The American Way of Repression: Political Intimidation in the United States

The United States is not generally thought of as a repressive country, although its history includes well-known examples of political repression and persecution. Are McCarthyism and the threat of wiretaps under the Patriot Act just exceptions or are they typical of American society? Is there anything that unifies the form that American repression has taken over time?

With Foundation support, Corey Robin and Ellen Schrecker will address these questions in a book they are writing, titled “The American Way of Repression: Political Intimidation in the United States.” The book is intended to be a comprehensive theoretical and historical study of American political repression from the late eighteenth century to the present. The authors ask questions about the relationship between liberalism and repression and aim to place the domestic consequences of the war on terrorism in its proper historical and theoretical perspective.

Robin and Schrecker intend to examine four arguments about American political repression: its relatively mild and non-violent character, its pluralist dimension, its legal and constitutional framework, and the role of the private sector in repression, including the network of unspoken collaborators that is necessary to sustain any project of repression. To uncover the larger patterns of repression, the principal investigators will use case studies ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts, slave patrols, and the Ku Klux Klan activities, to assaults on the labor movement before and after the New Deal. They will try to identify continuities as well as changes across time, for example, assessing whether there is an increased tendency for the federal government to outsource repression to the private sector in response to growing constraints placed upon it by the courts.