The Manufacture of Consent

The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal--so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director's domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the power of his office and the active assistance of anti-labor...
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The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal--so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director's domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the power of his office and the active assistance of anti-labor Republicans and segregationist Democrats to subvert the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and redirect the trajectory of U.S. culture away from social democracy toward a toxic brand of neoliberalism. The erosion of democratic traditions Hoover fostered continues to haunt Americans today.