The Hunt for Red Menace: - 2
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McCarthy Period Private Sector Groups
During the McCarthy period Red Channels, published by American
Business Consultants and Counterattack published by Aware, Inc.
were the primary blacklisting newsletters.<$F Navasky, Names,
p.88> Two groups formed in Chicago, the American Security Council
and the Church League of America began as information clearinghouses
for industrial and business security agents.
The American Security Council started life as an employers reference
to ferret out pro-union and thus supposedly subversive employees. There
is an excellent review of the American Security Council's early red-hunting
activities in William Turner's Power on the Right.
The FBI, COINTELPRO, and the
War on Dissent
When the smear tactics of Joseph McCarthy and his allies were finally
discredited, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover simply took the red menace
campaign underground and re-institutionalized attacks on dissenters with
a massive program of illegal spying and harassment dubbed COINTELPRO-the
FBI's Counterintelligence Program. Meanwhile, unaware of COINTELPRO,
the grassroots nativist forces retreated to the fringes of the American
political system to regroup and publish their periodicals and books.
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