My project is a history of the Center for Editions of American Authors, a government-funded, Cold War-era organization tasked with publishing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century American writers from 1963-1976. CEAA editors claimed that their methodology could restore authorial intention to texts corrupted during their original publication. I argue that the CEAA largely re-wrote the American canon according to contemporaneous notions of objective textual analysis. Because CEAA editions remain standard, their influence on scholarship persists today.