The best books that expose the hidden underbelly of the American empire

Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms as United States president, from 1952-1960. His administration is widely remembered for rapid economic growth and adept international diplomacy. Yet the pubic face of much of that growth and diplomacy masked Ike’s vehement prosecution of a brutal cold war—acts of attrition and deceit overseas that vastly expanded the US empire around the globe.

The brothers John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen Dulles, who was head of the Central Intelligence Agency, led the American rise to international preeminence. The Devil’s Chessboard focuses largely on Allen Dulles, who waged secret wars across the planet in service of American imperial objectives. Prior to World War Two, Dulles worked for an investment firm that had direct ties to Hitler’s Third Reich—Allen Dulles met with Hitler in 1933. During the war, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and was stationed in Switzerland. There, writes Talbot, Dulles maintained close ties with Nazi officials and business leaders throughout the war.

When the war ended, Allen Dulles helped establish “rat lines” that allowed former high-ranking Nazi officials and scientists to escape to the United States and South America. Later, as head of Eisenhower’s CIA, Dulles seamlessly continued this work and expanded it by staging coups that allowed American corporations free reign to seize and exploit resources and labor. Dulles also oversaw the CIA’s infamous MK-Ultra program, which experimented with drugs, principally LSD, as a means of achieving mind control. Talbot even provides a fascinating and well-researched connection between Dulles and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Kendzior released Hiding in Plain Sight in 2020, just prior to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by Trump followers. The book quickly became a bestseller and an essential reference for anyone wanting to make sense of the increasingly authoritarian strain of American politics in general, and the Trump administration in particular. 

In 2012, Kendzior earned her PhD by studying authoritarian regimes that grew out of the states of the former Soviet Union. She brought that knowledge home and, in 2016, applied it to predict Trump’s unlikely electoral victory. Hiding in Plain Sight tracks Trump’s ascent through the history of America’s consolidation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands and through the corruption inevitably associated with such inequity.

The book explores Trump’s tutelage under his reactionary mentor Roy Cohn, his rise in popularity through reality TV, his failed business dealings, and his ability to tap into deep wells of American discontent among working-class voters. Kendzior identifies Trump as the inevitable result of “an elite criminal network [that] has been building for decades.”

Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.

Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next rise. 

The Grapes of Wrath still stands among the finest works of American fiction, now with more than 14 million copies sold. Steinbeck published the book during the Depression, while farmer migrations remained ongoing. Reading it today, The Grapes of Wrath can be viewed almost as prescient in tone—perhaps anticipating the voracious consuming of these millions of acres of farmland by the country’s growing agricultural conglomerates, four of which today control 74 percent of all US food production.

In this exhaustive, deeply researched study, Benjamin Madley examines in grim detail the relentless series of massacres and exterminations of peaceful Native American Indians in California that occurred from 1846 to 1873. During this era, writes Madley, “perhaps 80 percent of all California Indians died.” Survivors, especially children, were often enslaved. 

The brutality is systematic, if not endemic, to the construction of the American empire. Nearly half of the book is comprised of appendices that quantify most known Indian massacres in California during the mid-nineteenth century. (“~April 5, 1846. Number killed: 120-1,000. Location: Close to Reading’s Ranch.”) What emerges is a disturbing portrait of ceaseless violence inflicted by pioneers and settlers, by business owners and hired thugs, and by the state and federal governments against large, sophisticated human populations that had lived in place for thousands of years.

The nearly comprehensive genocide remains rarely invoked in modern times, no matter that it was prosecuted to seize Indian lands and resources as a prerequisite to creating the empire known as California, today the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Few writers dig as deeply or as diligently into the underbelly of the American empire more than Edwin Black. One of his earliest books, IBM and the Holocaust, documents how the pioneering computing company sold Hollerith tabulation machines and the required punch cards to Germany’s Nazi government throughout World War Two, allowing the regime to identify and exterminate Jews. 

Two years later, Black published something of a prequel, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. It’s an extensive and exhaustively documented account of American white supremacists and their bogus but widely accepted theories of “eugenics,” or “race science,” that maintained a surprising legitimacy in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.

Eugenic policies led to the marginalization and forced sterilization of human “defectives” in the United States. Not long thereafter, employing lessons learned in America, the Nazi Third Reich prosecuted the Holocaust. Among America’s many prominent white supremacists was the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose 1916 screed, The Passing of the Great Race, is still cited today by white supremacists throughout the world.

Black reports that, after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, he wrote a fan letter to Madison Grant. “This book is my bible,” wrote the Fuhrer. Black writes, “Hitler praised the policies of the United States and its quest for Nordic purity…and proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed American eugenic legislation.”