Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Erin G. Carlston
American Literary History, Volume 22, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 615-625
(Review)
Access provided by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (10 Apr 2018 21:07 GMT)
Modern Literature under
Surveillance: American
Writers, State Espionage, and
the Cultural Cold War
Erin G. Carlston *
named “Book Review Section” within the bureau; its actual, sinis-
ter job was “to monitor, manage, and manipulate literary pro-
duction” (Culleton 49). Numerous bureau functionaries worked,
seemingly around the clock, to review books and other printed
materials for subversive content; the scale of their efforts can be
gauged by the fact that the reading room staff was responsible for
reading and clipping 625 newspapers daily (Culleton 240). But the
bureau’s involvement did not end with surveillance: Hoover and
his staff reviewed and approved, or advised against publishing,
manuscripts submitted in advance by publishing houses, and they
maintained informants in the publishing industry, including many
supposedly on the left, who supplied Hoover with minutes and
notes from editorial board meetings so that he was aware of poten-
tial articles and books as soon as ideas for them were proposed
(Culleton 59, 238). They scanned syllabi to determine what books
were being read in college English classes (Culleton 48). Above
all, they spied on writers and critics, following them, intercepting
their mail, soliciting information from neighbors and paid infor-
mants, sometimes wiretapping them. And then they fed infor-
mation from their files on those writers to the right-wing press,
HUAC, Senator McCarthy, the INS, the military, and other gov-
ernment agencies, or anyone else Hoover thought needed to know
when a writer had—or had once had, or was said to have had—
any connection with left politics.
Actually, “left” politics is something of an oversimplification
here because Hoover feared and mistrusted anyone to the left of
far right and even kept dossiers on some conservatives like
William F. Buckley, Jr. (who fell from grace after making a joke
about Hoover’s rumored homosexuality [Robins 175]). A multi-
tude of sins could get a writer, artist, or critic investigated and, if
he or she was sufficiently worrying, “indexed”—added to what
was revealingly called the “Custodial Detention Index” until
Hoover changed the name to the more opaque “Security Index,” a
list of people to be incarcerated as security threats in case of
national emergency. (In Hoover’s view there were several such
emergencies during his lifetime, including the outbreak of the
Korean War, when he asked President Truman to suspend habeas
corpus and send 12,000 US citizens to military prisons immedi-
ately. There is no evidence that Truman paid attention to the sug-
gestion [Weiner].) In the 1920s, any signs of sympathy for the
labor movement raised a red flag, as did arguing for racial equality
or even mentioning that the US had a race problem. Writing about
poverty or unhealthy working conditions, advocating birth control,
or giving money to, or signing a petition for, any of the hundreds
of groups the FBI designated “Communist front organizations”
American Literary History 619
were all enough to earn a writer a dossier. In the late 1930s, sup-
porting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War was taken as a
sure sign of subversion that merited opening files on dozens of
writers and artists, despite the fact that within a very few years the
US was officially at war with the fascist regimes that had backed
Franco. And then, of course, traveling to, or praising, the Soviet
Union, let alone actually joining the Communist Party, virtually
guaranteed someone a place in Hoover’s filing cabinet.
In their introduction to Modernism on File, Culleton and
Leick argue, rather counterintuitively, that this history of surveil-
lance of the arts was productive as well as repressive:
It must be said that these essays do not always bear out this some-
what optimistic claim. That art and artists were indeed “starved”
by that gaze—sometimes almost literally, in the cases of those
who lost contracts, publication opportunities and speaking engage-
ments because of bureau interference—is indubitable (Culleton
14). In “Raising Muscovite Ducks and Government Suspicions:
Henry Roth and the FBI,” Steven G. Kellman proposes that Henry
Roth’s legendary sixty-year case of writer’s block can be at least
partially attributed to bureau harassment and Roth’s “[a]nxiety
over his dissident political views” (40). Richard Wright fled to
France, James Baldwin to Turkey, to dodge Hoover; these moves
provoked FBI “travel warning[s]” about both writers that directed
the INS to keep an eye out for the men (Maxwell 32).
One of the saddest cases is that of Ernest Hemingway, whose
growing mental instability was exacerbated by his accurate suspi-
cion that he was being shadowed by Hoover’s G-Men. Debra
A. Moddelmog suggests, in her essay “Telling Stories From
Hemingway’s FBI File: Conspiracy, Paranoia, and Masculinity,”
that Hemingway’s work on his novel The Garden of Eden reflects
both an awareness of the 1950s “Lavender Panic,” the widespread
campaign against sexual deviance vigorously supported by
Hoover, and a thwarted desire to resist the tyranny of sexual
McCarthyism: “That Hemingway never published—or, for that
620 Modern Literature under Surveillance
else. Natalie Robins reports that the FBI believed William Carlos
Williams’s “poems might be a clandestine code” (239), a concern
also raised about James Joyce’s Ulysses (Culleton 45). Certainly
realist or “socially conscious” writers like Theodore Dreiser,
Clifford Odets, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck fell under FBI
scrutiny, but so did experimentalists Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot,
William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound—whose file
was opened in 1911, decades before he became a propagandist for
Mussolini. Clearly modernism itself was the problem, not any
specific literary style or political position adopted by modernist
writers or texts.
Modern literature, after all, posed many challenges to a
“Hooverite” worldview in addition to its occasional forays into
labor politics. It dealt extensively and explicitly with sexuality,
and as Culleton and Leick write in their introduction, “While
Hoover and his henchmen knew little, if anything, about art or lit-
erature per se, because so much of it (it seemed) had begun to
transgress the boundaries between art and obscenity . . . it was
identified as a legitimate area of exploration for the bureau” (6).
Modernism was also, in Hoover’s view, too Jewish (which in turn
signified left-wing and internationalist); especially before World
War II, files routinely make note of the “real” Jewish names of
subjects who had Anglicized their names, describe them as “Jew
Communists” like Lillian Hellman (Robins 254), or say they have
“Jewish appearing features,” as in the case of playwright Elmer
Rice (Mitgang 139). The preponderance of Jews among the pub-
lishers of modernist works was also duly noted. (Here it is hard to
know what is cause and what is effect. Were Jewish publishers
like Albert Boni, Horace Liveright, Pascal Covici, and Benjamin
W. Huebsch actually more drawn to publishing modernist texts
than Gentiles, for what might have been a variety of reasons? Or
did FBI pressure on established, east coast WASP-dominated pub-
lishing houses successfully deter them from taking on controver-
sial work, leaving the field open to upstart new Jewish houses with
less to lose?)
Modernism’s internationalism and the expatriate status of
many modernist writers also threatened rigid conceptions of
national identity that the bureau was meant to police. Even
though Gertrude Stein (whose file was opened in 1937) and
some of her friends said that she had no great interest in poli-
tics, for instance, the fact of her expatriation seems to have
been equated with disloyalty; her file noted that Stein’s “sym-
pathies were not very strongly with America else she would not
have stayed abroad so long” (Robins 207). Redding argues that
indeed, by attacking “internationalism,” Cold War politics were
622 Modern Literature under Surveillance
for the purposes of the story, April, May and June are the names
of three sisters, couldn’t it also mean that for three months, or
until July, somebody’s back was to the door—maybe the door to
the Balkans or the Mediterranean?” (216). Reading this remarkable
piece of analysis, one can appreciate Maxwell’s dry comment that
“Given the FBI’s . . . intense concern for the highlights of African
American modernism, we may eventually discover that it judged
Jean Toomer’s Cane a work of both elusive Imagism and secret
Bolshevik code” (27).
And yet Maxwell’s ultimate point is not that the FBI was a
hamfisted and dangerous exegete (although it was, and very well
may be still). Rather, one of Maxwell’s four “theses” about the
relationship between the bureau and Afro-modernism is that “the
FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and powerful forgotten critic
of twentieth-century African-American writing” (28). The FBI
The FBI took black took black writers very, very seriously when mainstream insti-
writers very, very tutions of literary criticism, publication, and promotion did not.
seriously when If nothing else, the bureau bought their books. As Maxwell
mainstream institutions
of literary criticism,
poignantly, and pointedly, remarks, “[ p]ractically alone among
publication, and publicly funded institutions of literary study, Hoover’s FBI
promotion did not. never treated African American writing as an ineffectual
fad” (26).
The same could be said about the place of American letters
more generally in the Cold War: the energy dedicated to either
co-opting or persecuting writers and scholars reflects a belief in
the power of literature that I suspect we have lost. Hoover’s view
of literature was in the end oddly commensurate with the moder-
nists’; as Maxwell writes, “he shared the modernist avant garde’s
extravagant estimation of literature’s ability to order minds in a
fallen world” (29). Reading these recent works by Redding,
Culleton, and others, in fact, I experienced a pang of something
almost like nostalgia for a time when poetry and novels and lit-
erary criticism were considered important enough to pose a
genuine threat to national security. In the Cold War of ideas that
Redding describes so well, what humanists did mattered. Today,
when fewer and fewer Americans read “serious” books, funding
for the arts has been strangled and no less an authority than
Stanley Fish argues rather cheerfully that the liberal arts have had
their day and we might as well get used to it, the production and
criticism of literature seem consigned to death by irrelevance. It’s
enough to make you want to call up the FBI and demand that they
open some new files.
American Literary History 625
Works Cited