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American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations. By Robert Justin Goldstein. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xxii, 361 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-0-7006-1604-6.)
This is the first full-scale study of the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (agloso), which the author argues was the "single most important domestic factor that fostered and facilitated the Red Scare" (p. xi). Using Department of Justice (doj) and Federal Bureau of Investigation records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, Robert Justin Goldstein provides a dense narrative of American officials' long, counterproductive effort to enhance national security by maintaining a list of "subversive" organizations.
From its start in 1903 as a tool of immigration policy, the agloso evolved during World War II into a device for screening federal employees. The names of organizations designated "subversive" were not made public until 1947, when Harry S. Truman formalized the federal loyalty program....