G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the …
Gage offers several great insights around the January 1920 Justice Dept raids of the Communist parties -- raids that, of course, included brutality, warrantless arrests, misidentifications, etc., and brought in some 7300 arrests nearly overnight.
But one of her insights is easy to overlook: behind the raids is an extremely sloppy understanding of this period's communist activities that doesn't just conflate all "radicals" (anarchists, labor activists) with communists, but fails to distinguish communism *at that moment, in the US* from the Bolshevik Revolution, let alone from Marx (!).
"Hoover saw little distinction between the social theories of a nineteenth-century German philosopher, the actions of an embattled Russian revolutionary government, and the moment-to-moment proclivities of American radicals. All were part of the same criminal plot." (p. 78)