The Thought Police: An Episode in Radical Bigotry

New York: John T. Flynn, 1946. First edition. Pamphlet. Stapled wraps, 6 x 9 inches, 8 pp. Printed on newsprint. Small closed tears to tail edge and chipping to edges. Browning to newsprint. Very scarce, with only four showing in OCLC institutions (Northwestern University, University of Tulsa, University of Oregon, and Stanford University). Very good.. A scarce pamphlet written and published by journalist, author, and polemicist of the "Old Right," John T. Flynn (1882-1964). Flynn began his career as a journalist at the New Haven Register before becoming an editor at the New York Globe specializing in finance. During the 1920s and 1930s Flynn would grow into a prominent social and political commentator, contributing columns to national publications such as the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and Collier's Weekly. Flynn was an early supporter of President Roosevelt, but was soon disillusioned by the New Deal's centralization of federal power, bureaucratic expansion, and reliance upon debt to finance it all. Flynn would spend much of his literary career fighting against the trends that increasingly defined the nation: centralism and militarism. In 1946, the mystery novelist Rex Stout, on behalf of the Writer's Board, urged fellow writers to boycott the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement on account of its policy positions. Flynn penned and self-published The Thought Police: An Episode in Radical Bigotry in response. Flynn asserts in the pamphlet that in "America thus far the Thought Policeman has been limited to two chief weapons-the Smear and the Boycott," and he accuses Stout and others of using such tactics to disparage and silence the arguments of those who do not follow their political line. Flynn would further recount his battle with Stout in his 1951 book While You Slept: Our Tragedy in Asia and Who Made It. A rare and original instance of Flynn at his polemical best.