J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  But the bombings remained unsolved.

  On August 12 Flynn sent a confidential letter to “all special agents and employees” (a euphemism for undercover operatives). No mention was made of the raids, but the more experienced agents guessed what was coming when Flynn ordered “a vigorous and comprehensive investigation” of all anarchists, Bolsheviks, and “kindred agitations.” Although stating the investigations should be directed particularly to aliens, for the purpose of developing deportation cases, Flynn added, “You will also make full investigation of similar activities of citizens of the United States with a view to securing evidence which may be of use in prosecutions under the present existing state or federal laws or under legislation of that nature which may hereinafter be enacted…” (italics added).

  In short, in addition to investigating aliens for possible deportation, for which neither the Justice Department nor the Bureau of Investigation had statute authority, American citizens should also be investigated, anticipating that perhaps someday Congress might pass laws covering their beliefs and associations too.

  As for the type of information to be sent to Washington, the agents and informers were to report everything: “all information of every nature whether hearsay or otherwise.”12

  Flynn did not explain how an agent decided who or what was “radical,” and to what degree; whether an accusation was factual or unwarranted or simply irrelevant; or what constituted a permissible, as contrasted to a dangerous, belief. All this would be determined in Washington, by Hoover’s GID.

  At the time of Flynn’s confidential letter, the American Communist party hadn’t been born. That event occurred two weeks later, during the Socialist party convention in Chicago, when left-wing members walked out and, already fighting among themselves, gave birth to feuding twins: the Communist Labor party of America and the Communist party of America.

  Palmer used this development to generate “tons” and “bales” of Red-scare propaganda. (That both parties were small, ineffectual, and to a large extent scorned by American labor, went unmentioned in the Justice Department press releases.)* Hoover used it to launch his career as an anti-Communist crusader.

  The foundations for that remarkable career were two legal briefs—one on the Communist party of America, the other on the Communist Labor party of America—which Hoover “wrote” that fall.

  As Don Whitehead tells it in his “authorized” history The FBI Story, it was while studying the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and others of their ilk that J. Edgar Hoover discovered “a conspiracy so vast, so daring, that few people at first could even grasp the sweep of the Communist vision. It was a conspiracy to destroy totally and completely the religions, governments, institutions and thinking of the Judaic-Christian world, the Buddhist world, the Moslemic world and all religious beliefs.” Communism was, Hoover finally decided, “the most evil, monstrous conspiracy against man since time began.”14

  Little of this passion comes across in the briefs themselves, which are as dry as they are repetitive, yet they were important for several reasons:

  First, they provided legal justification for the raids; as the New York Times later reported, the warrants of arrest were based on briefs “submitted by J.E. Hoover.”15

  Second, they were introduced as “evidence” in many of the deportation cases.

  And third, and perhaps most important, they established Hoover’s credentials as America’s first and foremost expert on communism.*

  There is a certain irony in this since—in common with most of his later speeches, articles, and books—Hoover neither researched nor wrote the briefs. The research was done by various BI and GID employees, including the Chicago Bureau chief, Jacob Spolansky, who attended and took notes on the founding conventions of the two Communist parties; while, according to Bureau old-timers, the briefs themselves were written for Hoover by George F. Ruch.

  The first of Hoover’s many ghostwriters, Ruch rates only a brief mention in Whitehead’s history, and that in a footnote, which identifies him as a former George Washington Law School classmate who joined the Bureau in 1918 and served as “Hoover’s principal assistant in this study.” Observing that “until his death in 1938 Ruch was one of Hoover’s closest friends,” Whitehead also states that he “left the Department in 1923 and became an official of the H.C. Frick Coal Company,” but neglects to mention that Ruch’s job with Frick was to head a labor espionage operation.16

  He was neither the first nor the last Bureau agent to find such employment in the private sector.

  Meanwhile, secret preparations for the raids continued.

  One of the largest stumbling blocks was removed when Palmer convinced Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson that action should be taken against alien radicals under the deportation provisions of the Immigration Act of 1918. Further, since Labor was tightly budgeted and understaffed, and Justice had extra funds and a large investigative force, Palmer’s offer of help was readily accepted.

  It was agreed that the Justice Department would conduct the investigations and supply the names; the Labor Department would issue arrest warrants; the Justice Department would make the arrests; and the Labor Department, assisted by the Justice Department, would handle the deportation cases.

  Since Palmer was the country’s chief law officer, Wilson did not think to ask him if all this was legal. Nor did Palmer enlighten him about the extent of his plans.

  Late that summer key BI agents and selected immigration officials were brought to Washington for secret briefings. They were told that there would be two mass roundups: the first (which became known as the practice raid) would have as its target the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers; the second, and larger, which occurred some weeks later, would concentrate on the two Communist parties.

  Although Hoover later denied participating in these planning sessions, evidence indicates that he was very much involved.

  In a court case following the raids, Federal Judge George W. Anderson questioned Immigration Commissioner Henry J. Skeffington of Boston regarding the arrest procedures.

  Q: “Were these arrests for what you call the ‘raids’ made by your forces, or by the Department of Justice?”

  A: “Department of Justice, your Honor…”

  Q: “Can you point out any rule or any statute under which Department of Justice agents have the power to arrest?”

  A: “No, I don’t know anything about that, Judge, except that we were working under rule. We didn’t have the men. They had to furnish them, and they did furnish them.”

  Q: “Did you have any instructions as to this procedure?”

  A: “We had an understanding.”

  Q: “Written instructions?”

  A: “No. We had a conference in Washington in the Department of Justice with Mr. Hoover and another gentleman of the Department of Justice.”

  Q: “Who is Mr. Hoover?”

  A: “Special Assistant to the Attorney General.”17

  One person who might have stopped the raids, the president of the United States, no longer had the power to do so.

  On September 25, while on a whistle-stop tour to muster support for the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson had collapsed during a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. Although the severity of his illness was kept from the public, for the rest of his term Wilson was president in name only. He did appear at one Cabinet meeting, where, in a weak, ghostlike voice he beseeched his attorney general, “Palmer—do not let this country see red!”18

  But by then it was too late.

  Both the target and the timing of the “practice raid” had been carefully chosen.

  The Federation of the Union of Russian Workers was made up, in its entirety, of Russian immigrants. Its platform, adopted in 1907, welcomed “atheists, communists and anarchists.” But after the 1917 revolution most of its radical founders had returned to Russia. According to Coben, “A few members continued to give radical lectures and distribute revolutionary propaganda; but by 1919 the organization
served chiefly as a social club for the lonely and an educational institution for the ambitious.”19

  The chosen date, November 7, 1919, was the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

  The raids occurred at 8:00 P.M., local time, in twelve different cities. In Manhattan, BI agents, assisted by the New York Bomb Squad, descended en masse on the Russian People’s House, at 133 East Fifteenth Street. The union occupied only one room in the building; except for a small cafeteria, the rest were classrooms, where subjects such as English and citizenship were taught. But all were raided.

  The people on the ground floor were the most fortunate. They weren’t thrown down the stairs.

  According to the New York Times, “A number in the building were badly beaten by the police during the raid, their heads wrapped in bandages testifying to the rough manner in which they had been handled.”

  Altogether 33 men were taken to the immigration office on Ellis Island. Some 150 others had been set free. However, the Times noted, “Most of them also had blackened eyes and lacerated scalps as souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which has been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds and suspected Reds.”20

  The Times was not being critical of this treatment, which also occurred in most of the other cities. In common with hundreds of other papers throughout the country, it praised that “lionhearted man” A. Mitchell Palmer for finally taking action against the Red threat.

  On November 14, Palmer, accompanied by the young head of the GID, appeared before Congress to ask for the passage of a peacetime sedition bill. Although this and subsequent pleas were unsuccessful, Palmer was greeted with cheers and applause. With such encouragement, preparation for the main raids was accelerated.

  There were some complaints. Attorney Isaac Schorr, of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, wrote the attorney general asking for an investigation of the New York beatings. Palmer routed the complaint to Hoover, who apparently did not read the New York papers, since he reported back that he was unaware that any violence had occurred. Hoover’s suggestion, which the attorney general heeded, was to ignore Schorr’s letter, lest a reply prolong the controversy.

  As for Schorr himself, he merits a dubious distinction: he is the first person known to have made J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list. Not only did Hoover open a file on him; he also wrote Special Assistant to the Attorney General John Creighton suggesting Schorr be “disbarred from further practice before the immigration authorities.”21

  One aspect of the November raids did bother Hoover, but it was neither the violence nor the many illegalities. It was Rule 22.

  That provision of the immigration regulations read, “At the beginning of the hearing…the alien shall be allowed to inspect the warrant of arrest and all the evidence on which it was issued, and shall be apprised that he may be represented by counsel.”22

  Once the aliens had talked to attorneys, however, many refused to answer questions regarding their associations and beliefs and, in the absence of other evidence, had to be released.

  Worried that the same situation would recur during the Communist raids, Hoover on November 19 wrote Commissioner of Immigration Anthony Caminetti urging him to change Rule 22. When nearly a month passed with no reply, Hoover wrote a second letter. With the main raids only weeks away, he reiterated his request, stressing its urgency.23

  In later years J. Edgar Hoover would be lauded as “America’s foremost defender of human rights,” while these two letters, in which he urged that the constitutional right to counsel be ignored, would lie forgotten in the Justice Department files.

  Hoover apparently forgot them even more quickly than that. Less than six months later he testified, “Now, in so far as the Department of Justice is concerned in the change of Rule 22, it had no part whatsoever. The rule was changed at the insistence of the immigration officers.”24

  On December 21, with the main raids now only days away, and with no decision yet reached on Rule 22, Hoover took a few hours off to attend a bon voyage party. That the function was official made it no less pleasurable, for it marked the successful conclusion of one of his earliest and most famous cases.

  * * *

  *Mostly Palmer replaced John Lord O’Brian’s appointees, whom he considered liberally bent and therefore too weak for the task at hand, with his own men. Apparently Hoover survived the purge both because of his expertise in counterradicalism and by convincing Palmer, through Garvan, that he was not an “O’Brian man.” William Allen served as chief of the Bureau of Investigation for so short a time, less than six months, that he is lost in the cracks of most Bureau histories.

  *First called the Radical or Anti-Radical Division, its name was later changed to the General Intelligence Division to broaden the scope of its investigative activities.

  Hoover himself described the expansion in an October 5, 1920, memo: “While the work of the General Intelligence Division was at first confined solely to the investigations of the radical movement it has now expanded to cover more general intelligence work, including not only the radical activities in the United States and abroad, but also the studying of matters of an international nature, as well as economic and industrial disturbances incident thereto.”10

  The term “industrial disturbances” was a euphemism for “strikes,” the Department of Justice under Palmer having become a national strikebreaking agency.

  *From its inception, the size of the American Communist movement had been a matter of dispute. According to Theodore Draper, in The Roots of American Communism, “Both parties, of course, claimed the maximum for themselves and the minimum for their rivals. The Communist party gave itself 58,000 members and gave the Communist Labor party only 27,000. The Communist Labor party gave itself 30,000 members and gave the Communist Party only 27,000.” Having researched all available sources, including actual dues payments, Draper concludes that the American Communist movement probably “started out with a minimum of 25,000 and a maximum of 40,000 enrolled members after the conventions.”13

  But this figure, Draper notes, is deceptively large, for various foreign-language associations enrolled en masse, often without informing their members. As would become evident following the raids, many of those arrested were unaware that they were Communists.

  *As for their legal argument, it can be briefly stated: both parties adhered to the teaching, programs and tactics of the Third International; the Third International advocated the overthrow of all non-Communist governments through mass action; mass action meant, among other things, the use of force or violence; therefore alien members of the two American Communist parties were subject to deportation because they either advocated or belonged to an organization which advocated the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States.

  Neither legal scholars nor the courts have dealt kindly with this logic.

  7

  The Soviet Ark

  The port was New York; the ship, the Buford, a decrepit troop transport ancient even when the United States obtained her from the British during the Spanish-American War. Her destination was Russia, via Finland. And her cargo consisted of “249 blasphemous creatures who not only rejected America’s hospitality and assailed her institutions but also sought by a campaign of assassination and terrorism to ruin her as a nation of free men,” according to the New York Times, or, as other papers put it, “249 anarchists.”1 Actually there were only 51 anarchists—184 of the passengers were members of the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, picked up in the November raids, while the other 14 were aliens who had been convicted of moral turpitude or of being public charges—but two among the 51 were notorious: Emma Goldman, the feminist crusader for free speech, love, music and art, and a host of other causes; and her one-time consort, Alexander Berkman.

  Both Conant and O’Brian having left the Justice Department, Hoover saw an opportunity to enhance his own reputation by “adopting” the Goldman-Berkman cases. On August 23, 1919—while the pair were still in
prison, finishing their two-year sentences—Hoover sent Creighton a memo warning, “Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this county and if permitted to return to the community will result in undue harm.”2

  With Creighton’s approval, Hoover personally prepared the deportation cases against both, although this was the business of the Labor Department rather than of Justice. He arranged for Berkman’s arrest as he walked out the gates of Atlanta penitentiary; he went there for his hearing, conducting part of the questioning himself; he arranged with Immigration Commissioner Caminetti to have Goldman’s hearing switched from St. Louis to New York, where he apparently had reason to feel the magistrate would be more favorably inclined to the government’s case; he helped question her; he urged Caminetti to close her case “at the earliest possible moment”3 so that she could not embark on a nationwide lecture tour to muster support; and he personally complained when bail was set at only fifteen times the usual amount.