J. EDGAR HOOVER INSULTS THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
Ferry, W. H.
J. Edgar Hoover Insults the American People by W. H. FERRY W. H. Ferry, vice president of the Fund for the Republic, recently dared criticize the usually untouchable ). Edgar Hoover, director of...
...Hoover says, an advance detachment of Communists within our borders with the "capacity to pervert our thinking and destroy the spiritual supports which form the foundation of our freedom...
...This is sententious poppycock...
...Communist hacks William Z. Foster and Benjamin Davis and the U.S.S.R.'s Nikita Khrushchev about the numerical smallness but great potential strength of the Communist Party...
...It is that the Communists are nine feet tall, craftier than Satan, the most expert managers the world has ever seen, not human beings like ourselves but a race apart, determined to put man and God into jail forever...
...In a column appearing in the Los Angeles Times he once again delivered his well-worn message about the Red danger...
...This is a human enough failing, but he really cannot have it both ways...
...Hoover's remaining plaints are ancient ones which I pass over to reach his final point, which impresses me as a gigantic slur on the citizenry...
...Why should we start to believe them now, especially when they are selling their own line of goods...
...Hoover thinks they are...
...President Kennedy told us in his Yale address recently that each generation had "to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truism and stereotypes" in order to be able to move on to a "new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality...
...His comments brought sharp denunciation from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a demand by Republican National Chairman William E. Miller that the Democratic Party repudiate the speech, an attack on Mr...
...There is, Mr...
...If in fact we are as infested with these rascals, as Mr...
...In these persistent reports about espionage and sabotage, is he delicately telling us that he isn't up to the job, that Red spies are running loose despite his best efforts...
...Hoover has told us never to believe a word these men say...
...Ferry spoke at the Western States Democratic Conference in Seattle...
...Hoover suggests, they cannot be either very spiritual or very supporting...
...The myth of their invincible dedication to a horribly different kind of economic life is hard shaken when we learn that their system is becoming more and more like our own, with incentive payments, market systems, and the like...
...This is an old line of the FBI chief, and its success year after year is a tribute to the trance into which his sermons throw Americans, not excepting Congressmen...
...Hoover is, after all, our official spy-swatter...
...It is an insult to the American people to say that they are so weak-minded and spiritually insecure as to be ready to throw down institutions and traditions built up over centuries at the blandishment of a small, devious band...
...It really makes me think that Americans must have a generous streak of masochism to accept it...
...Fortunately, sensible studies about many of these illusions have begun to appear...
...The Progressive publishes below the portion of Mr...
...Ferry by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Iowa Republican, on the Senate floor, and bitter assaults in the daily press...
...Yet I fear this particular branch of mythology will be around to harry us for a long while, for it is constantly rejuvenated, not by the Communists but by devotees of the nine-foot-tall cliches about them...
...TT^he subject of Communism in the United States is a mischief-making tapestry of legend and illusion if there ever was one...
...Hoover starts off by quoting old U.S...
...Hoover warns against Soviet espionage in the United States...
...But on other occasions Mr...
...The studies only tell us what our common sense and confidence in America should have told us all along...
...No one cares to have spies and saboteurs percolating through the republic, and if the FBI is not up to finding and prosecuting them, let us set up an agency that can...
...J. Edgar Hoover Insults the American People by W. H. FERRY W. H. Ferry, vice president of the Fund for the Republic, recently dared criticize the usually untouchable ). Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI...
...So, since he does not produce many flesh-and-blood spies and saboteurs year after year, he apparently feels he must keep up the supply of clandestine, and possible unreal ones...
...Hoover a penny...
...What is the legend that haunts and cripples us here...
...Our institutions are nowhere nearly so fragile as Mr...
...Hoover apparently believes them when their statements fit into his argument, and calls them liars when they don't...
...For example, the myth about the Soviets' ability to manage the world collapses when we observe Moscow's inability to manage Yugoslavia, Red China, or even their own corn and wheat output...
...The legends shrink in the washing...
...Nowhere, it seems to me, is this advice more salutary than in our confrontation with Communism...
...If the spiritual supports of a nation that glories in its Judeo-Christian tradition can be nibbled away as Mr...
...Hoover.—The Editors...
...Then Mr...
...Consider, for example, an effusion last week by J. Edgar Hoover, who is as responsible as any person for keeping the Red poltergeist hovering in the national consciousness...
...Congress never grudges Mr...
...Hoover intimates, it might occur to many people that the country needs a more efficient spy-swatter...
...Ferry's speech dealing with Mr...
Vol. 26 • September 1962 • No. 9
