Second Time's the Charm: The Ghost of Hoover and the Third Red Scare
Just as the Haig administration was characterized by an incredibly... active anticommunist foreign policy, historians studying the time period are quick to note a concurrent rise in domestic measures following a similar theme. Much of the shaky legal ground that facilitated this system has since been clarified or actively counteracted, but that is likely of little comfort to all the activists and organizers harassed, arrested, humiliated or otherwise discredited for the sake of countering a nebulous web of sinister communist infiltrators.
Although the new system did not have an official name, it persisted nonetheless, hidden under the umbrella of executive authority and within the cracks and crevices of the federal law enforcement bureaucracy. Students of this sort of authoritarian strain in US domestic policy typically draw a straight line through the twentieth century, from Wilson's use of the Alien Enemies Act in World War I, through the First Red Scare, and on to Japanese internment, McCarthy, and COINTELPRO. The latter had been in the ground only a little over a decade before it came roaring back, the ghost of Hoover come up out of the grave.
During the portion of the Era of Bad Feelings commonly called the "Third Red Scare", the massive uptick in FBI plants in "subversive" organizations was also supplemented (some would say camouflaged) by a veritable flood of public and private money to finance a morals crusade. The War on Drugs ballooned into a quagmire, with ever-expanding fronts against a whole host of social evils that were undermining America. The reds were a mass of godless degenerates, and what true god-fearing American would give them an inch, after all?
As details of the true scope of the program would become know following Haig's departure from the Oval, certain tactics pioneered during his adminstration would be briefly revived twice before being killed off for good. The first would occur in the 1990s, used by a man who most detested them, and the second just after the turn of the century, finally breeding enough backlash once the public sobered up to see these unsavory avenues closed for the foreseeable future, despite the pleas of some in the Executive....
Although the new system did not have an official name, it persisted nonetheless, hidden under the umbrella of executive authority and within the cracks and crevices of the federal law enforcement bureaucracy. Students of this sort of authoritarian strain in US domestic policy typically draw a straight line through the twentieth century, from Wilson's use of the Alien Enemies Act in World War I, through the First Red Scare, and on to Japanese internment, McCarthy, and COINTELPRO. The latter had been in the ground only a little over a decade before it came roaring back, the ghost of Hoover come up out of the grave.
During the portion of the Era of Bad Feelings commonly called the "Third Red Scare", the massive uptick in FBI plants in "subversive" organizations was also supplemented (some would say camouflaged) by a veritable flood of public and private money to finance a morals crusade. The War on Drugs ballooned into a quagmire, with ever-expanding fronts against a whole host of social evils that were undermining America. The reds were a mass of godless degenerates, and what true god-fearing American would give them an inch, after all?
As details of the true scope of the program would become know following Haig's departure from the Oval, certain tactics pioneered during his adminstration would be briefly revived twice before being killed off for good. The first would occur in the 1990s, used by a man who most detested them, and the second just after the turn of the century, finally breeding enough backlash once the public sobered up to see these unsavory avenues closed for the foreseeable future, despite the pleas of some in the Executive....