Enemies: A History of the FBI (4 page)

Bonaparte personally swore to Congress that the Bureau would not be a secret police. It would be above politics. The attorney general, as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, would command and control its agents. “
The Attorney General knows or ought to know at all times what they are doing,” he promised.

The precipice between “knows” and “ought to know” would become a dangerous abyss when J. Edgar Hoover came to power.

3

TRAITORS

O
N
A
UGUST
1, 1919, Hoover became the chief of the Justice Department’s newly created Radical Division. He held a combination of powers unique in the government of the United States.

He oversaw hundreds of agents and informants working for the Bureau of Investigation. He could call for the arrest of almost anyone he chose. He began organizing a nationwide campaign against the enemies of the state. He was still only twenty-four years old.

The United States had fought and won its military battles abroad in the two years since Hoover had joined the government. Now it was engaged in political warfare against enemies on the home front.

The Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation had used their powers against Americans and aliens alike from the start of World War I. President Wilson had warned that “
vicious spies and conspirators” had “spread sedition among us.” He had asserted that “many of our own people were corrupted” by foreign agents. He told citizens who opposed the war that they were in effect enemy combatants. “Woe to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way,” Wilson said.

Hoover had learned the mechanics of mass arrests and detentions during his first year at Justice. The department had a list of 1,400 politically suspect Germans living in the United States on the day war was declared. Ninety-eight were jailed immediately; 1,172 were deemed potential threats to national security and subject to arrest at any time. They were the first political suspects over whom Hoover kept watch.

The Bureau launched its first nationwide domestic surveillance programs under the Espionage Act of 1917, rounding up radicals, wiretapping conversations, and opening mail. The Espionage Act made possession of information that could harm America punishable by death; imprisonment
awaited anyone who would “utter, print, write, or publish” disloyal ideas. One thousand fifty-five people were convicted under the Espionage Act. Not one was a spy. Most were political dissidents who spoke against the war. Their crimes were words, not deeds.

Rose Pastor Stokes, a Russian immigrant married to a millionaire American socialist, was sentenced to ten years in prison under the Espionage Act for saying that “no government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people.” Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Socialist Party, was indicted for speaking out against her conviction. He had won close to one million votes running against President Wilson, but he would conduct his next campaign from prison. “
I believe in the right of free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs said at his trial. “If the Espionage Law finally stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.” His prosecutor, Edwin Wertz of the Justice Department, responded that Debs was a threat to society because his words inflamed American minds: if he went free, then “a man could go into a crowded theater … and yell ‘fire’ when there was no fire.” A unanimous Supreme Court upheld the ten-year sentence. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the most famous jurist in America, wrote that the Socialists had used “words that may have all the effect of force.” They created “a clear and present danger” to the nation.

As the war went on, Senator Lee Overman, Republican of North Carolina—a prominent member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the Justice Department—demanded stronger action by the Bureau against “
traitors, scoundrels, and spies.” The senator warned that 100,000 foreign espionage agents stalked the United States. Citing the Bureau as his authority, he would double and redouble the number when he pleased—200,000 one day, 400,000 the next.

Attorney General Thomas Gregory wrote to a Justice Department prosecutor: “
There is quite a deal of hysteria in the country about German spies. If you will kindly box up and send me from one to a dozen I will pay you very handsomely for your trouble. We are looking for them constantly, but it is a little difficult to shoot them until they have been found.”

The hunt for foreign spies became a wild-goose chase. The army and the navy, the State Department, the Secret Service, U.S. marshals, and big-city police forces competed with one another and the Bureau of Investigation in the fruitless pursuit. The Bureau faced “
an enormous overlapping of investigative activities among the various agencies charged with winning the war,” remembered one agent, Francis X. Donnell. “It was not an uncommon
experience for an agent of this Bureau to call upon an individual in the course of his investigation, to find out that six or seven other government agencies had been around to interview the party about the same matter.”

The search became a free-for-all. Attorney General Gregory and the Bureau of Investigation’s wartime director, A. Bruce Bielaski, backed business executives across the country who financed the ultrapatriotic American Protective League—gangs of citizens who spied on suspected subversives. They worked in posses, wearing badges proclaiming them members of a “secret service.”
At its height the league claimed more than 300,000 loyalists. Its more zealous members reveled in burglarizing and beating their fellow Americans in the name of justice and the flag. The rumors, gossip, and innuendo gathered by the league filled the files of the Bureau of Investigation.

President Wilson’s son-in-law, Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo, told the president that the Bureau’s alliance with the league posed “
the gravest danger of misunderstanding, confusion, and even fraud.” That gave the president pause; Wilson asked Attorney General Gregory if these vigilantes were the best force America could muster. He said it was “very dangerous to have such an organization operating in the United States, and I wonder if there is any way in which we could stop it?” The president said he knew he had been “derelict in not having sought a remedy” to the disorder in the government’s ranks—but he was “still in doubt as to what the best remedy is.”

Attorney General Gregory had an answer. As the searchlights played across America and the sirens of warning wailed louder, he put the Bureau of Investigation to work as a political strike force.

The Bureau conducted two major political raids during the war. The first was a nationwide attack on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a left-wing labor movement with 100,000 members in the United States. The IWW had passed a resolution against the war; the rhetoric alone was a political crime under the Espionage Act. The attorney general intended to put the IWW out of business. President Wilson heartily approved.
The New York Times
opined that the union’s leaders were “
in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany,” under the theory that the Germans paid the IWW to subvert American industries. The newspaper suggested that “Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators.” Bureau agents and American Protective League members did so. They kicked in the doors at IWW offices, homes, and
union halls in twenty-four cities across America, seizing tons of documents and arresting hundreds of suspects. Three mass trials led to the Espionage Act convictions of 165 union leaders. Their prison sentences ran as long as twenty years.

Politicians and the public applauded the arrests. Calls for the jailing of traitors, scoundrels, and spies rang from the pulpits of churches and the chambers of state legislatures. The attorney general found an easy target. He authorized the Bureau of Investigation to round up the “slackers”—men who had failed to register for the military draft—in the spring and summer of 1918.

The biggest slacker raid by far was a three-day roundup set for September 3, the most ambitious operation in the decade-long history of the Bureau of Investigation. Thirty-five agents gathered under the direction of Charles de Woody, the head of the Bureau’s New York office. The Bureau’s men were backed by roughly 2,000 American Protective League members, 2,350 army and navy men, and at least 200 police officers. They hit the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn at dawn, crossed the Hudson River in ferries, and fanned out across Newark and Jersey City. They arrested somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 suspects, seizing them off sidewalks, hauling them out of restaurants and bars and hotels, marching them into local jails and national armories. Some 1,500 draft dodgers and deserters were among the accused. But tens of thousands of innocent men had been arrested and imprisoned without cause.

Attorney General Gregory tried to disavow the raids, but the Bureau would not let him. “
No one can make a goat of me,” de Woody said defiantly. “Everything I have done in connection with this roundup has been done under the direction of the Attorney General and the chief of the Bureau of Investigation.”

The political storm over the false arrest and imprisonment of the multitudes was brief. But both Attorney General Gregory and the Bureau’s Bielaski soon resigned. Their names and reputations have faded into thin air. Their legacy remains only because it was Hoover’s inheritance.

“T
HE GRAVEST MENACE TO THIS COUNTRY
”

The Red threat began to capture the imagination of the American government in the last weeks of World War I.

President Wilson sent some 14,000 American troops into combat against Bolshevik revolutionaries on the frozen frontiers of Russia. They were still fighting when the guns fell silent in Europe on November 11, 1918. The first battle of America’s war on communism was fought with live ammunition.

The president also launched a political attack on Russia’s radicals. To the shock of his top aides, Wilson personally authorized the publication of secret dossiers purporting to show that the leaders of the Russian Revolution were paid agents of the German government. These documents had been delivered to the White House by one of Wilson’s experts on propaganda, who thought he had produced “
the greatest scoop in history.” The president consulted no one about their authenticity. They were fakes—crude forgeries sold to a credulous American by a czarist swindler—but they changed the political conversation in America.

Congress now joined the war on communism. In January 1919, the U.S. Senate began hearings on the threat, led by Senator Lee Overman of the Judiciary Committee. The Justice Department gave Senator Overman open-ended access to Bureau of Investigation records. In turn, his committee gave the Bureau copies of all its reports from every other branch of government. These files formed a cornerstone for the foundation of J. Edgar Hoover’s career.

The tone of the hearings was set by the testimony of a New York lawyer named Archibald Stevenson, a largely self-taught expert on the subject of the Soviets.

“The idea, then, is to form a government within this Government?” asked Senator Overman. “And to overthrow this Government?”

“Precisely,” Stevenson said.

“You think this movement is growing constantly in this country?”

It was, Stevenson said, and it constituted “the gravest menace to this country today.”

“Can you give us any remedy?” asked the senator.

“The foreign agitators should be deported,” he said. “American citizens who advocate revolution should be punished.”

Senator Overman concluded by saying it was high time to start “getting this testimony out to the American people and letting them know what is going on in this country.”

As the Senate’s alarm at the Red threat increased, the fighting spirit mustered for the world war festered. Nine million American workers in war industries were being demobilized. They found new jobs scarce. The cost of
living had nearly doubled since the start of the war. As four million American soldiers started coming home, four million American workers went out on strike. The United States never had seen such confrontations between workers and bosses. The forces of law and order felt the Reds were behind it all.

On January 21, 1919—the day that the Senate took its first testimony on the Red threat—thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle walked off their jobs. Federal troops put down their uprising, but the spirit of the strike spread to coal mines and steel mills, to textile workers and telephone operators, and to the police force in Boston. Hundreds upon hundreds of strikes threw sand in the gears of the American engine. Political and economic fear ran across the country.

The White House was vacant. President Wilson had set sail across the Atlantic aboard the USS
George Washington
, seeking to bring an end to all wars. He and his most trusted aides went to France in pursuit of his dream of a League of Nations, a global alliance to keep the peace. Wilson called his proposal a covenant; a messianic element tinged his mission. His wartime allies, the leaders of England and France, found Wilson unbearably sanctimonious. They were far more interested in punishing Germany than in building a new world founded on Wilson’s visions.