Manufacturing Hysteria: Scapegoating, Surveillance and Secrecy in Modern America

Critics of the recent Bush administration's infringements on civil liberties%E2%80%94from the detentions of citizens of Middle Eastern and South Asian origin to the Patriot Act%E2%80%94will find a shameful legacy in Feldman's compact history of 20th-century American political repression. Feldman (When the Mississippi Ran Backwards) charts the federal government's "all out assault on dissent, with a three-pronged attack of legislation, propaganda and surveillance" from the early 20th century on, revealing how "the safeguards of our liberty are in danger not so much from those who openly oppose them as from those who, professing to believe in them, are willing to ignore them when found inconvenient for their purpose," as Idaho Sen. William Borah observed during the red scare of 1919. Feldman ably sketches out instances of the trampling of the constitutional rights of Japanese-Americans during WWII and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, and offers especially fine analyses of the McCarthy era as "once again, the American people fell in line with the government, as liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans all joined in the scapegoating." Feldman's history offers a sharply revisionist view of 20th-century America that eschews triumphalism, and ends on the disheartening note that while "we have managed to right the ship of state each time" democracy is challenged, "one of these times we could reach a point of no return." (Aug.)