by Charles Lane
These events disproved Hiram C. Whitley’s claim, in Memoirs of the United States Secret Service, that the existence of the force reflected a decision by the American people, through their elected leaders, to create “an elaborate plan of detection, similar to that supported advantageously in European countries.”38 He was correct to assume that no such institution could endure except on a strong political basis, of the kind that monarchy supplied in places like Russia or Spain. In the United States, however, the Secret Service was not the product of a king’s decree or a true national consensus, but of a rare and fleeting political circumstance: control of the federal government by one party, the Republicans, whose principles and interests it favored. White Democrats in the South, however, came to think of the Secret Service, like the rest of the federal government, as their enemy. Restored to a share of power in Washington, they legislated accordingly.
Consequently, of the Republicans’ two great post–Civil War nation-building projects—a national currency and equal national citizenship for whites and blacks—only the national currency would continue to enjoy protection from a federal undercover force. Only the national currency enjoyed sufficient bipartisan support.
With that understanding, a Republican Congress authorized the Secret Service Division of the Treasury Department explicitly, by statute, for the first time, in 1882, removing any question as to its legality.39 For the rest of the nineteenth century, the Secret Service had to make do with a budget no more than about half of what it had in Hiram C. Whitley’s day. Between 1878 and 1893, its roster averaged two dozen full-time detectives.40
They performed well, especially after James J. Brooks, a former internal revenue agent with actual undercover experience, took over in late 1876. Secret Service detectives pursued counterfeiters using the same methods Whitley had so staunchly advocated: entrapping low-level criminals, turning them into informants, following up leads until they reached the top of a gang’s chain of command.
Subsequent editions of the Secret Service’s instruction book in the nineteenth century included only minor changes from the one Whitley produced in 1873. Also maintained was the three-tier hierarchy Whitley established within the division, along with the distribution of regional field offices he devised. When the Secret Service moved its headquarters from New York to Washington, per Secretary Bristow’s orders, Whitley’s files on counterfeiters and other suspected criminals, complete with detailed biographies and photographs, traveled to the Treasury Department building, too. They represented an irreplaceable legacy of his tenure.
Solicitor of the Treasury Bluford Wilson’s notion that the United States Marshals could effectively lead the fight against counterfeiting died a quiet bureaucratic death. Instead, Whitley’s successors rehired Whitley-era detectives who were untainted by the safe burglary or other scandal. Michael G. Bauer, the German-born sleuth who infiltrated Klan dens in South Carolina and Kentucky; William Kennoch, the erstwhile tobacco smuggler who wrestled Joshua D. Miner to the muddy ground in Manhattan; and Henry Finnegass, Whitley’s crony from Civil War days in New Orleans—all returned.41 Bauer served almost continuously until he died in 1898.42 Among the holdovers from Whitley’s team only Charles Anchisi went bad. His superiors caught him engaging in fraud and counterfeiting, for which he was tried and convicted in 1881.43
Over time, the Secret Service reduced the formerly rampant scourge of counterfeiting to a relatively infrequent crime. There were four thousand different counterfeit issues in circulation in 1865; by 1911, the Treasury Department estimated that only one out of every one hundred thousand bills in circulation was a phony.44 Past kingpins of the illicit business were neutralized. Harry Cole, who traded his testimony against Miner for immunity from prosecution, tried to go back to counterfeiting, but Secret Service men ran him down. Given a twelve-year sentence in 1879, he died in prison in 1885.45
Yet there would be precious little federal intervention on behalf of black Americans, the great majority of whom remained poor agricultural workers in the rural South. At the mercy of white supremacist–dominated state governments, they faced violence, segregation, and, over time, disenfranchisement. White authors of terrorist violence during Reconstruction, by contrast, escaped punishment and often went on to fame and fortune. William D. Chipley of Columbus, Georgia, constructed railroads in the Florida panhandle, won a seat in the Florida state senate, and, eventually, became mayor of Pensacola.46 The town of Chipley, Florida, bears his name.
Chipley and his fellow defendants in the Ashburn case celebrated their good fortune by purchasing a magnificent silver-handled mahogany walking stick for Senator James B. Beck of Kentucky. “A grateful remembrance from the Columbus Prisoners, as a gift for their defender,” the inscription reads.47 Beck died in 1890.
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As the events of Reconstruction faded into historical oblivion, or succumbed to the outright historical distortion of Thomas Dixon Jr. and other Southern apologists, myths about the origins of the Secret Service also took hold. The most stubborn was the tale that President Abraham Lincoln gave the order to establish it, on the final day of his life. Purportedly this occurred at a cabinet meeting on the morning before Lincoln’s fateful April 14, 1865, outing to Ford’s Theatre: Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch reported to Lincoln that the government’s efforts against counterfeiting were inadequate, and proposed a “permanent force” to improve them. “Work it out your own way, Hugh,” the president supposedly said. That night, John Wilkes Booth assassinated him, leaving McCulloch to carry out his wishes.48
Not a shred of contemporaneous documentation supports this story. None of those present at Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting subsequently recalled the exchange about counterfeiting. Hugh McCulloch’s own 1889 memoir included a detailed account of his final conversation with Lincoln on the day of the assassination; it lacks any reference to counterfeiting.49
The myth probably persists because it is considerably more dramatic than the truth, which is that the United States government’s first civilian secret agency began its existence as a bureaucratic improvisation. It reflected the policy and partisan interests of the Republican politicians who found themselves in charge of the federal government in the tumultuous aftermath of the Civil War. Until 1882, its only legal basis was a flexible interpretation of appropriations for the Treasury and Justice departments.
Hiram C. Whitley had grand ambitions for the force, and he realized some of them before his career came crashing down. There would have to be further political development before the United States could truly acquire the centralized, covert, investigative bureaucracy whose necessity Whitley so fervently affirmed.
As the twentieth century approached, the sectional and partisan divisions of the previous Civil War generations abated; and America’s international involvement grew. The Spanish-American War, beginning in 1898, created a common enemy, Spain, against whom the federal government could deploy undercover agents legitimately, in the eyes of both political parties and all sections of the country. Secret Service detectives, many of them Spanish-speakers newly hired for the war, conducted espionage and counterespionage against Spanish agents throughout the Western Hemisphere.
After an anarchist assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, the Secret Service received a mandate from Congress to act as a presidential bodyguard. This formalized in law a mission detectives had previously performed informally for President Grover Cleveland during summer vacations, and, indeed, for President McKinley, on occasion.
During World War I, the Secret Service again engaged in war-related intelligence-gathering, until eventually ceding that kind of work to the Department of Justice, and its new Federal Bureau of Investigation—whose first eight detectives were reassigned to it from the Secret Service in 1908. For the remainder of the twentieth century, the Secret Service would have two missions: protection of the president and other dignitaries, and, as always, fighting counterfeiters.50
By then, too, many of the inherent dangers to civil liberties of such an apparatus had also been made manifest, whether through the Palmer Raids against anarchists just after World War I, the internal security investigations of leftists and Communists in the 1950s, or the wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other African American civil rights leaders.
The dilemmas of a permanent federal covert apparatus are with us still, as the debate over alleged Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and FBI excesses in the “war on terror” since September 11, 2001, demonstrate. Americans across the ideological spectrum alternate between lauding the skill and patriotism of their intelligence services, and expressing fear, or anger, at their alleged co-optation for partisan use or, worse, their evolution into a self-perpetuating “surveillance state” beyond democratic control.
All of this seems new and modern. Yet it all has precedent in the rise of the Reconstruction-era Secret Service, and in the long-ago conflicts over its power and purposes. In the twenty-first century, Americans debate using military commissions, selective suspensions of habeas corpus, isolated interrogation centers, and torture against terrorists—including, potentially, American citizens considered terrorists. Each one of these issues had its historical counterpart in the Reconstruction-era debates over the Grant administration’s response to Ku Klux Klan terror. None of the legal, moral, and constitutional arguments for and against these methods today is fundamentally different from the ones that were advanced almost one hundred fifty years ago by men like Hiram C. Whitley, or Amos T. Akerman, or Bluford Wilson, or, for that matter, James B. Beck, on behalf of their respective causes.
We, like they, are torn between Alexander Hamilton’s appreciation, expressed in The Federalist Papers, of the executive branch’s capacity for “decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch,” and James Madison’s equally valid belief that “all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”51 Like Hiram C. Whitley and his contemporaries, we decide whether the ends justify the means based on a mix of rational thought, moral principle, ideological belief, and partisan self-interest.
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Living in de facto internal exile on the Kansas prairie, Hiram C. Whitley finally achieved the respectable business success that eluded him in younger days. With the wealth he accumulated, licitly or otherwise, as Secret Service chief, Whitley acquired Emporia’s Coolidge House Hotel, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Merchant Street, soon after he arrived in town. He renamed it the Whitley Hotel and turned it into a profitable establishment, catering to business travelers on the transcontinental railroads. Purchase of another hotel soon followed, as did Whitley’s promotion of Emporia’s modern water, gas and electric lighting, and streetcar systems. He and four partners built the Whitley Opera House, which bore his name because he provided most of the funds. Opened in January 1882, it was the largest facility of its kind in the state; Emporia began to call itself “the Athens of Kansas.”52
The Whitley Hotel in downtown Emporia was one of several enterprises through which Whitley finally achieved the respectable business success that had eluded him earlier in life. (The Emporia Times)
Whitley built his family a Victorian mansion on the outskirts of Emporia. The place had ten rooms, identical in size to the rooms in the Whitleys’ previous home in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the carpets from that abode could be shipped West and installed without trimming.53 In time, he and Catherine adopted yet another daughter, whom they named Sabra, after Whitley’s maternal aunt. Like Kittie’s adoption, Sabra’s adoption occurred under remarkable circumstances. A woman in her twenties from Massachusetts, who called herself Lizzie W. Newcomb, migrated to Emporia at roughly the same time the Whitleys did and, on November 11, 1878, awarded them custody over her fifteen-month-old child. Then she moved into their big Victorian house, too, and remained there for the rest of her life, described in various local newspaper articles and official documents as a visitor, a widow, or even as the niece of Whitley’s confidant, Abner B. Newcomb, who also hailed from Massachusetts.
As Sabra matured, people would remark on how much she resembled her adoptive father, and whisper that, possibly, there was more of a connection between the founder of the Whitley Opera House, Lizzie, and Sabra, than any of them acknowledged. Certainly, it was unusual that Whitley would draw up a will in 1895 granting Lizzie a sixth of his estate, and making both her and his wife, Catherine, coexecutors, contingent on Lizzie’s promise to renounce “any possible claim she might have” against him. For the old Secret Service man, concealing paternity and an extramarital affair, while enlisting his very own wife in the plot, would have been the ultimate covert operation.54
The Whitleys’ home was a Victorian mansion on the outskirts of Emporia; the former Secret Service chief is visible seated in the middle foreground. (Danforth W. Austin Family Collection)
For the most part, Whitley seemed content to reign over this unconventional family and supervise his business empire, basking in his prestige as a civic leader and avoiding any thought of a return to federal service or even state-level police work. “Because their earlier years were filled with excitement,” the Emporia Gazette noted, “Mr. and Mrs. Whitley have preferred and enjoyed quiet in the later years.”55 Still, Whitley enjoyed regaling Emporians with his version of events during his tenure at the Secret Service. He would occasionally lend his interrogation talents to local police, when they needed help questioning particularly uncooperative suspects.56
Whitley’s public involvement in his previous line of work otherwise took the limited and retrospective form of an autobiography, which appeared in 1894. As his title, he chose In It, a bit of detective slang referring to a state of constant watchfulness.57 Hiram C. Whitley certainly thought of himself as having been “in it” his whole life. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the detective memoir, and—thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes—detective fiction had become popular genres. Publishing his book, Whitley was taking advantage of an opportunity for profit, and following the literary trail previously blazed by other famous undercover operators who had written up their exploits, such as his American contemporary, Allan Pinkerton, and, many years earlier, Vidocq of France.
Hiram C. Whitley lived out his life in de facto internal exile in Emporia, Kansas, with his wife, Catherine, and adopted daughters, Kittie (left) and Sabra (right). (Danforth W. Austin Family Collection)
In the text Whitley not only relived his glory days but also relitigated them, bemoaning once again the wrong done to him and his men by Judge Benedict’s jury instructions, which resulted in Joshua D. Miner’s acquittal. “Justice had probably retired to the mountains for a time,” he wrote.58
Once again, he defended detectives against their moralizing opponents. Covert operations were not only a necessary evil, he now contended, but quite literally the Lord’s work: “Suspicions come from Heaven, and the use of detective intelligence was coextensive with the origins of mankind.” Whitley’s proof came from the original police report—the Book of Genesis. “The first sin committed by men was detected by the Almighty,” he wrote.
He walked into his garden one evening to take an airing. As He strolled about admiring the beautiful flowers and delicious fruits He had created for the good of man, He, as if by chance, spied Adam and Eve skulking about in the sombre shadows of the trees, amo
ng the shrubbery. He called them. As they came forth and drew near to him, He saw they had donned fig-leaf aprons and suspected and questioned them. The young couple cast their eyes on the ground as He accused them of partaking of the fruit which had been forbidden them. The fig-leaf aprons somehow bespoke craft and it is assumed that they were taken as an indication of guilt. It seems that Adam at first tried to defend himself by charging blame upon the woman; and the woman in her turn declared that she had been beguiled by the snake. It seems, however, that the Lord did not accept their excuses, as He inflicted punishment on all who had assisted in committing the offense.59
In It focused on Whitley’s battles against counterfeiting, and told the tale of the dirty trick he played on James Ivins (albeit with the names of Ivins and the Williamses omitted), but mostly avoided two other great dramas of his career: the covert campaign against the Ku Klux Klan and the safe burglary affair. Whitley’s slighting of the latter episode, his disgrace and his downfall, was understandable. The less said about such things, the better for Whitley. Otherwise, a key theme of his memoir—that the most dangerous “rogues” were not common criminals, but “high-toned” ones like Joshua D. Miner, who cloaked their wrongdoing in the raiment of respectability, or escaped punishment “through technicalities”—could too easily apply to him.60
As for his campaign against the Klan, that was a genuine accomplishment, but no longer a politically popular one. By 1894, Blue and Gray were busily reconciling on the basis, partly, of their shared contempt for black people’s capacity to participate in self-government. As a hotelier, Whitley had to do business with men from all sections of the country as they passed through his town. The less In It said about his part in the covert federal crackdown on Klan terrorism, the better that would be for him, too. His book briefly decried the Klan—“infamous,” he called it—and then moved on, while expressing the view, widely held among whites, that blacks were destined by racial inferiority to second-class status.61