Chapter 13: Details about the Howard Chandler Christy painting of the signing of the U.S. Constitution came from the website of the Architect of the Capitol, https://www.aoc.gov/art/other-paintings-and-murals/signing-constitution.
When Senator Herbert Lehman, Democrat from New York, claimed during that Senate debate that one hundred Communists were crossing into the U.S. from Mexico every day, he was quoting the Acting Commissioner of Immigration: “It was recently discovered that approximately 100 present and past members of the Communist Party had been crossing daily into the United States in the El Paso area; also that the number of present and ex-members of the Communist Party residing immediately across the border from El Paso number about 1,500, and it has been established that there exists active liaison between the Communist Party of Mexico and the Communist Party in the United States.” Senate Congressional Record, March 8, 1954, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1954-pt2/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1954-pt2-21.pdf.
The racism of Representative Howard Smith, Democrat from Virginia, is long established and vile. See Clay Risen’s “The Accidental Feminist: Fifty Years Ago a Southern Segregationist Made Sure the Civil Rights Act Would Protect Women. No Joke,” Slate.com, February 7, 2014.
The people of Mossville, Louisiana, have indeed been victims of the very real problems caused by chemical plants in their midst. Some of the details for this book were taken from Bernard H. Lane, “The Industrial Development of Lake Charles, Louisiana 1920–1950” (Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, January 1959); Tim Murphy, “A Massive Chemical Plant Is Poised to Wipe This Louisiana Town Off the Map,” Mother Jones (March 27, 2014).
Details about Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. were taken from his own memoirs Adam by Adam (New York: Dial Press, 1971) and Keep the Faith, Baby! (New York: Trident Press, 1967) and from Wil Haygood, “Power and Love,” Washington Post, January 17, 1993. Some of the information about the Senate debate comes from “Power to Recruit Mexicans Is Voted; Bill Authorizing the Admission of Migrant Labor Goes to White House,” New York Times, March 4, 1954.
Chapter 14: Roy Cohn was vividly brought to life in Nicholas von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Cohn’s own book about his mentor, McCarthy (New York: New American Library, 1968), is also quite revealing.
That Joseph Alsop did work for the CIA was revealed by Carl Bernstein in “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
Yes, Joe McCarthy would eat a stick of butter when he drank! At least according to Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May’s McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the “Ism” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953). Roy Cohn’s speech in chapter 14 about why McCarthy would be a good president is taken from comments made by Urban Van Susteren (Greta’s dad) about McCarthy in that book. More about the Nazis he defended can be found in Gabriel Schoenfeld, “The Truth, and Untruth, of a German Atrocity,” Weekly Standard, June 19, 2017, and the Malmedy Massacre Investigation, Report of the Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services of the United States Senate, Eighty-First Congress, October 13, 1949.
If you’re interested in reading more about Sam Zemurray and the relationship of the Dulles brothers to United Fruit Company, please check out Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (New York: Picador, 2013). One interesting excerpt: “John Foster Dulles, who represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell—he negotiated that crucial United Fruit deal with Guatemalan officials in the 1930s—was Secretary of State under Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors, was head of the CIA under Eisenhower; Henry Cabot Lodge, who was America’s ambassador to the UN, was a large owner of United Fruit stock; Ed Whitman, the United Fruit PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. You could not see these connections until you could—and then you could not stop seeing them. Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of the United States begin? It was impossible to tell. That was the point of all Sam’s hires.”
Chapter 15: Yes, night-vision technology existed in the 1950s; see “Black-Light Telescope Sees in the Dark,” Popular Science (March 1936). (But no, there were no night-vision binoculars available commercially.)
Information on John F. Kennedy, especially about his health, comes from Ted Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), and Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John Kennedy (New York: David McKay, 1965).
Chapter 16: Details about Communism in academia were gleaned from Ellen Schrecker, “Political Tests for Professors: Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Years,” University of California History Project, October 7, 1999, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/loyaltyoath/symposium/schrecker.html; David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Samuel W. Bloom, “The Intellectual in a Time of Crisis: The Case of Bernhard J. Stern, 1894–1956,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 26 (January 1990).
You can learn more about the saga of Clinton Brewer in Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Jerry W. Ward and Robert J. Butler, eds., Richard Wright Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008).
Chapter 17: Some basic details about trains in the 1950s came from Mike Schafer and Joe Welsh, Classic American Streamliners (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1997). Also see “The Congressional Services” at https://www.american-rails.com/congressional.html; “Pennsylvania’s Congressional, 1952–1967” at http://www.trainweb.org/fredatsf/cong52.htm.
Chapter 18: Details about the history of the Harvard Club of New York were taken from its website: https://www.hcny.com/.
The story of Martin Couney came from Claire Prentice, “How One Man Saved a Generation of Premature Babies,” BBC, May 23, 2016.
There are many fine books and articles that detail how pesticides became what is commonly referred to as Agent Orange. Among them: Alvin Lee Young, The History, Use, Disposition and Environmental Fate of Agent Orange (New York: Springer, 2009), and Biologic and Economic Assessment of Benefits from Use of Phenoxy Herbicides in the United States, Special NAPIAP Report Number 1-PA-96, United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Pesticide Impact Assessment Program in cooperation with Weed Scientists from State Agricultural Experiment Stations.
Chapter 21: Before it was Xerox, it was the Haloid Company. Background on the photocopy machine is from Alfred Zipser, “Printing System Speeds Drawings: Xerox Machine Can Make Copies of 10 Different Plans a Minute,” New York Times, October 26, 1958. Other information about the history of xerography comes from the Xerox.com website.
Chapter 22: The incident with sheep at Skull Valley, Utah, happened in 1968. For more, see “Nerve Gas: Dugway Accident Linked to Utah Sheep Kill,” Science, December 27, 1968; and Jim Woolf, “Feds Finally Admit That Nerve Agent Was Found Near 1968 Sheep Kill,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1998.