![]() But if the best-known symbols of the McCarthyite blacklist like the Hollywood Ten - screenwriters and directors who refused to name names in front of Congress - are well-known, the depth and reach of the war on culture are today less familiar. It is generally acknowledged that the beginnings of the Cold War brought a vicious attempt to bring down the Communist Party, in the process destroying the lives of members and nonmembers alike. In focusing on the repression of radical folk musicians in the mid-twentieth century, Leonard adds a new dimension. As he wrote in Heavy Radicals, “the understanding of how determined, organized resistance and political repression are intimately intertwined, remains a current and relevant problem.” Relying mostly on FBI archives and the yield of countless Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, he has sketched how the state sought to infiltrate and take down the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the Black Panthers, and once-influential Maoist groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party. With his previous two books - Heavy Radicals and A Threat of the First Magnitude, both coauthored with Conor Gallagher - Leonard has proven his ability to craft a compelling story from the records of political repression. It also says a great deal about the pervasive paranoia that McCarthyism had fostered in American political and cultural life. There’s more than a bit of Guthrie’s propensity for tall tales and cockeyed humor in this response. ![]() I can jump up on the table and shout “I’m a communist!” and all they’ll say is “Oh he’s crazy.” You try doing that anywhere else in America. Besides, this is the freest place in America. When his friends asked how he was faring, Guthrie replied: While a patient at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, Guthrie was visited by friends Lee Hayes and Fred Hellerman. The second story, also relevant to Guthrie’s struggle with Huntington’s disease took place just before his diagnosis. “Guthrie, in other words, remained an active candidate for detention as a communist,” writes Leonard, “despite being afflicted with a fatal neurological disease.” The bureau obliged by removing him from the Security Index, but they kept tabs on him in the Communist Index. ![]() In 1955, an FBI agent tasked with keeping tabs on Guthrie and his affiliation to the Communist Party recommended that, given the folksinger’s rapid deterioration, he be taken off the bureau’s “Security Index.” After all, he would soon be incapacitated, and therefore no longer pose any credible threat. By 1950, Guthrie had already begun to lose motor functions, his mood became depressed and anxious, his behavior erratic, and his mind slipped progressively into dementia. The debilitating condition was not correctly diagnosed until 1952 when Guthrie was forty. One of the best-known folk singer-songwriters in modern American history, he was also unlucky enough to have genetically inherited Huntington’s disease. They both, appropriately, involve Woody Guthrie. Leonard’s The Folk Singers and the Bureau capture the importance of the book. Review of The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956, by Aaron Leonard (Repeater Books, 2020).
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