Secret Armies: : The New Technique of Nazi Warfare. Exposing Hitler's Undeclared War on Americans Paperback - 2010

John L. Spivak (1897-1981), whom Lincoln Steffens called "the best of us" among the many progressive and muckraking writers of America's early 20th century is almost unknown today. Neglect may be due to his ideology. He was a thinly disguised communist and was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Spivak was imprisoned for his alleged libelous writings. Perhaps neglect is due to his many violations of ethical standards in methods of investigation and reporting. Maybe he is not remembered because his investigative passions were spent on independent inquiries that led to sensational books and exposes in leftist media. He was at the center of many landmark cases, issues, and wars in American and international history. Spivak's documentary photography was carried on inside Georgia chain gang camps during the early 1930s. He published several images in Georgia Nigger, a fictional book based on his underground investigations. Spivak claimed that those on the chain gang, primarily African-Americans, were sometimes beaten or worked to death as a result of medieval-like methods of diabolical pain and punishment. Georgia Nigger had great public impact. Spivak's analysis occasionally is eerily relevant to issues raised by Abu Ghraib prisoner/detainee abuses by military guards in Iraq and Guantnamo Bay, Cuba. Spivak's photography is analyzed within the frameworks of aesthetics theory, visual rhetoric, reception theory, and the historical tradition of documentary photography analysis.