Masculine Insecurity State

Abstract

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joe McCarthy, and attorney Roy Cohn were among the most villainous figures in mid-century U.S. politics. In addition to intimidating dissenters and promoting traditional racial and gender hierarchies, the three men frequently smeared liberals and radicals as dangerous “sexual perverts.” Yet Christopher Elias argues that they were finally undermined by the same forces they helped unleash—“to varying degrees, each man was ultimately hoist with his own petard,” he says (p. 17). These men who devoted their careers to constructing what Elias calls “surveillance state masculinity” eventually had their own manhood called into question. Elias might not persuade the reader that these men suffered much for their ruthless queering of their opponents, but in the process of analyzing their performative masculinity, he reveals some fascinating connections between extremist anti-communism, changing norms in gender and sexuality, and the culture of gossip. Elias also shows how these three men constructed identities and invented techniques that still haunt U.S. politics today. Elias’s analysis of his main characters turns on the intersection of three historical developments: the expansion of the national surveillance state; the revolution in gender and sexual norms; and the emergence of a culture of gossip in American media, politics, and society. The first two themes—the roles that Hoover, McCarthy, and Cohn played in creating the surveillance state and their conscious construction of their own masculine identities—have received attention from scholars. Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes (1998), Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (1991), Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox’s The Boss (1988), Robert Griffith’s The Politics of Fear (1970), and David Oshinsky’s A Conspiracy So Immense (1983), among many other books, have described how Hoover and McCarthy gained and retained power by weaponizing American fears of communist infiltration. Claire Bond Potter’s War on Crime (1998) and Richard Gid Powers’s G-Men (1983) traced