the emergence of the Communist Party and the notorious anti-
radical Palmer Raids, veterans of World War I formed the American Legion to foster
and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism and the Legion quickly grew to over
one million members.33 By the mid-1930s, the Legion became sufficiently concerned
with the menace of radical ideologies what it referred to as alien Isms -- that its
national convention mandated what was, [in the Legions self-congratulatory
formulation] without a doubt, the most intensive drive to rid America of un-American
propaganda ever undertaken by any organization, declaring that all destructive alien
Isms must be driven from this nation and replaced by the teaching of sound
Americanism. Ostensibly combating both domestic fascism and communism, over 90
percent of the Legions 1937 report on alien Isms was dedicated to exposing the many
ways in which the Communistic movement bores from within. Declaring that A loyal
and patriotic citizenship is necessary to the preservation of the nation, the Legion
pledged to vigorously combat Communism and all other organizations whose purposes
are to undermine, sap, overthrow or otherwise destroy the principles of American
government. While the Legion cautioned its members against taking vigilante action
(which was not uncommon), it repeatedly suggested that speech deemed subversive was
not constitutionally protected and urged loyal members to report it and demand its
official suppression. Freedom of Speech does not protect publications or teachings
which tend to subvert or imperil the government. The Legion saw themselves duty-
bound to defend the unique qualities of Americanism. We, of the Legion, take our
citizenship seriously. We do so because it came to us as a heritage from our fathers with
privileges and opportunities known to the citizenship of no other nation in the history of
the world and was earned for this generation by hard work and great sacrifice and
sanctified by the blood of our comrades. Failure to defend Americanism against its
internal enemies would then represent a betrayal of previous generations, and especially
those who served in the nations wars and fell in battle. 34 A decade later, the national
commander of the American Legion would write in its official magazine equating
American communists with clandestine invaders stealthily waging war from within:
Never forget the fact that Communists operating in our midst are in effect a secret
battalion of spies and saboteurs parachuted by a foreign foe inside our lines at night and
operating as American citizens under a variety of disguises35 The implication is that
all Americans are on the front lines of an ongoing battle, but some of us are fighting for
the enemy. In time of war spies and saboteurs are dealt with most harshly, and therefore
so should be American communists. For decades before the era of McCarthy, veterans
groups had been active anti-communists. During the 1950s they waged a broad and
vigorous campaign against subversive un-Americanism:

Both the Legion and the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] maintained their
Americanism programs and cultivated close contacts with schools, churches, civic
groups, and politicians. The Legions national convention in 1950 voted that CP

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members should be tried for treason. Veterans pressed their old interest in
combating the subversion of young minds, the VFW holding in 1953 that children
should be compelled to study officially approved history. The Legion and VFW
enthusiastically encouraged the congressional investigation committees and kept
their own files of individuals and organizations suspected of subversive
tendencies, which they obligingly opened to state and federal investigators. The
veterans groups sponsored local antisubversion seminars, presented public and
college libraries with anticommunist literature, and supported such enterprises as
the All-American Conference to Combat Communism, an annual event of the
1950s.36

The United States Chamber of Commerce also promoted business-friendly Americanism

and calumniated radicals as the enemy within. In a 1946 publication, authored by
Catholic anticommunist and FBI collaborator Father John F. Cronin, the Chamber alerted
businessmen to the threat of communism a system which is utterly alien to [American]
ideals. A menace among us, a Fifth Column of Communists and fellow-travelers
have penetrated the labor movement, the church, literary, educational, and other groups.
Their influence in the government is considerable

They seek constantly to obtain positions in government and in agencies that can
influence public opinion. They agitate continuously for strife in the domestic
labor movements. They exploit the grievances of minority groups. They are
particularly adept in forming front organizations, to use persons who would
never consciously collaborate with Communism.

Their ultimate goal is to introduce total tyranny in America.37 Since Communist

subversion depends upon secrecy and deceit, the Chamber recommends a concerted
campaign to uproot Communists from labor unions and to expose them in the literary
world, and to screen public and private employees for loyalty a process in which the
burden of proof would be borne by the suspect.

Nor should proof be required that a given subject is actually a member of the
Communist Party. If he follows its line, joins its from groups consistently, and
shows constant sympathy with its aims, he should be open to question. Such
activities reflect either upon his loyalty or his judgment.

Calling businessmen to arms, the Chamber cautioned its fellow Americans against
excessive tolerance: we have never extended the principle of freedom so far that we
have countenanced sedition and treason. 38

Evangelical protestant churches and the Catholic Church were similarly eager to expose
and destroy the forces of godless communism, immorality, and un-Americanism. Billy
Graham congratulated congressional investigating committees for their work of
exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings
of the American eagle. Only as millions of Americans turn to Jesus Christ can this
nation possibly be spared the onslaught of demon-possessed communism.39 The

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American Catholic hierarchy including Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop Cushing and

Bishop Sheen, as well as grassroots Catholic groups such as the Knights of Columbus,
also denounced communist infiltration and subversion. Working with material secretly
provided by Hoovers FBI, and with close cooperation of the House Un-American
Activities Committees vigorous young red-hunter Richard Nixon, Father John F. Cronin
became a prominent voice of Catholic anticommunism.40

The distance between these avatars of mainstream Americanism and the supposed lunatic
fringe inhabited by the likes of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Societys
Robert Welch is less than is commonly thought. The triumphal victories of World War II
had seemed to validate the presumptions of American Exceptionalism, so Americans had
been shocked and dismayed in by the discovery of a Soviet atomic bomb test, the Chinese
Communist seizure of power, and the frustrating difficulties confronting U.S. troops in
the Korean War. McCarthy framed this as a puzzle, the only reasonable answer to which
was communist conspiracy and betrayal of Americanism.

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in
this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product
of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any
previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that,
when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the
maledictions of all honest men.41

When in this June 1951 Senate speech McCarthy accused Secretaries Acheson and
Marshall of being complicit in a communist conspiracy to weaken U.S. defenses against
Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without, what was
remarkable was less the positing of a communist conspiracy including treacherous
enemies within, than his identification of prominent statesmen as conspirators. McCarthy
embellished, rather than invented, the legends of pervasive communist conspiracy that he
peddled so vigorously. His notoriety came from his projected self-image as an avatar of
populist masculinism standing up to the effete ruling class, his bully-boy tactics, and his
penchant for amoral opportunism and high-risk sensationalism; but McCarthys antics
were enabled by a cultural construction of Americanism and un-Americanism which had
long since come to be widely shared, a familiar constellation of popular common sense.42

Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society (JBS), picked up where McCarthy left
off, interpreting McCarthys downfall as further evidence of turpitude and treason --
treachery of well-entrenched and highly-placed conspirators able to calumniate and
silence those who would expose them and spread the alarm. At the December 1958
meeting that founded the Society, Welch lectured his audience of eleven influential
businessmen for two full days.

Communism is wholly a conspiracy, a gigantic conspiracy to enslave

mankindgiving an appearance of spontaneity to a movement to the left which is
conspiratorially plotted and promoted. Communist sympathies and even actual
Communist subversion are daily made more respectable by the actions of our

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government, our great universities, much of our press, and by the complacency of
our people Right under our noses the Communists are gradually carrying out
their plan of grand strategy so to change the economic and political structure of
the United States that it can be comfortably merged with Soviet Russia in a one-
world socialist government. [They are] taking us over by a process so gradual
and insidious that Soviet rule is slipped over so far on the American people,
before they ever realize it is happening, that they can no longer resist the
Communist conspiracy as free citizens, but can resist the Communist tyranny only
by themselves becoming conspirators against established government.

In Welchs view, expanding state power and international engagement in early Cold War
had led to a dramatic erosion of the limited, constitutional republic idolized by
Americanist ideology: we have been steadily taken down the road to Communism by
steps supposedly designed, and presented to the American people, as ways of fighting
Communism. The stakes were high: in apocalyptic terms he described the struggle as a
battle between light and darkness; between freedom and slavery; between the spirit of
Christianity and the spirit of anti-Christ for the souls and bodies of men. And the hour
was late: You have only a few more years, he warned, before the conspiracy succeeds
in subsuming the United States within a world-wide Communist dominion ruled by
police-state methods from the Kremlin.43 Welch advised JBS leadership at the first
meeting of its National Council, the takeover at the top is, for all practical purposes,
virtually complete our federal government is already, literally in the hands of the
Communists. Only in this way could it be understood that our government is helping to
strengthen the Communists and weaken their enemies, everywhere in the world and, as a
result, the United States government is the most important and powerful single force
promoting the world-wide Communist advance.44 Initially seen as an important
participant in the mid-century reconstruction of American conservatism, Welch
subsequently became notorious and by 1965 was disowned by more self-consciously
respectable conservatives such as William F. Buckley after it became public that Welch
claimed President Eisenhower and other prominent cold warriors were themselves
instruments of the Communist conspiracy and could fittingly be accused of treason.45 If
as Welch believed those posing as defenders of capitalism were actually in league with
the Communists, then who could be orchestrating this grand Cold War charade, and for
what purpose? By 1966, Welch and JBS claimed to have resolved this puzzle with still
more byzantine conspiracy theories in which the worldwide communist conspiracy was
but one tentacle of a longer, larger and deeper plot originated in 1776 by Bavarian
professor Adam Weishaupt and the rationalistic, anti-monarchical secret society known
as the Order of Illuminati. Viewed through this conspiracist kaleidoscope, the most
significant world-historical developments of the last few centuries the French
Revolution and Napoleonic wars; Marxism and the worldwide threat of red revolution;
central banking and credit creation; financial speculation and monopoly capital; income
tax harnessed to payment of ever-increasing public debt; economic crises of inflation or
depression; both world wars; colonialism and anti-colonialism; the proto-totalitarian
expansion of government power and emergence of global institutions such as the United
Nations -- all could be understood in terms of the machinations of these master plotters
and their followers. Creating conflicts, exploiting political, religious, and racial divisions,

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the Insiders manipulate the appearance of political struggle so as always to amass

greater wealth and power for themselves. On this view, Americas elite Cold Warriors
were as much a part of the master conspiracy as the Communists themselves.46

It was these fantastic exaggerations, inferences and extrapolations, rather than the initial
positing of a conspiracy of treacherous un-Americans, that earned Welch and the Society
their reputations as cranks. By the early 1960s, top FBI officials regarded JBS as a
fanatical right-wing group with utterly absurd viewpoints.47 Although Hoover
publicly declared that the extreme right is just as much a danger to the freedom of this
country as the extreme left, and the FBI was in possession of key JBS documents and
was well-aware of its activities, the FBI did not vigorously investigate or suppress the
JBS on the grounds that it promoted constitutional government and was not a subversive
organization.48 Assistant Attorney General for Internal Security, Walter Yeagley, quoted
Hoover as saying: We have never investigated the [John Birch] Society. Our
investigations are limited to subversive activities. Hoovers concern was not that JBS
doctrines were contrary to Americanism, but that its most wildly implausible claims
might damage the credibility of the official defenders of Americanism, chief among them
J. Edgar Hoover. By Hoovers lights, Welch and JBS were not un-American, but merely
irresponsible. Hoover sought to disassociate the Bureau from this brand of fanatical
Americanism and began stating publicly that he had no respect for the head of JBS or
the hysterical claims of such amateur anti-subversives.49 Movement conservatives such as
Goldwater, Buckley, and Reagan sought to distance themselves from Welch while hoping
to attract the active support of Americanists who might have been associated with JBS.50

Unofficial Americanism continued to exist in the shadow of official Americanism.

Historian Seth Offenbach concludes: Despite the notoriety of the John Birch Society,
however, many other groups held firm to a similar worldview that argued that
Communisms power within the United States was growing, even if they did not accuse
Eisenhower of treachery.51 In their axiomatic anticommunism and phobia of internal
subversion, the Birchers had at least one foot in the mainstream of American political
life, which had long since been vigorously purging itself of the enemy within. As early as
1947, Harry Truman had declared that sympathetic association with radical or
subversive organizations or causes was sufficient for federal employees to be dismissed
as security risks. That same year, the Taft-Hartley Act required union officials to sign
anticommunist affidavits as a condition for unions to receive legal protections, prompting
a process of purging numerous radical activists and eleven entire unions from the CIO.
And in 1949, the federal government began prosecution of Communist Party leaders
under the Smith Act which made it a federal crime to teach or advocate revolutionary
social change. Over a hundred CP leaders around the country would be convicted under
the Smith Act.52 According to Heale, By 1950 an anticommunist consensus had settled
on American public life. The principal organs of government, the major political parties,
the trades union movement, leading church spokesmen, and many public and private
institutions across the land were agreed that Communists had no legitimate role in
American society. Strong majorities of the public favored criminalization of
Communists.53 Schrecker acknowledges the many ways in which the partys
contradictions and mistakes made it vulnerable, but concludes that the consequences of

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the anticommunist campaign for the broad American left of the Popular Front era were
devastating:

Though the CP itself was to survive the repression unleashed against it, the larger
universe within which the party operated did not. The front groups and labor
unions that were so central to the communist movements dynamism and to
whatever broader influence it had were all destroyed.54

Enabled by the destruction of the labor-based and organized radical left, and the popular
embrace of anticommunism as a core element of Americanism by conservatives and
liberals alike, for almost two decades there was little organized popular opposition to the
deepening Cold War and the U.S. geopolitical project of militarized anticommunism and
globalizing capitalism.

III. Containing a crisis of hegemony: Vietnam and the enemy within

By the late 1960s, the vision of Americanism that had predominated since the early Cold
War was in crisis. After the commitment of U.S. forces in 1965, conservatives of various
stripes had united around a nearly universal commitment to defeating communism in
Vietnam,55 whereas even before the 1968 Tet offensive large portions of the American
public were turning against the Vietnam War and openly questioning its anticommunist
rationale, along with the official narrative of Americas role in the world. In response to
this challenge, defenders of Americanism and supporters of U.S. global military
supremacy invested substantial cultural energy in the re-narration of Americas Vietnam
War as a noble cause, nearly won, except for betrayal by disloyal, un-American elements
within U.S. society. Enormous cultural energy has been, and continues to be, devoted to
the cause of re-narrating Americas Vietnam War so that it can be comfortably
accommodated within the narrative of the intrinsic righteousness of American power. The
historical structures supporting American global power depend for their coherence upon
this assimilation. Further, the particular ways in which this re-narration has been
constructed -- in terms of a mythology of Victory Betrayed in Vietnam -- lends itself to
articulations of populism and militarism. This ideological construction, which I am
calling populist militarism, situates the people on the side of the military and the
troops -- represented as avatars of the people in arms and champions of their intrinsic
righteousness -- and positions critics of militarism as betrayers of the American people
and their values. Articulating U.S. militarism with the values and identity of the
American people, betrayed by implicitly un-American elites and others parasitic upon
the people, this populist-militarist narrative stigmatizes dissenters and authorizes their
marginalization or repression as enemies of the people. Omnipresent in the public
sphere and popular culture in the U.S., the imperative to Support the Troops is fraught
with these ideological connotations. In this way populist-militarism serves as a powerful -
- but contestable and contested ideological support for a political project of national
renewal and U.S. imperial power.

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Since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the early 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover and
Ronald Reagan had seen the student left and the emergent peace movement as
Communist pawns, deliberately manipulated in order to weaken U.S. resolve in the
apocalyptic confrontation with Communism. Despite the certainty of their belief,
vigorous investigation produced no evidence of instigation or coordination by the forces
of international Communism. Yet, Hoover and his collaborators happily spread
disinformation that the student movement was part of a Communist plot (almost
comically, they alleged that Berkeley faculty were key plotters). Along with state and
local authorities, and with the close cooperation of Governor Reagan and Edwin Meese
(initially a local prosecutor and then a close Reagan aid), the feds waged a long-term
campaign to infiltrate, disrupt, and suppress the student movement emerging at Berkeley,
which Reagan described as the fruit of appeasement, and later accused of treason --
giving aid and comfort to the enemy in Vietnam.56 Beginning in the Johnson
administration and intensifying under Nixon, the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence
investigated, infiltrated and harassed antiwar organizations across the nation, opened mail
and intercepted telephone conversations, and compiled dossiers on hundreds of thousands
of activists. By 1968, this anti-subversive campaign had morphed into COINTELPRO
New Left, ordered by Hoover to expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize the activities
of the various New Left organizations, their leadership and adherents. The
organizations and activists who spout revolution and unlawfully challenge society to
obtain their demands must not only be contained, but must be neutralized.57

As Nixons policies prolonged and expanded the war to obtain what he called peace
with honor, the antiwar movement reached its peak with massive demonstrations in
1969-70. From the White House, Nixon addressed the nation, counter posing the patriotic
perseverance of the silent majority with protests demanding precipitate U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam, and implying that the latter constituted a betrayal:

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us
understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only
Americans can do that.58

As he expanded the war with a major U.S. offensive into Cambodia in 1970, Nixon urged
his staff to counteract antiwar messages with the following talking point: Dont stab our
men in the back while they are fighting for this country in Vietnam. Nixon wanted
protesters described as giving aid and comfort to the enemy deliberately invoking the
constitutionally specified definition of treason.59

Elected to the presidency in the aftermath of the Iran hostage crisis, which many
Americans viewed as a national humiliation, Ronald Reagan promised to strengthen the
nations military so that America could once again stand tall in the world and
vigorously support the cause of liberty with American power. Integral to this agenda was
putting the Vietnam conflict of recent memory in the proper context, to which Reagans
famously sentimental attitude toward American history and notoriously flawed memory
was especially well-suited. Speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars about the need to
confront Soviet Communism with a strategy of peace through strength, presidential

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candidate Reagan provided a comprehensive re-narration of the Vietnam War which

reactivated a dichotomous Cold War world view, restored America to its position of
righteousness, redeemed Americas fighting men, and placed the blame for wars
outcome on those who had opposed it. Almost entirely erroneous, Reagans fable of
Vietnam was nonetheless compelling insofar as it resonated with self-understandings
deeply embedded in popular common sense and tied them together into a more-or-less
coherent narrative that seemed to make sense of an otherwise dauntingly complex and
morally challenging historical conjuncture. For too long, Reagan told the Veterans,
we have lived with the Vietnam Syndrome.

Much of that syndrome has been created by the North Vietnamese aggressors
Over and over they told us for nearly ten years that we were the aggressors bent
on imperialistic conquests. They had a plan. It was to win in the field of
propaganda here in America what they could not win on the field of battle in
Vietnam It is time we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause. A small
country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and
the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest. We
dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we
give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful, and we
have been shabby in our treatment of those who returned. They fought as well and
as bravely as any Americans have ever fought in any war. They deserve our
gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern.

The lesson of Vietnam, Reagan continued, is that we will never again ask young men to
fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win. 60 Americans
cannot allow their forces in the field to be undercut by those among us who are disloyal
or dupes of anti-American propaganda. Writing in 1977, Reagan vowed that whenever
again men are asked to fight and die for this nation, the voice of the traitor will not be
allowed.61 As President, Reagan continued to repeat these themes. Presenting the Medal
of Honor to a soldier who had performed heroically in Vietnam, Reagan summarized the
Vietnam experience in terms which suggested that the military had been betrayed by
civilians and by their civilian leadership: Several years ago, we brought home a group of
American fighting men who had obeyed their countrys call and who had fought as
bravely and as well as any Americans in our history. They came home without a victory
not because theyd been defeated, but because theyd been denied permission to win.62
Later, Reagan suggested that the American military won its battles in Vietnam, so it was
misleading to portray the war as having been lost: We didnt lose that war. We won
virtually every engagement.63 But despite the militarys putative successes, the media
distorted the truth about victory in the noble cause, the public became disaffected and, in
the end, Congress forbade funding for the military support that might have enabled South
Vietnam to withstand the Northern offensive of 1975. American warriors, South
Vietnamese anti-Communists, and ideals of freedom were betrayed by domestic
opponents of the war and weak-willed politicians.

Such narratives of troops undermined and abandoned, and victory betrayed, became
commonplace in the popular culture of the 1980s. As Bruce Franklin has documented,

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this basic plot line was replicated in numerous movies, television shows, pulp novels and
other popular media. Franklins history of this culturally resonant mythology of the
Vietnam war suggests that it originated in the Nixon administrations attempt to construct
a publicly acceptable rationale for continuing the war until a politically face-saving exit
could be contrived. His research found not a shred of verifiable evidence that live
POWs were still held in Vietnam.64 Yet, By the end of the 1980s, the POW/MIA myth
had emerged from American popular culture in the shape of an ominous Frankensteins
monster beginning to haunt its ingenious creators in Washington.65 According to Bruce
Franklin, by 1991 69 percent of Americans surveyed in a Wall Street Journal / NBC
News poll believed that Americans [were] still prisoners of war in Southeast Asia and 52
percent of those surveyed are convinced that the government is not doing enough to get
them back. The mythology suggesting that men officially listed as Missing in Action
are actually held as POWs is firmly anchored in public imagination, politicians pay ritual
homage to the lobby groups which have emerged around this non-issue, and POW-MIA
flags fly from public buildings and patriotic private properties across the country.
According to historian Michael Allen, belief in POW/MIA abandonment was so serious
and widespread as to alter U.S. politics and foreign policy for over four decades.66

To those who claimed that martial values, racial arrogance, or patriotic orthodoxy
had led the nation astray in Vietnam, POW and MIA families argued the opposite:
that decadent and disloyal domestic elements were responsible for the debacle in
Vietnam, and accountable for the men lost there. Such an argument casts critics of
the war as enemies within who must be silenced or purged before the nation could
return to its proper foundations.67

Again, it may be instructive to compare these popular betrayal narratives with the
conspiracy theories identified with the so-called lunatic fringe of the far-right. Robert
Welch and JBS were initially skeptical of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, seeing the war as
another pretext for conspiratorial Insiders secretly in league with the Communists -- to
further enhance and justify the increasingly totalitarian state powers at their disposal.
Once U.S. forces were committed and conservatives had rallied around the war effort,
Welch modified his position into a pair of rhetorical questions: if the United States is not
winning the war, why not? And if the United States government will not do what is
necessary to win, what are U.S. troops fighting for?68 Welch suggested that several
administrations and politicians of both parties had been complicit in a deliberate policy of
bipartisan treason which has resulted in the deliberate, conscious, and coldblooded
murder of American servicemen ostensibly sent to fight communism in Vietnam.

Is it possible that [the most powerful nation on earth] cannot lick a puny bunch of
half-starved guerillas in a country the size of Missouri? Is the war in Vietnam,
with its actions on both sides controlled by the Communists according to a
blueprint in advance, actually a long planned and vital part of Communist strategy
for the final steps in the Communist take-over of the United States and with it the
rest of the world? Is the obvious lack of any will to win, on the part of the
Administration, really something far worse, and part of a carefully planned design

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not to win, imposed on us by the Communist influences which are running the
show?

To avoid this long-term stalemate-driven descent into totalitarianism, Welch calls for the
U.S. to Go ahead and win this war, promptly and conclusively, an outcome which
could be obtained in a very few months once Washington has the will to win forced
upon it by an aroused citizenry. And then, bring our boys home.69

But the Insiders in government were only one side of the conspiratorial forces at work.
According to JBS dogma, ostensibly radical anti-war protesters were also integral to the
plot, prolonging the war by weakening American will, creating domestic unrest and
providing yet another pretext for expansion of state power at home. Congressman John
G. Schmitz was a member of the John Birch Society and wrote the Introduction to Gary
Allens notorious book, None Dare Call it Conspiracy. In a 1971 Congressional report,
Schmitz claimed to expose those who operate behind the scenes to organize and control
the direction of major antiwar protest in this country, an effort he saw as part and
parcel of a well-organized and viciously conceived international Communist-led
campaign to hamstring the United States and destroy our will to resist Communist
aggression, not only in Vietnam but around the world. As seen by JBS, middle-class
Americanism was caught in a vise, squeezed between elite treachery in the highest
echelons of government and radicals demonstrating in the streets, all militating toward
the expansion of tyrannical state power that JBS equated with Communist conspiracy. 70
Profound suspicion of the wars managers, as well as those who protested against it,
hardly distinguished Birchers from the mainstream of the American right.

Conclusion

Drawing on the cultural reservoir of popular common sense, far-right ideologies of

Americanism have constructed images of internal and external enemies in ways that
enabled and shaped the historical structures of American global power by creating a
culture of imperial consent. This has occurred through episodes in which those meanings
were actively contested, in which significant alternatives were present in American
political discourse and important social forces dissented from the imperial project, until
these were socially stigmatized as beyond the limits of acceptable Americanism and
repressed by official and unofficial means, in public and in secret. Americas continuing
Global War on Terror has been enabled by far-right discourses of betrayal by the
liberal, multi-cultural left, and the correlative cultural imperative to support the
troops.71 In each of these episodes, conservative and far-right individuals and groups
participated actively in larger processes of political culture through which social
identities of Americanism and un-Americanism have been constructed, generating
narratives of Americanisms betrayal by enemies within, and authorizing the cultural
marginalization and official suppression of those who have dissented from the project of
imperial power. Shaping the politics of coercion and consent, far-right ideologies of

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Americanism have been integral to the construction of a hegemonic imperial project in

the U.S.

Notes
1
Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York:
Guilford, 2000); Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in
Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Michael Barkun, A Culture
of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006). Popular classics of the conspiracy genre include Larry Abraham,
Call it Conspiracy (Seattle: Double A Publications, 1985); and Pat Robertson, The New
World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991). Major contemporary conspiracy mongers
include Glenn Beck and theblaze.com, Alex Jones and infowars.com, and (for the
Reptilian variation) David Icke of davidicke.com.
2
Samuel Brenner, Fellow Travelers: Overlap between Mainstream and Extremist
Conservatives in the Early 1960s, in L. Gifford and D. Williams, editors, The Right Side
of the Sixties (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 84.
3
Public Policy Polling, Democrats and Republicans Differ on Conspiracy Theory
Beliefs, Raleigh, North Carolina, April 2, 2013, online at
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/04/conspiracy-theory-poll-results-.html.
Accessed May 2, 2013. Fairleigh Dickinson Public Mind Poll, Beliefs about Sandy
Hook Coverup, Coming Revolution Underlie Divide on Gun Control, Madison, NJ, May
1, 2013, online at http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2013/guncontrol/. Accessed May 2, 2013.
4
Brenner, Fellow Travelers, p. 87.
5
Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the
United States (New York: Guilford, 1995), pp. 6-7.
6
Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008), pp. 1-2.
7
Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3, 9.
8
This is the central theme of David Neiwert, The Eliminationists (Sausalito, CA:
PoliPoint Press, 2009). On the centrality of betrayal narratives (the notorious stab-in-
the-back) for the Nazi political project of purgative national renewal, militarization, and
genocidal aggression see Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (New York: Norton,
1998), pp. 87-105, 240-253; Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis (New York: Norton,
2000), pp. 63, 461-494, 821-822; and Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich
(London, Penguin, 2003), pp. 60-76, 168-175, 197-199.

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9
Gramscis iconic works are his Prison Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections
from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (New York:
International Publishers, 1971). On ideological struggle and popular common sense, see
especially pp. 323-34, 344-45, 419-25. The quoted passage is from p. 422.
10
Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 116-17.
11
M.J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970.
Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Ellen Schrecker, Many are the
Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998).
12
The anti-fascist Popular Front was interrupted by the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact
of 1939, at which point CPUSA members were obliged to oppose anti-fascist policies in
the name of peace. For many CP activists and sympathizers, this reversal of party line
provoked serious crises of conscience and even breaks with the Party. Others rationalized
it as a defensive expedient necessary to defend the homeland of global socialism in a time
when the West was as yet unwilling to confront Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR
isolated and compelled to fend for itself. This torturous moral ambivalence ended when
Hitler launched his war of extermination against the Soviet Union in 1941, and CP
members and sympathizers became some of the most ardent advocates of military victory
over fascism and supporters of the allied war effort. This apparently amoral dance, so
obviously following Moscows tune, did little to bolster the Partys credibility as an
authentic representative of indigenous social forces, i.e., twentieth-century
Americanism: Maurice Isserman, If I had a Hammer: the Death of the Old Left and the
Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), chapter 1; Heale, American Anti-
Communism, pp. 124-29; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 12-17.
13
Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the
Spanish Civil War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 204.
14
Mark Rupert, Producing Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
15
Isserman, Hammer; Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers
Unions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Schrecker, Many are the Crimes,
pp. 3-41.
16
On Cold War spies see Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI failed in
counterintelligence but promoted the politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years
(Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002); Ellen Schrecker, "Stealing Secrets: Communism and Soviet
Espionage in the 1940s," North Carolina Law Review 82, 5 (June 2004): 101-47; Maurice
Isserman and Ellen Schrecker, Papers of a Dangerous Tendency, in Cold War
Triumphalism, edited by Ellen Schrecker (New York: New Press, 2004), pp.49-173; R.
Bruce Craig, Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2004); Allen Hornblum, The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man

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who gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Benn
Steil, Red White: Why A Founding Father of Postwar Capitalism Spied for the Soviets,
Foreign Affairs, March-April 2013. Online at
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138847/benn-steil/red-white. Accessed March 15,
2013.
17
KGB memo quoted in Isserman and Schrecker, Papers of a Dangerous Tendency, p.
169.
18
Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 4-5.
19
Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Activities and
Propaganda, January 3, 1939 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office), pp. 10,
12.
20
J. Edgar Hoover, Testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities,
Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, March 26,
1947 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), pp. 33, 35, 37, 43.
21
J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), pp. 48, 95, 181,
185. This book was written for Hoover by FBI Domestic Intelligence staff, published by
a conservative crony who owned a publishing house, and eventually sold well over two
million copies including bulk purchases by patriotic organizations such as the American
Legion. The revenues from the book brought Hoover a modest fortune. See Athan
Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American
Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 311-12; Tim Weiner,
Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 202-203.
22
Hoover, Masters of Deceit, p. 297.
23
Hoover, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda, p. 37.
24
On the FBIs routinized law-breaking, see Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 9-18, 169-
75, 257-61, 308-9, 312-13, 362, 393-95, 413-416, 426; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes,
pp. 223-34; Weiner, Enemies, pp. 73-77, 86-90, 115, 134, 155, 164-65, 191-97, 265-70,
282, 335-36; Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBIs War on Student Radicals and
Reagans Rise to Power (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 21-22, 89, 140-
41, 144-45.
25
Hoover memo quoted in Weiner, Enemies, pp. 85-6.
26
Quotation from Rosenfeld, Subversives, p. 201. On the Custodial Detention Program
and Security Index, see Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 172-74; Schrecker, Many are
the Crimes, pp. 106-107, 208, 234; Weiner, Enemies, pp. 83-86, 121-24, 144-45, 160-62,
190; Rosenfeld, Subversives, pp. 71-72, 177, 201, 254, 287.

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27
Weiner, Enemies, pp. 195-96. See also Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 312-313;
Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, p. 227, 414.
28
Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 355-60; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, p. 395;
Weiner, Enemies, pp. 197-201, 230-36.
29
On Hoover and Congressional red-hunters, see Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 203,
250-256, 261-62, 275, 279-93; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 214-16 ; Weiner,
Enemies, pp. 148-50, 157-59, 182-87; Rosenfeld, Subversives, pp. 88-9.
30
Schrecker estimates that between ten and twelve thousand people lost their jobs as a
result of this kind of FBI action: Many are the Crimes, p. 363. See also Weiner, Enemies,
pp. 176; Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, p. 217; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 211-
213, 221, 272-73; Rosenfeld, Subversives, pp. 28-32.
31
Quotations are from Barbara Epstein, Anti-Communism, Homophobia, and the
Construction of Masculinity in the Postwar U.S., Critical Sociology 20, 3 (1994), p. 41;
and Weiner, Enemies, pp. 175.
32
In other words, the wage dependence implicit in capitalist class relations was
deliberately deployed as an instrument of political repression.
33
Heale, American Anticommunism, p. 66 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 61-64.
34
National Americanism Commission of the American Legion, Isms: A Review of Alien
Isms, Revolutionary Communism and their Active Sympathizers in the United States
(Indianapolis: American Legion, 1937), pp. 5, 11, 285. On the FBIs long-term
relationship with the Legion as informer and propagandist against subversives, as a see
Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 193-198, 216; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp.
217.
35
James F. ONeil, How You Can Fight Communism, American Legion Magazine,
August 1948, reprinted in Schrecker, ed., Age of McCarthyism, pp. 124-5.
36
Heale, American Anticommunism, p. 173.
37
Chamber of Commerce of the United States, Communist Infiltration in the United
States, Washington D.C., September 1946, pp. 2, 5, 12, 38. On Cronins authorship, and
his relationship with the FBI and Nixon, see Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, pp. 217-218,
251; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, p. 214; Weiner, Enemies, pp. 147-48
38
Chamber, Communist Infiltration, pp. 34-35.
39
Billy Graham quoted in Heale, American Anticommunism, p. 171.

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40
On the important role of the Catholic Church in the anticommunist network, see
Heale, American Anticommunism, p. 172; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 72-75,
216-17.
41
Speech delivered by Senator Joseph McCarthy before the Senate on June 14, 1951,
abridged version published online as part of the Modern History Sourcebook by Paul
Halsall of Fordham University: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1951mccarthy-
marshall.html. Accessed May 7, 2013. McCarthys 1951 Senate speech was republished
by the John Birch Societys Americanist Library under the title Americas Retreat from
Victory (Boston: Western Islands Press, 1965).
42
David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York:
Free Press, 1983), esp. pp. 191-202; Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 240-65; Heale,
American Anticommunism, pp. 157-161.
43
The Societys founding document is Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch
Society, 9th printing, 1961, quotations from pp. i, 9, 24, 29, 30, 31, 39, 100. For JBS
history, see Diamond, Roads to Dominion, pp. 52-58; Goldberg, Enemies Within, pp. 37-
65; and Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 110-119, 153-57.
44
Robert Welch, A Confidential Report to the Members of the Council of the John
Birch Society, January 1960. Along with other documents relating to anticommunism
and right-wing movements, this typed JBS memo was archived by independent scholar
Ernie Lazar. Lazars full archive is housed in the Tamiment Library at New York
University. I accessed a scanned copy of this JBS Confidential Report posted on
Lazars web page: https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/jbs-1. Accessed May 22,
2013. I am very grateful to Mr. Lazar for making these materials available to the public,
and for detailed interpretive notes in which he draws on materials from the entire archive.
45
For Welchs use of the word treason in his manuscript, The Politician, see Lazars
web page: https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/jbs-1. On Buckleys role in Welchs
marginalization, see Carl Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of
American Conservatism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011), pp. 174-221.
46
Note that legends of the Illuminati and conspiratorial secret societies have been an
established part of American political culture since the founding: see David Bennett,
Party of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 22-26; Welch was not so much an
originator as a re-animator of these legends: see Robert Welch, The Truth in Time,
originally published in American Opinion, November 1966, reprinted in the 2012 edition
of the Blue Book of the John Birch Society, pp. 167-97. For a more recent statement of
the official JBS version of conspiracy theory, see John F. McManus, The Insiders:
Architects of the New World Order (Appleton, WI: John Birch Society, 1995); also
William H. McIlhany, A Primer on the Illuminati, The New American, June 12, 2009,

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online at http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4660-a-primer-on-the-
illuminati. Accessed May 4, 2013.
47
FBI memo quoted in Rosenfeld, Subversives, p. 304.
48
The quotation is from Hoover, testimony dated May 14, 1964, Hearings Before the
Presidents Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy [Warren
Commission], Volume 5, p. 101, online at http://www.history-
matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh5/pdf/WH5_Hoover.pdf . Accessed May 22,
2013. On the official FBI stance toward the JBS, see Clyde Tolson to Hoover, November
20, 1964; Hoover to Robert Welch, November 24, 1964. On FBI knowledge of JBS, its
key documents and activities, see memos to Special Agents in Charge (SAC): SAC Letter
59-13, March 25, 1959; SAC letter 60-5, January 26, 1960; and SAC letter 61-14, March
21, 1961. These FBI documents were obtained by Ernie Lazar through Freedom of
Information Act requests. Scanned copies on Lazar web page:
https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/jbs-1. Accessed May 22, 2013.
49
Hoover quoted in Assistant Attorney General Yeagley letter (recipient redacted) dated
February 19, 1965. The statement Yeagley attributes to Hoover is supported by the SAC
letters cited above. For the language of no respect see Tolson memo to Hoover,
November 20, 1964, and Hoover letter to Welch, November 23, 1964. Scanned copies on
Lazars web page: https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/jbs-1. Accessed May 22,
2013.
50
Diamond, Roads to Dominion, pp. 63-4, 148; Perlstein, Before the Storm, pp. 153-56,
166, Bogus, Buckley pp. 174-221; Rosenfeld, Subversives, pp. 303-4; Brenner, Fellow
Travelers, pp. 92-96.
51
Seth Offenbach, Defending Freedom in Vietnam: A Conservative Dilemma in
Gifford and Williams, editors, The Right Side of the Sixties, p. 205. Also Brenner,
Fellow Travelers.
52
The quotation above is from Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, p. 190. On the Smith Act
trials, see Schrecker, pp. 190-200; Heale, American Anticommunism, pp. 142, 162-3.
53
Heale, American Anticommunism, pp. 167, 183.
54
Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 41.
55
Offenbach, Defending Freedom in Vietnam, p. 216.
56
Rosenfeld, Subversives. For fruit of appeasement, see p. 301; aid and comfort, p.
386.

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57
Hoover memo quoted in Rosenfeld, Subversives, p. 414. See also Weiner, Enemies,
pp. 264-5, 274-5; and Geoffrey Stone, The Vietnam War: Spying on Americans, in
Daniel Farber, editor, Security v. Liberty (New York: Russell Sage, 2008), pp. 95-114.
58
Richard Nixon, Address to the nation on Vietnamization, November 3, 1969.
vietnam.vassar.edu/doc14.html. Accessed August 3, 2010.
59
Nixon quotations from Susan Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and
Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 217;
and Rick Perlstein, Operation Barbarella, London Review of Books, November 17,
2005. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/rick-perlstein/operation-barbarella. Accessed
February 4, 2013. See also Weiner, Enemies, pp. 279-87.
60
Ronald Reagan, Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety, Address to Veterans of
Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, Il, August 18, 1980.
www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/8.18.80.html, accessed 6/04/2010. On
Reagans role in re-imagining the Vietnam War, see H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and
other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Pres, 2000), p. 41-2;
Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 105-108; and Michael Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs,
and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),
pp. 212-219.
61
Reagan quoted in Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, p. 192.
62
Ronald Reagan, Remarks on Presenting the Medal of Honor to Master Sergeant Roy
Benavidez, February 24, 1981. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=43454,
accessed 6/04/2010.
63
Ronald Reagan, Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Regional Editors
and Broadcasters, April 18, 1985. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=38498,
accessed 6/04/2010.
64
H. Bruce Franklin, MIA or Mythmaking in America (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill
Books, 1992), pp. xi, 169. On the deliberate manipulation of the issue by the Nixon
administration, see also Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, chapter 1.
65
Franklin, Vietnam and other American Fantasies, p. 196.
66
Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, p. 1.
67
Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, p. 7.
68
Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 148; Bogus, Buckley, pp. 195-96, 307-25.

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69
Robert Welch, The Truth about Vietnam (Boston: Western Islands Press, 1967), pp. 1,
2, 7, 13, 19-20. See also New York Times, Welch Says U.S. is not trying to Win or End
War in Vietnam, March 11, 1967.
70
Hon. John G. Schmitz, The Viet Cong Front in the United States (Boston: Western
Islands Press, 1971), p 2. The Birch Society republished the text of Schmitzs report of
the House Internal Security Committee originally entitled The Second Front of the
Vietnam War: Communist Subversion in the Peace Movement. For the populist imagery
of middle-class Americanism squeezed in a conspiratorial vise, see Abraham, Call it
Conspiracy, p. 138.
71
These themes are explored at greater length in Mark Rupert, Support the Troops:
Populist Militarism and the Cultural Reproduction of Imperial Power, Syracuse
University, http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/merupert/Populist%20Militarism.pdf.

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