by Jay Feldman
In the first three weeks of February 1931, agents came up with only 225 deportable aliens, 64 of whom agreed to “voluntary departure” to Mexico, thereby avoiding arrest and deportation and giving them the option of reentering the country legally at a later date. The rest, who were held for formal hearings, included Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans, but according to the Immigration Bureau supervisor William F. Watkins, who had been brought in to manage the Los Angeles operation, it was “the Mexican element that predominates.”38
Despite the Mexican government’s protests, the raids continued. The most flagrant one took place on the afternoon of February 26, when a force of about thirty Immigration Bureau agents and Los Angeles police officers surrounded the city plaza park and sealed it off for an hour while they questioned about four hundred individuals.39 According to eyewitnesses, a number of Mexicans were struck by police in the course of the proceedings. The raid, which was not covered by the English-language newspapers, netted eleven Mexicans, five Chinese, and one Japanese. One of the arrested Mexicans produced his passport, showing that he had entered the country legally, but he was taken into custody nonetheless. Nine of the eleven apprehended Mexicans were later released.
By the third week of March, 230 people had been deported, 110 of whom were Mexicans. Another 159 captured Mexicans had departed voluntarily, making Mexicans 69 percent of those expelled in the Los Angeles crusade to rid Southern California of illegal aliens.
Law-enforcement officials had by now rounded up and interrogated between 3,000 and 4,000 individuals in order to get rid of 389 illegals. But the number of deportations was not the point. The real purpose behind the deportation drive was to instill fear in the ethnic Mexican population, which in turn would hopefully cause many to return to Mexico. On that level, the crusade was a ringing success. As Visel wrote to Labor Secretary Doak, “The exodus of aliens deportable and otherwise who have been scared out of the community has undoubtedly left many jobs which have been taken up by other persons (not deportable) and citizens of the United States and our municipality. The exodus continues. We are very much impressed by the methods used and the constructive results steadily being accomplished.”40
Not everyone was so favorably impressed. Between March 13 and 25, the Los Angeles Record ran a hard-hitting series that underscored the abridgment of aliens’ civil liberties. Headlines in the series cited “Inquisition Methods,” “Terror Reign,” and “Deportation Mania.” The Nation called it “an outrage that the Immigration Bureau officials should be investigators, prosecutors, judges, and a final court of appeals in deportation cases, and take their orders from men of the type of William N. Doak.”41 And James H. Batten, the executive director of the Inter-America Foundation, made headlines when he spoke out against the deportation campaign, saying, “We are suffering from an epidemic of hysteria against aliens which finds expression in rigid enforcement of the law governing deportations … The present deportation activities … are actually scaring bona fide resident Mexicans out of the country.”42
Alarmed at the wholesale abrogation of civil liberties, the constitutional rights committee of the Los Angeles Bar Association appointed a subcommittee to study the deportation of aliens in the area. The subcommittee’s report discovered blatant civil liberties violations that were virtually identical to those described in the Wickersham Commission’s report.
The criticism had little, if any, effect. By the time the funding for Visel’s office expired on March 31, the deportation crusade in Los Angeles had triggered the desired evacuation of Mexicans, and the low-yield deportation drive had merged with the far more effective “voluntary” departure program—now euphemistically called “repatriation”—to produce a mass evacuation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from Southern California.
If the claim behind the deportation campaign was to free up jobs for American citizens, the stated rationale for the repatriation crusade was to reduce the welfare rolls, which, in fact, were populated in the greatest part not by illegals—who tended to avoid applying for public assistance for fear of being detected§—but by lawful residents and U.S. citizens. Moreover, there was no pretense here of claiming that the repatriation effort was not directed “against any one race.” This measure was clearly aimed at Mexicans.
The journalist and author Carey McWilliams was at Central Station when the first trainload of 350 “repatriates” left Los Angeles for El Paso on March 23. “The loading process began at six o’clock in the morning,” wrote McWilliams. “Repatriados arrived by the truckload—men, women, and children—with dogs, cats, and goats; half-open suitcases, rolls of bedding, and lunchbaskets.”43 Another observer noted, “The majority of the men were quiet and pensive. Most of the women and children were crying.”44
Many of the émigrés had been in the United States for well over a decade—having entered at a time when the law did not provide any penalty for illegal entry—and were hardly eager to return to Mexico. Moreover, their U.S.-born children were fully Americanized, English-speaking U.S. citizens. In some instances, families were torn apart when the husband left but the wife stayed behind in order to avoid displacing the children, who had no experience of Mexico and no desire to live there.
In the middle of April, The New York Times reported that since the beginning of the year, thirty-five thousand Mexicans had left Southern California and returned to Mexico.45 Anti-Mexican sentiment now spread all across California, and a new state law made it virtually impossible for a contractor to use Mexican workers on a public job.
In Texas, meanwhile, the continued deportations drove the repatriation campaign. The Hidalgo County Independent reported, “Arrests by agents have terrified the Mexicans, acting in accord with orders issued from Washington to deport every deportable alien. It is obvious only a small fraction of the number returning to Mexico would be deportable, but ignorance of the law and fear of arrest has added to the movement across the border.”46
By this time, the deportation/repatriation campaign had spread across the country. The Immigration Bureau pressed the deportation operation, while local governments, welfare bureaus, and private charitable agencies encouraged local Mexican and Mexican-American residents to return to Mexico voluntarily. Free railway transportation was offered as an incentive, which, combined with the Mexican government’s tender of land, persuaded scores of thousands to undertake the move. Coercion and deception were used as well, as the Inter-American Foundation’s James Batten cited cases of welfare workers persuading Mexicans to repatriate voluntarily, under the false assurance that they could return to the United States at will. Others were told that if they refused the offer of free transportation, they would be cut off from further welfare assistance and their cases closed with the notation “Failed to cooperate.”47 McWilliams cited instances of invalids being removed from Los Angeles County Hospital and “carted” across the border.48
All across the United States, Mexican immigrants pulled up stakes and streamed south. Mexicans from Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Gary, Kansas City, New Orleans, New York City, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Terre Haute, and other locations boarded trains and ships and made the journey. Untold thousands more fled in automobiles and trucks without informing any authorities of their leaving. By the beginning of December, The New York Times reported that “112,407 Mexican repatriates have returned [to Mexico] this year, most of them from the United States,” and predicted that the total for the year could exceed 150,000.49
Although 1931 was the peak of the deportation/repatriation exodus, it was not the end. According to The New York Times, by the summer of 1932, a quarter of a million Mexicans had been repatriated from the United States.50 While the intensity of the movement ebbed after Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, the migration back to Mexico continued for the rest of the Depression decade, as the lack of employment opportunities and the fear created by the deportation drive combined to send Mexicans and Mexican-Americans across th
e border in droves. At least 250,000 of them were from Texas.
Estimates of the total who returned between 1929 and 1939 vary.51 The two most authoritative studies of the subject offer quite different numbers. In Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression, Abraham Hoffman estimates 500,000, while in Decade of Betrayal, Francisco Balderrama doubles the figure to 1 million.52 Whichever number is closer to accurate, either one is staggering.
In 1931, Jane Perry Clark summed up the tendency to persecute minorities during crises. “In time of stress,” she wrote, “as in the deportation raids of 1920, and again in the economic depression of 1930 with its renewed deportation raids and activity, anti-alien sentiment so manifests itself that fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution may be completely disregarded.”53
The book was barely closed on the Great Depression, with its deportations and repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, when the next crisis arrived, unleashing another round of scapegoating, surveillance, and the curtailment of civil liberties.
*Legislators were not the only victims of unwarranted spying. In two other notable examples, the BI continued its surveillance of the former assistant secretary of labor Louis Post after he left office and conducted extensive investigations of the twelve lawyers who authored the National Popular Government League’s 1920 report on the Justice Department’s illegal practices; the BI even went so far as to become involved in the unsuccessful attempt to have one of the attorneys, Zechariah Chafee, dismissed from his teaching post at Harvard (see David Williams, “The Bureau of Investigation and Its Critics, 1919–1921,” Journal of American History, Dec. 1981, pp. 570–74).
†The restrictionists were opposed by the powerful southwestern agricultural interests, which maintained that a quota on Mexican immigrants would cripple not only their industry but the economy of the entire Southwest. Any concerns over the social costs of Mexican immigration, they insisted, were far outweighed by economic factors.
‡This attitude was institutionalized. During the 1930 census, for example, census takers were instructed that “all persons born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico, who are not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese, should be returned as Mexicans” (Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Special Report on Foreign-Born White Families by Country of Birth of Head, p. 27).
§A Border Patrol inspector was quoted as saying, “It has been found from experience, an alien who is unlawfully in the United States does not apply for relief unless he finds it absolutely necessary, through fear that he will be found and deported” (See Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans, p. 122).
CHAPTER 9
The Utmost Degree of Secrecy
Following the reorganization and reprioritization of the Bureau of Investigation as mandated by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone in 1924, the agency was supposedly converted from a witch-hunting unit into a crime-fighting corps. Theoretically, the BI would no longer be keeping tabs on people for political reasons. The era of covert spying on and overt hounding of “subversives,” typified by the former BI chief Burns’s vow to “drive every radical out of the country and bring the parlor Bolsheviks to their senses,” was purportedly over.1
Certainly, the greatest part of what the American Civil Liberties Union had called “The Nation-Wide Spy System Centering in the Department of Justice” was dismantled.2 But it was not completely eliminated. The ACLU—despite its enthusiastic public endorsement of Hoover and the “new” bureau—continued to be the object of covert BI attention. “They never stopped watching us,” said the ACLU founder, Roger Baldwin, decades later, when files released under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1970s revealed the BI’s ongoing surveillance of the ACLU.3
Nor was the ACLU the only group that the BI kept tabs on. Bureau agents continued to provide Hoover with reports about organizations like the Communist Party, as well as with information about hundreds of suspected individual “subversives,” indiscriminately lumping those who may have posed some actual threat with those who simply ran afoul of Hoover’s notions of what constituted loyalty.
Until Stone’s 1924 edict, Hoover had carried on a secret exchange of information with the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, supplying MID with reports and carrying out investigations when asked, and receiving intelligence gained from foreign sources in return. While Hoover ended this practice after Stone’s decree, he continued to pass along any information regarding specific violations of federal law that he thought might interest military intelligence. In 1929, he also established a working agreement with the retired Army major general Ralph Van Deman, who is often called the father of U.S. military intelligence.4 After retiring from the Army, Van Deman maintained a private intelligence network with which the BI exchanged confidential information.
Moreover, although the Bureau of Investigation had been largely reined in and its main focus and activity were now fighting organized crime, it still carried out investigations of radicals where there appeared to be a violation of federal laws, or when such investigations were specifically requested by the State Department. The BI also collected “intelligence-type information” when it was “volunteered by some outside force.” Thus, the bureau emerged from its pre-1924 rogue status to become “the recognized instrument of the Federal Government for the investigation” of radical activities.5
Publicly, at least, Hoover did refuse a number of requests during this period for BI involvement in investigations of radicals, citing the lack of any violation of federal law on the part of such individuals and groups. For example, when the New York congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., who, as chair of a House committee investigating Communist and radical activities in December 1931, introduced legislation that would empower the BI to “investigate the revolutionary propaganda of communists in the United States, and of all entities, groups or individuals who teach or advocate the overthrow by force and violence the republican form of government,” Hoover opposed the bill, arguing that “it would be better to make it a crime to participate in such activities.”6
Hoover’s reluctance to let the bureau be used for such purposes appears to have been based as much on a fear of criticism as on any principled concern for preserving civil liberties. Recalling, no doubt, the censure leveled at the Justice Department and the BI after the red scare, he told Attorney General William D. Mitchell that if the BI were to take up such actions, “the Department and the Bureau would undoubtedly be subject to charges in the matter of alleged secret and undesirable methods in connection with investigative activities, as well as to allegations involving charges of the use of ‘Agents Provocateur’ [sic].”7
Even as Hoover kept the bureau from becoming too deeply involved in investigations of radicals between 1924 and 1934, other developments during these years combined to increase the BI’s scope and power: it became the clearinghouse for fingerprints and other identification records; an organized program to train new agents was developed; and a new, state-of-the-art crime laboratory was created. As part of his continuing professionalization of the agency, Hoover instituted uniform reporting rules for agents in the bureau’s field offices, which were located in strategic cities around the country. Also, in the spring of 1934, a spate of new federal crime bills bestowed greater responsibilities on the bureau. As a 1976 Senate committee report concluded, although these factors did not confer any explicit power to carry out intelligence investigations, they unquestionably created “an organization with all the assets, composition, and capabilities for conducting such investigations if so directed.”8*
With this structure in place, it was inevitable that the bureau would be so directed. In the second year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, the directive arrived.
Just as the Russian Revolution had raised alarms in the United States in 1917, the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe now caused similar concerns. As Mussolini and Hitler solidified their power, Fascist and Nazi groups began springing up in this country. In January 1
934, Secretary of War George H. Dern had informed Attorney General Homer Cummings of the “definite indication” that foreign espionage was afoot in the United States, and of the probability that there would be an eventual attempt to undermine U.S. military capability.9 Dern recommended establishing a civilian counterespionage service to collect information about potential espionage or sabotage activities, a throwback to the American Protective League and the other “patriotic” organizations that had flourished during World War I.
On May 8, FDR assembled a group at the White House to discuss the budding Nazi movement in the United States. Of particular concern to him was Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund, an organization that enjoyed the backing of several powerful businessmen, including Henry Ford. The White House conference was attended by Attorney General Cummings, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Secret Service chief W. H. Moran, and the BI director, J. Edgar Hoover. According to Hoover’s memo on the meeting, the president asked the various agencies to cooperate in a very thorough investigation of the Bund and other domestic Nazi groups, particularly to determine whether the German embassy and consulates might be connected to the movement.
Hoover immediately sent confidential instructions to the BI field offices, directing them to begin such an investigation and informing them that the inquiry was for the purpose of providing the president with information, rather than for purposes of prosecution. As such, it was a distinct break with Stone’s policy stating, “The activities of the Bureau are to be limited strictly to violations of law.”10
While FDR’s directive to the Bureau of Investigation constituted a clear-cut departure from Stone’s guidelines, the parameters of the investigation ordered by the president were intended to be limited to the connection of German diplomats in this country to the domestic Nazi movement, particularly vis-à-vis the German-American Bund. Roosevelt requisitioned “an intelligence investigation within specified guidelines,” but Hoover lost no time in extending the study into a more “sweeping and general assignment … which by necessity, involved aliens and United States citizens.”11