Enemies: A History of the FBI (3 page)

Terrorists and anarchists represented “
the gravest threats against our national peace and safety,” the president said. “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.… The hand of our power should close over them at once.”

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI would become the instruments of that power.

2

REVOLUTION

“
I
BELIEVE IN POWER,”
President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in June 1908, at the hour he decided to create the force that became the FBI. His presidency possessed “more power than in any other office in any great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern times,” he recorded with pride. “I have used every ounce of power there was.” Catapulted into the presidency by an anarchist assassin at the turn of the twentieth century, Roosevelt fought to enforce democracy, to impose political order, to build a nation under law.

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.

“T
HESE 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 facts, 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.

“T
HE
A
TTORNEY
G
ENERAL 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.