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j edgar hoover
Woke Is the New Red
In the 1950s “communist” was the slur of choice to attack those focused on equity, particularly for people of color.
Aug 20, 2023
Over half of Republicans agree that “fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses” is more important than protecting Social Security and Medicare, finds a recent Wall Street Journalsurvey.
“Florida is where woke comes to die,” brags the state’s governor Ron DeSantis, “woke” is “basically a war on the truth.” Under the banner of anti-woke, he enacted sweeping limitations on what can be taught in public schools, a six-week abortion ban, and America’s cruelest anti-trans policies.
For DeSantis, the “woke” are “cultural Marxists” who are to blame for what’s broken in America.
We’ve endured a long history of labels that mislead, divide, and hinder us. So, let’s stop the name calling, listen to the actual agenda of those with whom we think we differ, and engage in real conversation.
Merriam-Webster defines “woke” first as being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” The term took off in 2014 after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, and then came to be used in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Today, “woke” is a sweeping, ill-defined insult making it harder to find common ground essential to reforms benefiting most Americans, such as lifting the minimum wage.
For those who lived through the 1950s it rings painful bells. Back then, “communist” was the slur of choice to attack those focused on equity, particularly for people of color. The McCarthy-era witch hunt caused as many as 12,000 people to lose their jobs.
Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the early ’50s my parents helped found the first Unitarian church and to integrate it. The FBI took notice. I’ll never forget an agent knocking on our door as part of the agency’s investigation of our church. The inquiry was scary enough to shrink our membership. It didn’t shut us down but did lead to several members being fired from their jobs.
As a kid, I thought that we were suspect in the eyes of the FBI because Unitarians were seen as atheists, and atheism was associated with communism. Only recently did I learn my storyline was wrong.
With access to church archives, I discovered a letter from someone in our congregation to J. Edgar Hoover complaining that a member of our church had been questioned by two FBI agents at his home. The letter stated that “Among other questions, this man was asked what he thought of racial equality for Negroes, would he marry a Negro, and whether or not he attended the Unitarian Church.” He added: “I think you will agree these questions are completely out of line.”
Hoover’s response? “No questions were asked by representatives of this Bureau such as are alleged in your letter.”
At about the same time I uncovered these documents, someone in my extended family shared with me his related experience with the FBI. During the Korean War, the army had called him to serve. But when the recruiter learned he was a member of the NAACP, my relative was told that he was no longer qualified because that affiliation meant he was likely a communist.
Today, “woke” as a put down is similarly worrying. The term is derived from African American Vernacular English, meaning to be “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” It could have become a rallying cry for a better America. Especially now, as the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action, facing racism’s deep and painful harm becomes even more urgent.
We’ve endured a long history of labels that mislead, divide, and hinder us. So, let’s stop the name calling, listen to the actual agenda of those with whom we think we differ, and engage in real conversation. We might discover common ground on which we can all advance.
We would then be able to tackle the long-standing, anti-democratic economic and political rules that generate income inequality more extreme than in 109 countries—including all of the Western, industrial world—and wealth so tightly held that the top 1% control almost as much as the bottom 90%. Such unequal economic power harms us all, as it is linked to poorer health and education, greater violence, and other social ills. Its effects also infuse our political lives, twisting policies to further favor the few and undermining democracy itself.
Together we could in fact wake up to what truly harms us and thus become eager to join hands for the benefit of all.
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Before There Was QAnon, There Was J. Edgar Hoover and Red-Baiting Aimed at MLK Jr.
The notorious FBI director as far-right conspiracy theorist.
Jan 16, 2023
Ours is an age beset by conspiracy theories, with the fascist QAnon cult at the center of much public lunacy. These completely implausible ideas, apparently taken seriously by millions of people, have been enabled by the internet, by social media, and by the rise of a new, militant billionaire class that funds them. Indeed, with the turn to such conspiracies by new Twitter owner Elon Musk, that site has seen an explosion of hate speech, calumny, and wacky but dangerous ideas. Just to refresh our memories, QAnon accused Hillary Clinton and other high officials of running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. At one point these vicious lies even led to the pizzeria being shot up. This conspiracy theory was believed and broadcast by Gen. Michael Flynn, the former U.S. National Security Advisor! More recently, QAnon acolytes were involved in the January 6, 2021, attempted coup d’etat.
You may wonder if the world has abruptly gone mad.
Alas, it is the sad duty of historians to remind everyone shocked by the present that, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 has it,
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
As we commemorate the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is worth remembering that the Q of his era was not anonymous. It was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI was formed in 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt, over the objections of Congress, which feared a secret police. Its initial charge was to hunt down anarchists, who in the hysteria that swept the country after the assassination of President McKinley were thought to be lurking just about everywhere in the country and making designs to pull down Western civilization. In fact, there were not many anarchists and they weren’t, as you might expect, very well organized. Many were German, Italian and Jewish immigrants involved in labor movements and many stood against WW I. That was a legitimate stance to take, but it was made illegal, quite in contravention of the First Amendment, and an Anarchist Exclusion Act was passed making it easy to bar such people from coming to the U.S. and to deport those already here. The Red Scare gripped America. One of its teenaged proponents was a young J. Edgar Hoover.
Sixteen years after the FBI was created, J. Edgar Hoover became its head at age 29, surfing the wave of the Red Scare. He ran the organization with an iron fist until 1972, during which time he perfected the techniques later used by press lord Rupert Murdoch at Fox, of spying on prominent people, getting dirt on them, and then using the dirt to manipulate them.
Another QAnon-type conspiracy theory that gripped Washington in the 1940s through the 1960s was McCarthyism, which held that there were a lot of U.S. Communists and that they might take over the government. They were the new anarchists. There were likely about 100,000 Communists in the U.S. by the 1950s, about half of whom left after 1956 when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev revealed dictator Josef Stalin’s crimes. None of them wanted to overthrow the government and most were in provincial unions or were writers, etc., and had no power to do so. To this day, spoiled rich people and over-testosteroned rightists bemoan the proliferation of American Communists. As with the pedophile rings in pizzerias, they don’t exist and are a chimera used to beat people into submission regarding perfectly reasonable demands like a living wage. Republicans tried to defeat a corporate Democrat like Joe Biden, who may be a bit to the right of Ike Eisenhower, as a “socialist.” They meant, “Communist.”
The real purpose of red-baiting is to make sure that U.S. workers find it difficult to organize for better pay and conditions. By stigmatizing sympathy with working class people, the Right makes the demands of the latter politically and socially taboo.
Hoover had obsessed about the socialist and Communist menace all his adult life, and that was the lens through which he saw demands for rights for Black people. It seems to me that Hoover must have also been a racist, or he would have been better able to separate demands for civil rights from dialectical materialism. So Hoover saw the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as potentially a Communist. Communists don’t believe in God, so I’m not sure how that was supposed to work. In fact, King preached against Communism as incompatible with Christianity. Duh.
King was a socialist, no doubt, and much more radical than today’s mainstream news will allow him to be. But he was not a violent revolutionary who wanted to impose Bolshevism on people.
Sarah Pruitt at History.com explains that one of the attorneys who supported and advised Rev. King, Stanley David Levison, had been a Communist and appears to have been in the mass exodus from the movement of 1956. Years later, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy granted Hoover permission to wiretap Levison on these grounds.
In all the years the FBI monitored King under the COINTELPRO domestic surveillance program, no evidence ever surfaced that he was a Communist or anything like a Communist. Instead of calling off his dogs, however, Hoover doubled down and used the monitoring of King’s personal life to gather evidence of his extramarital affairs. Hoover then tried to use those tapes to convince King that his reputation would be ruined and that he should commit suicide.
Hoover actually wrote a note to King instructing him to commit suicide.
Today’s FBI looks back on this episode as one of the darkest in the Bureau’s history.
But with the reemergence of conspiracy theories at the heart of the U.S. government during the Trump QAnon presidency, we should not be sanguine about the threats they pose to democracy. King renewed American democracy by forcing his co-citizens to face the evils of racial segregation and racial discrimination enshrined in the laws of the Jim Crow states.
That’s not Communism. That’s simple human decency. That is the sum of American values. Beware the ideological termites burrowing away at the fundament of our basic rights.
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'Burglars' Revealed: Sixties Activists Who Stole FBI COINTELPRO Files
'On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.'
Jan 07, 2014
In an exclusive with the New York Times on Tuesday, published to coincide with a new book about a fateful plan more than four decades ago that helped bring down J. Edgar Hoover and expose the dark nature of the FBI's obsessive targeting of the dissident and anti-war left, the original burglars who broke into a bureau field office in 1971 have now stepped forward to discuss the meticulously planned theft that altered the course of modern history.
As the Timesreports:
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover's lengthy tenure as director.
"When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it," said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. "There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting."
The new book, entitled 'The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI' and written by former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, traces the history of the time that surrounded the event and explores the motivations of the FBI, led by Hoover, and the anti-war and social justice movements of the late 60's and 70's whose members became targets of the law enforcement agency's clandestine COINTELPRO program.
As the Times article notes, the stolen document that would have the "biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.'s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro."
And continues:
Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro -- shorthand for Counterintelligence Program -- were revealed.
Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.
"It wasn't just spying on Americans," said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. "The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations."
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