by Jay Feldman
Among the group of 249 aliens deported on the Buford were the two most prominent anarchist leaders in the country, Alexander Berkman (second from left) and Emma Goldman, shown here in custody, with Uncle Sam looking down on them.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-GGBAIN-24437
Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post played a crucial role in bringing the red scare to a close.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-GGBAIN-13593
Harlan Fiske Stone (right) was sworn in as attorney general in April 1924. Though politically conservative, Stone was a steadfast civil libertarian who had spoken out publicly against the red scare and the Palmer raids. Stone announced a reorganization of the BI and a reordering of its priorities, including an end to illegal surveillance and persecution of civilians for their political beliefs.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-NPCC-10893
J. Edgar Hoover joined the Bureau of Investigation in 1917 and soon began a meteoric rise to the top of the agency. He is pictured here in 1924, when Harlan Fiske Stone appointed him BI director.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-92411
This was the scene on March 8, 1932, when four trains carrying men, women, and children left Los Angeles’s Central Station for Mexico. Between a half million and a million people, many of them United States citizens or otherwise legal residents, were deported or “voluntarily repatriated” during the Depression.
Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
In the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly seven thousand German, Japanese, and Italian aliens were arrested and subsequently interned in Department of Justice camps. At the camp in Crystal City, Texas, a combined crew of Japanese and German aliens built housing.
USAFA McDermott Library MS 52, Jacobs Collection
Major Karl R. Bendetsen, aide to the Army’s provost marshal, authored the plan to carry out the evacuation and relocation of more than 112,000 Japanese on the West Coast.
Photograph by Mark Kauffman, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The Japanese-American owner of this grocery in Oakland, California, placed the “I Am an American” sign in his store window the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The store was sold soon after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the evacuation order.
Photograph by Dorothea Lange, ©The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland; Gift of Paul S. Taylor
Evacuees, like this San Francisco group in April 1942, were allowed to take only what they could carry. They were sent first to assembly centers, then to relocation camps.
Photograph attributed to Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-24654
California representative Richard M. Nixon (upper left) and the archconservative committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas (second from right), at a 1948 hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Photograph by New York Times Co./Getty Images
Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy has been called “the most gifted demagogue” in American history. For all the hundreds of individuals McCarthy accused and investigated during his reign of terror, he never discovered or revealed a single Communist or any instance of espionage.
Photograph by Hank Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The tide began to turn against McCarthy when television journalist Edward R. Murrow devoted the entire March 9, 1954, installment of his nationwide See It Now program to exposing the senator’s deceit and fabrications.
Photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Joseph Welch, representing the army against Senator McCarthy, uttered the celebrated line, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”, causing the audience to burst into applause.
Photograph by Hank Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
One of the most vicious and vindictive FBI COINTELPRO campaigns was conducted against the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Photograph by Popperfoto/Getty Images
In May 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson (right) signed an executive order exempting J. Edgar Hoover from the mandatory retirement age of seventy for federal employees, effectively ensuring that Hoover would remain in his position as FBI director for life.
Photograph by Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images
COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist Hate Groups was an across-the-board attack on emerging African-American awareness and black pride, but the Black Panther Party, members of which are shown here in a 1969 New York City protest, bore the brunt of the assault.
Photograph by David Fenton/Getty Images
COINTELPRO–New Left targeted the anti–Vietnam War movement and other left groups, particularly Students for a Democratic Society. This photograph was taken during the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Photograph by Leslie H. Sintay/Bettmann/Corbis
In 1975 and 1976 a Senate committee to study government intelligence activities, chaired by Idaho senator Frank Church, issued more than fifty thousand pages of reports detailing abuses by the FBI and other United States intelligence agencies that dated back decades. Photograph by Central Press/Getty Images