In a published eulogy for the actor John Garfield, playwright Clifford Odets bemoaned that Garfield was from that generation of Americans that had been “processed by democracy,” a comment duly noted in Odets’s 30-page FBI file. “In all ways,” Odets wrote to the New York Times, “he was as pure an American product as can be seen these days, processed by democracy, knowing or caring nothing for any other culture or race” (Odets FBI file).1 Clearly, a repellent brand of chauvinism had absorbed Odets’s America, and the uniquely defiant American spirit that he so successfully captured in his 1930s plays Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Till the Day I Die, and Paradise Lost (almost single handedly making “radical theater a paying concern in New York City, and a prime medium for political expression”, Norma Jenckes writes in the Encyclopedia of the American Left [542]), was, by 1952 he thought, a thing of the past. A number of fundamental elements accounted for such a sea change; but in this chapter I argue that J. Edgar Hoover’s omnipresence and his status as a fixture in the twentieth-century American home was one of the more essential factors.