Just as in the Philippines, surveillance was about control. When a Howard University dean wrote a pamphlet against lynching, Van Deman sent an agent to have a stern talk with him. Black newspapers were monitored closely—and threatened. The most influential, the Chicago Defender, was visited by one of his agents, who reported that the editor had “been told that he would be held strictly responsible and accountable for any article appearing in his paper in the future that would give rise to any apprehension. . . . I have . . . informed him that the eye of the government is centered upon his paper.” Van Deman urged the YMCA to keep the NAACP’s The Crisis out of its reading rooms, where it might be seen by black soldiers.
One object of his intelligence unit’s suspicions in 1917 was the Reverend A.D. Williams, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. A forceful organizer, Williams helped put together an Equal Rights League to protest discrimination in voting, and he helped set up a branch of the NAACP that would register black voters. “It behooves us,” said one telegram, “to find out all we possibly can about this colored preacher.” A report in Williams’s file termed him a “radical Negro agitator” because of his campaign to create a black high school. A grandson of “this colored preacher” would eventually become a pastor of the same church and in turn the subject of a later generation of government surveillance: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
• • •
Labor organizers were another group Van Deman went after. As with anti-lynching campaigners, he was convinced that such homegrown organizations as the Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies”—founded in Chicago well before the war—must be connected to the enemy. He asked for a federal investigation of deposits made in Wobbly bank accounts in Arizona and referred to “the many rumors that the recent I.W.W. activities are supported by funds from German sources.”
Also under suspicion was the Conference of Christian Pacifists in California, a group he judged “watery and neutral as far as its war loyalty is concerned.” In a letter to the Secretary of War’s office, he boasted of his threats against the organization: “ample warning . . . has been given to all concerned in these activities. Public opinion finally was aroused at various points on the Pacific Coast regarding their pernicious public gatherings.” To the warden of the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where the anarchist Emma Goldman was locked up, Van Deman sent word that Goldman was still wielding influence from behind bars and suggested “that it might be well to place greater restrictions upon her.”
Always alert to possible rivals, Van Deman artfully blocked an attempt by the Army’s Signal Corps to start its own domestic counterespionage operation. And, however unreliable it was, the stock of intelligence gathered by his huge staff allowed him to deal with officials who far outranked a mere colonel. He corresponded, for example, with former President Theodore Roosevelt and with the governor of Montana, whom he warned about a possible mining strike. At military intelligence headquarters, cabinet members and newspaper correspondents were regular guests at a weekly luncheon he hosted, known as the General Hindquarters.
But then, testifying before the Senate Military Affairs Committee in April 1918, he fatally overreached himself. The country needed military tribunals to take “quick and summary action” against Americans who opposed the war, he told the senators, because the existing courts were “tied up with forms and red tape and law.” Note the last word.
Despite the administration’s draconian crackdown on anti-war dissent, President Wilson immediately declared himself “wholly and unalterably opposed” to such tribunals. By this point, senior military and Justice Department officials were feeling their power threatened by Van Deman’s burgeoning surveillance empire and saw to it that he was dispatched, with only the vaguest of assignments, to Europe.
For a skilled navigator of the military hierarchy, however, this merely offered new opportunities, particularly since the American commander at the front, General John J. Pershing, was an Army War College classmate. When the fighting ended, Van Deman managed to get himself placed in charge of all security arrangements for the months-long peace conference at Versailles, with a staff of fifty-six.
Paris in the spring of 1919 was a social climber’s dream: There was a whirl of military band concerts and embassy dinners and balls, as Allied diplomats and generals exultantly redrew the maps of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East with little thought of where the smoldering resentment of a defeated Germany might lead. Van Deman’s letters home to his wife, Irene, known as Cherry, are a curious mixture of passion (“Cherry dearest . . . to think of holding you tight in my arms again!”), dire political warnings (“There is a widespread attempt to start a world revolution along Bolshevic [sic] lines”), and bureaucratic triumphs (“Gen. Pershing had personally told the Adjutant General . . . to issue an order saying definitely that I was to perform my duties in connection with the Peace Commission in addition to my other duties and that I was not to be detached from G-2, G.H.Q.A.E.F.”).
After Versailles, Van Deman resumed his rise in the Army, although jealous rivals kept him away from anything to do with intelligence. When he retired in 1929, it was as a major general.
• • •
With its balmy climate and dense array of Army, Navy, and Marine bases, San Diego had long been a favorite spot for those leaving the armed forces, and that was where the Van Demans settled. His friends included many other retired military men, and he found this conservative part of the country congenial. Even local labor leaders had a right-wing bent, and San Diego—with only a small Latino population at that point—was dominated by a Protestant, Anglo oligarchy, a far cry from the East Coast cities filled with recent immigrants and subversive ideas.
Within a few years of moving to San Diego, Van Deman embarked on yet a new phase of his passion for surveillance. The operation to which he would devote the remaining two decades of his life did not even have a name. With volunteer help from his wife and a retired officer friend, plus two clerks paid for by the Army, he quietly created a private intelligence bureau. Its records came to almost fill an apartment adjoining his own. “I’m sure I am not exaggerating,” he told his Harvard classmates in a volume of autobiographical reports, “when I say that since 1932 I have devoted at least twelve hours a day to this work.” His efforts, he hinted, were aided by funds contributed by wealthy sympathizers. As in the Philippines thirty years earlier, to record details about people he was watching, Van Deman used file cards. Eventually 85,000 of the cards would index and summarize the contents of a dozen filing cabinets containing more than ninety linear feet of agents’ reports, photographs, letters, and other documents. “It was a rare Red,” the San Diego Union would write years later, “whose appearance in this area was not noticed.”
“Essentially Van Deman was a vigilante,” says Athan Theoharis, a professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and the author of a number of books about the FBI and surveillance. “A self-appointed one. Talk about a true believer! This was his life’s work. He saw himself as a savior of the nation. He had this mission, which was amazing in terms of the amount of information he collected and turned over to people who could act on it.”
Among those who did were district attorneys eager to prosecute subversives and employers’ groups who wanted to know who was trying to organize their workers. Always an adroit networker, Van Deman traded information with them as well as with police and sheriffs’ departments and old friends in military intelligence who were spying on civilians. One Army unit in San Francisco made copies of so much material for him that it made a rubber stamp, “VanD.” Writing to “My dear General,” an official in the San Diego post office happily supplied the return addresses of packages and letters sent to an unnamed “person in regard to whom we have had recent conversation.”
For hunters of subversives, the 1930s were busy years. The devastating toll of the Great Depression spurred the growth of radical and socialist groups. Police red squads cracked heads at picket lines, while org
anizations from the American Legion to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce set up departments to hunt communists. Nowhere were tensions higher than in California, where existing hunger and joblessness were exacerbated by desperate migrants fleeing into the state from the Dust Bowl.
Van Deman’s undercover agents monitored the Communist Party so thoroughly that one account reports on a meeting that drew only four people. Nonetheless, the general accumulated reports on everything from a Young Marxian Pioneer Troop to “Airplane Pilots with Red Tendencies.” For him, surveillance was a labor of love—or, as he would say, patriotism—not profit. He apparently charged no one for the information he shared, even though detective agencies were making the same kind of espionage a multimillion-dollar business.
Communists were indeed working with, among others, the state’s miserably paid farmworkers, many of them Mexican or Mexican-American. Growers’ organizations like the Associated Farmers of California became grateful consumers of Van Deman’s information. From friends in Navy intelligence in 1933, the general heard that a communist named James Dixon would be organizing a strike of celery pickers near San Diego, word he relayed to others in his network. He exchanged information about a lettuce harvesters’ strike with the district attorney of Imperial County, a place where labor protestors were repeatedly beaten up by vigilantes deputized by local sheriffs and police. When San Francisco saw a massive waterfront strike in 1934, Van Deman obtained a list of suspected agitators and was soon discussing the situation with the city’s Industrial Association.
Although much in his files came from police departments or other agencies, thousands of pages are from his own undercover operatives. Some of the correspondence is written in invisible ink, with agents identified only by letters and numbers. B-11, for example, was a particularly active fellow who posed as a communist recruiting seamen and then farmworkers and who reported on a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union—a frequent target of the general’s scrutiny. Another agent posed as a delegate to a convention of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. The general’s crew was not above the occasional burglary: Agent C-14 provided a list of distributors and subscribers of the communist newspaper People’s World—“found in trunk of Celia Shermis’ car.”
By now, Van Deman had also grown obsessed with the film industry. A report on the movie star James Cagney notes darkly that “he wrote a piece for the Screen Actors Guild, which . . . is the employes [sic] rebellion against the producers.” In Here Comes the Navy, Cagney’s character “is antagonistic to and creates hatred for his superior officers.” Even more sinister, Cagney had reportedly contributed to a relief fund for striking cotton pickers.
Schools and colleges were another arena for vigilance. An ally on the San Diego Board of Education used the Van Deman files to vet anyone who applied to host an event on school property. A long list of “Radical Professors and Teachers” ranged from Columbia University to Milwaukee State Teachers College. A list of suspicious professors at UCLA and the University of Southern California noted that one was “an admirer of [the socialist novelist] Upton Sinclair” and another was “questionable . . . is married to a Polish Jewess.”
Jews, indeed, were often among Van Deman’s targets. In a letter to an Army colleague, he declared himself “convinced that there may be more than a modicum of truth” in the connection between “Bolshevism and Semitism.” The general trafficked in conspiracies, and one document in his files reports on a veritable trifecta of villains by citing a “Yiddist [sic] pamphlet” that “urges the Masonic Fraternity to come to the support of the Soviet Union.” Duly filed as well is a chart someone sent in claiming that both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had Jewish ancestry.
Among other sources feeding Van Deman’s anti-Semitism was agent B-31, one of the few operatives whose name we know; historian McCoy has identified her as a California advice and gossip columnist, Mary Oyama Mittwer. During a 1946 trip to the East Coast, she reported that “organized Jewry is out to control organized labor.” Furthermore, “the Jewish people are slowly but surely securing a stranglehold on the poultry and egg business.” And worse lay ahead: Jewish refugees “are coming in here by the shiploads, they have Hotels in NY City where they are re-outfitted, their jewelry is turned into cash; and then . . . homes are purchased for them.” A shadowy plot was behind it all: “Felix Frankfurter and possibly Henry Morgenthau manage to pull a lot of strings in the background. . . . The motion picture and stage industry . . . is practically controlled by the Jewish race.”
The general was deeply suspicious of President Roosevelt and the people around him. One report notes that Frances Perkins—longtime secretary of labor and the first woman in an American cabinet—“admitted her married name is Mrs. Paul Wilson.” A follow-up investigation Van Deman ordered to this apparently incriminating piece of information produced a copy of a 1910 Massachusetts marriage certificate showing a Paul Wilson marrying someone else—possible evidence of further skullduggery. (The general had both the date and place wrong: Perkins had quite publicly married another Paul Wilson in New York in 1913.)
During these California years, Van Deman found what every zealot yearns for: a disciple. This was a younger man named Richard Ellis Combs. For the nearly two decades that their professional lives overlapped, Combs considered the general his mentor, living for a time with him and his wife in San Diego. “Van Deman taught me that to master the field of subversion,” he said years later in a rare interview, “you must read with notebook in hand, summarize everything, then type your own file card. . . . You must do this yourself. You can’t divide the job and let a secretary help. You do it and it becomes your knowledge, your resource. After a while, you will command everything in the field.”
In 1941, the tall, red-haired Combs began an influential thirty-year tenure as chief counsel and lead investigator for the California Un-American Activities Committee, or CUAC. This was the most powerful and choleric of the state legislative groups that echoed witch-hunters at the national level like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and later Senator Joseph McCarthy. Over the years, bolstered by intelligence passed on by Van Deman, CUAC held hearings, fiercely grilled witnesses, and built up its own gargantuan files, which eventually came to cover 125,000 individuals and organizations. Even public school sex education programs in the town of Chico came under the committee’s scrutiny as possibly communist-inspired.
We don’t know everything Van Deman and Combs did together, because the general was always discreet. “There are a lot of things that I want to talk over with you when you come down,” he once wrote to Combs, “which are just as well not put on paper.” But we do know that the two strategized how to use the mysterious death of a UCLA student after attending a political meeting in 1948 to fan the flames of anticommunism. Their efforts helped feed a frenzy that soon resulted, among other things, in the University of California requiring all employees to sign a loyalty oath. The subsequent firings of those who refused to sign sent a chill through the state’s entire educational system.
• • •
In his zeal for surveillance, his sweeping hostility to African American activism, and his approval of black-bag jobs by his agents, Van Deman foreshadowed no one so much as a figure thirty years his junior, J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, the two men knew each other. Van Deman always had an eye for those on the rise, and in 1922 he had pulled strings to get an Army Reserve commission for Hoover, then a 27-year-old Justice Department official. In the next decade, the general resumed contact with Hoover. His letters to the FBI chief were almost fawning; in 1938, he apologized for having made “an attempt to break in on the privacy of a very busy man trying to get a little well earned rest.” Van Deman’s courting of Hoover was successful, however, because he was included in a crucial meeting Hoover hosted in the run-up to American participation in the Second World War. On May 31, 1940, Hoover assembled high officials from the Army, Navy and State Department in his office to divide up intelligence-gathering
territory. “This was like the Pope dividing the unexplored world [between Spain and Portugal] in 1493,” McCoy says. “The FBI got counter-intelligence at home—and operations in Latin America. Military intelligence, out of which the OSS and then the CIA evolved, got the rest of the world.”
Van Deman’s presence at the meeting is testimony to his ability to ingratiate himself with the powerful, for at this point he had been retired from the military for eleven years and had no government job. Hoover soon asked a San Diego FBI agent to “devote himself exclusively to the task of reviewing General Van Deman’s files and extracting all information of value to the Bureau.”
The FBI came to rely on Van Deman’s archive so much that the general developed a library card system showing when the bureau had borrowed and returned a file. The FBI’s San Diego office informed Hoover that agents were in touch with the general “almost daily.” After he turned eighty in 1945, Van Deman began suffering various illnesses and an FBI man in San Diego kept Hoover apprised, sometimes giving the address of a hospital so that “the Director” could send a get-well-soon letter or telegram.
As Van Deman aged, he fretted about the fate of his treasured files. The FBI, however, began to develop a few doubts about the reliability of his data, and it also discovered a major bureaucratic obstacle to merging his files with its own: The general’s 85,000 file cards were on four-by-six-inch cards, while the FBI used three-by-five-inch cards. Nonetheless, a few months before Van Deman died at the age of 86 in 1952, the FBI chief in San Diego recommended to Hoover that the bureau take custody of the files when the time came, because “if the General were to become aware of the fact that neither the Army nor the Bureau had any interest . . . this thought would most certainly leave him heart-broken, disillusioned and possibly hasten his death.”
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 6