In the early 1940s, worried over black attitudes to the war effort, the FBI began compiling files on such traveling targets as [Richard] Wright, Chester Himes and Barack Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis....
In the depths of the Cold War, a busy season of FBI literary criticism, no fewer than 22 African-American authors were first tracked by Bureau paperwork, among them Ralph Ellison and Lorraine Hansberry. (Hansberry’s now family-friendly drama A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was reviewed by an incognito FBI agent even before reaching Broadway. The four-page paper that resulted would receive a non-inflated “A” in my introductory African-American literature class.) Three Cold War files created in the 1950s—for [James ] Baldwin, Hoyt Fuller and Black Arts founder Amiri Baraka — looked forward to the last great wave of FBI book-clubbing: an elaborate counterintelligence program, well documented in the Senate’s Church Committee report of 1976, to imitate and subvert the literature of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s....
May 2, 2015
"While the [FBI]’s voguish interest in Harlem’s 'New Negroes' faded during the Great Depression..."
"... its inspection of African-American writing persisted from World War II through the militant Black Arts movement unveiled in 1965."
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14 comments:
I've long suspected that the Hammond B-3 was part of a nefarious plot by the FBI or the CIA to destroy jazz.
Eric the Fruit Bat said...
I've long suspected that the Hammond B-3 was part of a nefarious plot by the FBI or the CIA to destroy jazz.
I blame fusion.
....and this is how we ended up with rap.
What is it with all the food verifications??
So odd that you should mention Hoyt Fuller. I just quoted him at length: link
Hoover threw a wide net. Black and White writers included.
J. Edgar Hoover's War on Writers
Steinbeck
1930's through 1970 was quite the opulent period for him.
But then today we only have the NSA...
Its interesting that the FBI bothered with literature. The objective was to stay on top of radical subversive movements against the state. Literature was socially and politically significant. Not today. Would anyone bother, now ?
The FBI's so called black bag operations were originally directed against the German-American Bund organizations. I have no objections to that, and I've never heard of any liberal objections to the snooping on the Liberty Lobby, except, of course, during the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. The protests against breaches in our civil liberties have been far more selective and discriminatory than the breaches themselves.
Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were openly affiliated with Communist organizations. Lorraine Hansberry worked for publications funded by Paul Robeson who was an open communist. James Baldwin and Amiri Baraku (Leroi Jones) openly called for violence in their writings. I would be disappointed if the FBI did not pay at least as much attention to the communist organizations and the organizations known to be funded by communists as they did to the John Birch Society whose meetings were regularly under surveilence.
Everybody knows Hoover was mad at black men who were Jazz greats for their getting into beautiful white women's pants while all J. Edgar could get into was Clyde Tolson.
Hoover the secret keeper absolutely hated John Steinbeck because Steinbeck was interested in the truth about people which he write down in magnificent prose with a talent second only to Shakespeare.
But many people still hate Steinbeck and refuse reading him based on rumors spread by Hoover and his anti-communist cults.
Who is "many people"?
At my strictly conservative and most rigidly anti-communist Catholic High School Steinbeck was required reading.
Besides, I haven't heard anyone on the American right, in 40 years of National Review, WSJ, and numerous others, ever say that Steinbeck shouldn't be read. On the contrary, he was usually considered one of the great men of American literature.
Hoover had a profound fear all his years at the FBI that the discriminated-against American black community was ripe for Communist infiltration. The Communists agreed, and tried mightily to make inroads into the black community.
In this matter as in all others, the CPUSA was its own worst enemy, and their obsession with doctrinal orthodoxy drove away all but the purest-hearted of Commie. The Party demand for atheism was one such stake through the heart for communist agitation among the most Christian of all American ethnic groups.
While it's easy to read these articles and feel that the FBI went overboard in these matters, it's also good to remember two things:
1) Many of these public intellectuals went to the USSR & publicly fellated the regime at the height of Stalin's atrocities against his own people. There was much evidence of what was going on, but it came from "counter-revolutionary sources" so it was ignored. These intellectuals saw the mote in their own society's eye, but missed the beam in the USSR's. There is blood on their hands, as surely as there is on the KGB's.
2) The revolutionary intellectuals of the Hoover years were often horrible to each other, and were not above using the US Government to do their dirty work. The CPUSA turned in their Trotsyite ex-comrades to the FBI, as they did with all their comrades who ended up on the losing side of ideological struggles in the USSR.
Nobody involved in this sorry-ass business was a Boy Scout, and it's simply revisionist propaganda to say otherwise.
Steinbeck has been debunked as a serial liar by his own family. "Travels with Charley" was one of my favorite books until I found out it was fake.
The FBI was right to keep tabs on the Commies during the Cold war and on those who didn't support the war effort during WW2.
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