A Reading List on Radicalism and Law Enforcement

People seem sort of interested in these books, so here are a few recommendations from my own collection

I’m going to stay away from reference books here, but this is a list of some of the books that have shaped the way I think about these things. I think I’m fairly moderate, maybe slightly revisionist—none of this is all that out there—but I suppose it isn’t really for me to say. One thing many people may not appreciate is how much this field has changed in the last 10-15 years. Political people certainly do not.

The basics

• Anything by Richard Gid Powers. His biography of J. Edgar Hoover and Broken, a history of the FBI, are both very good. Not Without Honor is also one of the few treatments of the anti-communist movement that’s both fair and serious.

• Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848, by Adam Zamoyski, 2015
  I posted about this book a few months ago on this blog, it’s very good and very readable.

• To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement, by Robert Churchill, 2009
  This is the best academic treatment of the militia phenomenon, which is very sensitive to the struggle between their potential for violence and their unmistakeable presence in the U.S. Constitution and the Whig radicalism that informed many of the Founding Fathers.

• Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan, by Athan Theoharis, 1978
  Theoharis died a couple of years ago, but he was a widely respected center-left critic of the FBI.

• Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790-1988, by Bernard Porter, 1989
  A good, wide-ranging study that goes back a long ways. The author also wrote a history of Special Branch that’s quite good.

• The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, by Trevor Aaronson, 2013
  One of the best War on Terror books, to my mind, about some of the FBI’s bad cases in this era.

• Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe: Political Extremism in America, by John George and Laird Wilcox, 1992
  A wide-ranging book that deals seriously with the civil liberties issues surrounding political extremism.

On the far-left

• Basically anything by Klehr and Haynes is more or less canonical in this area. They fought an uphill historiographical battle, but at this point I think it’s fair to say they won it.

• The two books by Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher, about FBI infiltration in general and of a Maoist radical group that splintered off from the New Left, are very good, published in 2015 and 2018.

• The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain, by Tony Bunyan, 1976
  This is canonical, for sure.

• The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the U.S. Government, by James Burnham, 1959
  This is James Burnham’s partly first-person account of what various congressional committees uncovered about communists in the federal government. The thing to pay attention to is his palpable sense of frustration.

• True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy, by Scott Carmichael, 2007
  The author was the case agent for the Montes investigation.

• 50 Years of Covert Operations in the U.S: Washington’s Political Police and the American Working Class, by Larry Seigle, Farrell Dobbs, and Steve Clark, 2014
  A good work of Trotskyist outrage-mongering.

• A Spy in Canaan: How the FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, by Marc Perrusquia, 2017
  This one made serious waves in lefty circles when it came out, a study of Ernest Withers.

• It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America, by Brad and Ruth Schulz, 1989
  An oral history of political repression, mostly of lefties.

• American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, by Robert Justin Goldstein, 2008
  The author has done a number of interesting books, but this is the most interesting from the standpoint of American legal history.

• Undercover Girl: The Lesbian Informant Who Helped the FBI Bring Down the Communist Party, by Lisa E. Davis, 2017
  Also a study of a photographer, Angela Calomiris, involved in Greenwich Village Communist circles and was written about by Walter Winchell and Mary McBride.

On the far-right

One thing I’ve found to be true is in the past, when it comes to books on the far-right, an in-depth book by a serious journalist is often better than one by an academic. These days I’m not really sure. Both Nancy MacLean and Carol Swain have written books about the far-right, but I’m more inclined to trust Swain on this subject because she’s a little more conservative.

• The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America's Violent, Anti-Government Militia Movement, by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, 1990
  This is the more or less authoritative treatment of the violent spinoff from the Aryan Nations, by two Denver reporters—the title is slightly misleading.

• The Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Right, by Cheri Seymour, 1991
  A very detailed history of William Potter Gale’s group. Gale was a staff officer with Douglas MacArthur—a common thing is army intel guys connected to famous generals getting involved in this stuff.

• The National States Rights Party: A History, by Michael Newton, 2017
  A very detailed history of one of the first postwar Nazi-inspired groups. There’s a lot of bleeding over between this group and others.

• The Minutemen, by J. Harry Jones, 1968
  The author was a reporter for the San Diego Tribune, and this is his look at Bob DePugh’s group, which set the pattern for a lot of the militia groups that followed.

• Willis Carto and the American Far-Right, by George Michael, 2008
  The author is one of the top guys in the field, and this is his best book.

• The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, by Gary May, 2005
  One of the best books on this subject focused on a single character, Gary Thomas Rowe, who was allowed to get away with numerous violent acts due to his informant status.

• One More Victim: The Life and Death of a Jewish Nazi, by A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, 1967
  Authored by two New York Times reporters, this is the biography of Dan Burros, who killed himself when another Times reporter published that he had a bar mitzvah in Queens.

• The two books by Kevin Coogan, the biography of Francis Parker Yockey and The Spy Who Would be Tsar, are very high-quality in terms of research.

Jewish stuff

• The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, 2003
  A good, brief volume about people trying to negotiate the taboos around anti-Semitism.

• Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left, by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, 1982
  Probably the best study about how Jews on the New Left looked at themselves, and the way they related to their comrades of other faiths.

• Jewish Identity and the JDL, by Janet Dolgin, 1977
  This one was published too early to account for much of the truly weird and violent behavior of the group in subsequent decades, but it’s still very good.

First-person accounts

These are mostly pop books, and not necessarily the most reliable. But they tell you something about the way informants see themselves.

• Undercover Nazi, by David Gletty, 2009
  This guy infiltrated the National Socialist Movement in Florida for the FBI.

• Into the Devil’s Den: How an FBI Informant Got Inside the Aryan Nations and a Special Agent Got Him Out Alive, by Dave Hall and Tym Burkey, 2008
  These two were at the center of the civil suit that bankrupted the Aryan Nations.

• My Undercover Years with the Ku Klux Klan, by Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., 1976
  This one is extremely unreliable.

• Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer With the Weathermen, by Larry Grathwohl, as told to Frank Reagan, 2013
  Grathwohl was a very key informant in the group.

• Inside a Police Informant’s Mind, by Paul Derry, 2016
  This guy was up to a whole bunch of stuff infiltrating drug-running groups in Canada, working with the RCMP.

Propaganda studies

• The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, by Daniel Boorstin, 1962
  This is a very good book, a consensus historian starting to reckon with the realities of mass media, and some of the absurdities it produces.

• German Propaganda and U.S. Neutrality in World War I, by Chad Fulwider, 2016
  Analyzes Germany’s countermeasures to Allied propaganda in the U.S. in the First World War, an interesting study.

• Searching for a Demon: The Media Construction of the Militia Phenomenon, by Steven Chermak, 2002
  A book that makes a novel argument that most people had never heard of the militia groups until they were endlessly hyped by the feds and watchdogs, which counterintuitively drove their recruitment.

Brief revisionist studies

• Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR's White House Triggered Pearl Harbor, by John Koster, 2012
  I’ve read a few books on Harry Dexter White, but this is one is fairly novel—the maximal case, if you will, for his nefariousness. If you find it compelling, you will be disturbed by the limitations of other historiography on him.

• The League: The True Story of Average Americans on the Hunt for WWI Spies, by Bill Mills, 2013
  There aren’t very many books on the American Protective League—this is probably the best. Raises all sorts of civil liberties concerns.

• Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944, by Thomas E. Mahl, 1998
  This one’s a real eye-opener.

• We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States’ Latin-American Civilian Internment Program of World War II, by Heidi Gurcke Donald, 2006
  A brief look at the internment of German civilians in Latin America during World War II on the orders of the U.S. government.

• Shattered Lives, Shattered Dreams: The Disrupted Lives of Families in America’s Internment Camps, by Russell W. Estlack, 2011
  Much is written about Japanese internment, lots of schoolchildren read Farewell to Manzanar, but this one looks at the internment of Italian and German citizens as well, and their uses as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges.

• Orchids of War, by Denise Frisino, 2016
  A history made possible with new interviews and material released under FOIA, that looks at the round-up of Japanese spies on the West Coast during World War II.

• I’m fascinated by the Elizabeth Bentley case, the first Communist spy to flip in the early Cold War, before Whittaker Chambers. She was relentlessly smeared and then drank herself to death. Clever Girl and Red Spy Queen are both good fairly recent biographies, though I like Red Spy Queen better. She wrote an autobiography, but it’s not very good.

Some fun books

• God, Guts and Guns: A Close Look at the Radical Right, by Phillip Finch, 1983
  Stylistically, I think the approach Finch takes in this book when it comes to writing about some right-wing stuff is about right, it’s a little humorous.

• Snitch Culture: How Citizens are Turned Into the Eyes and Ears of the State, by Jim Redden, 2000
  An interesting entry from Feral House, a little unusual, but that’s why I like it.

• Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, by Bertram Gross, 1980
  This book made a big splash when it came out, and it’s due for a revival. Focused heavily on the collusion between big business and big government.