What is scary enough to justify decades of FBI scrutiny?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Folk music.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my family had several run-ins with the "red scare". It drastically altered my uncle Richard's career when Burl Ives named him to the witch-hunters (though the online sources consistently talk about ending his career on the spot, whereas the records he recorded after that are the ones that are still available, and he toured domestically and internationally and performed regularly as long as he was physically able to).

And my father had a protracted legal fight with the Army, which wanted to revoke his security clearance because his best friend since grade-school had in fact been a communist for a while (back during the period when basically any decent human being had to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the communists since they were the only ones selling or even offering human rights action). Which my father eventually won, for no great benefit (none was expected, he wasn't regular army and didn't want to be, but he wanted to continue in the reserve after WWII and Korea); though it did delay, though not in the end prevent, his getting tenure at Purdue.