While we can't exactly footnote an episode, we can offer you a bibliography of all the books and articles we touch on in the episode. To the best of our ability, these references are organized by topic and by when they are touched on in the show. So, without further ado, the freaks present to you:
Main Sources Used Throughout the Show
- Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1995)
- Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (1997)
- Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989)
- Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2009)
- Richard Boyer and Herbert Morias, Labor’s Untold Story (1955)
- Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History fo the US Working Class (1987)
For More on “Engineering Consent”
- Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988)
- Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (1986)
The Progressive Era and the Creation of Groups like the Chamber of Commerce
- Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967)
- Benjamin Waterhouse, “The Political Wing of American Capital,” Jacobin, 4/27/2021
- On the role of corporate power in shaping the Progressive Era: Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1963); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (1968)
Labor & the Taft-Hartley Act
- The Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947
- Union Density (the percentage of the total workforce that belonged to a union) peaked in 1954 at just under 35%
- Union Membership (the total number of people in unions) peaked in 1979 at 21 million.
- As of 2019, just over 14 million workers in the US were part of a union, making up just 10.3% of the workforce.
- Check out our episode on Labor and the Truman Admin for more on the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act
On Communists in the CIO
- Richard Boyer and Herbert Morias, Labor’s Untold Story (1955)
- Robin DG Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990)
- Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993)
On Trotsky and the Dies Committee (HUAC)
- William Chase, “Trotskii v Mekcike. K istorii ero neglasnykh kontaktov s pravitel'stvom SShA (1937-1940)” ("Trotsky in Mexico: Toward a History of His Informal Contacts with the U.S. Government, 1937-1940"), Otechestvennaia istoriia, 4 (July/August 1995). Translation available here.
- For accounts from the time, see: NYT, “Dies Aims to Call Trotsky, Rivera,” 12/7/1939; NYT, “Trotsky Will Give Testimony to Dies,” 12/8/1939
- William Chase, “El Extraño Caso de Diego Rivera y el Departmento de Estado” ("The Strange Case of Diego Rivera and the U.S. State Department"), Zona Abierta (Suplemento de Economica, Politica y Sociedad del Financiero) II, 61 (Noviembre 1993). Translation available here.
- The article from WSWS that we mention is here
The “Lavender Scare” in the State Department
- David K Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004)
Anticommunism and the Entertainment Industry
- Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment
- Scandalize My Name: Stories from the Blacklist, Documentary (1998)
- Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982)
- NYT, “Kazan Honor Stirs Protest by Blacklist Survivors,” 2/23/1999
- On the depiction of Native Americans in film, see: Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians (1998)
On the CIA’s Role in the Arts
- Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2013)
On the Politics of Postmodernism
- Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (2007)
- A (mostly) readable discussion of the intellectual history of postmodernism can be found here: Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (2006)
On the Politics of Academia
- Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986)
- Philip Meranto, et al, Guarding the Ivory Tower: Repression and Rebellion in Higher Education (1985)
- Michael Parenti, History as Mystery (1999)
- Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives (2001)
MOMA and the Importance of Corporate Board
- The biggest event in the NY social scene is the MET Gala which is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), not the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) as Brian said. Both museums have boards that would raise eyebrows however, with the MET counting David Koch and Henry Kissinger among its Trustees Emeriti and the MOMA counting Leon Black (try googling his name plus “Epstein” for fun) and Alice Tisch (who doubles on the MET board) as board members and David Rockefeller as a lifetime trustee. A closer examination of these two boards would reveal a who’s-who of the NYC capitalist class who either hold seats directly or fill them with their fail-sons and fail-daughters.
- Sociologist G. William Domhoff has been tracing the American ruling class through corporate boards and charitable foundations for the past 50 years through new editions of his book Who Rules America.
Policing and Repression in the Second Red Scare
- Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (1990)
- On the origin of the FBI’s Red Squads, see: Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009)
- For the connection between US empire and American policing, see also: Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (2019)
- For a history of the FBI repression of communist groups see: Aaron Leonard & Conor Gallagher, Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists (2014) and A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union, 1962-1974 (2018)
The John Birch Society
- Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2009)
- For a brief history of the “war on Christmas” see: Mary Anne Henderson & Brian Platt, “The War on Christmas, or How to Build Mass Support for Right-Wing Ideology,” Counterpunch, 12/23/2015
More Info
- For more on how American capital’s campaign to reshape the public mind post-1960s, see: Brian Platt, “Behemoth,” Mechanical Freak, 11/17/2019
For Previous Episodes of History Sucks
- On LBJ: Jumbo Rising pt 1 & Jumbo Rising pt 2
- On Harry Truman and the Start of the Cold War: Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4