| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. By David H. Price. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. xviii, 426 pp. Cloth, $84.95, ISBN 0-8223-3326-0. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 08223-3338-4.)

In this important contribution to our understanding of the dimensions of McCarthyism, the anthropologist David H. Price argues that discrediting progressive social activism was the true aim of the national security apparatus that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Congress first began to build during the 1930s and that by the 1950s had developed into a full-blown inquisitorial program. Focusing on investigations of professional anthropologists, Price paints a grim picture of reactionary G-men, perfidious legislators, skulking academic collaborators, and timorous professional associations, all conspiring to ruin the careers of brave and outspoken social egalitarians and progressives. Among social scientists, anthropologists were especially singled out, Price argues, because they studied—and, more important, tended to speak out on behalf of—the marginal, the dispossessed, and the nonwhite. Price shows conclusively that, insofar as anthropologists turned to political advocacy on behalf of subjects in marginal positions within American society proper, they soon became objects of scrutiny for the national security state. Challenges to the normative social order of any progressive sort, not just red politics, were the true targets of the interrogative and investigative strategies of McCarthyism. (That some of Price's subjects in fact were Communists is to Price irrelevant.)

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