In the late forties and fifties, there would be considerable political benefit in going after the radical left, but when Hoover began in the twenties, he was led by pure instinct, for he did not like people who were different, people who opposed the values in which he believed, people whose names were different. Intellectually, it was as if he was a survivor of a simpler America that existed mostly in myth; Richard Gid Powers has described Hoover’s ethos as “a turn-of-the-century vision of America as a small community of like-minded neighbors proud of their achievements, resentful of
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