Enemies: A History of the FBI (12 page)

“S
EE THAT EVERY SECRECY IS MAINTAINED
”

Attorney General Stone had told Hoover to stick to law enforcement. He had asked Hoover more than once what federal laws made communism illegal. There were none. “
The activities of the Communists and other ultra-radicals have not up to the present time constituted a violation of the federal statutes,” Hoover wrote on October 18, 1924. “Consequently, the Department of Justice, theoretically, has no right to investigate such activities.”

The Bureau of Investigation had no authority to conduct political warfare. The Espionage Act of World War I was null and void now that the war was over. The remaining federal sedition law, dating from the Civil War, required proof of a plan to use violence to overthrow the government. The Bureau never had been able to prove to the satisfaction of any court that American Communists conspired to that end. An even older law, the Logan Act of 1790, outlawed the communication of hostile conspiracies between Americans and a foreign country. Communists in the United States clearly communicated with Moscow. But Congress never had voted to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition—it was not a country, in the eyes of American law—so the Logan Act was out. Hoover had no law to enforce. He had bent his authority to the limits and beyond in the realm of anticommunism.

Yet he had met the attorney general’s standards. On December 10, 1924, Stone said he had passed the test. Hoover would become the director of the Bureau of Investigation.

Remarkably, that same week, Hoover found a legal basis for secret intelligence investigations of the American Left. It lay buried in an eight-year-old Justice Department budget authorization bill. In 1916, the Wilson administration, newly vigilant against foreign diplomats engaged in espionage, had started using the Bureau’s agents to eavesdrop on the German embassy. The administration had slipped a line into the Justice Department budget giving
the Bureau the power to investigate “
official matters under the control of the Department of Justice
and the Department of State
” [emphasis added]. The bill became law and its provisions remained. When the Senate held hearings on the question of Soviet recognition in 1924, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes asked Hoover to prepare a report on Moscow’s influence over American Communists. Hoover responded with nearly five hundred pages detailing his belief that Soviet communism sought to infiltrate every aspect of American life.

He maintained that the continuing diplomatic and political controversy gave him license to investigate communism in the United States. Hoover made that fragment of a sentence the foundation of his secret intelligence service.

Harlan Fiske Stone now ascended to the Supreme Court, where he served for the rest of his life, ending his days as chief justice. He watched over Hoover, and the new director knew it. To that end, Hoover hewed to Stone’s edicts. He had to avoid the barest hint of lawbreaking if he wanted to rebuild the Bureau from the rubble bequeathed to him. “
This Bureau cannot afford to have a public scandal visited upon it,” Hoover wrote in a “personal and confidential” message sent to all special agents in May 1925. “What I am trying to do is to protect the force of the Bureau of Investigation from outside criticism and from bringing the Bureau of Investigation into disrepute.”

He fired crooks and incompetents, cutting his forces until he had fewer than three hundred trustworthy special agents. He banned drinking on and off the job in light of the Prohibition laws. In time, he instituted uniform crime reports, constructed a modern criminal laboratory, built a training academy, and assembled a national fingerprint file. And for the next decade, he kept his spying operations small and tightly focused.

The risks of being caught spying on Americans were great. Hoover ran them; the risks of not spying seemed greater. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, Hoover and the Bureau tracked the work of American Communists with the help of paid informers, Party defectors, police detectives, and State Department officials.

Hoover investigated the national movement to stop the 1927 execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Their murder conviction was seen as a frame-up by liberals across the country, chief among them Hoover’s old nemesis Felix Frankfurter, who had fought Hoover face-to-face during the Deer Island deportations. He instructed his agents to “keep fully
informed” on the local Sacco and Vanzetti defense committees and to “keep me advised”—but to “
see that every secrecy is maintained.” Hoover had always suspected that Italian anarchists had carried out the 1920 terrorist bombings that targeted American leaders and left Wall Street running in blood. But he was never able to prove it; the cases remained forever open.

Hoover spied on William Z. Foster, the Communist Party’s perennial presidential candidate, the Comintern’s favorite American labor organizer, and the head of the Party’s Trade Union Educational League. FBI files from 1927, detailing secret meetings of Communist Party leaders in Chicago and New York, reported on the Reds’ resolve to redouble recruitments and burrow into the ranks of the American Federation of Labor. Hoover told his most trusted confidant at the State Department that Communists controlled “
the entire membership of all New York unions” and conspired “to take over the executive power of the unions in this country.” He went on high alert when Foster and his followers traveled to Moscow in May 1929. He took note when Stalin directly addressed the American delegation, and he kept the file on hand for the rest of his days.

“The moment is not far off when a revolutionary crisis will develop in America,” Stalin said. “Every effort and every means must be employed in preparing for that, comrades.”

The crisis came quickly. It began with the Wall Street crash in November 1929, it grew mightily with the Great Depression, and it lasted until World War II.

8

RED FLAGS

“
T
HE WORKERS OF
this country look upon the Soviet Union as their country, is that right?” Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York asked the American Communist leader William Z. Foster. “They look upon the Soviet flag as their flag?”

“
The workers of this country,” Foster said, “have only one flag and that is the red flag.”

The ruins created by the Great Depression provided cornerstones for the Communist movement. Roughly eight million people lost their jobs in 1930. Thousands of banks failed. One-quarter of the nation’s factory lines stopped. President Herbert Hoover seemed unwilling or unable to act. Congress did little or nothing to help. The Communist Party of the United States, despite vicious internal battles, began to build significant support among labor unions and unemployed workers.

Congress responded with its first formal investigation of American communism in 1930. The House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities was a long-running spectacle, but not a success. The congressional investigators were befouled from the start by forged documents, fake evidence, and grandstanding witnesses.

J. Edgar Hoover tried to keep his distance from the public crusade led by Congressman Fish, a cantankerous Republican who represented Franklin D. Roosevelt’s home district in New York State. But he did agree to testify before the investigative committee, and he shared some of his voluminous files on American radicals. Hoover issued a pointed warning about the power of Communist propaganda, which he called a new instrument of warfare for an armed conflict between workers and bosses, a class struggle that could threaten the shaky foundations of American capitalism.

But he said the Bureau could not attack American Communists unless
Congress once again outlawed revolutionary words. He wanted federal laws to make communism itself a crime.

In 1931, as the misery of the Great Depression spread and protests against the government grew, Congressman Fish ended his hearings in a state of rage. He had concluded that “no department of our government had any authority or funds from Congress to investigate Communism, and
no department of the government, particularly the Department of Justice, knew anything about the revolutionary activities of the Communists in the United States. We have about 100,000 Communists in New York, and if they were so minded, they could raid the White House and kidnap the President, and no department of the government would know anything about it until they read it in the newspapers the next day.”

But Congress gave Hoover no fresh ammunition for the war on communism; nor did the Supreme Court. The new chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, the former secretary of state, was from the progressive wing of the Republican Party. He held that even Communists had constitutional civil liberties. The chief justice wrote a majority opinion overturning the California conviction of Yetta Stromberg, a nineteen-year-old counselor in a Communist Party summer camp who was sentenced to five years in prison for raising a red flag each morning. The Court said her conviction violated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The red flag could be waved freely in America.

Congressman Fish wanted to strike that flag. He wanted to outlaw Communist words and deeds. He wanted the Bureau back on the case. So he called on Hoover.

The director explained his precarious position to the congressman. The Bureau’s power to spy on Americans had “
never been established by legislation,” Hoover said to Fish on January 19, 1931. It operated “solely on an appropriation bill”—the slender reed of the 1916 budget language saying the Bureau could work for the secretary of state. This was not a technicality: legislative language cloaked in a spending bill was only language, not law. If Congress and the Supreme Court wanted to outlaw communism, they should do so. But until then, the Bureau had no power to openly investigate political conduct. Hoover was walking a very fine line.

Hoover also told Attorney General William D. Mitchell that secret undercover work was crucial “
to secure a foothold in Communistic inner circles” and to stay abreast of their “changing policies and secret propaganda.” But “the Bureau of Investigation may be given the closest scrutiny
at all times”—and it “would undoubtedly be subject to charges in the matter of alleged secret and undesirable methods,” Hoover warned. Under law, he could not investigate political acts “which, from a federal standpoint, have not been declared illegal and in connection with which no prosecution might be instituted.”

Hoover nevertheless kept spying on the Communists, hewing to his reading of the law by reporting in secret to the State Department.

On January 20, 1931—one day after his conversation with Congressman Fish—Hoover sent a letter to the State Department’s most respected Russia hand, Robert F. Kelley, the chief of the Eastern European division. He summarized a series of reports from the Bureau of Investigation’s New York office, based on the work of confidential informants within the Communist Party.

Hoover reported on an organization called the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League—which he called an “
active Communist unit” of American military veterans of World War I. The veterans wanted the government to pay a promised “bonus” for their military service—a payment that was not due until 1945. The group was “trying to organize an impressive number of ex-servicemen for the purpose of a ‘Hunger March’ to Washington,” Hoover wrote. “The campaign is conducted by the league under the direction of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.” The veterans and the Communists had joined forces, Hoover said, and they were planning to mount a protest march the likes of which no one had ever seen.

Hoover’s intelligence report on the evolving plans for the Bonus March was prophetic. In the summer of 1932, thousands of ragged and unemployed World War I veterans from across the country gathered for a demonstration against the government. One Bonus Army banner read:
IN THE LAST WAR WE FOUGHT FOR THE BOSSES/IN THE NEXT WAR WE’LL FIGHT FOR THE WORKERS
. Marching on Washington, many accompanied by their families, they set up ragged encampments. They built a hobo jungle on Capitol Hill, pitched tents by the Anacostia River, and squatted in abandoned federal buildings.

On July 28, the president called out the troops—led by General Douglas MacArthur and his aide-de-camp, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. They met the Bonus Army marchers with tanks, mounted cavalry, machine guns, and infantry with fixed bayonets and tear gas. General MacArthur’s soldiers burned down the camps by the river; one of the Bonus Marchers was killed in the melee. The spectacle of the United States Army chasing the unarmed
veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War. The newspaper pictures and the newsreels of the rout were a political disaster for President Hoover, who had just won the Republican Party’s nomination for a second term.

Attorney General Mitchell announced that the Communists were to blame. He turned to J. Edgar Hoover to back the charges. Bureau agents in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis worked for months trying to prove that the Communist Party had planned and financed the march. Infiltrating meetings and rallies, searching bank records and shadowing leaders of the march, they investigated in vain. A grand jury convened to gather proof that the Bonus Army was a Communist conspiracy. It found none.