Portside Date: September 20, 2025

Author: Denise Lynn

Date of source: September 15, 2025

Portside

At the heart of American anticommunism has been the conviction that communists seek to destroy American freedoms and institutions. Yet anticommunists, including today's conservatives, seek to create a culture that resembles their fever dreams about communism. The goal of today's right wing is to silence the media, destroy institutions that ensure equity, give the state control over bodily sovereignty, marginalize people of color and Queer people, dismantle educational institutions, illegally detain and deport legal and illegal immigrants, and redistribute wealth upwards. In other words, they seek to weaponize anticommunism to restrict individual liberty. This contradiction has always been at the heart of anticommunism; anticommunists seek only to secure the freedom of the elite capitalist class to abuse workers, control public policy, and silence critics. The agency that has most helpfully enabled this is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI has been not just undemocratic in its use of illegal surveillance and harassment, but it has been anti-democratic, actively silencing individuals and organizations that have worked toward democracy.

 

During the Cold War, even as anticommunists claimed that Soviet citizens lacked basic rights, could not express themselves freely, and could not organize in democratic institutions like labor unions, the FBI with the blessing of the government, was actively suppressing freedom movements. As Nick Fischer argues "Anticommunist propaganda decried...the subjugation of trade unions; the deportation of millions of kulaks and ethnic minorities; the corrupt wealth of party members; and the ubiquity of the dreaded secret police." Anticommunists deployed "semantic contrivances" to claim the US was a model democracy and the envy of others; meanwhile, the FBI focused its energies on activists and described their freedom aspirations as conspiratorial while their international counterpart, the CIA, destroyed freedom movements abroad.

 
The FBI's own documentation is evidence of its anti-democratic practices. Charlotta Bass' FBI file is an excellent example. The Bureau is no longer releasing the full file and instead will provide only an abridged fifty-page version that catalogues an insurance disagreement, not its surveillance. Bass was the editor of one of California's first Black Newspapers, The California Eagle. While never a Communist Party member (CPUSA), she grew increasingly radical in her politics, allied with communists and radicals, and openly challenged US Cold War policy. Even before the Cold War, she had garnered a reputation in Los Angeles as an advocate for equality who willingly faced off against the Ku Klux Klan.

 
Bass' file was started during World War II. The Bureau claimed that she "follows the Communist Party 'Line.'" The Party "Line" according to the Bureau was: "advocating abolition of poll tax, immediate opening of second front, abolition of 'Jim Crow,' etc." The Bureau was linking goals that would eventually become public policy to a foreign conspiracy. The FBI believed that her newspaper was an organ of the CPUSA though it failed to substantiate that rumor and found no evidence that "would indicate that any financial support was being received" from the CPUSA. Lack of evidence of conspiratorial intent never dissuaded the Bureau in its assumption that a foreign inspired conspiracy existed. J. Edgar Hoover disagreed with a report from the SAG (Special Agent in Charge) in LA that her file be closed and instead instructed the LA office that even in the absence of evidence, Bass "is obviously collaborating with the Party" and that they should continue to surveil her so that "should the necessity arise, you will be in a position to take action against the paper and its owner without delay."

 
As Charisse Burden-Stelly has argued, anticommunism is a "Durable Mode of Governance" that is both anti-red and anti-Black, and this is clear in Hoover's letter; he believed that Bass' paper was the "foremost means of influencing the Los Angeles Negro Community" to join the CPUSA. His evidence of this was that the Party advocated integrating the LA railroad, and Bass' paper did as well. Bass' paper reported on the case of Festus Coleman, a Black man falsely accused of rape and robbery who was sentenced to 65 years in San Quentin. The Party organized in his defense. Among other examples, Bass' leadership in the LA Black Freedom Struggle was enough evidence to secure her a place on the FBI's Security Index.

 

Bass also appears throughout the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ) FBI file. She was a founding member and the STJ chairperson. The organization was founded by radical Black women devoted to equity, ending racist violence, anti-imperialism, and opposition to Cold War anticommunism. Within weeks of its founding, the FBI had opened a file on it and monitored the women's first action, a meeting in Washington D.C. The Bureau was not alone in watching the STJ, it was surveilled by the Secret Service, Counterintelligence Corp of the US army, and Naval Intelligence. FBI informants infiltrated the organization and fed the Bureau exaggerated and manufactured rumors.

 
Bass was followed by US intelligence when she traveled overseas. In 1950 she attended a peace conference in Prague, then used her press credentials to go to the Soviet Union. The CIA reported on her movement's there, then upon her return, instructed the State Department to seize her passport. Bass refused to turn it over and the Bureau reported that she had engaged the services of an attorney to fight its seizure. In 1952, Bass ran for Vice-President on the Progressive Party ticket. The FBI followed her campaign, noted its opposition to the Korean War, and her opposition to the segregated US military. She argued that the US could not spread democracy globally while Black America could not enjoy democracy. The FBI continued its monitoring even as the elderly and increasingly sick Bass became less politically active. It made pretext calls to her home and hospitals when she was bedridden noting her "crippling arthritis" and kept her on the security index. Bass' file is especially unusual because it continued after her death in 1969. The FBI monitored her estate lawyer Ben Margolis, worried that she left funds to the CPUSA. The last document in her file is dated 1990, over twenty years after her passing.

 
Even as US policymakers, religious leaders, and business owners warned Americans that Soviet citizens were harassed and monitored by a secret police force, US intelligence did the same. During the Cold War and to the present, it treated citizen activists as a foreign scourge seeking to undo American freedoms. The Bureau has not demonstrated that it has abandoned its history of anti-Black harassment as it continues to target Black Lives Matter activists. Today's conservatives regularly deploy anticommunism to describe any policy or institution that stands in the way of their agenda, this includes the FBI. While Donald Trump has focused energy on condemning the Bureau, firing some of its agents, and questioning its mission, he does not seek to end its extralegal surveillance of citizens. Instead, he wants a Bureau that is malleable and accountable only to him, an agency that will surveil his political enemies and critics, imprison those most vocal, and use high-tech surveillance further enabled by the tech sectors obeisance. It is hard to sympathize with the Bureau as it comes under political attack, but this new version will be further weaponized against freedom struggles and it has a long history of anti-democratic practices to draw from. 

 

Thanks to the author for submitting this Blog to Portside.