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Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

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Threatening Anthropology tells how the FBI and senate committees spied on and harassed hundreds of anthropologists working for racial equality. Price gathered a lot of new documents and information and his analysis left me thinking in new ways about McCarthyism and how the FBI was used to enforce racist policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Price uses thousands of documents to show that the FBI was used to persecute pioneering scientists threatening widespread bigotry.

Threatening Anthropology is a consuming, thought provoking book. Because there is a lot of dense information I thought I would slowly work my way through this over three or four weeks, but the writing and subject matter pulled me right in and I read it in a few days like I would a well written novel. Price really brings the reader into the story by richly describing the historical setting and then delving into dozens of individual stories telling how several dozen anthropologists like Melville Jacobs, Richard Morgan, Gene Weltfish, Ashley Montague and Margaret Mead were followed and harassed by the FBI because their fights for equality was seen as some sort of foreign communist plot. Price uses extensive FBI documents and correspondence to establish this story and brings an anthropological perspective that made me rethink what McCarthyism was.

I used to wonder if the McCarthy like witch trials could happen again, and Price's detailed analysis and current political developments leave no doubts in my mind that we could do this again very quickly. This book has a lot to say to us all today and deserves to be read by anyone concerned about the abuses of the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security in the war on terrorism, and the past examined here looks a lot like the present. As Price says in the final pages of his book, "Today, much as in the past, free thought, civil liberties and academic freedom are curtailed under conditions of fear as America appears to be preparing for another lengthy ill-defined war." But Price doesn't leave us there, he gives us hope by analyzing past defenses against McCarthyism for us to use in the present.

Threatening Anthropology is a beautifully written, meticulously researched account of how J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy and others attacked anthropologists educating the public on scientific findings supporting racial equality. I passed this book on to non-anthropologist friends who found it to be a real page turner and were moved by the impassioned story Price artfully tells. This is a rare book that is carefully written for a board public readership, yet is so thoroughly researched and footnoted that historians and other scholars will find this to be an important contribution.

This book will send shockwaves through the anthropological community. It should lead anthropology's historians to rethink their silence on the events documented here. How can it be that we learn so late that so many anthropologists from Franz Boas until now have been tormented by FBI spies? Have others known of these events and remained so silent for so long?

While I studied anthropology during the decades discussed in this book I had no idea that my colleagues suffered the attacks detailed here, but I felt the pressures to avoid controversial advocacy that are documented here. Price may go too far in his criticism of postmodernism's contributions to anthropology's current crisis, but I find the historical positioning of his critique provocative.

Threatening Anthropology should be read by all Americans concerned about the growing powers of the FBI and CIA.

Lots of good documentation allows Price to establish just how far the FBI went to torment scientists challenging racist and sexist popular views. It is as if J Edgar Hoover spied on Margaret Mead, Oscar Lewis, Ashley Montague and every other living anthropologist just because they believed that all people are equal. All the FBI files used in this book left a real chill with me, but it also left me more committed to speaking out and being more of an activist.

A good book for any general reader questioning the Patriot Act and who wants to know why the FBI had its powers limited before Congress passed the "Patriot Act."

Threatening Anthropology is an important book--one that I hope will signal a signicant change in the way the history of anthropology is written. Prior to Price, historians such as George Stocking have taken an apolitical view of anthropology's history. This is unfortunate in large part because many founding members of the discipline were politically active and engaged. The anthropologists paid a heavy price for this political activism--a point that Price drives home effectively. Encyclopedic in approach, Price does a great job outlining how politically active anthropologists were persecuted and lost their jobs--while the American Anthropology Associaltion looked on and did nothing. Based on extensive research via the FOIA, Price is to be commended for his efforts. While Price has focused on the larger issue of the Cold War, for those who want a case study see William Peace's biography of Leslie A. White. Hopefull the work of Peace and Price will inspire other anthropologists to take a closer look at the history of anthropology. Taken together, Price's and Peace's work will signal a new era in writing about anthropology's past.

Few books can affect a reader so profoundly as this one has me. Price's book has received accolades -- "destined to become a classic," and "belongs on anyone's shelf." I wandered into the pages and, to my surprise and relief, found myself revisiting the underside of what I thought I had observed all along. Names were named, some of them among real live faculties I had known. I experienced a personal Eureka! when I learned that Jacobs and Stern, authors of that Barnes and Noble introduction to anthropology that I read in my formative years, had both been blacklisted. Now I must read that old paperback again and retrace where my interests might have started off in naive directions. I look forward to this self-study in self-censorship for the postmodern age.

I was overjoyed that Price did not stop with the accepted, formalized "end" of McCarthyism, but rather explained the brief re-emergence of relative "academic freedom" through much of the '60s-'70s and '80s, and the more sophisticated, perhaps more dangerous downward spiral today. The book helps those of us who entered college at a time when Ashley Montagu, Kathleen Gough and so many others were in the news over issues other than their research. Price has prepared a thoroughgoing catalogue of official harassment targeting scholars who operated on now-popularly-accepted assumptions of global human worth and equality.

The paradox is that, while anthropology has to rely on those assumptions if it is to operate as a field of intellectual endeavor, our audience -- any public -- does not, but they pay us anyway. Popular reactions to most anthropological contributions range from wonder to outrage. Anyone with basic grounding in anthropology would probably tell you that the field has always pushed the limits of acceptance within host countries, most of which have been main players of Western industrial civilization.

As with the job interview, it is always important to understand who holds the purse strings. Western anthropologists have long pushed the limits of societal acceptance, and that has always had consequnces. Today's "globalization" of anthropology finds many individuals from societies that were traditionally the subjects of anthropological study, pushing those limits from new and refreshing directions, and, of course, the resulting consequences are also "globalizing."

We are such good people; why are we then so villified? Tired old explanations of "cultural lag", ethnocentrism, and differing viewpoints still work. But Price's contribution is a detailed catalog-summary with specific cases showing particularly what makes the United States Government antsy about anthropology. Until "Threatening Anthropology," no one source discussed in context the prevailing governmental assumptions, and the various selected facts, political spins and, yes, myths on which government agencies often rely for those assumptions. Our tired, old explanations have finally got some help, as someone focused on the intersections between anthropology and host society as they are expressed in the United States.

I have recollections from my own past when, during euphoric rushes of "academic freedom," I presumed to speak from an anthropological perspective in ways that might draw the attention of, say, the FBI. Many of these run perilously close to Price's examples. One still wonders, but at the same time one has a grander perspective on why offers have not poured in from academia.

Price's volume is indeed chilling. The prevailing situation within anthropology since well before Boas has been chilling. I keep in mind the smaller-scale analogy of covert ostracism on a band or tribal level. At least within our society there are other avenues of endeavor, and we can retain a view of that old anthropolgy "avenue" and see what's happening and what has happened to our former colleagues.

Price does rather well with his conclusions. I am in some agreement with him over postmodernism insofar as many of its adherents appear to encourage the view that anthropology is only a part of Western science, and that as such it cannot do justice to any cross cultural perspective. Postmodernism in its "deconstruction" of positivism does appear to feed the late 20th century and continuing vogue for discounting what Mooney (The Republican War on Science) calls the "fact-based" perspective as irrelevant for today's policy-making. Such a notion would have frustrated Philleo Nash. I know it gets a double-take from me.

I also agree whole-heartedly that organizations like the American Anthropological Association would do well to treat future governmental meddling with individual scholars' employment -- present and future versions of McCarthyism -- with less timidity. All organizations need a clear understanding of just what constituties grounds for employee discipline, and they need to know that other power centers back them up.

Last time around the witch hunts came and went, leaving lasting scars. The issues are lively, and generate shouting-matches to this day. It was a political choice for organizations to remain in the background as "apolitical." It would be no more a political choice to stand behind individual anthropologists and help them make reasonable stands should they find themselves going against those big guns.

Price hits his readers pretty hard in this brutal tale of shame. This will enrage some readers, but he's justified. He fights like Hotspur and marks out a clear lineage of blame & dishonor. Too bad so few who lived through the years described here are alive to read this account.

Strong scholarship supports this new explanation of attacks on academic freedom and activism in the 1950s. Very impressive research and well written. The volume of FBI records produced here is stunning, and this gave me a new view of the current chill at Yale, Columbia and elsewhere.

Like another reviewer, I was unable to put down this outstanding and exceptionally disturbing book, a work of scholarship which has a much wider audience than anthropologists alone. I won't repeat the points made by others that Professor Price's work has clear political applications in the present day in academia generally. What I found engrossing was a side of anthropology which rarely or never emerged in my university courses, particularly in those which brought up sociology and anthropology's relation to literature (my own area of study). In the seminars hermeneutics was the focus and the specific emphasis was on signification cross-culturally. I think students (or at least I) got the impression that anthropology was indeed, as Professor Price notes, a science which shuns cultural hierarchies, but that technique was the crux of the authorial problem and that philosophies informing how these techniques came about were in second place. This isn't to say that the committments and philosophies of anthropologists could somehow be subordinated to the idea of the true text, but that an objectivity separate from ideology was, if not possible, at least desired.
I can't remember whether I thought this was reasonable at the time, but in retrospect I see that my notions of how the anthropologist goes about her or his work was certainly limited. This book inspires me to read more in the history of this field and to go to the primary texts which the author provides in such rich abundance.

This book deals with a very important and timely topic. The Cold War had a major impact on academia, and Price is to be applauded for undertaking such an extensive archival research project to document how these dynamics were manifest in anthropology. His greatest weakness, however, is an uncritical acceptance of the egalitarian rhetoric of the Soviet Union and the US Communist Party as signifying a genuine committment to humanitarianism and equality. This grossly inaccurate assumption underlies Price's key theme in the book: that the FBI and other security agencies in the United States (aka the bad guys) persecuted leftists and communists (aka the good guys) solely as a means to maintain existing race and class hierarchies in the United States. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the violence and aggression of communist party politics in the 1930s, or the history of the Soviet Union (including its genocidal approach to ethnic minorities within its own borders) should realize this is quite a crock. Price is certainly not alone in his myopia in this area: his assumptions reiterate many cherised illusions of the Left. While these shortcomings may have been forgivable in the past when knowledge about the Soviet Union was more uncertain, any contemporary scholar who ignores the overhwelming array of evidence and testimonials that have emerged from Soviet archives since the end of the Cold War renders himself and his work largely irrelevant to contemporary academic debates in this area. In that sense, Price's work fits in well with earlier anthropological activists, such as those who militantly defended the Rosenbergs as innocent victims of anti-Semitism and US Cold War hysteria. Soviet archives have shown, of course, that the Rosenbergs were quite guilty and their defenders in academia were willingly duped by the barrage of Soviet propaganda released on their behalf. Price continues to reiterate the same theme in his work, never once considering that a peek in the Soviet archives might offer interesting revisions to his assumptions. Did the KGB maintain files on Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Gene Weltfish? This book would make a much greater and more lasting contribution to Cold War scholarship if the author had even a token awareness of the Soviet side of things. Unfortunately, like so many leftists, he is more intent on using FOIA to bash the United States rather than to undertake a serious analysis of the way anthropology became suspended (or distorted) between rival superpowers during the Cold War. For an insightful and disturbing account of how these dynamics have influenced other social sciences, see Harvy Klehr and John Haynes recent book "In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage." It is much more enlightening than Price's work.

The author's intent -- to examine the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology -- is a good one. Anthropology attracts a lot of liberal minded people (someone told me that they tend to register Democrat over Republican by a 30-1 ratio). However, what is disappointing about this book is that Price didn't seek out to interview more of the people who knew these anthropologists, as well as people in government who actually wrote such reports. For the most part, reports/texts are largely taken at face value, whereas in reality reports may have been received in greater or lesser degrees of seriousness and credibility. Thus, the tendency is probaby to exaggerate the degree of victimization.