Sticky Reputations

STICKY REPUTATIONS
Sticky Reputations
The Politics of Collective Memory
in Midcentury America
Gary Alan Fine

Gary Alan Fine
ISBN 978-0-415-89498-2
,!7IA4B5-ijejic!
www.routledge.com an informa business
Sticky Reputations
Sticky Reputations focuses on reputational entrepreneurs and support

groups shaping how we think of important figures, within a crucial period
in American history—from the 1930s through the 1950s. Why are cer-
tain figures such as Adolf Hitler, Joe McCarthy, and Martin Luther King
cemented into history unable to be challenged without reputational cost
to the proposer of the alternative perspective? Why are the reputations of
other political actors such as Harry Truman highly variable and change-
able? Why in the 1930s was it widely believed that American Jews were
linked to the Communist Party of America but by the 1950s this belief had
largely vanished and was no longer a part of legitimate public discourse?
This short, accessible book is ideal for use in undergraduate teaching in
social movements, collective memory studies, political sociology, socio-
logical social psychology, and other related courses.
Gary Alan Fine is the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern

University. During 2010–2011 he was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow
and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He
is also the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil,
Inept, and Controversial.
Sticky Reputations
The Politics of Collective Memory
in Midcentury America
Gary Alan Fine

Northwestern University
First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of Gary Alan Fine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sticky reputations : the politics of collective memory in midcentury America / edited by
Gary Alan Fine.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Public opinion—United States. 2. Reputation—United States. 3. United States.—
Politics and government—20th century. I. Fine, Gary Alan.
HM1236.S75 2011
303.3’80973—dc23
2011030055
ISBN: 978-0-415-89498-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-89499-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-13596-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion
by EvS Communication Networx, Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper

by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO.
Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 The Chaining of Social Problems: Solutions and
Unintended Consequences in the Age of Betrayal 1
In this chapter I build on arguments about the unintended
consequences of political action raised by influential scholars
including Herbert Spencer, Robert Merton, and Lewis Coser. I
argue that the solution of one problem produces other problems as
a result of the solution. In this sense social problems are chained
together with solutions causing new problems. I use as an example
the prevention of subversion in American politics. I demonstrate
how from 1919 through 2001, each political solution has provoked
a new set of problems in its wake.
Chapter 2 The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational

Images and the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and
Communism 23
In the second chapter I ask how the reputation of American Jews
as a group shifted from the 1930s to the 1950s. During the 1930s
it was widely believed and publicly discussed that American Jews
as a group were linked to the Communist Party of America. By
the 1950s, this belief was no longer a part of legitimate public
discussion. To understand this dramatic change I apply the theory
of prejudice as a function of group position to the examination
of reputational politics. For a previously stigmatized group to
establish a positive reputation it must demonstrate that it is not
fundamentally distinctive from other groups, that its members
reveal both good and evil, and that the value of attack has
diminished. I focus on the reputations of Alger Hiss and Roy Cohn,
as well as the deviance of anti-Semitic talk brought about by the
defeat of Nazi Germany.
vi • Contents
Chapter 3: Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the

Power of Memory Templates 51
The third chapter describes the importance of forgetting to the
establishment of collective memory. I examine the case of the
“Brown Scare” in the early 1940s and how it came to be forgotten
in American history in contrast to the widely remembered “Red
Scare” of the 1920s and later 1950s. The Brown Scare involved
attacks by the Department of Justice on proto-Nazi rightists in the
period leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and a subsequent
sedition trial beginning in 1942. This trial was the largest sedition
trial in American history, eventually leading to a mistrial after the
death of the trial judge. The Brown Scare did not fit subsequently
established memory templates of political institutions and social
movements, and indicates what happens to widely-known events
that lack prominent and well-situated political backers.
Chapter 4: The Construction of Historical Equivalence: Weighing

the Red and Brown Scares 77
The fourth chapter constitutes a theoretical extension of Chapter 3.
Drawing on the cases of the Red and Brown Scare, I ask under
what circumstances are “events” considered equivalent. In what
ways were the two “Scares” similar and in what ways different in
their origin, scope, consequences, and shared meaning? How do
these similarities and differences affect the likelihood of remaining
in collective memory?
Chapter 5: Resurrecting the Red: Pete Seeger and the Purification of

Difficult Reputations 91
The fifth chapter addresses the question of how reputations that
had once been under attack can be preserved. Today Pete Seeger
is widely considered one of America’s most beloved folk singers.
Yet, throughout much of his career, Seeger was an active and
outspoken member of the Communist Party, even during its most
brutal Stalinist years. How could this leftist activist, controversial
in his early career, become so widely accepted and why were
conservatives largely silent as his reputation became purified?
After debates are judged concluded, political activists are no longer
committed to revisiting them unless there is a clear gain.
Chapter 6: Notorious Support: The America First Committee and

the Personalization of Policy 113
The sixth chapter returns to isolationist politics in the United
States. The AFC was the leading non-interventionist/isolationist
group prior to World War II. I focus on reputational politics
surrounding the group with its opponents personalizing
criticism of the organization by focusing on disreputable
members, including Charles Lindbergh. Serious policy debate
Contents • vii
was transformed into personal attack. This form of reputational

politics constitutes the “personalization of policy.”
Chapter 7: An Isolationist Blacklist?: Lillian Gish and the America

First Committee 145
The seventh chapter examines the Hollywood Blacklist, but not
the blacklist that is widely known. I examine processes of internal
exclusion in the film and theatrical community. In the late 1930s
and early 1940s, many figures in the entertainment field pushed
actively for American intervention against fascist Europe, and
some of those who were affiliated with the “isolationist” movement
were pressured with the loss of employment opportunities. The case
of Lillian Gish is particularly striking because of her prominence.
Chapter 8: Honest Brokers: The Politics of Expertise in the “Who

Lost China?” Debate 151
Owen Lattimore was one of the most widely admired and
influential Sinologists in America in 1950 when he was attacked
by Senator Joseph McCarthy. No complex social system can survive
without knowledge specialists who provide information that
political actors rely on to make decisions. But what happens when
the advice is widely considered to be incorrect? Using the debate in
the early 1950s over “Who Lost China?,” assigning responsibility
for the fall of the Nationalist Chinese regime to the Communists,
I examine the political battles that surrounded Lattimore’s
reputation. Smears (a set of linked and critical claims) and
degradation ceremonies (the institutional awarding of stigma) are
central tools within contentious reputational politics, undercutting
knowledge regimes through the exercise of institutional power. For
an expert’s reputation to be preserved, the expert must be defined
as competent (having an appropriate background), innocent
(taking a neutral stance), and influential (providing relevant
information).
Chapter 9: Sticky Reputations: Adolf Hitler and the Stigma of

Memory Work 183
The final chapter evaluates the power of a fully established
reputation. In most cases the claims made about reputations
shape the reputation of the target, but in a few cases they affect
the reputational entrepreneur. This is particularly true when the
reputation at issue is sharply defined and widely consensual. In
some cases, the attempt to shape established reputations can rub
off on the reputational revisionist. These are what I label as sticky
reputations. In this chapter I describe the consequences of the
effects to revise or modify the reputation of Hitler by those who
attempt to provide challenging or discordant views of the German
leader’s reputation within the American political context.
viii • Contents
Permission Credits 207

Index 209
Sticky Reputations
An Introduction
GARY ALAN FINE
Reputations may not be set in stone, but they often are fixed in amber.
Those who follow politicians know that some reputations are subject to
change, while others remain in place, so firmly placed that anyone who
argues against the dominant view discovers his/her own reputation subject
to attack.
A decade ago, I published a volume, Difficult Reputations: Collective
Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial. In this volume, I argued
that it was essential to examine the creation and the continuation of the
reputations of those whose reputations were not entirely positive. Under-
standably much analysis of reputations has been of the grand and the con-
secrated: the Washingtons and Lincolns of our past. But what about the
scandalous and the failed: the Benedict Arnolds and the Warren Hard-
ings, and those who, like John Brown, the radical abolitionist leader of
the attack on Harper’s Ferry, according to critics an extremist, terrorist,
and madman, have reputations that remain controversial. That volume
focuses upon the establishment of public identity through a set of actors
that I termed reputational entrepreneurs. These individuals, who some-
times included the reputational target, see it as in their interest and have
the resources to shape a reputation and share it with the public. This repu-
tation work occurs when a target has established a positive and beloved
reputation, but it is particularly salient in the case of reputations that are
being battled over or are negatively tinged. These images that proclaim
a moral identity must be situated within a reputational market (Sauder
and Fine 2008). The focus of the chapters as they were written was on the
x • Introduction
construction of reputations, but not their effects on the person who spon-
sored them.
That earlier volume skipped and jumped widely over American his-
tory. I examined reputations throughout American history from the colo-
nial age until post-war America. With such a broad scope I did not focus
closely on any political period. Recognizing this weakness, I chose to con-
centrate on a narrower period. This volume extends my previous argument
by making available a new set of articles on the sociology of reputation,
and which have as their primary focus the moment of American political
struggle from 1935 to 1955.
Midcentury American Politics: From Diversity to Consensus

The period of midcentury American politics has some particular virtues
for my goals. At the start of the period, mired in the depths of a never-
ending depression, the range of political discourse expanded considerably.
These voices arose from the sense that something had gone terribly wrong
with the American economy and that the leaders lacked the requisite skills
to solve the problems we faced. Throughout much of the 1930s it was easy
to see a dark future, even if some ironically whistled the tune, “Happy Days
Are Here Again,” a song first recorded in November 1929, and famously
used as the theme song for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential
campaign. But throughout the decade, there were many reasons to doubt
this optimistic refrain. It was only later when times were more prosperous
that the limits of political action were narrowed.
At this historical moment one could find politicians, parties, and social
movements that pushed communist, socialist, nativist, and fascist nos-
trums. While these groups never gained a substantial foothold in Ameri-
can political life, they did gain greater visibility, and in some cases elected
sympathizers to Congress or state legislatures. Congress included some
socialists, and some Midwestern isolationists were uncomfortably close to
fascist movements. Some Southern politicians were closely and unabash-
edly linked to white supremacist groups.
The events surrounding World War II rapidly altered America’s political
calculus. Prior to the War the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in which Russia and Ger-
many created a red/brown alliance, caused many of those affi liated with
the Communist Party to go through a period of soul-searching. Those who
remained with the party had to shift their beliefs overnight, and others
(those who had remained after the Purge Trials of 1937) distanced them-
selves from a party that seemed willing to betray its core beliefs in the
name of expediency.
Isolationists had their own difficulties. They were constantly attacked
Introduction • xi
by the Roosevelt administration in the late 1930s, an administration that

wished actively to support the British in their war effort, despite wide-
spread public opposition. However, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
changed the political landscape overnight. Eventually some came to feel
(later echoed by the “Truthers” in the aftermath of 9/11) that the American
government either was aware of the attack or even deliberately provoked
it. Still, one could not push an isolationist line after December 7, 1941 and
maintain one’s political credibility.
The end of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War between
the United States and the Soviet Union, coupled with the arms race and
the Soviet control of much of Eastern Europe, most notably the eastern
portion of Germany, along with revelations (true, false, and exaggerated)
of Soviet espionage in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations margin-
alized all those with linkages, however slight, to Communist-dominated
groups or seemingly legitimate front-groups or groups of fellow travelers,
as leftist sympathizers were often called.
For the old right, the final moments of their delegitimation came with
the stigmatization of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the fall of the
Nazi regime, and then subsequently with the censure of Senator Joseph
McCarthy and the marginalization of the most vituperative anti-subver-
sives. In the course of two decades what began as a flowering of diverse
political opinions became a narrowing of thought to centrist, consensual
beliefs in the mid-1950s. The last gasp of extremist views in electoral politics
occurred in the 1948 election in which both Henry Wallace, running on
the Progressive Party line, and Strom Thurmond, running on the National
States’ Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats) line, each received about 2 per-
cent of the votes (with Thurmond picking up 39 Southern electoral votes as
well). Third parties vanished as a part of the electoral process until George
Wallace ran in 1968. The American political landscape had shifted.
Given today’s hyper-partisan divide, one might think of the late 1950s
as a Golden Age of American consensual politics. The two dominant par-
ties strove to be centrist, and, despite partisan sniping, there was consider-
able consensus on many aspects of policy, both foreign and domestic. By
examining the narrowing of discourse along with the shaping of reputa-
tions, I examine how reputational politics affects not only the target but
the claimant. How this recognition of that stigma encompassed views out-
side the mainstream is central to my theoretical task.
The Power of Sticky Reputations

The social science examination of reputations has, quite understandably,
focused on the reputation itself and the linkage, strong or weak, to the
xii • Introduction
target. How do reputations shape, build, or destroy identities? However,

the presentation of the reputation of another is an act in which the speaker
presents herself as an actor with interests and with expertise. These claims
may come to characterize the presenter. One requires a set of supporters
who finds the reputational claim to be plausible and morally proper.
Under what conditions are these linkages between the performing self
and the proposed reputation made? That is, when do reputational claims
shape the identity of the proponent: the person that I have previously
labeled a reputational entrepreneur (Fine 1996)?
In many cases there is little cost in shaping a reputation. Reputational
entrepreneurs often escape blame in that not much is at stake. This is the
case either because the reputation is not a matter of epistemic dispute or
because, if the reputation is controversial, social actors stand on all sides,
providing a community of support for whichever claim is put forth. In
other words, many reputations are lightly linked to moral evaluation,
while other reputations have diverse segmental support.
I emphasize reputations that matter. Some identities have consequences
for claimants. Not only are these reputations firmly established, but in
their solidity, a powerful moral evaluation has been established. A per-
son who pushes for a reputation that is sharply opposed to the consensual
perspective can be stigmatized by that claim. The person who argues that
George Washington was evil or that Jefferson Davis was a patriot has some
answering to do to whichever publics become aware of the claim. As I dis-
cuss, this is most strikingly evident with regard to Adolf Hitler. At what
point does proposing a reputation suggest that you are the kind of person
who is willing to make that claim? When does a claim stop being a simple
parsing of facts, and become an ideological moment of attempted persua-
sion? Reputational claims stem from interests. Why propose a reputation
if one didn’t feel strongly that there was a case to be made? Fortunately on
most occasions, people are prepared to admit that there are several reason-
able perspectives, even if one disagrees with one perspective or another.
The amount of information is vast, and facts are promiscuous. Certainly
such claims help to cement the belief that one is of a particular persua-
sion. Believing that George W. Bush or Bill Clinton was a successful or
failed president provides powerful cues as to other beliefs that the pro-
poser holds, and such beliefs when stated with vigor might persuade one’s
fellows that one is wise or foolish, depending on their perspective. Yet, in
most cases, other than revealing one’s political preferences, any particular
stance doesn’t carry a heavy moral burden.
But let us consider the case of the Rev. Martin Luther King. During
his lifetime and after his death, King was a subject of controversy (Rie-
der 2008). He was a plagiarist, a womanizer, and, perhaps, a traitor in his
Introduction • xiii
outspoken attacks on the American war effort in Vietnam. Despite his oft-
stated embrace of non-violent protest, one might argue that the demon-
strations that he sponsored occasionally led to violence. My point is that
there are sufficient controversial or even disreputable actions to give King
a difficult reputation. Even if we add to these flaws, the positive work that
King did, we might say that he had a mixed reputation. Such a mixed repu-
tation is possible, but only in an alternative universe.
In contrast, the Martin Luther King that we as a people know is a man of
high heroism, moral virtue, and visionary insight. This Rev. King is among
the greatest of Americans. Along with Christopher Columbus, King is the
only non-politician to receive his own national holiday. Of course as fans
of Columbus can attest, a holiday by itself doesn’t translate into consen-
sual admiration among all stakeholders (Schuman, Schwartz, and D’Arcy
2005). Still, Martin Luther King is a man of whom few dare to utter unkind
words. And more than this, those who do make those criticisms are often
treated as racists (sometimes justly) because of their criticism. Why would
one attack Martin Luther King today if one didn’t intend to insult the Afri-
can-American community? King is fortunate—in reputational terms—in
having a solid community that stands behind him. It is less the acts of the
person than the intensity of the community that is important in gauging
the power of the reputation and the dangers of a reputational challenge.
Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the reputation of Adolf
Hitler, as I discuss in the final chapter of this volume. Here is a man who
lacks any defenders who are a legitimate part of public discourse. In some
nations it is even against the law to speak well of the German leader. It is
not that there are no Hitler fans, but these admirers stand apart from civil
society, and even these figures often attempt to make the case that Hitler
wasn’t so bad because he didn’t—in their view—commit the crimes against
humanity of which he has been accused. As small as this group is, the
number of individuals who endorse the actions of Hitler as they are gener-
ally depicted is far smaller and even more extreme.
As noted, Hitler’s reputation is so toxic that some Western democracies
(and Germany is the prime case) make illegal claims on Hitler’s behalf. The
German government believes—in a way that the American government
does not—that any praise of Hitler might be persuasive or that any voiced
support is likely to uncut the very idea of multicultural democracy. Central
to this marginalization of discussion is the attempt to insure that Hitler’s
positive reputation lacks a community of support.
Yet, as leader of a major industrialized nation for twelve (tumultu-
ous) years, Hitler was involved in many realms of policy making. Clearly
few of the policies of the German state were genocidal, even if these were
highly salient. Certainly one could make a case for the Nazi war on cancer
xiv • Introduction
(Proctor 1999) without endorsing Hitler’s racial politics. Yet, endorsing

the virtue of any of Hitler’s policies without emphasizing that one holds a
sharply negative perspective to the man, the National Socialist Party, and
the Nazi state is perilous, liable to provoke criticism. As the praise becomes
more expansive, the danger increases.
To be sure there are relatively few such figures—and their position is a
matter of degree. But the sensitivity that many Muslims have about depic-
tions and evaluations of the Prophet Mohammad, and the willingness of
some Islamic mullahs to issue a fatwa—in practice a death sentence—
suggests just how powerful reputational politics can be when groups feel
themselves to be under attack from those considered evil or sinful.
Jesus Christ is a figure who should be spoken of with respect, but the
differences between Christian and Islamic cultures, as they have devel-
oped, means that a person who attacks Christ may be scorned without
being threatened. In the political realm figures such as Abraham Lincoln
or Frederick Douglass are protected and preserved by supporters; critics
can be held to account.
But why should reputational claims affect the speaker as well as the
target? The answer is that such claims have an illocutionary force (Aus-
tin 1975). That is to say that claims are taken not merely as the presen-
tation of belief, but as a vehicle by which other things are achieved. The
praise of Hitler, for instance, is not merely a case of “setting history right,”
but rather as making a claim for how publics should think about other
issues in the past and, more saliently, in the present. For controversial—
or “sticky”—figures the claims reverberate beyond the historical assertion
itself. If Hitler is seen as “less bad,” it may be that some of Hitler’s policies
can be retrieved and reassessed. A change in reputation could be a subtle
means by which a set of current policies are praised or attacked.
But reputational claims potentially extend beyond this. Such asser-
tions are relational. A reputational claim is a strategy of linking a speaker
to a community—or, in the extreme case, to separate that speaker from
the community. Reputational work can mean that individuals share a
worldview. These colleagues are on the same team. How one relates to
the streams of collective memory is not individual, but collective. Eviatar
Zerubavel (1997) in Social Mindscapes, his invitation to “cognitive soci-
ology,” argues that alongside cognitive universalism and cognitive indi-
vidualism stands a view of social mnemonics (Olick and Robbins 1998),
a shared perspective on the world. The claims of reputation suggest one’s
placement within a mnemonic or epistemic community. While it may be
the case that the claims are made strategically, in time strategic claims
become part of the background taken-for-granted vision of the world. As
a result, a set of reputational claims becomes the basis on which a pub-
Introduction • xv
lic identity is based. When that public identity is embraced, the identity
becomes a self, an argument implied in the analysis of fame put forward by
Charles Horton Cooley (1918). As a result, how we understand and evalu-
ate the world is not simply external to our core being, but rather something
that defines who we are and with whom we wish to associate.
A particularly powerful instance of reputational “blowback” occurs in
circumstances under which one’s community feels that core beliefs are
being undermined. These communities can be of any size, including a
larger public sphere (such as when Hitler is praised). But the community
may be smaller as well. This explains the extreme hostility shown to those
who are defined as “turncoats.” Such individuals have betrayed the com-
munity of which they are ostensibly a part. The hatred of those who have
once been loyal to a political party or a religious group is palpably stronger
than that directed to those who were never involved in the group. These
are acts of betrayal that suggest that the betrayer is knowledgeable about
the group and has deliberately decided to reject it. One of the most effec-
tive ways of revealing this rejection is to attack the reputation of those that
the group admires (or to praise the enemies of the group). In turn, those
disloyal to a group are expected to have their reputations smeared.
We see this interactional treachery in the case of those who are said to
“betray their class interests.” This involves the ideal type of the turncoat
(Ducharme and Fine 1995), a category that particularly generates hostil-
ity and disdain. The liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt, personally linked to
American elites, was taken as a personal affront by members of the group,
part of the visceral hatred for Roosevelt by many wealthy Americans who
had once considered him one of them. What kind of person would oppose
their friends and colleagues—those who belonged to the same social
world? Such betrayal must reveal inestimable badness. As a result, the tar-
get must become an outsider or “Other,” and, as a result, the false claim
that Roosevelt was Jewish made sense to many of those who felt aggrieved.
Likewise, anyone who is affi liated with the group and supported such a
disreputable figure must be suspect as well.
Part of the process involves whether an individual has a reputation that
can be delinked from the groups to which s/he belongs. Some individuals
are so typified by their real or imagined community that the beliefs of the
group transfer to the individual. These persons have Velcro selves: every-
thing that is challenging and difficult sticks to their identity. In contrast,
those with an independent source of positive evaluation can be said to have
Teflon selves. They can make claims that have the potential to affect them
negatively, but their publics are ready to discount the stigma, separating
their self from pejorative claims. Their idiosyncrasy credits (Hollander
1958)—their favor bank—protects and preserves them. As I discuss in
xvi • Introduction
Chapter 9, this results from the intersection of essence (who the claimant
truly is), location (where s/he falls within a value space), and interest (what
is the assumed justification for the claim). Individuals who already have
a difficult reputation, those surrounded by similarly difficult colleagues,
and those perceived to have a nefarious interest in making the claim are
more likely to find that the reputation sticks through the process of moral
blowback: they are Velcro, not Teflon, in their social identities.
These arguments represent ways in which sticky reputations have their
effects. Reputations are not merely claims about others, but about selves,
and, as such, they structure social order. These reputations are not merely
claims that have the power to produce stigma, but in the long run, they
also produce selves.
Sticky Conspiracies
I have emphasized the reputations of individual political actors. However,
much discussion among publics concerns the presence of hidden networks
that shape policy, economic outcomes, or political results. When we dis-
agree with these assumptions, we are prone to describe these perspectives
as “conspiracy theories” (Olmsted 2009) and claim, pejoratively, those who
propagate or accept these beliefs are “conspiracy theorists” or sometimes
nuts or whackos. Of course, these labels depend on what we might label as
the politics of plausibility (Fine and Ellis 2010). Conspiracy theories have
long been present, truly for millennia. However, increasingly the focus is
on elites, rather than outsider groups such as Jews or Gypsies (Campion-
Vincent 2005).
When conspiracy beliefs are not widely accepted by elites and main-
stream media (such as the 9/11 Truthers or the Obama Birthers), claims
to find such conspiracies can stigmatize the believer, and can lead others
to give the person a deviant label. For instance, President Obama’s “Green
Jobs” czar, Van Jones, was forced to resign because of the sympathy that
he once claimed for versions of the 9/11 conspiracy stories and because he
had signed a petition to get at the “truth” of the attacks. There were many
things that he might have believed that would have passed unnoticed,
but the belief that the U.S. government might in some way be behind the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was not deemed
acceptable. And so he was labeled as disreputable and forced to leave his
powerful government position.
The case of Van Jones exemplifies the power of conspiracy beliefs as
a wedge that reputational opponents can use to characterize the self. Of
course it is not only those on the political left who are targets. Conserva-
tives who are sympathetic to the belief that President Obama is covering
Introduction • xvii
up his alleged Kenyan birth are similarly considered outside the main-
stream with damage done to their public selves.
The point is that such conspiracy beliefs that lack broad community
support are often taken as more than a mistake in judgment, but rather
serve as a blot on one’s moral character, as was claimed about non-inter-
ventionists, such as Charles Lindbergh, in the period prior to the attack on
Pearl Harbor. These figures were labeled isolationists, even as they wished
for increased trade with the Axis nations. They became the kind of people
who might believe “things like that,” and this came to raise the question
of what moral failings contributed to such an assessment of plausibility. In
judging the soul through public beliefs, we are reminded that politics can
be sticky and self-defining.
Plan of the Book

In this volume, I draw on my writings over the past decade, most of which
have appeared in journals of sociology. Together they address the power of
reputation management in creating selves.
Chapter 1, “The Chaining of Social Problems: Solutions and Unin-
tended Consequences in the Age of Betrayal,” was presented as a presiden-
tial address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In this paper I
build on arguments about the unintended consequences of political action
raised by influential scholars including Herbert Spencer, Robert Mer-
ton, and Lewis Coser. I argue that the solution of one problem (let us say,
health insurance) produces other problems as a result of the solution. In
this sense I argue that social problems are chained together with solutions
causing new problems. I use as an example the prevention of subversion
in American politics. I demonstrate how from 1919 through 2001, each
political solution has provoked a new set of problems in its wake. While I
cover a long period, I focus on the challenge of dealing with Communist
and fascist “infi ltration” during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
In the second chapter I address “The Cultural Frameworks of Preju-
dice: Reputational Images and the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Com-
munism.” I ask how the reputation of Jews shifted from the 1930s to the
1950s. During the 1930s it was widely believed and publicly discussed that
American Jews as a group were linked to the Communist Party of Amer-
ica. By the 1950s, this belief had largely vanished and was not longer a part
of legitimate public discourse. To understand this dramatic change I apply
the theory of prejudice as a function of group position to the examination
of reputational politics. For a previously stigmatized group to establish a
positive reputation it must demonstrate that it is not fundamentally dis-
tinctive from other groups, that its members reflect a moral balance in the
xviii • Introduction
group, and that the discursive utility of attack has diminished. In making
this argument I focus on the reputations of Alger Hiss and Roy Cohn, as
well as the discursive limits brought about by the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The third chapter, “Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and
the Power of Memory Templates,” describes the importance of forgetting
to the establishment of collective memory in distinction to the power of
remembrance. I examine the case of the “Brown Scare” in the early 1940s
and how it came to be forgotten in American history in contrast to the
widely remembered “Red Scare” of the 1920s and later of the 1950s. The
Brown Scare involved attacks by the Department of Justice on proto-Nazi
rightists in the period leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and a sub-
sequent sedition trial beginning in 1942. This trial was the largest sedi-
tion trial in American history, eventually leading to a mistrial after the
death of the trial judge. It served as a model for subsequent trials against
Communist leaders later in the decade. The Brown Scare did not fit subse-
quently established memory templates of political institutions and social
movements, and indicates what happens to widely-known events that lack
prominent and well-situated political backers.
The fourth chapter “The Construction of Historical Equivalence:
Weighing the Red and Brown Scares,” constitutes a theoretical extension
of Chapter 3. Drawing on the cases of the Red and Brown Scare, I ask under
what circumstances are “events” considered equivalent. In what ways were
the two “Scares” similar and in what ways different in their origin, scope,
consequences, and shared meaning? How do these similarities and differ-
ences affect the likelihood of remaining in collective memory and what are
the implications for comparative historical studies?
Chapter 5, “Resurrecting the Red: Pete Seeger and the Purification of
Difficult Reputations,” addresses the question of how reputations that had
once been under attack can be morally preserved. Today Pete Seeger is
widely considered one of America’s most beloved folk singers. His stat-
ure is so well-established that he received a Kennedy Center award for his
artistry during the Clinton administration. Yet, throughout much of his
career, Seeger was an active and outspoken member of the Communist
Party, even during its most brutal Stalinist years. It was not until the late
1960s that Seeger distanced himself from the party. How could this left ist
activist, controversial in his early career, become so widely accepted and
why were conservatives largely silent as his reputation became purified?
I examine how, after debates are judged concluded, political activists are
no longer committed to revisiting them unless there is a clear gain. I also
argue that Seeger’s legitimation made his continuing strong critiques of
American society invisible to most of his admirers.
The next chapter returns to questions of isolationist politics in the
Introduction • xix
United States. “Notorious Support: The America First Committee and

the Personalization of Policy” presents the AFC as the leading non-
interventionist/isolationist group of the period prior to the Second World
War. In this chapter I focus on reputational politics surrounding the group
with its opponents attempting to personalize criticism of the organiza-
tion by focusing on disreputable members, including, for some, Charles
Lindbergh. Serious policy debate was transformed into personal attack (a
strategy that is still common today). This form of reputational politics con-
stitutes the “personalization of policy.” I ask how the America First Com-
mittee attempted to fight back, distancing itself strategically from those
who were stigmatized or demonstrating that attackers also had disrepu-
table supporters. I focus on the reputation of Charles Lindbergh and how
he came to represent the organization with both beneficial and harmful
consequences.
Chapter 7 examines the Hollywood Blacklist, but not the blacklist
that is widely known. In “An Isolationist Blacklist?: Lillian Gish and the
America First Committee” I examine processes of internal exclusion in
the film and theatrical community. The entertainment industry is politi-
cally progressive, a reality that justified the McCarthy era blacklists. In the
late 1930s and early 1940s, many figures in the entertainment field pushed
actively for American intervention against fascist Europe, but more than
this those who were affi liated with the “isolationist” movement were pres-
sured with the loss of employment opportunities. The case of Lillian Gish
is particularly striking because of her prominence.
Owen Lattimore was one of the most widely admired and influential
Sinologists in America in 1950 when he was attacked by Senator Joseph
McCarthy and his supporters. In “Honest Brokers: The Politics of Exper-
tise in the ‘Who Lost China?’ Debate,” I discuss threats to the reputations
of experts. No complex social system can long endure without knowledge
specialists who provide information that political actors rely on to make
decisions. But what happens when the advice is widely considered to be
incorrect? How do experts preserve their own reputations in a conten-
tious political culture? Using the debate in the early 1950s over “Who Lost
China?,” assigning responsibility for the fall of the Nationalist regime to
the Communists, I examine the political battles that surrounded the repu-
tation of Professor Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University. Smears
(a set of linked and critical claims) and degradation ceremonies (the insti-
tutional awarding of stigma) are central tools within contentious reputa-
tional politics, undercutting knowledge regimes through the exercise of
institutional power. I focus on two U.S. Senate committee hearings: the
1950 Tydings Committee hearings and the 1951–1952 McCarran Commit-
tee hearings, both exploring political subversion in the State Department.
xx • Introduction
For an expert’s reputation to be preserved, the expert must be defined as

competent (having an appropriate background), innocent (taking a neu-
tral stance), and influential (providing relevant information).
The final chapter, “Sticky Reputations: Adolf Hilter and the Stigma of
Memory Work,” evaluates the power of a fully established reputation. In
most cases the claims made about reputations shape the reputation of the
target, but in a few cases they affect the reputational entrepreneur. This
is particularly true when the reputation at issue is sharply defi ned and
widely consensual. In some cases, the attempt to shape established repu-
tations can rub off on the reputational revisionist. These are what I label
as sticky reputations. In this chapter I describe the consequences of the
effects to revise or modify the reputation of Hitler by those who attempt
to provide challenging or discordant view of the German leader’s reputa-
tion within the American political context. These reputational challengers
fall in three categories: embracers, deniers, and cryptics. The first group
embraces standard histories, but finds Hitler’s actions meritorious; the sec-
ond denies the standard histories, and proposes a revisionist view of the
Nazi interregnum; the third group proposes a more “complex” view of the
Nazi leader, pointing to positive achievements or a positive evaluation of
some aspects of Hitler’s leadership. Although the three groups are different
in their social placement, there is a reputational price to pay, often exclud-
ing the claimant from acceptable public discourse. Challenging the stan-
dard view of a sticky reputation creates deviance that is not easy to escape,
often characterizing the claimant as a moral deviant.
***
For these chapters, I am grateful to many collaborators, critics, and
friendly readers, all of whom have shaped the reputation of this body of
research. In particular, I thank the following students and colleagues
for their advice and insight, Aaron Beim, Carolyn Carr, Karen Cerulo,
Emily Eisenberg, Hank Johnston, Terence McDonnell, Jeff rey Olick, Barry
Schwartz, Rashida Shaw, Ryan White, and Bin Xu. Chapter 2 was co-
authored with Aaron Beim, Chapter 3 with Terence McDonnell, Chapter 5
with Minna Bromberg, Chapter 7 with Rashida Shaw, and Chapter 8 with
Bin Xu. I thank them for their collaboration, insight, and friendship.
Stanford, California
April 2011
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CHAPTER 1
The Chaining of Social Problems
Solutions and Unintended Consequences
in the Age of Betrayal
GARY ALAN FINE
The real revenge is not what we do intentionally against one another.

It is the tendency of the world around us to get even, to twist our clev-
erness against us. Or it is our own unconscious twisting against our-
selves? Either way, wherever we turn we face the ironic unintended
consequences of mechanical, chemical, biological, and medical inge-
nuity—revenge effects, they might be called.
Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back
In March 1934 a liberal New York Congressman, Samuel Dickstein, a Dem-

ocrat representing the Lower East Side of Manhattan, stood on the floor of
the House of Representatives. Hitler had recently grabbed power in Ger-
many and fascism seemed on the march. Even in Dickstein’s Manhattan,
German supporters were goose-stepping at pro-Nazi rallies in Yorkville.
Dickstein believed that these subversive activities were dangerous and
that Congress had an obligation to investigate Nazi propaganda. That
month, the House approved a temporary committee, called the Dick-
stein Committee, that was formally chaired by Massachusetts Represen-
tative John McCormick (Goodman 1968:10). Even though the committee
accomplished little (Morgan 2003:146), Dickstein kept pushing for an
investigative committee to examine “slanderous or libelous un-American
2 • Chaining of Social Problems
propaganda of religious, racial or subversive political prejudices” from

the left and right of the political spectrum (Goodman 1968:14). Joining
forces with conservative Texas Democrat, Martin Dies, in 1938, Dickstein
persuaded his colleagues to establish the House Un-American Activi-
ties Committee. Dickstein was not appointed to the committee, which,
at first, investigated people on either side of the political spectrum. But
gradually, it emphasized investigations of the left , so that finally, after
World War II, that became the committee’s dominant focus—a far
cry from Dickstein’s intent. It is a signal irony that Dickstein, the
originator of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is the
only member of the United States Congress known to have spied for
the Soviet Union (Morgan 2003:146–47).
As Sam Dickstein was attempting to persuade his colleagues to inves-

tigate fascist bigotry, a young Manhattan sociologist, Robert Merton, was
publishing the first of his numerous influential articles. In the inaugu-
ral volume of the American Sociological Review, Merton (1936) exhorted
sociologists to recognize the importance of examining the “unanticipated
consequences of purposive social action.” He described the conditions
that permitted action to have dramatically different effects than had been
intended. Among these was the Heisenberg-like effect of the prediction
itself influencing the study design. Put another way, knowledge of the
hypothesis affects the results, a point emphasized by Robert Rosenthal
and Lenore Jacobson (1968) in their studies of the Pygmalion effect and,
more generally, the literature on experiment expectancy effects (Rosenthal
1966). The action reverberates throughout the social sphere, or as Merton
phrased it, “precisely because a particular action is not carried out in a
psychological or social vacuum, its effects will ramify into other spheres
of value and interest”(1936:902). These effects, once recognized, continu-
ally encourage us to make adjustments to the unanticipated consequences,
adjustments that themselves have unanticipated consequences (Tilly
1996). As Raymond Boudon (1982) recognized, these results play a vital
role in producing social change (p. 5).
Merton was, by no means, either the first or the last to recognize the
importance of “second order consequences” (Bauer 1969; Preston and
Roots 2004). As social problems, these effects are referred to as “perverse
effects” (Boudon 1982:1) or “reverse effects” (Sieber 1981:9–12). We can
trace this theme of unpredicted outcomes to Bernard Mandeville’s early-
eighteenth century The Fable of the Bees and Adam Smith’s late-eighteenth
century reference to the “invisible hand.” Perhaps most presciently Her-
bert Spencer (1892) wrote in 1850, in his Social Statics:
Chaining of Social Problems • 3
To mitigate distress having appeared needful for the production

of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned
upwards of one hundred Acts of Parliament having this end in
view; each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of
Acts previously passed. … What is the statute-book but a record of
such unhappy guesses? (Pp. 12–13)
Spencer also (1892) gives the following example:
When it was enacted in Bavaria that no marriage should be allowed

between those without capital, unless certain authorities could “see
a reasonable prospect of the parties being able to provide for their
children,” it was intended to advance the public weal by checking
improvident unions, and redundant population. … Nevertheless
this apparently sagacious measure has by no means answered its
end. In Munich, the capital of the kingdom, half the births are ille-
gitimate. (P. 11)
Max Weber (1958) writes similarly: “It is undeniably true, indeed a fun-
damental truth of all history that the final result of political activity often,
nay, regularly, bears very little relation to the original intention: often,
indeed it is quite the opposite of what is intended.” This point is similarly
endorsed by Karl Marx in Das Kapital (Roots 2004:1381) and John Dewey
(1922) in Human Nature and Conduct. In a similar vein, both Edward A.
Ross and Georg Simmel have described the various unexpected conse-
quences of modernity (Gross 2003). The recognition of unexpected con-
sequences has been one of the hallmarks of the skeptical and contrarian
nature of sociological theorizing (Mills 1959; Portes 2000:1).
While many of those who address the unintended consequences of pur-
posive action are skeptical of government action (Bastiat 1950; McCord
2003; Roots 2004), this libertarian stance need not exhaust our perspec-
tive on unanticipated consequences, seemingly condemning both conser-
vative and progressive policies to the dustbin of history. Choosing not to
act is a policy, and non-action leaves unanticipated consequences in its
wake (Portes 2000). Laissez-faire government has its own unintended con-
sequences. Indeed, critics of modern capitalism, such as Anthony Giddens
(1990), Charles Perrow (1984), and Ulrich Beck (1997) have argued that
the complexities of contemporary society leads to unpredictability and
the absence of technological control. Lewis Coser (1969) entitled his 1968
SSSP Presidential Address, “Unanticipated Conservative Consequences
of Liberal Theorizing.” I hope that my essay, thirty-seven years after Cos-
er’s, builds on the shoulders of this giant. If we cannot precisely predict
repressive consequences of social action, we can continually be on guard to

push policy adjustments to promote goals of freedom, justice, and oppor-
tunity for which the Society for the Study of Social Problems has continu-
ally fought. Discovering unexpected outcomes does not suggest a moral
failure.
We students of social problems have set ourselves the noble and honor-
able task of bettering the world. We realize that this betterment is never
value-neutral and we know that no solution can ever be objectively cor-
rect, but we persevere, because we understand that communities evolve
through dialogue, debate, and collective action. We are morally obliged to
link our actions to our values. Risking failure, we understand that apathy
is a choice as well. We must avoid an ontological hopelessness in which the
imperfection of solutions prevents active engagement. The solutions that
we advocate result from cultural path dependency, tied to what we imagine
can be achieved, and network embeddedness, tied to the relations of power
that surround us.
Some solutions stick, even if at the time we may be unsure whether other
problems will arise in their wake. Sometimes when we institutionalize a
solution to a social problem, we hear no more of it for awhile—we define
the problem as solved. The solution has the quality of settled law, whatever
the hidden or long-term health and economic effects. In such cases closure
has been established. Those who object are seen as social problem cranks,
not taken seriously.
In this chapter I examine those instances in which a social problems
solution generates the recognition of another social problem—a process
that I term the chaining of social problems. There are several ways in which
a solution may spawn a new problem (Evans 1995), just as organizations
search for new goals to pursue after previous goals have been defined as
solved, what Blau (1955; Sills 1957) defined a “succession of goals.” I briefly
consider four processes by which problem succession occurs: incremental-
ism, slotting, counter-movements, and unintended consequences.
Incrementalism
Moral entrepreneurs have agendas (Becker 1963). Often they recognize
that they cannot achieve the totality of their goals immediately, and so
their preferred solution is instituted in stages. Each battle is a link in the
chain, and the strategy is conscious in creating “domain expansion” (Best,
personal communication, 2004). This process may involve pressing for
solution segments (eliminating cigarette smoking in schools, in hospitals,
in airplanes, in offices, in saloons, and perhaps eventually in homes, until
the ashtray goes the way of the spitoon). In other cases, the steps progress
to the full solution (such as by steadily decreasing the amount of toxins in

air or water or gasoline until pollution becomes unmeasurable, and, thus
for all practical purposes, absent).
Prohibitionist movements often have an incrementalist character. Pro-
life activists propose solutions for limited domains (banning late-term
abortions, instituting waiting periods, or requiring parental notification)
but the solutions are strategic attempts to eliminate abortions. The same
can be said of proposals made by anti-tobacco activists, anti-death penalty
activists, or, earlier, by abolitionists. The gun lobby claims that this is the
strategy of their opponents. Each limit on gun ownership is seen as a step
on the slippery slope toward the eventual elimination of firearms in pri-
vate hands. One solution leads to a focus on a related problem. Although
legislators do not always slide down slippery slopes (Volokh 2003), incre-
mentalism remains a concern for opponents.
Slotting
As Stephen Hilgartner and Charles Bosk (1988) emphasize, the media are
organized by beats or news slots. Once a social problem is established in
the public mind as news, it becomes a routine journalistic topic. Prob-
lems may be either acute or chronic, or oscillate between the two. Acute
problems call for immediate action and are addressed until resolved (or
until the public or editors lose interest). When interest is lost or solutions
deemed impossible an acute problem can become a chronic condition.
“Important” trials typically have an acute aspect, covered until they are
resolved by a jury, as are short wars and other foreign crises. When a prob-
lem settles into a routine, the topic is shelved until something newsworthy
occurs, until some event or claim is defined as calling for a media update
to a chronic condition.
Some problems oscillate between an active, acute phase and a latent,
chronic phase. These constitute punctuated problems, depending on the
drama of events and on the needs of claims-makers. The core problem
image is available for public claims. For instance, the morality of Holly-
wood entertainment is always potentially capable of being drawn upon by
problems entrepreneurs, but “Hollywood” as a problem appears and dis-
appears, depending on the strategic interests of claimants and on choices
of the media as gatekeepers of problems discourse.
When the solutions are embraced by relevant institutions, the prob-
lem can, for the moment, be moved from its news slot, leaving room for
a replacement problem. Potential social problems come to be treated as
significant through their rhetorical placement, as Gamson (1989) notes of
nuclear power. Since newspapers are organized by beats (Fishman 1980;
Tuchman 1978), only a few stories are possible on each beat at any given
time. A news hole cannot easily be filled with a new problem as long as the
current problem is defined as acute. Chronic problems, in contrast, can be
trumped by those defined as acute.
Countering
Some social problems generate a pitched battle between opponents who
hold dramatically different values and beliefs. As Chip Berlet (personal
communication, 2004) suggests, movements may stigmatize their oppo-
nents, using “apocalyptic dualism,” taking threats and magnifying them
into manichean struggles, creating a demand for coercive purity. Social
concerns such as alcohol prohibition and the death penalty generate par-
tisans on both sides. These advocates confront each other directly. In such
circumstances, a legislative or judicial “resolution” may reverse the sides,
but does not muffle the debate. Supporters of what had been the status quo
now strive to overturn the new reality. The classic case in recent American
politics is abortion rights. With the 1973 Supreme Court decision in the
case of Roe v. Wade, the sides reversed. Prochoice activists, who in 1972
demanded that the problem of dangerous abortions be solved by legisla-
tion legalizing voluntary and elective abortions, were replaced the follow-
ing year by pro-life activists who demanded that the state no longer permit
the killing of innocent babies. Abortion remained a problem, but the sides
had altered.
When countering is central, two sides exist, one that supports the status
quo and another that opposes it. Such cleavages often characterize public
opinion (Blumer 1969:200). Given the intensity of belief, public opinion
may have a social control function in determining the possibility of solu-
tions (Noelle-Neumann 1993). A contentious public opinion may con-
strain the discovery of common ground.
This explicit rivalry is distinctly different from those problems, such as
homelessness, child abuse, pornography, or pollution, where such condi-
tions have no defenders. Debates involve disagreement on the tactics of
mitigation. Were these problems magically to vanish, opposing activists
would not wish them back. In contrast, in the case of problems with move-
ments and counter movements any “solution” may shift power and tactics,
but not the underlying clash.
Unintended Consequences
The final type of problem succession involves unintended—and perverse—
consequences of a solution. Sometimes a solution is consensually agreed to
have resolved a problem, but in its wake other undesirable consequences

emerge. This recognition of the perversity of social intervention is cen-
tral to libertarian objections to deliberate social change (Hirschman 1991;
Roots 2004; Schneider 1975), but all policies can have perverse effects.
A dramatic example of this process concerns changes in attitudes
towards the treatment of mental patients during the 1950s and 1960s.
The large mental hospitals of the period were emptied out releasing their
chronic patients, a result of changes in psychiatric ideology and public
awareness, coupled with advances in pharmaceuticals. The problem of
warehousing the mentally ill had been solved. But to what end? Without
social services and institutional support, a significant number of these
troubled individuals wound up on the streets. The presence of odd men
and women contributed to the recognition of a newly defined problem of
homelessness. The linkage between deinstitutionalization and homeless-
ness is a widely recognized instance of solving one problem and unexpect-
edly creating another. Here the solution provides the catalyst for the new
problem: what we might term “Merton’s Problem.”
Solution Failure
To appreciate the challenges of unintended consequences, I describe two
means by which solutions fail to improve the lot of men and women. Using
the traditional sociological distinction between manifest and latent effects,
I examine ineffective solutions (manifest failures) and unintended conse-
quences (latent failures).
Ineffective Solutions
Th is form of failure is the simplest to recognize. As Charles Tilly (1996)
notes in his essay, “Invisible Elbow,” “social interaction entails inces-
sant error followed by error correction” (p. 589). So it is with plans to
alter social relations. A policy—for instance, a measure to decrease
crime or increase productivity—can fail because it does not achieve its
goals. The problem remains. Admittedly it is not always simple to deter-
mine whether a solution was effective. One must operationalize success,
specify a time frame, and be aware of concurrent causes that may have
produced the effect. Judging the policy outcomes is tied to the political
interests of those making the assessments (Evans 1999). Still, consensus
often develops; the world of problems has an obdurate character. As a
result, policy makers may attempt to correct the disappointing outcomes
through improvisation (Tilly 1996:590)—jury-rigging the policy or
reconceptualizing goals.
Latent Failures
The second type of failure represents the classic instance of unintended
consequences. Here the problem that is targeted may have been settled, but
perverse effects stem from the changes. Whether this is a function of an
absence of adequate information, a narrow vision resulting from ideologi-
cal blinders, or the impossibility of tracing out action through a complex
social system, the reverberations of newly created constraints and rein-
forcements are missed. These problems, seemingly unrelated or tangential
to the original problem, follow from new social conditions. As problem
solutions often alter rewards and costs for action, these changes can gener-
ate new behaviors. Prohibition, increasing the costs and risks of producing
and distributing alcohol, led to organized crime involvement in the mar-
ket. The new institutional structure in which the production and distri-
bution of alcohol was illegal produced institutions that were motivated
to keep their activities secret, escalating production costs (Denzin 1977).
Committing other crimes became a cost of doing business. The crime rate
increased because of newly-minted crimes and because criminalizing the
market led to subsidiary crimes as criminal syndicates were strengthened.
Prohibition is a solution that failed, not because alcohol consumption did
not decline, but because other problems arose that came to be defined as
more serious.
Subversion and the State

To describe the chaining of social problems, I focus on a site of struggle.
I examine how the American state has faced the challenge surrounding
regime disloyalty and subversion. This concern with disloyalty is based
on the belief that citizens can betray their nation, threatening it in the
process, and in turn through government overreaction that the govern-
ment betrays the rights of citizens to dissent. Put another way, I consider
responses to what Samuel Dickstein labeled un-Americanism. What is the
proper response to those who in their words and actions seek to under-
cut state legitimacy? Whether these threats are labeled anarchism, sedi-
tion, subversion, treason, or terrorism, the United States government has
at times acted to protect the status quo from those deemed to threaten the
political order. I use the generic term subversion, which, while a political
term, avoids some of the boundary problems of treason and sedition.
Concern with political subversion is a punctuated problem, a concern
that—like Holly wood immorality—rises to public attention and then
retreats. Subversion is a problem that is both long-lasting and recurrent,
changeable and stable. In this paper I examine the chaining of the problem
of subversion between 1919 and 2005, but similar concerns were raised
during the late eighteenth century at the time of the 1798 Alien and Sedi-
tion Acts, again at the time of the Mexican War in the 1840s, and during
and after the Civil War. However, it wasn’t until the twentieth century with
the establishment of powerful regimes and totalitarian ideologies, hostile
to American republican-capitalism, that establishing a balance between
security and rights became a priority and it wasn’t until sophisticated tech-
nologies of surveillance were in place that action could be taken.
Each solution sets the terms for later problems and constrains their
solutions. Put another way, institutional responses shift the path depen-
dency under which future events unfurl. My concern is what changes in
attitudes towards subversion and surveillance suggest about how social
problems and their solutions are linked. In this paper I do not attempt to
suggest a proper balance between state security and the rights of individu-
als and groups to express their beliefs. In a society that claims an adher-
ence to procedural democracy, there are limits as to what activities are
legitimate outside of this system. This must not deny the necessary place
of social movements, even militant ones. We are obliged to support the
legitimate place of challenges that contest our values. One of the ironies of
the chaining of social problems is that laws and regulations are often used
against those partisans who once most supported them. We cannot be sur-
prised that one’s attitudes are a function of who is likely to be benefited and
disadvantaged in the short run. Yet, policies have a way of boomeranging,
harming those who smugly thought that they would be protected.
Suppression, Surveillance, Suspicion, and Surmise

When a regime comes to perceive that forces are strategizing to overwhelm
or alter the normative and institutional system, it is not surprising that it
responds, attempting to restrain extralegal change. That this perception
often occurs under conditions of social strain (Erikson 1966), leads the
response to be more vigorous and emotional than it might otherwise be.
Of course, each situation has its own historical context and cast of charac-
ters. The decision of what constitutes appropriate responses is historically
contingent, just as the recognition of shared pasts shapes what is permis-
sible in the present. In other words, each response to subversion occurs
within the context of previous events defined as relevant.
To explore the unintended consequences of security concerns, I focus
on five moments in U.S. history over the past century: the Palmer Raids
of 1919, the Brown Scare of 1940 to 1944, the period of McCarthyism
from 1947 to 1954, attacks on the New Left from 1965 to 1971, and the
aftermath of 9/11 since 2001. Following Erikson (1966), I note that each
of these moments occurred either immediately before, during, or after an

armed conflict. Concern became salient for a time, and then, sometimes
due to state repression that seemed to dampen the threat, it retreated in
public consciousness. These actions have unintended and reverberating
effects and the tools that have been used to “solve” the problems become
resources for future challenges.
The Palmer Raids and the “Great Red Scare”

The aftermath of war is often a moment at which nations, even victorious
ones, attempt to strengthen their political and moral boundaries. Having
emerged from the fire of battle, states are concerned about whether poten-
tial enemies, including former allies, are subverting the nation. The meta-
phor of battle is omnipresent. The moment peace is established, just like
the moment of war, is a time at which national unity is often paramount.
The demand for political conformity was dramatically evident in
the years immediately after the end of World War I. Americans became
intensely concerned about communists and anarchists in their midst, a
concern that was heightened by apprehension over the Russian Revolution
and subsequent creation of the Soviet Union, as well as the expansion of
revolutionary fervor throughout Eastern Europe (Morgan 2003).
Nor was the anxiety wholly irrational. Despite the label “Red Scare,”
the fears were not groundless, even if in retrospect they seem overblown
and the tactics excessive. During this period radicals sent three dozen
mail bombs, engaged in violent strikes, shot Armistice Day paraders in
Centralia, Washington, bombed Wall Street, killing thirty and injuring
hundreds, and threatened conservative governments throughout East-
ern Europe. Whether the governmental response was excessive or legal,
one could reasonably assert that during 1919 the threat was real. Ambi-
tious American politicians, notably Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,
attempted to fan the flames of public concern in his efforts to deport alien
radicals through a series of Department of Justice raids, many of which
were subsequently judged improper by the courts. In looking back to 1919
we already know the outcome, permitting a causal, presentist judgment
of what seemed reasonable at the time. We engage in the error of reading
history backwards. The radicals and their violence had been trumped, but
at the time—as in 1940, 1947, 1968, or 2001—this happy ending was by no
means certain and perhaps was a result of the state actions that were sub-
sequently deemed illegitimate.
These concerns about foreign agitators gave political weight to sharp
limits on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe as institution-
alized in the Immigration Act of 1924. Even if Attorney General Palmer’s
tactics of deporting radical agitators were excluded as an acceptable politi-

cal response, his fears were institutionalized in limits on immigration
(Bennett 1988; Heale 1990), altering the internal American labor market
and moderating concerns about unassimilated foreigners. The absence of
a pool of foreign laborers contributed to the “Great Migration” of Afri-
can Americans from the South to Northern industrial factories (Lemann
1
1992), contributing to urban problems that remain intractable today. That
the concerns of anarchism could lead indirectly to inner-city poverty,
through a restriction in global labor markets, is a dramatic instance of
unintended consequences and social problems chaining.
On the security front, threats to the American polity were increasingly
defined as homegrown, with ethnicity rather than nationality, the defining
threat until revision of immigration quotas in the 1960s. This prevented
deportation from being a significant option in the fight against subversion,
but in its place giving rise to a domestic security apparatus in the form
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Keller 1989). Local police units
yielded to the power of a national organization, skilled in investigating
political crimes. Americans had to learn that subversion can also emerge
from the acts of fellow citizens, as an internal, rather than external, threat.
This view would not change until the mass immigration of the last decades
of the twentieth century.
The label “Red Scare” itself had unintended consequences. It was first
used a decade after the Palmer raids by liberal journalist Frederick Lewis
Allen (1931) in his book Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s,
designating the early years of the period “the Big Red Scare.” By this time
the fear engendered by the terrorist bombings, which led to Palmer’s
2
response, had waned and the threat seemed slight, merely a scare. Allen
(1931:38–39) declared that the American people:
were listening to ugly rumors of a huge radical conspiracy against

the government and institutions of the United States. They had
their ears cocked for the detonation of bombs and the tramp of Bol-
shevist armies. They seriously thought—or at least millions of them
did, millions of otherwise reasonable citizens—that a Red revolu-
tion might begin in the United States the next month or next week.
… It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order,
of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and
civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.
Dismissing the need to respond to claims of subversion also dismisses

even the possibility of a real threat to American social and political order.
However, the fact that we recall the period by labeling it the “Red Scare,” in
contrast to a parallel term with vastly different implications, “Red Menace”

(Haynes 1996; Jenkins 1999:11), means that the lessons from that period
will be to create a community that mistrusts governmental responses to
institutional threat. Menaces are real, whereas scares are illusions.
The Brown Scare and the Dangers of Isolationism

After the placid 1920s, a concern with subversion, from both the left and
the right, grew throughout the 1930s, an unexpected result of Depres-
sion-era politics. As noted, in 1934, the United States House of Repre-
sentatives established a temporary committee under the leadership of
Democratic Congressman John McCormick to examine subversion by
the right, a committee that eventually became institutionalized in the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 (Goodman
1968). Because of its political make-up, largely of conservative Republicans
and Southern Democrats, HUAC proved partial to investigations of the
left (although the committee, particularly at first, investigated both right
and left). HUAC and its earlier incarnation created the category of action
called “un-Americanism,” a term born on the left, but orphaned and later
adopted by the right, as the Cold War started.
The concerns about sedition in the 1930s established the FBI as the
agency responsible for domestic security investigations, a stance endorsed
by political liberals (Keller 1989:6). Liberals viewed the FBI as a profession-
alized law enforcement agency situated outside partisan politics (Cunning-
ham 2004:24). Such a position institutionalized the control of subversion
within the Agency, insulating it from the political process, both pres-
sure and oversight. While the Roosevelt administration’s attempts were
designed to remove the investigation of subversion from partisanship, the
unintended consequence was to create what William Keller (1989) termed
an “independent security state,” a choice with strong repercussions during
the FBI’s counter-subversion efforts in the 1960s.
The battle over subversion heated up after Hitler’s attack on Poland in
the autumn of 1939. At first the Roosevelt administration officials wanted
to aid Great Britain under terms of the Neutrality Act, without commit-
ting United States forces, and the 1940 election was fought on this basis,
between two interventionists, Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. After the
election, the debate over the extent of American aid to the Allies intensified.
The Midwest, perhaps because of its German heritage or because of its dis-
tance from the coasts, was staunchly isolationist, while the cities of the
East Coast focused more on international issues and, with a heavier pro-
portion of Jewish residents, Eastern cities were more inter ventionist. These
areas were joined by the solidly interventionist South, whose support for
Roosevelt’s foreign policy was rewarded by the Federal government, which

tacitly endorsed segregationist regimes.
By 1941 America was in the midst of a “Great Debate” over the extent
of U.S. support for the Allies. With the fascists and communists in league
(until the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union in June), it was easy to feel
that isolationists had a totalitarian bent. Even after the about-face of the
Communist Party of America, the claim that supporters of non-interven-
tionists were Nazi-sympathizers, as some few were, was commonplace
among interventionists. The Roosevelt administration was not above deni-
grating opponents as Nazi “fellow-travelers” or using the FBI to investi-
gate either individuals or groups, as it did to both Charles Lindbergh and
the America First Committee (MacDonnell 1995; Wallace 2003). The FBI
even investigated Congressional leaders such as Representative Hamilton
Fish and Senator Burton Wheeler. Roosevelt labeled his isolationist oppo-
nents “Cooperheads,” referring to the Northern traitors who supported the
South during the Civil War.
This linkage of legitimate political disagreements to the politics of sub-
version and treason might have been convenient, as it caused the America
First Committee much expense and effort, but it left a lasting mark on
American politics. One’s opponents, particularly foreign policy oppo-
nents, were now vulnerable to the framework of sedition, a master frame.
The passage of the 1940 Smith Act (Alien Registration Act) was an
example of this conflation of policy disagreement and sedition. The Smith
Act led to the prosecution of thirty rightists for sedition and conspiracy in
the trial U.S. v. McWilliams (1944), an investigation that began even before
the war. As Senators Robert Taft (R-Ohio) and William Langer (R-North
Dakota) noted, the McWilliams trial was reminiscent of the Palmer Raids
and World War I witch hunts but now aimed largely at citizens (Reilly
1985; Roots 1997). The trial, just as the Palmer Raid before it, provided a
template for action in later years, neutralizing the threat to political con-
sensus (Chapter 3).
McCarthyism and the Smith Act

Just as the attacks on isolationists and rightists were embroiled in par-
tisan political concerns, so were subsequent attacks upon communists.
The vitriolic attacks of the Roosevelt administration in the early 1940s on
their opponents were matched by the bitter recriminations of the resurgent
post-war Republican Party, ready to suggest that the cozy connections of
the Roosevelt administration with the Soviets and American leftists dur-
ing the Depression and World War II, were being continued by Truman
and the Democratic Party in what became known as the Cold War.
Now that the Venona decryptions are availabile we can no longer doubt
the extent of the Soviet espionage network in American government and
culture (Morgan 2003; Powers 1998; Weinstein and Vassiliev 1999). The
guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, controversial at the time, seems
less so today. Fervent supporters and fellow travelers of the American Com-
munist Party displayed moral obtuseness when they tried desperately to
ignore the anti-Semitism, imperialism, corruption, brutality, and mass
murder in the Stalinist empire, and their behavior warranted no badge
of honor. Portions of their domestic agenda such as fighting racism, sup-
port for union organizing, and promotion of various forms of collective
social assistance are worthy of praise, even if for some leaders of the party
and their Soviet handlers these noble efforts were used strategically for less
noble aims.
The Communist Party of America proved an inviting target for con-
servatives. Their attacks were political payback for using the state appara-
tus to censure the right and also because of the linkages between certain
members of the Communist Party and the Roosevelt administration it
made excellent political theater. Add to this, the fact that the member-
ship of the Communist Party was largely composed of Jews, elite WASPS,
and foreign-born residents allowed attacks on communists to fit cultural
templates that made for good politics. Subversion once tied to Roosevelt’s
congressional opposition could now be linked to the Executive Branch.
The fact that Roosevelt had built an institutional investigative arm in the
FBI provided an infrastructure in which counter-subversion had an inde-
pendent base of power.
As was true in the Palmer Raids and the Brown Scare, concerns about
subversion, the legitimacy of techniques of counter-subversion, and the
“subversive” groups themselves evaporated in time. As with the Brown
Scare after Pearl Harbor, external shocks undercut the threat of the com-
munist left. The Soviet Union’s brutal hegemony over Eastern Europe, its
1956 invasion of Hungary, and Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin eliminated
any idealism still associated with a Soviet-controlled party. However, these
events occurred within the context of American state attacks that, even
if limited by McCarthy’s collapse and the Supreme Court’s limitation of
sedition investigations, curtailed the effectiveness of the left (Stone 2004).
Once again the outcome of this anti-subversive effervescence had effects
not immediately apparent. The decline of the Communist Party gave rise
to the growth of an unstructured left, permitting the flowering of the youth
rebellion in the 1960s, an outpouring of energy and anger that flourished
under local organization (Polletta 2002) without an infrastructure that
could be easily attacked or easily controlled.
The New Left and FBI Surveillance

Problems solutions and the added social problems they subsequently gen-
erated contributed to the political ferment of the 1960s. The radicalism
evident among some youth can be traced to the expansion of college edu-
cation. College provided young people with an ideal moment for action, in
which they had sufficient political skills, yet still lacked routine economic
responsibility. The growing availability of college education, particularly
for the upper-middle class, created a community lacking a specific social
agenda. In addition, the prosperity of the period, which was, in part, a
function of federal investment in the Cold War defense establishment,
provided a resource-base for collective action. Educational institutions
and many well-to-do parents sheltered the dissidents and their radical
politics too.
However, the destruction of the Communist Party (both its self-
destruction and the destruction caused by government action) eliminated
an organized structure that could support radical action. As Polletta (2002)
emphasized, the New Left struggled with various political forms, often
embracing an unstructured and unstable democracy that limited coordi-
nation and organizational stability. Each group had a distinctive micro-
culture that proved hard to integrate with other groups (Gerlach and Hine
1970). Organizations, such as Students for a Democratic Society, registered
dramatic changes in ideology, in strategy, and in organization over a few
short years, or even months (Sale 1973). This caused such excrescences as
the infamous “Days of Rage.” The absence of a central structure led to the
movement’s decline, as no organizational structure existed to control the
excessive behaviors the media focused on (Gitlin 1980). This structure-less
quality was a result of the aftermath of the attacks on the highly organized
and highly ideologically sophisticated Communist Party.
The government, facing an internal subversive threat during the Viet-
nam War, found itself unable effectively to target organizations or ide-
ologies, due to earlier Supreme Court rulings. As David Cunningham
(2004:27) pointed out, “The demise of the Smith Act signaled a turning
point within the FBI, which had depended upon the act to publicly jus-
tify its harassment of the Communist Party.” Now criminal acts needed to
be demonstrated. This created a need for political surveillance, including
undercover work, increasing the weight and political authority of the FBI
in creating an independent security state. These rules allowed the FBI to
engage in secret, disruptive tactics outside of the purview of an increas-
ingly skeptical court. One result was the counterintelligence program,
known as COINTELPRO, aimed at disrupting the Communist Party, the
Klan, certain civil rights groups, and the New Left.
Charges of conspiracy increasingly replaced generic claims of sedi-

tion. However, once again, the strategy and tactics of countering subver-
sion were brought into question. Claims of subversion must be served hot.
Once the claims became routine and the forces of subversion were muz-
zled, those who organized the crackdown were themselves attacked. The
1971 disclosure of the FBI COINTELPRO program ravaged the bureau’s
reputation, and, along with the FBI’s investigations in the 1960s, created a
wall of suspicion among political liberals (Keller 1989:112). Investigations,
by the Church Committee and others, revealed FBI excesses and even the
CIA’s domestic intelligence gathering. Subsequently, limits on the amount
of information gathering and active domestic intelligence permitted had a
crucial impact on domestic events. In the aftermath of 9/11, it became clear
that a critical intelligence failure was a factor in the attacks (Cunningham
2004:224). In other words, the revelations of FBI excesses had the unin-
tended effect of prompting the bureau to adopt a legalistic mind-set that
deterred officials from thinking in preventative, rather than prosecutorial
terms. One effect of this was to make the bureau more effective at solving
crimes than preventing terrorism (Posner 2004:10).
9/11 and the Patriot Act

We are still recovering from September 11 and its multiple reverberations.
The responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
must be understood in light of previous responses to subversion. Govern-
ment response to Al Qaeda has been constrained by those responses that
we consider legitimate and those that we do not. We protect our state in
light of what is permitted. Limits on the investigation of domestic dissi-
dents had become onerous, so a space opened for policy revisions under
presidential powers as well as the legislation, such as the deliciously named
“Patriot Act.” John Ashcroft’s decision to change the investigation guide-
lines to override previous legal constraints results from the unanticipated
consequences of using a policy designed to limit the investigation of
domestic political radicals to apply to international terrorists.
This created a situation in which protection against domestic terrorism
was not considered law enforcement but national defense—a military mat-
ter. There has been a growth in public esteem for the U.S. Armed Forces
since the Vietnam War. In some regards, the military came to be seen as
the most progressive of American institutions as a result of its transforma-
tion into a voluntary force as well as its multi-cultural inclusiveness.
Because of that, the military, along with a weakened and defensive FBI,
was transformed into a legitimate force to suppress terror threats (Etzioni
2004:6; Posner 2004:10).
Many former counter-subversion strategies are no longer an accepted

part of the armature of government, even though the damage inflicted
on 9/11 differed only in degree from the deadly bombs of the Palmer era
and the Sixties. After World War I, we also feared foreigners who wished
to destroy the government, but mass deportation is today no longer an
option, and sedition laws have been so weakened that, in effect, domestic
courts can no longer arraign dissidents. The United States has also cur-
tailed the disruption of subversive groups within its borders, and although
I do not discuss the internment of Japanese Americans during World War
II, our national shame has served to protect Arab Americans at a moment
when similar calls might have otherwise arisen.
The excesses of each of these strategies demanded new methods, pre-
viously unimaginable and certainly unintended, such as using the meta-
phor of wartime suppression. At no previous time were large numbers of
individuals held incommunicado, nor were Americans considered enemy
combatants. The Bush administration’s decision to treat the attack on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center as an act of war rather than as a
crime meant that the safeguards that are now permitted to political defen-
dants did not apply, until, once again, the Supreme Court drew some limits
on this practice.
The question is how to define troubling actions as illegal subversion.
At each point the strategy of the government is to target those who have
not committed a crime but who have sympathies that stand against state
power. Yet, at each historical moment, agents of social control must work
around those constraints that resulted from the past excesses of regime
power. Each episode provides the conditions for addressing future trou-
bles. Put another way, government response is culturally path dependent.
As Charles Tilly (1996) reminds us, we improvise until we are, for the
moment, satisfied with the outcomes. In this sense, each moment of sub-
version and each response are chained—often unintentionally—in a web
of social problems and political solutions.
Chains of Significance
Let us gaze beyond the unexpected effects of governmental responses to
internal security threats. The solution of a social problem does not neces-
sarily end matters, although it may push the problem from center stage.
Yet, solutions can fail, they can create other problems, and they can leave
spaces in which moral entrepreneurs can create attention for other prob-
lems. Solutions alter the costs and benefits of behavior, shift moral values,
and change power relationships.
When we examine the effects of the impulses towards prohibition—
tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and perhaps the stirrings of a movement against

fat—we see the same process. Take the changing approaches to the prob-
lem of alcohol usage. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
tury, reformers argued that Americans drank too much alcohol, and this
drinking, particularly among immigrants and the working class, was
perceived to lead to moral and economic decay: violence towards women,
neglect of children, and public disorder. In time, the problem was resolved
by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, insti-
tuting Prohibition, which, once established under the Volstead Act, led
to other problems that were either not predicted or not intended by sup-
porters, such as the rise of criminal syndicates and disrespect for the law.
This recognition led to the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment which
overturned Prohibition on the national level. This, however, did not elimi-
nate the problem of alcohol, leading both to local fixes (changing of the
age limit for drinking, setting limits on alcohol consumption for driving,
establishing state liquor stores, closing bars on Sundays) as well as eventu-
ally medicalizing the condition of alcoholism with attendant changes to
managed health care plans.
Sociologists must see solutions as embedded within complex, dynamic,
interconnected social systems. Social problems solutions create oppor-
tunities and constraints, some of which will eventually be communally
defined as dysfunctional. This does not suggest that solutions will inevita-
bly create effects that are perverse, and if perverse effects are discovered,
that they should not be addressed. Those who care about social problems
are obligated to use their best knowledge to increase the store of freedom,
justice, and equality.
Social problems solutions are path dependent, but they simultaneously
change those paths, producing unintended consequences. Policies are
embedded in relations among actors, who also change those relations as
they act. Because of the reflexive features of social systems—latent as well
as manifest relations—few problems solutions are so narrowly targeted that
they alter only the behaviors that moral entrepreneurs desire. This recogni-
tion provides an opportunity for sociologists to strip away the confident
rhetoric that surrounds proposed changes and to appreciate Robert Mer-
ton’s claim that behavior is interdependent, situated in a world that is tightly
coiled. All social problems have six degrees of separation—or fewer.
Notes
1. Of course, African Americans were not the only migrants to Northern factories; white
Appalachians moved as well. However, there were different patterns of upward mobility
for the two groups.
2. The term entered historical discourse as the title of Robert Murray’s (1955) engaging
account, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920, with its pseudo-psychiatric
subtitle.
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STICKY REPUTATIONS

Gary Alan Fine

Sticky Reputations focuses on reputational entrepreneurs and support

Gary Alan Fine is the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern

Gary Alan Fine

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-415-89498-2 (hbk)

Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Chapter 2 The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational

Chapter 3: Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the

Chapter 4: The Construction of Historical Equivalence: Weighing

Chapter 5: Resurrecting the Red: Pete Seeger and the Purification of

Chapter 6: Notorious Support: The America First Committee and

was transformed into personal attack. This form of reputational

Chapter 7: An Isolationist Blacklist?: Lillian Gish and the America

Chapter 8: Honest Brokers: The Politics of Expertise in the “Who

Chapter 9: Sticky Reputations: Adolf Hitler and the Stigma of

Permission Credits 207

Midcentury American Politics: From Diversity to Consensus

by the Roosevelt administration in the late 1930s, an administration that

The Power of Sticky Reputations

target. How do reputations shape, build, or destroy identities? However,

(Proctor 1999) without endorsing Hitler’s racial politics. Yet, endorsing

Plan of the Book

United States. “Notorious Support: The America First Committee and

For an expert’s reputation to be preserved, the expert must be defined as

The real revenge is not what we do intentionally against one another.

Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back

In March 1934 a liberal New York Congressman, Samuel Dickstein, a Dem-

propaganda of religious, racial or subversive political prejudices” from

As Sam Dickstein was attempting to persuade his colleagues to inves-

To mitigate distress having appeared needful for the production

Spencer also (1892) gives the following example:

When it was enacted in Bavaria that no marriage should be allowed

repressive consequences of social action, we can continually be on guard to

to the full solution (such as by steadily decreasing the amount of toxins in

have resolved a problem, but in its wake other undesirable consequences

Subversion and the State

Suppression, Surveillance, Suspicion, and Surmise

of these moments occurred either immediately before, during, or after an

The Palmer Raids and the “Great Red Scare”

tactics of deporting radical agitators were excluded as an acceptable politi-

were listening to ugly rumors of a huge radical conspiracy against

Dismissing the need to respond to claims of subversion also dismisses

contrast to a parallel term with vastly different implications, “Red Menace”

The Brown Scare and the Dangers of Isolationism

Roosevelt’s foreign policy was rewarded by the Federal government, which

McCarthyism and the Smith Act

The New Left and FBI Surveillance

Charges of conspiracy increasingly replaced generic claims of sedi-

9/11 and the Patriot Act

Many former counter-subversion strategies are no longer an accepted

tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and perhaps the stirrings of a movement against

The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice

Erasing the Brown Scare

The Construction of Historical Equivalence