This comprehensive and sprightly story suggests that the ascendancy of today’s right wing is based in no small measure on their obsession of the previous epoch—anticommunism—which savaged progressivism under the guise of fighting Communists. This book is an important contribution.— Gerald Horne, author of Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party

The sordid story of the intense and prolonged repression of American communists has never been told better. Aaron J. Leonard’s compelling and highly illuminating book is a must-read for everyone interested in US political history.—Geoffrey Roberts, Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and Member of the Royal Irish Academy

Aaron Leonard’s study of unparalleled political repression is both comprehensive and engrossing. For over sixty years, mass surveillance, sustained persecution, and frequent imprisonment were all used to silence American communists and, more broadly, cripple left-wing activism. Essential reading for students of American political history.—Phillip Deery, author of Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York

An Era of Disruption & Violence

The FBI & the Shattering of the Sixties New Left

By Aaron J Leonard

Rutgers University Press (Coming July 13, 2027)

Informants were instructed to support the National Office faction in SDS against the PLP faction.

—SAC Cleveland to Director FBI, re: June SDS Convention

The convention did result in a split of the SDS with the result that PLP was required to form its own “rump” organization; the SDS as the mainstay of the New Left Movement is now seriously divided and, to this extent, weakened...

—COINTELPRO Memo, August 1, 1969

Throughout the decade of the sixties, the FBI and other elements of the government undertook a massive effort to contain the movement against the American apartheid system and the war in Vietnam. The prime focus of these increasingly repressive efforts was the young radicals of the New Left, residing in the Students for a Democratic Society. Utilizing thousands of pages of unexamined FBI files, voluminous reports from Congress, and the author’s files obtained through Freedom of Information filings, this book will tell the story of the massive repression set loose against SDS, the group’s breakup due internecine factionalism, and how this was encouraged and amplified at every turn by secret measures deployed by the FBI.