Description: Despite the fact that the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the FBI in 1935) was ordered to cease political spying in 1924, it never did. Fearing that Bolshevism was spreading to America, the Bureau, led by a young J. Edgar Hoover, spearheaded the federal government's political intelligence network to help create a nation-wide antiradical panic, the first Red Scare. Hoover was convinced that black militancy -- including the demand for civil rights -- was communist-inspired and a threat to both national security and white hegemony, views which would remain part of the FBI's gospel well into the 197Os, Theodore Kornweibel spent ten years researching governmental archives and has uncovered much new material on the era of the first Red Scare, including the identities of black informers and agents provocateurs.

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