J. EDGAR HOOVER, LITERARY CRITIC. Lee Bryant writes in an e-mail about this article:
“What didn’t the feds and HUAC think was communist subversion back then? Oh I know, actual communist subversion.â€
I remember a high school assembly in the fifties where the speaker spoke of the Communist messages of the situation comedy FATHER KNOWS BEST, which apparently, despite the title, undermined the position of the father as head of the family. It is striking now, after exposure for years to Marxist literary criticism, to see the FBI engaging in Marxist literary criticism (or, literally, film criticism.) Of course, the real question should be: what kind of a country has the secret police (which functionally the FBI was) engaging in any kind of literary criticism?