The Attack on New York’s Finest

Gary Allen. Belmont: American Opinion, 1967. 6 x 9 in. Offset. Saddle stapled in wraps. 18 pp. 

Pro-police propaganda published by American Opinion, the bookselling and publishing wing of the far-right John Birch Society. Gary Allen was the spokesperson for the John Birch Society, which many consider to be the progenitor of the nationalist “patriot” movement. Allen once denounced rock music as a “Pavlovian Communist mind-control plot”, was a speechwriter for Alabama governor and famous American racist George Wallace, and helped popularize New World Order and international banking conspiracies suggesting a shadow government controlled the United States and other countries. His son is the prominent political journalist Michael Allen, co-founder and executive editor of Axios, and the former chief political reporter for Politico.

This book from 1967, reproducing an American Opinion article by Allen from a few months before, denounces liberal politicians and supposedly anti-police laws, and alleges Communist conspiracy and outsider agitators working to sow chaos on the streets. In the earliest mention we’ve found of the concept, Allen writes: “There is in fact only a Thin Blue Line that separates the city and its citizens from flaming anarchy.”

A scarce piece of right-wing fearmongering and pro-police propaganda, with early references to the concept of a “Thin Blue Line” from one of the most influential far-right propagandists of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Two small pinholes near spine; otherwise very good.