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This part aims to add depth and detail to less-familiar portraits of Hoover as a young militant, and to establish the character of the also young law enforcement agency he joined in the wake of World War I. Explaining why Hoover and the Bureau began to pursue African American writing, it presents the first of five theses: namely, The birth of the Bureau, coupled with the birth of J. Edgar Hoover, ensured the FBI's attention to African American literature. Section 1 recounts how the pre-Hoover Bureau emerged amid the social divisions of early twentieth-century America, and how it cultivated both literary publicity and public anti-New Negroism to whet an undivided national appetite for federal policing. Section 2 examines how the pre-Bureau Hoover managed his surprising familiarity with Afro-America. Section 3 establishes that with Hoover's hiring by the Bureau during the first Red Scare and the dawn of Harlem's cultural rebirth, the FBI's racial and literary preoccupations only deepened. Under Hoover's watch, the earliest Harlem Renaissance writing became the common passion of Bureau anti-New Negroism and “lit.-cop federalism,” the latter defined as the effort to inject a compelling federal police presence into the U.S. print public sphere.

Retracing some of the main lines of FBI history, this part demonstrates how Bureau counterliterature was stamped by four distinct phases of the institution's developing Hoover era, altogether long enough to form a kind of police Mesozoic. It examines the glamorous and violent phase of Bureau history between the New Deal and the early 1940s. It then analyzes the changing shape of Bureau counterliterature during World War II, and does the same for the McCarthy period. Finally, it reviews the creative upheaval in Bureau counterliterature during the Black Power 1960s and 1970s. Author files and adjoining documents disclose that Hoover's FBI, the principal custodian of “lit.-cop federalism,” angled during all these phases to enlarge the state's ability to determine aesthetic value, scheming and networking like some National Endowment for Artistic Gumshoes. But these documents likewise show that his Bureau pursued changeable, art-educated enhancements of police tactics, converting varying currencies of literary capital into novel forms of criminological capital. Through both types of meddling, the Bureau paved the way to this book's second thesis, of necessity its most historically sprawling: The FBI's aggressive filing and long study of African American writers was tightly bound to the agency's successful evolution under Hoover.

This part illuminates the interpretive assumptions of Bureau ghostreading against the backdrop of the best-documented entanglement of American criticism with American espionage: namely, the firsthand stamp of the New Criticism on the counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Section 1 explores CIA-endorsed formalism, its high-wire, Yale-rooted history, which was eventually integrated into FBI critical practice. Section 2 confirms that the Bureau ghostreaders cobbled together a distinct mode of FBI reading decades before the CIA's creation, a didactic yet meticulous biohistoricism in sympathy with academic schools of the late 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Section 3 looks into the background and outlook of the FBI agents tasked with criticizing Afro-modernism. Finally, section 4 assesses the impact of FBI ghostreading on an interested non-Bureau audience: the self-appointed model citizens who turned to Hoover as a literary-critical wise man and potential literary-critical collaborator. This part proposes the third and thus far most literary of the five theses: The FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature.

This part argues that Afro-modernist literature “pre-responded” to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications with growing bluntness and embellishment over the years from 1919 to 1972 and beyond. Thus, the fifth and last of the book's five theses, and the one that finally involves closer encounters with black poems, stories, essays, and novels than with their silhouettes in FBI files: Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature. Section 1 examines decisive responses to FBI surveillance in both the early journalism and the foundational poetry of the Harlem movement. Section 2 charts the FBI's migrant status in Afro-modernism from the mid-1930s through the early Cold War. Section 3 focuses on the expatriate trio of Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes, and their interlocking fictions of Paris noir in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Section 4 widens its focus, owing to the profusion of black Bureau writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final section sketches African American literature's less heated skirmish with the FBI after Hoover's death—a skirmish now led by black women including Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor.

This chapter surveys the defining debates on the historiography of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It argues that books about the FBI were, for a long time, little more than sycophantic biographies of J. Edgar Hoover. Some works, were sponsored by Hoover himself, who was keen to promote the comic-strip image of a well-oiled machine, peopled by G-Men gunning down gangsters and thwarting communists with the latest scientific techniques. Newly available sources deepened historical understandings of the Bureau and shifted the narrative away from the image of one-dimensional, heroic ‘G-men’ towards nuanced depictions of an organization struggling to maintain order and security amid challenges such as the Cold War, racism and postmodernism. In recent years, historians have moved away from political histories, crafting labour and cultural histories.

Crime first became a major national issue in the 1964 presidential contest between incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican challenger Barry Goldwater. The rising crime rates prompted Goldwater to speak frequently about the problem. Johnson won the election handily, but he recognized the seriousness of the issue and named a blue‐ribbon commission on law enforcement and the administration of justice to study it. The study panel was resisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, but it proceeded nevertheless. The commission's 1967 report laid out a compelling critique of the criminal justice system but watered down many of its long list of recommendations. Still, it established the groundwork for shifting anticrime policy from what had been predominantly a local issue to a federal focus.

This introductory chapter first discusses the FBI's surveillance African American writers and imitation of black prose as part of its struggle against African American protest. It argues that unlike nearly every other institution of U.S. literary study, prone to showing interest only during well-promoted black renaissances, the Bureau rarely took its eyes off the latest in African American writing between 1919 and 1972. And during this more-than-fifty-year period, the whole of its Hoover era, it never dismissed this writing as an impractical vogue relevant only to blacks (or to bleeding-heart white “Negrotarians,” for that matter). Relying on dueling public documents of African American literature and FBI literary commentary, the book helps establish their surprising depth of contact between spy-critics and black Bureau writers. An overview of the four parts of the book is also presented.

This chapter analyzes the effect of the anti-Communist campaign on the screen. There were two strains of anti-Communist films. The first followed the insights of Ayn Rand and is represented most notably by the film version of her novel, The Fountainhead (1943). On the other hand, J. Edgar Hoover's brand of anti-Communism talked about the role of American institutions—the government, the church, and the traditional, patriarchal nuclear family—as safeguards against Communist subversion. “Hooverism” therefore shaped the anti-Communist films far more than “Randism.” Hoover's mark was especially prevalent in anti-Communist “B” films, such as Robert G. Springsteen's The Red Menace (1949), Gordon Douglas's I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951), Leo McCarey's My Son John (1952), and Edward Ludwig's Big Jim McLain (1952); but it was also evident in such artistic achievements as Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954).

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.

Ezra Taft Benson brazenly asserted that Martin Luther King was a communist agent. Thus, Benson rejected the civil rights movement, claiming that it was an invitation to promote communist aims and organizations. In specific, Benson feared that the unrest unleashed by the “civil rights agitators,” as he called them, would lead to a revolution that would ultimately produce a worldwide depression and a catastrophic failure of money markets in the United States. For Benson, then, the civil rights movement was not about black rights but about communists using them as a pawn to undermine American institutions. This essay traces Benson’s views on civil rights, specifically Birch Society founder Robert Welch and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s influence on Benson’s racialist thinking.

The nature of anticommunism and the state of conservatism were called into question at the end of the 1950s. Developments between 1957 and 1961 convinced some Americans that not only were communists and liberals making gains but that American institutions often aided and abetted the enemy's cause. It was in such an explosive atmosphere that the Supreme Court and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev acted as flint and tinder, igniting a political brush fire that resisted repeated dousings, which grew until the entire nation took note. “Red Monday” is the day that referred to the three decisions handed down by the Court. By the end of the 1950s, the Cold War confrontation between American and Soviet diplomacy had reached new heights, with the rivalry extending to cultural, scientific, and economic arenas. The Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover is discussed. After more than four years of assaults on conservative ideology in America, optimistic individuals became keystones and leaders in a burgeoning movement.

Chapter 2 begins with an analysis of Baldwin’s substantial FBI files in order to raise several related points. Why did the Bureau monitor Baldwin so closely? What can his files tell us about Baldwin and about the way African-American writers were viewed by the authorities during the civil rights movement? Can we read the files as a political biography of Baldwin? Or do the FBI files simply tell us much more about the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover-particularly, in their dubious activity during the struggle for civil rights? The chapter then examines Baldwin’s involvement in black radical politics and explores the ways that his race and sexuality impacted his reputation and development as a writer, particularly as the Black Power movement gathered momentum in the late 1960s.

Chapter 2 analyzes the relationship between the anticommunist rank-and-file movement within Teamsters Local 544 (the Committee of 100) and the FBI that turned an internal union fight into a criminal case by the summer of 1941. James Bartlett and Tommy Williams, leaders of this anticommunist group, accused Vincent Dunne, Harry DeBoer, Emil Hansen, and other union leaders affiliated with the SWP of sacrificing the local’s interests to those of the party. The accused union leaders disagreed, arguing that Bartlett and Williams’s opposition was based not on a concern for democracy, but on a naked desire to seize control of the local. This chapter explores the complexity of early labor anticommunism within the context of the deepening crisis of the war in Europe and Roosevelt’s expanding preparedness plan at home. It examines the history of the split within Local 544-AFL that resulted in the creation of Local 544-CIO, against the wishes of Teamsters president Daniel Tobin. And it reveals the role of the Justice Department and the FBI (in particular of Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover) in selecting Local 544-CIO and the SWP as the first targets of the Smith Act because of the alleged threat they posed to national security.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the red scare in Hollywood, during which suspected Communist artists and entertainers faced the inquisitorial House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). In its internal records, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) consistently listed the threat of Communist propaganda as the prime justification for its investigation and surveillance of the motion picture industry. Indeed, during World War II, Hollywood Communists found more opportunities to bring some of their ideals to the screen. Through film they projected images of a postwar world deeply in conflict with the beliefs and attitudes of conservatives such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his Hollywood collaborators in the Motion Picture Alliance (MPA). Moreover, Communist Party members and their liberal allies sought to use film to critique society, promote reform, and provide a moral justification for the war in keeping with a left/liberal vision of progress.

As the newly appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (BI), J. Edgar Hoover aimed to rehabilitate the BI's reputation. During his tenure, Hoover fired crooked agents and shut down the BI's political policing operations. Enforcing federal law, and not chasing radicals, became the BI's policy. Even though the relationship between the BI and AFL had ended, the AFL continued its commonsense approach to contain Communism, attacking whenever Communists reared their heads inside unions.

This chapter examines the repercussions that resulted when King and Hughes were repeatedly accused of being subversive. After providing insight into how Hughes earned his subversive reputation with his links to communism and the Communist Party, the chapter charts the FBI’s interest in figures associated with King such as Stanley Levison, Jack O’Dell, and Bayard Rustin. King’s philosophical understanding of Marxism and the vindictive and personal attacks by J. Edgar Hoover against each of these men establishes the root source of these accusations of subversion. These accusations are one of the reasons why Hughes’s poems were often sub-merged in King’s rhetoric.

This chapter focuses on the FBI's organizational structure, at both the national and local level. It then examines the flow of communication within the Bureau itself to discover the underlying logic of COINTELPRO activity. The chapter argues that, just as it is problematic to conceive of the state as a unitary entity carrying out the directives of its executive, so we should avoid the trap of viewing FBI repression as a direct consequence of Hoover's preferences. Instead, we need to better understand the complex organization of the FBI itself.