Enemies of the State: The Radical Right in America from FDR to Trump

243 Pages·2018·4.97 MB·English

by  Darren J. Mulloy

Enemies of the State
The American Ways Series
General Editor: John David Smith,
Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
From the long arcs of America’s history, to the short timeframes that
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This Green and Growing Land: Environmental Activism in American His-
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Enemies of the State: The Radical Right from FDR to Trump, by D. J. Mulloy
ENEMIES OF
THE STATE
The Radical Right in
America from FDR to Trump
D. J. Mulloy
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-4422-7651-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-4422-7652-9 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
“It’s rough out there / High water everywhere . . . ”
—Bob Dylan, “High Water (For Charley Patton)”
For my students and for my teachers.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
1 Big Government on the March: FDR and the Roots of the
Radical Right 1
2 Wrestling the Octopus: Anti-Communism and the
Radical Right 27
3 Resisting the Tide: Civil Rights and the Radical Right 59
4 Out of the Wilderness: Ronald Reagan and the New Right 89
5 Radicalism Rising: Conspiracies and Anti-Statism at
Century’s End 119
6 Tea Parties and Trumpism: The Radical Right in the
Twenty-First Century 149
Conclusion 183
A Note on Sources 189
Index 209
About the Author 221

Acknowledgments
this book originated in a conversation at the annual meet-
ing of the Organization of American Historians in a rain-swept Rhode
Island in April 2016. My sincere thanks to the American history edi-
tor at Rowman & Littlefield, Jon Sisk, and to the general editor of the
American Way series, John David Smith, for that conversation and for
their unstinting support and enthusiasm for this project. I would also like
to thank assistant editor Kate Powers for her considerable assistance in
seeing the book through to publication and everyone else at Rowman &
Littlefield, especially associate editor Hannah Fisher, who made it pos-
sible. Adam Crerar, David Monod, and Peter Woolstencroft took time
out of their busy schedules to cast their expert eyes over the manuscript,
for which I am very appreciative. A list of the authors whose work I
consulted in writing the book can be found in “A Note on Sources” at
the book’s end. I thank them all. History is an always ongoing discus-
sion about the past, and I am deeply grateful to be able to contribute to
it. My parents have remained steadfast in their support for more than
forty years now. I do not take that for granted. Finally, I would like to
thank my wonderful wife, the novelist Pamela Mulloy, and my amazing
daughter, Esme, a budding social historian, for allowing me to escape so
regularly to my office in the attic over the past few months and for not
complaining too much about the strange music so often emanating from
there.