America's History of Fear-Based Governance

The Trump administration frequently uses fear as a weapon, whether stoking it, pledging to shield some populations from it, or endeavoring to inflict it on others. For example, the administration has engaged in what “border czar” Tom Homan describes as a “shock and awe” campaign that has included aggressively raiding communities around the country, shipping some migrants to dangerous prisons, and publicizing these actions through highly stylized videos and memes. The administration portrays its targets as “the worst of the worst,” as “pedophiles, armed robbers, and drug traffickers” whom law-abiding citizens should fear. The government’s own data, however, suggests otherwise. According to Reuters, “some 41% of the roughly 54,000 people arrested by ICE and detained by late November had no criminal record beyond a suspected immigration violation.” Citizens, too, have been swept up in raids. Entire communities thus have been placed in terror by an administration that claims to be protecting them.

The administration also has employed fear-based governing outside of the immigration context, including against the federal workforce. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, famously said before the 2024 election that a second Trump administration should inflict “trauma” on federal career employees. He explained that when “‘bureaucrats … wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down …. We want to put them in trauma.’” Vought’s wish has come true, with thousands of federal employees chased out of their jobs through a combination of ideological targeting and large-scale gutting of agencies.

Although Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and their colleagues excel at wielding fear as a tool of governance, they did not invent the practice. In his important new book, “The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower,” Patrick G. Eddington explores several earlier periods in American history during which federal officials and politicians regularly stoked fear against, and instilled fear in, disfavored targets. Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute who has worked as a CIA analyst, focuses his book on the late 19th century to the 1950s. This era encompassed two world wars, the height of the Cold War, and domestic social and cultural upheaval. It also saw the birth of the modern national security state. Eddington draws on extensive archival research to describe and explain the many ways in which fear pervaded the government and politics of the time and was built into the national security state’s DNA. 

Although Eddington navigates the era in a mostly straightforward, chronological manner, several themes and subthemes recur throughout the book. As its title suggests, the book’s overarching theme is fear. Eddington underscores this point from the outset, observing in the introduction that “the driving force” behind the developments he studies—principally the government’s “surveilling, penetrating, and actively subverting domestic political activities”—was “fear.” One aspect of that fear is that felt by “executive branch officials, members of Congress, and those on the federal bench—fear that challenges to existing political, economic, or social paradigms would alter the country in ways that would disempower those who benefitted from the status quo.” As Eddington’s subsequent chapters make clear, fear played a still more ubiquitous role in the events of the time. Politicians and officials not only felt fear themselves; they sought to make others afraid—afraid of their own government and of one another. 

Beneath this overarching theme lie the details, spanning decades, of the means that powerful actors in the executive branch, in Congress, and in compliant parts of the private sector used to instill and to respond to fear. Because Eddington covers so much ground, I highlight just three such means here, by way of illustration: the growth of the federal government’s surveillance and secrecy capacities; the surveilling and punishing of groups based on ethnicity and nationality; and the surveilling and punishing of groups based on ideology. 

The six decades Eddington explores were pivotal for the growth of the U.S. national security state, including the government’s capacities for surveillance and secrecy. With respect to the federal government’s surveillance activities, Eddington illuminates, among other things, the way that its growth was a product of executive initiative as well as congressional, judicial, and corporate enabling. He explains, for example, that the Treasury Department’s Secret Service Division was the dominant agent of domestic surveillance by the early 20th century, and that it went largely unchecked by Congress for years, even after the press revealed that the division had spied on members of Congress at President Theodore Roosevelt’s direction. Roosevelt had ordered the surveillance in an effort to uncover the source of an earlier media story. A subsequent spying scandal did lead Congress to adopt legislation in 1908, restricting the Secret Service Division’s activities to “defeating counterfeiting and presidential protection.” The scandal was a sensational one: The Navy had directed the division to spy on a naval officer at the urging of the mother of a woman with whom the officer allegedly had had an affair. Even after this scandal and subsequent legislation, however, the Theodore Roosevelt administration remained undeterred. It found a way around the legislative bar by creating a new organization: the Bureau of Investigation within the Department of Justice. It did so by using the Justice Department’s general revenue fund to employ 30 part-time agents, including many veterans of the Secret Service Division. As employees of the new bureau, these agents conducted domestic surveillance that the Secret Service Division was now barred from conducting. 

Eddington traces iterations of this pattern—a mixture of executive initiative, occasional congressional pushback, and more frequent congressional cooperation or willful ignorance—throughout the decades that he chronicles. Take, for example, his coverage of the period from the outbreak of World War I in Europe through the aftermath of both the war and the Russian Revolution. In the months following the sinking of the Lusitania, the Wilson administration grew desperate to surveil suspected German agents and their sympathizers in the United States, leading Wilson to authorize a renewed domestic surveillance role for the Secret Service Division. This action “effectively violate[d] the 1908 law” limiting the division’s activity, and Eddington “found no evidence that Congress was informed” of it. Shortly after the United States entered the war, however, Congress authorized some forms of surveillance by the division—for example, to conduct investigations under the Trading with the Enemy Act and the Food and Fuel Control Act. By the end of World War I, “the [division] and [the bureau had] full-fledged domestic spying counterparts in the [Army and Navy].”

These capacities were augmented through cooperation by corporate and civil society actors. For example, the Bureau of Investigation arranged for the major telecommunications providers to transmit copies, without warrants, of “incoming and outgoing telegrams of individuals or organizations of interest to investigators.” The bureau also partnered with a private organization comprised of volunteer investigators, “the American Protective League,” whose members were known to go rogue, “masquerading as [Secret Service] agents” and “in one case ordering a Des Moines, Iowa, resident to raise the American flag over his home.” Eddington also describes how these surveillance precedents and capabilities continued to be utilized after the war’s end. In the postwar years, “the Bolshevik threat [became] the prime, but not exclusive, focus.” As I elaborate below, other targets would include Japanese Americans and critics of their internment.

Secrecy was also an essential tool for the growing national security state, and for the executive branch more broadly. Although secrecy is frequently used to bypass congressional and judicial oversight, Congress and the judiciary enabled executive secrecy in significant ways. For example, the National Security Act of 1959 permitted the National Security Agency’s director “to bar ‘the disclosure of the organization or any function of’” the agency. The Espionage Act of 1917 bars a much wider range of speech, including information disclosures. Eddington stresses the Espionage Act’s importance in this regard, focusing especially on its use to punish anti-war speech and other forms of dissent throughout World War I and the Cold War. The Supreme Court also enabled broad prosecutorial discretion to punish anti-establishment but not imminently dangerous speech in a well-known line of cases beginning in 1919. The Supreme Court’s decisions in those cases, including Schenck v. United States, Debs v. United States, and Abrams v. United States, endorsed a narrow view of speakers’ First Amendment protections, particularly during wartime. 

Eddington also emphasizes the significance of the state secrets privilege and the Supreme Court’s 1953 decision recognizing it in United States v. Reynolds. The privilege may be invoked by the federal government in litigation where “‘there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.’” A significant problem with the ruling, as Eddington points out, is its suggestion that in some cases judges should not require disclosure even to themselves, for in camera inspection. The danger of abuse that this creates is evidenced in the aftermath of Reynolds itself. The case originated as a tort suit brought by a group of widows whose husbands, all civilian engineers, had perished in a crash of an Air Force B-29 bomber. The Air Force successfully resisted disclosing the accident report on the basis that it contained state secrets, and the Supreme Court refused to order even in camera disclosure. Decades later, the accident report, which by then had been declassified, was obtained by the grown child of one of the passengers. She learned that the Air Force had lied so many years ago. The report contained no state secrets but instead revealed negligence on the part of the Air Force.

The scope of the surveillance and secrecy capacities that Eddington explores is breathtaking, but their greatest significance lies in their wielding by government actors as tools to target disfavored groups and ideas. Among the most notorious instances of ethnic or nationality-based targeting was that perpetrated against Japanese Americans during World War II. Eddington’s research sheds new light on the extent of the government’s surveillance of Japanese Americans before and during World War II, and on the gulf between the information it gathered and the lies it told to stoke fear against, and justify the mass internment of, this group. For example, John Franklin Carter, whom President Franklin Roosevelt had secretly commissioned to perform intelligence work for FDR directly, concluded that “98 percent of the Japanese in Hawaii were ‘loyal to the U.S., and that those who are not’” had already been identified by the Navy and the FBI. In a cover letter forwarding one of his reports to FDR, Carter wrote, chillingly and prophetically, that his investigator “‘feels that the Japanese are more in danger from the whites than the other way around.’”

Eddington also highlights the political considerations that led FDR not only to support mass internment for Japanese Americans, but to prolong it. For example, he cites a memo that FDR wrote to two officials, explaining his view that “it would be a mistake to do anything drastic or sudden” in ending internment. FDR “wanted to determine ‘how many Japanese families would be acceptable to public opinion’ for relocation back to the West Coast” and suggested distributing Japanese Americans around the United States to “avoid[] public outcry” on the West coast. As an intelligence report that Eddington quotes acknowledged, the violent public backlash that did follow Japanese Americans’ return home stemmed both from “racial hatred” and “from whites who [did] not want to resume business competition with returning Japanese.”

Surveillance was also used to target ideological dissenters, including those who criticized the federal government’s actions against Japanese Americans. As Eddington recounts, “Such was the fate of a young Army private and aspiring singer-songwriter named Pete Seeger.” Seeger, who had a Japanese American fiancée (who eventually became his wife of nearly 70 years), wrote to the California American Legion to protest its passage of a resolution calling to deport all Japanese and Japanese Americans from the United States and to bar citizenship for all Japanese descendants. The Legion forwarded Seeger’s letter to the FBI, which eventually built an intelligence file on Seeger that ran more than 1,700 pages.

Seeger’s case is just the tip of the iceberg of ideological surveillance and punishment in American history. Eddington chronicles much of this history, ranging from the Secret Service Division’s targeting of anarchists and the nascent Bureau of Investigation’s surveillance of socialists, through the Palmer Raids, Espionage Act prosecutions of socialist and other speakers, “anti-red” scares stoked by members of Congress and the executive branch, and the efforts across many presidential administrations to surveil and target participants in the civil rights movement. 

Among the many striking elements in Eddington’s account of ideological targeting is the way that politicians stoked and wielded fears of socialism and communism to aggrandize themselves and to intimidate and control rival politicians. Eddington recounts, for example, that the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities had lost public and institutional support by 1944 but was revived and turned into a permanent committee after Rep. John Rankin, partnering with the American Legion, launched a public campaign to support it. The resuscitated committee went on to “do massive professional, personal, and political damage to thousands of individual Americans and domestic civil society organizations.” The prospect of committee “witch hunt[s]” also led some congressional Democrats, including Rep. Jennings Randolph, successfully to pressure President Truman to employ harsh internal loyalty measures throughout the executive branch. Eddington also gives their due to those administration members, representatives, and other high-profile figures who resisted the “anti-red” race to the bottom. Eleanor Roosevelt, for one, was a voice of conscience, writing to Truman: “I feel we have capitulated to our fear of Communism, and instead of fighting to improve Democracy, we are doing what the Soviets would do in trying to repress anything which we are afraid might not command public support.”

Eddington’s book is a rich, important contribution to our understanding of a pivotal time in American history, and of the growth of America’s national security state in particular. Of course, there are other significant works on the national security state and its abuses, and Eddington draws on many of them. As he notes in his introduction, however, “The Triumph of Fear” is extraordinary in its scale and in its use of primary as well as secondary literature to illuminate its subject. And Eddington is particularly effective in his choice of stories to highlight and to connect to the book’s larger theme of fear-based governing and politics. 

My one criticism of the book is that Eddington occasionally adds a conclusory statement about legality to an otherwise compelling, evidence-based description of government activity. For example, in discussing proposed legislation to criminalize certain disclosures about cryptology, Eddington states: “This was not an encroachment on the First Amendment—it was a proposal to destroy it in the name of national security.” Having written a great deal myself on the law of national security disclosures and the First Amendment, I am extremely sympathetic to Eddington’s point. It is, however, a complicated legal topic to which justice cannot be done in a single sentence. That said, my quibble is a small one because statements like the quoted one make up a tiny part of an otherwise excellent book. I mention this quibble only because the book on the whole is so strong and because its strength stems largely from its intensely research-driven approach. 

Because Eddington does, admirably, let his exhaustive research do most of the talking, he does not step outside of the studied time period to explicitly draw comparisons to the current administration. But readers will do as they please, and I suspect I will not be alone in seeing parallels between some of the terrible developments that Eddington chronicles and events now taking place on a regular basis in the United States. Readers likely will see not only parallels but roots, as today’s abuses are enabled in part by the growth in the national security state that Eddington recounts. Eddington’s book would still be an important contribution even if it were not so lamentably relevant to current events. But in this moment, especially, I am grateful for Eddington’s work. The historical context that it provides enables us better to understand what it is that we are living through.