Federal Bureau of Investigation

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. It is difficult to comprehend the history of the twentieth-century American Left without considering that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI has not only tried to establish the boundaries of permissible dissent, but has also intervened to change the course of American history. At times it has acted independently of congressional and Department of Justice oversight; at others it has functioned as an arm of the executive branch and within an implicit public mandate.

Founded in 1908, the Bureau of Investigation, as the FBI was called until 1935, first directly affected the American Left during the Palmer Raids. In nationally coordinated raids in November 1919 and January 1920, the Bureau seized at least four thousand supposed subversives, of whom about one thousand were eventually deported. From 1920 to 1924 the Bureau continued its “antisubversive” activities: it expanded its files on dissidents, helped break the 1922 railroad strike, cooperated with private detective agencies, and led the federal government’s drive to destroy Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association.

The Bureau of Investigation’s systematic violation of the Bill of Rights, combined with internal corruption at the top and in the ranks, produced significant reforms in 1924. Attorney General Harlan Stone established strict limitations on the Bureau’s activities and promoted Assistant Director J. Edgar Hoover to the directorship—the post he held until his death in 1972.

Hoover, born in Washington, D.C., in 1885, was the FBI. Operating from convictions and values established during his childhood and alien-registration work in the Department of Justice during World War I, Hoover almost literally turned Bureau employees into himself. Hoover’s supervision of the Palmer Raids, moreover, solidified a mind-set concerning dissent that prevailed until his death.

Two key points stand out about the FBI during the period from 1924 to 1936. First, the Bureau secretly continued its spying, while reducing its scope. (Other agencies, including urban police “red squads,” military intelligence, private spy agencies, and right-wing organizations, compensated for the cutbacks.) Second, a variety of circumstances—increased national attention to crime, an adroit public-relations campaign, and a qualitatively improved professionalism—combined to create a superb public image for Hoover and his G-men. Hoover’s FBI would live off this ideological and cultural capital for the next forty years.

A new stage in the FBI’s antisubversive activities began in August 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested a “survey” of Communist and fascist organizations. Hoover soon expanded this mandate and, by the fall of 1938, had reestablished the General Intelligence Section (dormant since the 1924 reforms) to begin reviewing Left periodicals and creating a filing index for information on individuals and organizations. The Bureau’s number of special agents had grown from 391 in 1933 to 898 in 1940; by 1944, it would have 4,886 such agents.

From 1940 to 1946, the Bureau opened thousands of files on individuals and organizations into which it poured information gathered from a variety of sources. From February 1941 through the following year, the FBI opened 60,000 individual files in the “subversive” classification and in the following year, nearly 120,000 files. Among the Bureau’s sources were general-circulation newspapers, Left publications, and internal organizational material. “Confidential informants” from the ranks of management, the labor movement, and Left organizations provided still more intelligence. Finally, the FBI gathered much information through barely legal and outright illegal methods. These included tapping telephones and rooms, breaking into domiciles and offices, and examining mail and trash.

In late February 1946, the FBI launched a full-scale offensive against American Communism. Ostensibly developed to prepare the American public for the “flood of propaganda from Leftist and so-called Liberal sources” in the “event of extensive arrests” of Communists during a “serious emergency,” the Bureau began preparing “educational materials” to “undermine Communist influence” in unions and “religious circles.” The goals were threefold: to separate Communists from those who would work with them; to politically isolate Left liberalism; to make Communism the nation’s only significant political issue.

The FBI promoted its version of “American” industrial unionism in three specific ways. First, ex-FBI agents became prominent in corporate security and personnel departments; they brought information and informers with them and hired former colleagues to do the same. Still others, such as the New York City ex-agents who founded Counterattack and eventually published Red Channels, were instrumental in anticommunist organizations.

Second, the FBI leaked information to individuals. As early as 1940, the Bureau could “place” articles and editorials in newspapers across the country; this activity expanded later in the decade. These journalistic arrangements not only helped establish the ideological boundaries of acceptable union activity, but also disseminated information that anticommunists could put to good use. Leaks to the Milwaukee Journal in 1946, for example, helped Allis-Chalmers management defeat militant unionism at its West Allis plant.
Leaders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), both nationally and locally, received FBI help. In 1943 James Carey requested information on CIO personnel; by early 1950, as Carey and other anticommunists stepped up their attacks on the United Electrical Workers (UE), Bureau data was flowing to Carey and his allies. And at the local level, for example, disgruntled members of a Westinghouse local in Erie, Pennsylvania, used such information in a series of unsuccessful efforts to overthrow the UE leadership.

The FBI also leaked information to Catholic laypersons and priests who were active within the heavily Catholic CIO. Father John Cronin, S.S., who acted as intermediary for the FBI and Richard Nixon during the Alger Hiss case and who later was a speechwriter for Nixon, began receiving and providing information in 1941. Cronin moved into the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1946; there he wrote a series of enormously influential Chamber of Commerce pamphlets, including Communists within the Labor Movement (1947). Some Association of Catholic Trade Unionists members, including Monsignor Charles Owen Rice, provided information to the FBI (and in turn received it).

In Congress, FBI leaks were used in hearings by the House Education and Labor Committee, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). These committee hearings were central to the attack on the CIO Left; they were often held during or immediately before strikes and/or representation elections—for example, the 1948 Univis Lens strike in Dayton and the 1952 International Harvester strike. While CIO leaders often condemned these witch-hunt committees, they took advantage of the political fallout during raids on Left-led unions and locals. In 1952 HUAC, with substantial FBI help, focused its Detroit hearings on the huge United Automobile Workers (UAW) local at Ford’s River Rouge plant. Walter Reuther, the UAW president under steady criticism from the River Rouge local, used the HUAC hearings as the occasion to place an administratorship over the local.

Third, some evidence exists to show more direct FBI intervention in trade union politics. In 1952 Hawaii special agents tried to split the Longshoremen’s Union by offering to have a Smith Act indictment dropped in exchange for a union official’s leading a secession movement. Although the agents thought they had solidified their union support, the plan backfired when union officials legally taped the oral offer of a bribe.

The FBI did not destroy the CIO Left on its own. Many other developments and factors—Soviet foreign policy, an ever-higher standard of living based on the “Pax Americana,” internal divisions within unions and the American working class, and anti-modernist reactions to changes in gender relations and social mores—contributed to that defeat. The Bureau’s tactic of getting out the “facts” was, however, extraordinarily effective, in part because of the Marxist-Leninist strategy of the Communist Party—the leading force on the American Left. Unionists who were members of the Communist Party in general hid that fact. This tactic allowed Party members to gain an enormous amount of influence that would not have been theirs if the issue of communism had been out in the open. On the other hand, when the “facts” came out—and the FBI often did have sound information—the rank and file and secondary leaders often felt a deep sense of betrayal. In contrast, where Party members functioned more or less openly—for example, in the Farm Equipment Workers—unionists often remained steadfastly loyal despite unrelenting attacks.

The FBI intensified its harassment of the American Left in 1956 when it established COINTELPRO: Counterintelligence Program. First put into effect against the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, then “White Hate Groups,” “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” and the “New Left,” COINTELPRO aimed to destroy, by any means necessary, the groups targeted. It was out of this mind-set and organizational effort that Hoover, who as a youth witnessed the formal segregation of Washington, D.C., directed the efforts to get rid of Martin Luther King, Jr., and replace him with more “responsible” black leadership.
Hoover’s perspective on the world, frozen at about 1920, grew increasingly out of sync with American society in the late 1950s and 1960s. His FBI was forced to investigate organized crime and the violation of civil rights; that FBI, molded in Hoover’s image and ideology, never quite understood that the movements of the 1960s could not easily be fit into a “Communist Infiltration” model. The COINTELPRO programs often succeeded not because the operating assumptions had some congruence with reality, as had the earlier drive against the CIO Left, but because the FBI had virtually unlimited resources, the ability to function illegally, and sense enough to exploit already existing divisions.

On 8 March 1971, a group calling itself the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Bureau office in Media, Pennsylvania. There they pilfered files that revealed the existence of COINTELPRO-New Left and published them in WIN magazine. This incident, according to one of Hoover’s aides, was the “turning point in the FBI image.” Criticism of the Bureau increased, and in late 1971 a two-day conference at Princeton met to discuss the FBI (Investigating the FBI, 1973). In 1973 and 1974, a lawsuit, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, forced the release of COINTELPRO documents; in 1975 the Bureau released records documenting its program against the Socialist Workers Party. Finally, the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence held fairly thorough hearings on a whole range of FBI activities from the 1930s on.

The Freedom of Information Act has permitted researchers an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the history of the FBI. Although the files released under that law are incomplete and often heavily censored, they show that the histories of the twentieth-century American Left and the FBI are inseparable. They demonstrate, furthermore, that the FBI, led by a genuinely American totalitarian, has often functioned as a policer of thoughts and a subverter of the Bill of Rights.

Charles, Douglas M. J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007.

Davis, James Kirkpatrick. Assault on the Left: The F.B.I, and the Sixties Antiwar Movement. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997.

Garrow, David J. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.

O’Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

O’Reilly, Kenneth. Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972. New York: Free Press, 1989.

Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Theoharis, Athan G. The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Theoharis, Athan, and John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.