Subversive Activities Quotes
Dulles was writing about the World War II Abwehr, the German intelligence service.
By secret societies, de Tocqueville meant societies or organizations where the membership was secret. He was not referring to organizations like the Masons which had secret oaths and rituals. Secret societies had historically been destabilizing forces in societies. At the time this was written, there were no secret societies in America, but in 1855 a major one developed—The American Party whose members were better known as “Know Nothings” as when they would be asked anything about the party and its organization of beliefs, they would claim that the knew nothing. They were virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Subsequently, there have been secret organizations in American politics from time to time, but they have generally been few compared to other countries, and their influence was not long lasting. Most recently, quirks in legal decisions and their interaction with the Constitution have produced non profit organizations which are financed and influenced by unknown people. The major officials of the organizations are known but the members and contributors are secret. These organizations then operate campaigns, most often to attack and damage the reputation of politicians running for political office—most frequently, the Presidency.
This commission was the intellectual forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism. Metternich called a conference of the heads of all the German states to deal with what they perceived as a dangerous liberalism enveloping German society. Metternich did not personally draft all the resolutions but he controlled the conclave and all the resolutions which are usually ascribed to him.
McCarthy was one of the most interesting political phenomena of politics in the 1950s. He was an alcoholic megalomaniac who made wild accusations about communists everywhere and that the Secretary of State and other politicians were communists. He claimed to have a list of thousands of communists in high positions of government. His accusations were so dramatic that most people assumed that there were facts behind them otherwise no rational man would say such things. But it turned out that not a single accusation was ever proven. When McCarthy was esposed, he was censured by the Senate and he lost most of his political credibility and shortly thereafter died as a result of his severe alcoholism.
In 1927 Astor with other wealthy Americans (including Kermit Roosevelt, Marshall Field III, David Bruce and Winthrop Aldrich) founded their own private espionage agency, ROOM, which was utilized heavily by FDR:
