| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles H. McCormick. Seeing Reds: Federal Surveillance of Radicals in the Pittsburgh Mill District, 1917–1921. (A John D. S. and Aida C. Truxall Book.) Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1997. Pp. x, 244. $37.50.

Charles H. McCormick's broadly researched, meticulously documented, yet compact monograph analyzes federal "efforts to define, understand and suppress leftists" (p. x) during World War I and the Red Scare. The author's focus on western Pennsylvania is not random, nor does it suggest simply a convenient local setting. Rather, Pittsburgh stood as arguably "the exemplar and seat of power of industrial capitalism in the United States." The city's elites summoned federal sleuths to "make the actions and intentions of foreign radical workers intelligible" and "thereby manageable" (p. 4). Throughout American history, frequently "the quest for order and national unity and the desire of the privileged to protect their interests have collided over and over with deeply ingrained individualism and fear of big government." Seldom has the clash displayed "such force as from 1917–1921" (p. 5), an era of massive civil liberties violations. 1

McCormick, tapping previously neglected files of the Bureau of Investigation (BI, predecessor to the FBI), Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and Military Intelligence Division (MID), easily animates Pittsburgh's colorful radicals. More impressively, he characterizes many heretofore faceless federal agents and informers, grey ranks whom confidentiality policies, clauses, and statutes have long protected. . . .

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