by Tim Weiner
Born in revolution and dedicated to liberty, America had been ripped asunder by civil war, reunited, and reshaped by great migrations of foreigners seeking freedom. At the turn of the twentieth century, the last wild and ungoverned western territories were on the verge of becoming states. The frontiers of exploration in the mountains and deserts were closing. Roughly 76 million people lived in the United States, more than half of them in small towns and villages. As America fought to civilize its frontiers, great swaths of the land remained lawless. U.S. marshals acted as sheriffs and formed posses; they faced death at the hands of desperadoes.
In American cities, the dynamos of money and power, invention and information, the poorer quarters teemed with immigrants seeking the promise of freedom and fortune in the New World. By 1900, American industry and its laborers had become the biggest creators of capital on earth, producing nearly one-quarter of the globe’s manufacturing output. As America became a giant, the influence of corporate wealth grew immense; captains of industry sought to command and control the millions of workers whose labor had made them rich. As America became a global force, each new wave of immigration from the Old World fueled the fear of foreign subversion. Revolutionaries were importing dangerous ideas from Germany and Italy and Russia. Their pamphlets and protests raged against the American political and economic order. The mines and factories and sweatshops of America were filled with people who had once lived under kings and czars. They dreamed of a better world. The most radical imagined the death of the old order and the rise of a political utopia where the wretched of the earth would rule.
“The time of the great social revolutions has arrived,” Roosevelt had written in 1895, the year he became the police commissioner of New York City, and the year J. Edgar Hoover was born. “We are all peering into the future to try to forecast the action of the great dumb forces set in operation by the stupendous industrial revolution which has taken place during the present century. We do not know what to make of the vast displacement of population, the expansion of the towns, the unrest and discontent of the masses.”
Anarchy was among the great dumb forces loosed upon the world. The anarchists aimed to destroy power itself; to pull down the pillars of western civilization. They had assassinated the president of France in 1894, the prime minister of Spain in 1897, the empress of Austria in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900—and the president of the United States, William McKinley, in 1901. McKinley’s murder made Theodore Roosevelt president at the age of forty-two, the youngest in American history.
In his first major address to Congress, in December 1901, Roosevelt declared that “anarchy is a crime against the whole human race.” He called for new laws to bar revolutionaries and subversives from living in the United States.
“THESE PEOPLE SHOULD ALL BE MARKED”
President Roosevelt had tasted imperial power and liked it. He acted alone when he carved a great canal out of the Panama jungle; he alone chose to send the American navy on a global show of force. He knew that foreigners might fight back when America projected its power across the world. But in the first years of his presidency Roosevelt had no real power to fight crimes against the United States. His Justice Department was only beginning to learn to uphold the rule of law.
Created in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War, the Justice Department and its chief, the attorney general, were charged with imposing order on a nation torn apart. The attorney general and his lawyers had set up shop a block from the White House, on three upper floors of the Freedman’s Savings Bank—a foul place, stinking from the sewers running beneath it—and there they remained for the rest of the nineteenth century. Congress gave them the authority to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States, along with the grand sum of $50,000 a year for that high purpose, but it failed to create a federal code of law regulating how justice was to be served.
Four nineteenth-century presidents had turned to the nation’s most powerful private police force, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as an instrument of law enforcement, a source of secret intelligence, and a tool for political combat. “I have always been averse to appointing and paying detectives,” Attorney General Benjamin Brewster wrote in 1884. But he did it nonetheless. The agency’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, had run espionage missions during the Civil War and helped created the Secret Service for President Abraham Lincoln. Its detectives served railroad and steel barons by spying, breaking strikes, and cracking skulls to defeat labor organizers; they paid secret informants whose identities were protected with code names. They did not shrink from breaking the law to uphold the law, or using violence in the name of order. In 1892, Congress banned the government from hiring the firm after a confrontation at the Carnegie Steel Company in Homestead, Pennsylvania, left three Pinkerton men and five workers dead. The White House was now bereft of the skills, cunning, and force of the private eyes.
After the McKinley assassination, a Pinkerton man proposed creating a new government agency dedicated to eradicating America’s radicals. “These people should all be marked and kept under constant surveillance,” Robert A. Pinkerton wrote. In 1903, under new laws banning anarchists from living in the United States, the Justice and Labor departments began keeping secret files on foreign radicals.
The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers.
In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s boss at the FBI.
The rape of virgin land by swindlers and speculators continued unabated. The president was enraged.
“ROOSEVELT, in his characteristic dynamic fashion, asserted that the plunderers of the public domain would be prosecuted and brought to justice,” according to a 1943 memo to Hoover from FBI special agent Louis Findlay, who had joined the Bureau in 1911. The memo is a unique record of the birth of the FBI, whose origins, with reason, were obscured by its founders.
“ROOSEVELT called Attorney General CHARLES J. BONAPARTE to the White House and told him that he desired that the land frauds be prosecuted vigorously, and directed that he obtain the necessary investigative personnel.” Bonaparte was a rare American blueblood—the grandnephew of Emperor Napoleon I of France and the grandson of the king of Westphalia. He had been a close friend and adviser to Roosevelt for years. Both men were aristocrats as well as progressives, reformers, and moralists; both supported the judicious use of force in the name of the law. Roosevelt favored giving strikers a taste of the nightstick and the blackjack; Bonaparte believed that violence by vigilantes could serve to vindicate the social order.
“BONAPARTE applied to the United States Secret Service for trained personnel to make the proper and necessary investigation, and was assigned quite a force of men” to root out the rampant land frauds, Findlay recounted. The president was unsatisfied. “He told Mr. BONAPARTE in most emphatic language characteristic of President ROOSEVELT that the report was a whitewash. He wanted the facts, all the facts, and the true fa
cts, and if there was any whitewashing done he would do it himself,” the record states.
“President ROOSEVELT directed BONAPARTE to create an investigative service within the Department of Justice subject to no other department or bureau, which would report to no one except the Attorney General.” The president’s order “resulted in the formation of the Bureau of Investigation.”
By law, Bonaparte had to ask the House and the Senate to create this new bureau. “The Department of Justice has no executive force, and, more particularly, no permanent detective force under its immediate control,” Bonaparte wrote to Congress; it was thus “assuredly not fully equipped for its work.” He formally sought the money and authority to create “a small, carefully selected, and experienced force.”
On May 27, 1908, the House emphatically said no. It feared the president intended to create an American secret police. The fear was well-founded. Presidents had used private detectives as political spies in the past.
“American ideas of government” prohibited “spying on men and prying into what would ordinarily be considered their private affairs,” said Representative Joseph Swagar Sherley, a Kentucky Democrat. Representative Walter I. Smith, an Iowa Republican and later a federal appeals court judge, objected strongly to the creation of a “system of espionage” in America. Representative John J. Fitzgerald, a New York Democrat, warned against “a central police or spy system in the federal government.” Representative George E. Waldo, a New York Republican, said it would be “a great blow to freedom and to free institutions if there should arise in this country any such great central secret-service bureau as there is in Russia.”
Congress banned the Justice Department from spending a penny on Bonaparte’s proposal. The attorney general evaded the order. The maneuver might have broken the letter of the law. But it was true to the spirit of the president.
Theodore Roosevelt was “ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in the way,” as Mark Twain observed. The beginnings of the FBI rose from that bold defiance.
“THE ATTORNEY GENERAL KNOWS OR OUGHT TO KNOW”
Bonaparte waited until after Congress adjourned at the end of June. Then he dipped into the Justice Department’s expense fund to hire eight veteran Secret Service agents as permanent full-time investigators. On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte signed a formal order establishing a new investigative division with a thirty-four-man force of “special agents.” He would have to beg, borrow, or steal the money and the men the president wanted. He appointed one Stanley W. Finch—a clerk unqualified to practice law in Washington, D.C.—as the first chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
“The difficulties encountered in recruiting a trustworthy and efficient detective force are serious,” Bonaparte privately warned the president. The force had to have “some acquaintance with the haunts and habits of criminals, and its members are obliged to frequently associate with and use in their work persons of extremely low moral standards.” Detectives were “often tempted to manufacture the evidence desired,” Bonaparte said. The attorney general had to be the man “justly to be called to account” for their work.
Congress was notified about the creation of the Bureau of Investigation after the fact, in December 1908, in a few lines of Bonaparte’s annual report on the work of the Justice Department. “It became necessary for the department to organize a small force of special agents of its own,” he wrote. “Such action was involuntary on the part of this department.” This shaded the truth, since the president had ordered the Bureau’s creation.
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
ON AUGUST 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 on
e 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.”