INTELLECT SURVEILLED: THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND THE ORGANS OF STATE SECURITY By Sylvia E. Bartley http://www.elegant-technology.com/TVbarSI.html selected quotes: "" ... Latent nativist fears in the United States surmounted class divisions to forge a ground_swell of anticommunism. This fusion of fear and myth, expressed as super-patriotism, would trample professed democratic tenets and quickly led to blatant violations of constitutional rights. The United States Government first resorted to espionage against its own citizens during the Civil War, while the Veblens were still farming in Cato, Wisconsin. To perform this domestic surveillance, the War Department hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had perfected such practices in previous anti-labor operations... By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, political detective units existed in most U.S. cities... In a climate of growing war hysteria, the second decade of the century saw the rapid development of collaboration between private and public police networks nationwide... ""