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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