Espionage! (Not)

Scott McLemee reviews Ralph Engelman and Carey Shenkman’s A Century of Repression: The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press.

And in the wake of that wartime repression, two counterposed influences on public life emerge, neatly framed by the authors through biographical accounts of J. Edgar Hoover and Roger Baldwin, at the helms of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the American Civil Liberties Union, respectively. In effect, Hoover carried forward the Espionage Act’s propensity to “conflate actions necessary in a democratic society—dissent, whistleblowing, and investigative reporting—with disloyalty,” as Engelman and Shenkman put it. Baldwin’s role was to resist that tendency. They were not evenly matched. Baldwin early on formed an impression of Hoover as both charming and scrupulous, putting him at a disadvantage; in time, the FBI had moles inside the ACLU leadership.