The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley Through Eisenhower

The September 6, 1901, assassination of President William McKinley by self-professed anarchist Leon Czolgosz triggered a nationwide political backlash against the killer’s like-minded political adherents. It also served as the catalyst for the expansion of nascent federal government surveillance capabilities used against not only anarchists but socialists and members of other social or political movements that were challenging the prevailing political, economic, and social paradigms of the day. And it was the ensuing, decades-long persistent exaggerations of domestic political threats from those movements that drove an exponential increase in the frequency and scale of unlawful government surveillance and related political repression against hundreds of thousands of individual Americans and civil society organizations.

The Triumph of Fear is a history of the rise and expansion of surveillance-enabled political repression in America from the late 1890s to early 1961. Drawing on declassified government documents (many obtained via dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits) and other primary sources, Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Eddington offers historians, legal scholars, political leaders, and general readers surprising new revelations about the scope of government surveillance programs and how this domestic spying helped fuel federal assaults on free speech and association that continue to this day. Join us for a conversation about the book with Eddington led by Caleb Brown, Cato’s director of multimedia.

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