Enemies: A History of the FBI (9 page)

Hoover sat silently at Palmer’s side. The attorney general looked down and began to read, and he did not stop until the afternoon of the following day. He described a world on fire. Communism was attacking the nation’s political institutions, its churches, its schools, its factories, its newspapers, winning converts through its insidious lies. Its “revolutionary disease” had spread from the slums of New York to the huts of Afghanistan through “the poison virus” of its ideology. Palmer invited anyone who doubted the nature
of the threat to look at the photographs of the prisoners taken by the Bureau of Investigation, to see the “cruelty, insanity, and crime” staring from their “sly and crafty eyes.”

“My own life is threatened daily,” he said; his character assassinated by the “friends of these criminals” who represented them in court and before Congress. Palmer saved his most bitter words for Louis Post and the lawyers who signed the “Report to the American People.” Such men, he said, were no better than the Communists. “They have not hesitated to give the widest publicity to their defenses of all of these communists and criminal anarchists and to their charges that these people have been outrageously treated.…

“I think the public is entitled to know what is going on in the country,” Palmer said. “I have tried to tell them. I have told them the truth.”

But it was not the whole truth. Late on the second day of his testimony, Palmer placed into the
Congressional Record
a document Hoover had prepared about the work of the Radical Division of the Bureau of Investigation. It contained “the complete story … of the bomb plot which broke out in a dozen cities a year ago today,” Palmer said. Buried deep within this report were a few plaintive paragraphs revealing that, in retrospect, the government might have been wrong to blame the bomb plots on the Communists. But the attorney general did not read a word of it. “It would take up too much time,” he said. “It is a story which might beguile an hour or so.”

Palmer’s public image had been scarred by his warnings of threats that never materialized. By the time he arrived at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, which opened in San Francisco at the end of June, his political reputation was plummeting and his dreams of nomination disappearing. Hoover, making his first trip to the West Coast, was one among many Justice Department aides who gathered at Palmer’s suite in the St. Francis Hotel, holding out hopes that he could still win. But after forty-four ballots, Palmer withdrew. His life in politics was over.

Palmer and Hoover were called once more to the Capitol, in the last days of the Wilson administration, to testify about the Red raids of January. Palmer insisted he was unaware of the details. Not even how many search warrants had been signed? asked Senator Thomas J. Walsh, a Montana Democrat. “I cannot tell you, Senator,” Palmer replied. “If you would like to ask Mr. Hoover, who was in charge of this matter, he can tell you.” The senator turned to the young crusader.

Hoover said he had no idea. “You know nothing about it at all?” Senator Walsh asked. And
Hoover said: “No, sir.” For the rest of his life, he disavowed his role in the raids. He was learning that secrecy and deception were essential to political warfare.

“W
E’LL GET THEM
”

Hoover prepared a report to Congress claiming that the raids had resulted in “
the wrecking of the communist parties in this country”—a premature boast. A total of 591 aliens had been ordered deported. The United States held 178 Americans convicted under the espionage and sedition laws. Hoover’s own records showed that at least nine out of ten people jailed in the January 1920 raids were now free. He had set out to remove thousands of radicals from the American landscape, and he had fallen short.

Hoover determined that it was time to revamp the Radical Division.

He renamed it the General Intelligence Division. This was not a cosmetic change. Hoover now intended to cover “not only the radical activities in the United States” but also those “of an international nature,” and not only radical politics, but “economic and industrial disturbances” as well. His ambitions were expanding. So was his understanding of what it would take to protect America.

In a word, it was intelligence. He wrote that it was better to fight subversives in secret; the government could not handle “
the radical situation from a criminal prosecution standpoint.” The law was too weak a force to protect America. Only secret intelligence could detect and disrupt the threat from the left and protect America from attack.

Shortly after noon on Thursday, September 16, 1920, as Hoover was putting the final touches on his plans for the General Intelligence Division, a horse-drawn wagon exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in Manhattan. It had been a pleasant day, and hundreds of people had left their desks for a lunchtime stroll, a brief respite from the great money machine. A bomb turned the center of American capitalism into a slaughterhouse. Blood ran in the streets where the first Congress of the United States had convened and the Bill of Rights had become law. Shrapnel scarred the walls and shattered the windows of J. P. Morgan and Co., America’s most formidable bank. The scars are still there, graven into the cornerstones facing the sidewalk.

The bomb killed thirty-eight people and injured roughly four hundred. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States, and it held that distinction for the next seventy-five years.

Minutes before the explosion, three blocks away, a postman had emptied a mailbox. He found five crudely misspelled pamphlets, handmade with rubber stamps and red ink. “Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you,” they said. They were signed “American Anarchist Fighters.”

The Wall Street bombing was almost surely an act of revenge for the indictments of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged five days before in the murder and armed robbery of a shoe-factory paymaster and his guard outside Boston. Hoover pushed the investigation to no avail. No suspects were ever brought to justice.

“
We’ll get them,” vowed Hoover’s boss, Bill Flynn. But the Bureau never did.

6

UNDERWORLDS

“
I
AM NOT FIT
for this office and should never have been here,” President Warren G. Harding lamented in the White House. His judgment, for once, was sound.

Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher who had risen beyond his station in life as a Republican U.S. senator from Ohio. When he became president on March 4, 1921, he brought his crooked friends with him to Washington. The closest was his campaign manager, Harry M. Daugherty, who became the attorney general of the United States.

Two prominent Republican senators strongly warned Harding against the nomination. “
Daugherty has been my best friend from the beginning in this whole thing,” the president-elect replied. “He tells me he wants to be Attorney General
and by God he will be Attorney General!
” A skilled political fixer, Daugherty had spent years twisting arms as a lobbyist in the Ohio statehouse; his specialty was killing legislation opposed by big companies. He cut deals between businessmen and politicians with common interests in money and power. His reputation preceded him to Washington. Once he arrived, Daugherty grew in office. He became one of the nation’s leading white-collar criminals.

Though the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation would fall into deep dishonor during the Harding years, J. Edgar Hoover would thrive.

Hoover won promotion to the number-two position at the Bureau of Investigation at the age of twenty-six. His reputation was unblemished, his aptitude for infighting undiminished, his focus on the Red threat unrelenting, his expertise unquestioned. He saw no great distinction among American radicals—Communists, Socialists, anarchists, pacificists. They were enemies of the state.

While Hoover took care of the war on communism, Harry Daugherty
took care of his friends. The new attorney general placed an old pal, William J. Burns, in charge of the Bureau in August 1921. Hoover, by now an accomplished cultivator of his superiors, assured Burns that the Bureau had been infiltrating the ranks of American radicals for years. “
We made an effort to have an informant in every one of the leading movements of the country,” he said, and the General Intelligence Division was on guard against new threats from the Left.

Burns, at the age of sixty, was America’s most famous private detective. His talent for self-promotion was impressive. After gaining notoriety as a jury-tampering federal investigator in the 1905 land-fraud cases championed by President Theodore Roosevelt, he had won acclaim by tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms to convict two labor racketeers in the 1910 dynamite attack on the headquarters of the
Los Angeles Times
, which had killed twenty-one people. He came close to going to prison himself in 1915 for stealing documents from a New York law firm. Hours after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, Burns publicly announced that the Communists were behind the attack and vowed to bring them to justice. He offered a $50,000 reward on behalf of the W. J. Burns International Detective Agency for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bombers. Now, as the Bureau of Investigation’s director, Burns promised the public that the Bureau would find the Wall Street bombers.

Bureau agents in Chicago, looking for clues in the bombing, intercepted a letter from the Communist Party underground in New York. The government was “
holding us responsible for the Wall Street disaster,” it said, warning against a new crackdown. “The January raids are past history,” it began. “So some of our members are beginning to think that
EVERYTHING IS SAFE. WE WANT TO CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IS STILL ON THE JOB
. It will continue
ON THE JOB
as long as we exist as a
Revolutionary Organization
. Spies, stool pigeons, provocateurs, and every form of scum is bound, in some way or other, to get into the organization or learn of its activities.…
EXERCISE GREAT CAUTION.… IF YOU ARE ARRESTED … ANSWER NOTHING.
”

“A
N OUTLAW ORGANIZATION
”

Hoover mobilized his growing network of informers. He combed through reports and tips from Bureau agents, army and navy intelligence officers,
leaders of the American Protective League, commanders of the American Legion, police chiefs, corporate executives, bankers, insurance men, telephone and telegraph companies. He warned that the Reds were burrowing into labor unions, factories, churches, schools, colleges, newspapers, magazines, women’s clubs, and Negro organizations. His weekly bulletins to the attorney general hammered home the threat. Daugherty needed no convincing. “
Soviet Russia is the enemy of mankind,” he maintained. “They have set out to conquer not only America but the world.”

In the spring and summer of 1921, dozens of Bureau agents under Hoover’s command spied on suspected Communists across the country, infiltrated their meetings, and broke into their headquarters. When Bureau agents and the New York bomb squad crashed into an apartment on Bleecker Street, seizing Party membership lists, internal reports, and encoded communiqués, they found a pamphlet entitled “
Rules for Underground Party Work.”

The rules were explicit:

  1) DON’T betray Party work and Party workers under any circumstances.

  2) DON’T carry or keep with you names and addresses, except in good code.

  3) DON’T keep in your rooms openly any incriminating documents or literature.

  4) DON’T take any unnecessary risks in Party work.

  5) DON’T shirk Party work because of the risk connected with it.

  6) DON’T boast of what you have to do or have done for the Party.

  7) DON’T divulge your membership in the Party without necessity.

  8) DON’T let any spies follow you to appointments or meetings.

  9) DON’T lose your nerve in danger.

10) DON’T answer any questions if arrested.

The pamphlet concluded: “AVOID ARREST BY ALL POSSIBLE MEANS.” That was a tall order for America’s top Communists. Almost all the men who led the Communist Party over the next four decades did jail time for their political work between 1918 and 1923. Few went more than a few months without facing a policeman, a judge, or a jail cell—locked up or under indictment on charges of conspiracy or sedition.

“Spies are on the job every day in every city bent upon ferreting out our
members, our meetings and working places,” the Bleecker Street pamphlet warned. The Communists believed they were under surveillance by the government every minute of their lives, whether they worked openly or underground.