Enemies: A History of the FBI (77 page)

12.
“They would destroy”:
Briefs quoted in J. Edgar Hoover,
Masters of Deceit
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1958), p. vi.

13.
“To gather a correct, up-to-date list”:
M. J. Davis, “In re: Communist Party,” Dec. 4, 1919, NARA M-1085, reel 931, doc. 313846.

14.
“a considerable number of affidavits”:
Hoover to Caminetti, Dec. 16, 1919, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846.

15.
“The crowd was very cocky”:
Hoover quoted in
New York Tribune
, Dec. 22, 1919;
“Haven’t I given you”:
The source of the quotation is Congressman William Vaile of Colorado,
Congressional Record
, Jan. 5, 1920.

16.
“It was 4:20
A.M
.”: Emma Goldman,
Living My Life
(New York: Dover Publications, 1970), pp. 716–717.

5
. “W
HO IS
M
R
. H
OOVER
?”

  
1.
“The Communist Party is practically busted”:
The agent’s identity remains uncertain. He evidently penetrated the executive committee of the Communist Party. He may have been Clarence Hathaway, a founding member of the CPUSA, and an FBI informant from 1920 onward. His undercover surveillance report went from Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill, the chief of Military Intelligence, to Hoover’s desk on Jan. 12, 1920, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846. Although the American Communists had many factions in their first decade, Ruthenberg was “the founder of the Communist Party in the United States,” in the words of Jay Lovestone, an early member and later one of the nation’s leading anti-Communists.

  
2.
“Arrange with your undercover informants”:
Burke to Kelleher, Dec. 27, 1919, published in “Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice,” United States Senate, 66th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921), pp. 12–14.

  
3.
“All instructions previously issued”:
Telegram to Agents in Charge, initialed JEH, Jan. 2, 1920, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846.

  
4.
“About 25 aliens were apprehended”:
Myron J. Blackmon, Special Agent in Charge, “Report of the Red Raid in Buffalo, NY, Night of Jan. 2/3, 1920,” filed Jan. 14, 1920, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600–1613.

  
5.
“The attack upon our organization”:
Charles E. Ruthenberg, “Report of the Executive Secretary to the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of America,” Jan. 18, 1920.

  
6.
“The Department of Justice of the United States”:
A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the ‘Reds,’ ”
Forum
63 (1920), pp. 173–185.

  
7.
“The revolutionary conspiracy is international”:
Hoover, “Report on Radical Division,” reprinted in
Attorney A. Mitchell General Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice
, 65th Congress, 2nd Session, June 1, 1920.

  
8.
“I am strongly opposed”:
Francis Fisher Kane’s letter was printed in
Survey
43, Jan. 31, 1920, pp. 501–503.

  
9.
“As an aftermath”:
Judge Anderson’s speech was reported in the weekly
Harvard Alumni Bulletin
and reprinted in
LaFollette’s Magazine
12, no. 2 (February 1920), p. 3. On Anderson’s record as United States Attorney and his handling of the Deer Island habeas corpus case, see his entry in
The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law
.

  
10.
“I’ll take great pleasure”:
Skeffington quoted in
Boston Globe
, Jan. 13, 1920.

11.
“Q: Who is Mr. Hoover?”:
The proceedings before Judge Anderson are cited in the National Popular Government League’s “Report upon the Illegal Practices of the U.S. Department of Justice,” May 1920.

12.
“This case seems”:
Ibid.

13.
“The plot is nationwide”:
The New York Times
, April 30 and May 1, 1920.

14.
“creatures of the imagination of the Attorney General”:
Hoover, Report on Radical Division, in
Palmer on Charges
, p. 186.

15.
“the real story of the red menace”:
Hoover to Palmer, May 5, 1920, Department of Justice file 209264.

16.
“an assault upon the most sacred”:
Report to the American People upon the Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice
, National Popular Government League, Washington, D.C., 1920.

17.
Hoover said: “No, sir”:
Report upon the Illegal Practices
, op. cit.

18.
“the wrecking of the communist parties”:
Hoover report to Congress on the General Intelligence Division, Oct. 5, 1920. He was half-right. Comintern files made public at the end of the century show that dues-paying membership of the Communist Party in the United States plummeted after the raids, from 23,744 in December 1919 to 2,296 in February 1920, then rose to 8,223 in April 1920; fewer than one thousand of those who remained on the rolls spoke English.

19.
“the radical situation”:
Hoover report to Congress on the General Intelligence Division, Oct. 5, 1920.

20.
“We’ll get them”:
The New York Times
, Sept. 19, 1920.

6.
U
NDERWORLDS

  
1.
“I am not fit for this office”:
Harding quoted by a close adviser, Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, in Butler,
Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), vol. 1, p. 411.

  
2.
“Daugherty has been my best friend”:
Francis Russell,
The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding and His Times
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 427.

  
3.
“We made an effort”:
Hoover to Burns, Sept. 20, 1921, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-1617-53.

  
4.
“holding us responsible”:
“Circular Letter to the Membership of the United Communist Party,” NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-14.

  
5.
“Soviet Russia is the enemy of mankind”:
Harry M. Daugherty,
The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy
(1932; Boston: Western Islands, 1975), p. 119.

  
6.
In the spring and summer of 1921:
C. J. Scully, “In re: Communist Activities—Special Report,” May 1, 1921, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-1775-8.

  
7.
“Rules for Underground Party Work”:
Communist Party of America leaflet, undated, Comintern Archive, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (hereinafter RGASPI).

  
8.
secret four-day meeting:
H. J. Lenon, “Unity Convention of Communist Parties,” NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-2265.

  
9.
Clarence Hathaway:
Hathaway was identified as an FBI informant from 1920 onward in a March 23, 1960, memo to Hoover on a meeting between Morris Childs, the FBI’s highest-ranking infiltrator of the CPUSA, and top CP leaders Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall. The memo was declassified by the FBI in a thirty-five-volume file on the Childs operation, code-named SOLO, and published on Aug. 2, 2011, on the FBI’s website:
vault.fbi.gov/solo
. The document identifying Hathaway is at volume 19, page 29 of the file.

10.
“The Communist Party is definitely an outlaw organization”:
C. E. Ruthenberg (writing under his pseudonym “David Damon”),
The Communist
1, no. 2 (August 1921). Communist membership figures are taken from Comintern records and C. E. Ruthenberg’s own estimates published in
The Communist
1, no. 9 (July 1922).

11.
“The word went out through the underworld”:
The snappy prose is from Hoover’s 1938 memoir,
Persons in Hiding
(New York: Little, Brown), ghostwritten by his favorite journalist, Courtney Riley Cooper.

12.
“trays with bottles carrying”:
Alice Roosevelt Longworth,
Crowded Hours
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), pp. 320–325.

13.
“Communists and most subversive activities”:
Hoover to Attorney General Robert Jackson, April 1, 1941.

14.
The deciding ballot was cast by Agent K-97:
Reflecting on the referendum, Max Bedacht, one of the delegates at Bridgman, wrote of the undercover Bureau man: “I became personally acquainted with the most contemptible creature in human form, the
agent provocateur
 … police agents who help instigate the committing of deeds which can be construed as crimes.” Bedacht himself went undercover. He became a leading liaison between American Communists and Soviet intelligence; in 1932 he recruited the young editor of a Marxist journal by the name of Whittaker Chambers to serve Moscow as a spy. Max Bedacht, “Underground and Above: A Memoir of American Communism in the 1920s,” unpublished memoir, Tamiment Library, New York University.

15.
“The radical chieftains”:
St. Joseph
[Mich.]
Herald-Press
, Aug. 24, 1922.

16.
“advocated crime, sabotage, violence, and terrorism”:
C. E. Ruthenberg, “Foster Verdict a Triumph for Communism in the United States,”
The Worker
, April 21, 1923.

17.
two workers on his payroll:
William Z. Foster, “Report on the Labor Union Situation in the United States and Canada,” Dec. 16, 1922, by William Z. Foster, Comintern Archive, f. 515, op. 1, d. 99, L. 1–2.

18.
“virtually nonexistent”:
J. Edgar Hoover,
On Communism
(New York: Random House, 1969), p. 5.

19.
civil war:
Daugherty,
Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy
, pp. 119–125;
But Daugherty and Hoover escalated:
“Lawless Disorders and Their Suppression,” Appendix to the Annual Report of the Attorney General for 1922; Washington, pp. 1–25.