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THE FBI

yale university press

Chapter One

Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, it has long been observed that it is an unjust organization. In the year 2003, people of Hispanic, African American, Asian, and Native American descent made up 33 percent of the United States population of 290 million. But members of those groups accounted for only 16.5 percent of the 11,633 special agents of the FBI.

The bureau's prejudice ran deeper than that of the nation at large. To take the indicative case of one ethnic group, African Americans made up 9.7 percent of the House of Representatives. This was a shortfall in that they formed 13.3 percent of the population. But the FBI was in a different league. Blacks composed just 5.5 percent of its special agent force.

Against this background, in recent years a concern has emerged that racial imbalance in the bureau endangered not just the welfare of minorities and the American system of justice, but also national security. That the imbalance persisted in defiance of the concern confirms the power of the dominant theme in the FBI's history, race.

The object here is not to plunge Americanreaders into despair, however, or to supply Europeans with an opportunity to gloat. Police forces, it seems, have always had a checkered record. The Athenian police in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. spied on aristocrats who were plotting to overthrow democracy, using house slaves of diverse races to do the job, and yet preventing those slaves from escaping or organizing their own rebellions. In the late twentieth century, the charge of "institutional racism" in the British police led to reforms that failed to silence the critics. Meanwhile, most of Britain's partners in the European Union were not even attempting to reform their police forces' hiring practices. In 2005, Europol, sometimes referred to as a European FBI, had among its police officers no nonwhite or Muslim employees.

These comparisons do not mean that Americans can be complacent about the FBI. The bureau needs to satisfy exceptionally high expectations because of the nature of its work in a country with worldwide responsibilities, and because it has long been regarded as the global leader among national criminal detection agencies. But its record of tolerance in comparison with its international peers does suggest the need for a fresh look at its history and provenance.

Today, we take it for granted that there should be a federal force to combat federal crimes. According to the Christian Science Monitor, by 2001 there were 3,300 federal crimes for the FBI to investigate. But the idea of Feds combating federal crimes is a relatively modern one. Before the 1870s, federal crime detection services in the United States barely existed.

The reasons for federal deficiencies in the area of law enforcement before the Civil War are not difficult to divine. For a long time America was a frontier society whose pioneers ran in advance of the institutions they had left behind. The Europeans who peopled America came from old worlds that had yet to develop the apparatus of the modern state. The Jeffersonian states'rights tradition strengthened the sentiment against Hamiltonian national institutions. Even when railroads snaked their way across state lines and businesses consolidated across huge areas, preindustrial, essentially local attitudes endured. Southern states would not agree on a uniform gauge for rail tracks. From 1836 until 1913, the United States lacked a central bank.

The secession of the Confederate States and the Union victory in the Civil War began to change all that. It weakened both the states' rights principle and the South's position of defending white supremacy. During hostilities, and for a period during the Reconstruction that followed the war, southern states were not fully represented on Capitol Hill. In the absence of southern opposition to creeping federalism, Congress enacted the Homestead Act and laws to permit the completion of transcontinental railroads. The resultant opening of the West further weakened the position of the former slave states. And it was the rump Congress that supported executive plans to establish federal detection and policing.

Even before the Civil War, government organizations occasionally used detectives. In February 1860, for example, a "special agent of the United States Mail Department" investigated mail thefts, and his inquiries led to the apprehension of a fifteen-year-old boy. In the plaintive voice of a newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, the teenager was the sole support to his widowed mother, and "much liked." Then, in the final flurry of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln established the United States Secret Service to prevent counterfeiting. Formed as a division of the Treasury Department, the service's responsibilities grew to include preventing tax evasion by moonshiners, and as a result of investigating these activities it began to develop professional skills in crime detection.

In July 1870, however, Congress broadened the scope for federal investigation through its creation of the Department of Justice. In the following year, a congressional appropriations bill for the first time authorized the attorney general to spend money on the unrestricted "detection and prosecution" of federal crimes. Consequently the Justice Department borrowed some detectives from the Secret Service for a special assignment. Such was the importance of the assignment that 1871 must surely rank alongside the commonly accepted year of 1908 as a significant founding date for the FBI.

The assignment was to penetrate the Ku Klux Klan and help smash it. White terrorists, the Klansmen were bent on restoring the newly freed African American to a form of virtual slavery. In their effort to assert the superiority of white civilization, they whipped, shot, tortured, and hanged men, women, and children. The U.S. Army tried to restore order in the South, but the terrorists had a good intelligence system. When soldiers arrived, they would fade into the woods, or run off to different states or to Canada, only to return and to terrorize once again.

Unable to track down their enemy, army officers requested civilian detective help, and the Justice Department provided it. African American informants who knew the local terrain and people helped the Justice detectives as they began to operate in the troubled areas of the South. Panic soon began to set in, and Klansmen began to inform on their fellow terrorists in exchange for leniency. Prosecutions of Klansmen peaked in 1872, and locally based U.S. attorneys and army officers began to think the Klan had been annihilated.

That perception was premature. When the former Confederate states returned fully to the body politic, their congressmen blocked further appropriations to Justice Department detectives, and outrages against black citizens could therefore no longer be investigated. Intimidation returned in different guises, notably lynching. Nevertheless, an expectation had been created, and those fearful of white hate crimes would never again let go of the thread of hope, thin though it may have been at times, that the federal government would act as their guardian.

If it seems contentious to say that 1871 was a significant originating year for the FBI, it must be recalled that for decades there was an effective conspiracy to blot out and reinvent memories of Reconstruction. In an influential display of amnesia, early-twentieth-century historians portrayed Reconstruction as corrupt and overly punitive of the noble white South, with black Americans acting as easily duped pawns of unscrupulous northerners who sent in oppressive federal troops. The most prominent among these historians, William A. Dunning, asserted in 1907 that some members of the Ku Klux Klan had been "respectable."

In popular depiction, the Klan assumed a heroic role as the chivalrous defender of southern autonomy, virtue, and white womanhood. It appeared thus in D. W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation (1915), in the wake of which the Klan revived as a national organization. Hostile reactions to the movie were a reminder that millions of Americans were still prepared to struggle against injustice, but they frightened future directors into ignoring the South, its violence, and those who struggled to stop it. Myopic Hollywood churned out, in the words of one shotgun-blasted civil rights worker, "Westerns instead of Southerns." Historians of the Secret Service tended to ignore what may have been the most valiant episode in its history, the fight against the Klan in the 1870s, and chroniclers of the FBI have afforded little importance to the bureau's share in Reconstruction memories. They have yet to catch up with those who, since the 1940s, have offered a corrective to the southern white version of Reconstruction history.

In unwittingly denying the vital first chapter in its history, even the finest historians have distorted the story of the bureau. One consequence of the conspiracy of silence regarding its origins is that the FBI has remained relatively uninteresting to the mainstream historian. Just as secret intelligence has been a missing dimension of diplomatic history, so the FBI's contribution to domestic history has been underappreciated.

Once its underlying character has been more carefully examined, the FBI's history can offer supplementary insights into several aspects of American history, politics, and society. The bureau's role in the history of American federalism and anti-federalism has always been instructive, and was occasionally vital. American anti-communism is better understood in light of the bureau's liberal provenance. FBI history has made its distinctive contribution to the lexicon of disputes between liberals and conservatives. U.S. achievements and shortcomings in the areas of "homeland security" and anti-terrorism cannot be properly appreciated until one understands that the bureau came into being for those purposes, and has a tenacious tradition. A collapse in public faith in the bureau contributed substantially to the mid-1970s crisis in American democracy. Justice Department detectives whose rationales stretch back to the nineteenth century have developed public applications for privately developed information technologies with serious implications for personal privacy. The bureau's involvement in racial matters has long been recognized, but, even here, there has been a less than full appreciation of its impact, especially its positive impact.

A downturn in federal law enforcement activities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century contributed to memory loss about the 1870s. The Justice Department did continue to engage detectives, and by the 1880s it had adopted the Secret Service practice of calling them "special agents," a nineteenth-century habit that survived in the FBI after it had died out in other agencies. But these detectives operated on a reduced scale. The restored southern states retained their hostility to Justice's engagement of Secret Service operatives. The department's occasional resort to Pinkerton private detectives was even more unpopular, and had to be discontinued. It was not until the twentieth century that federal detection of domestic crimes regained its former prominence.

In 1908,President Theodore Roosevelt decided that the Justice Department should have its own force of detectives, instead of having continually to borrow special agents from the Treasury Department. At first, hiring was done on an individual basis, and then in 1909 the new bureaucracy was formalized under the name Bureau of Investigation.

Roosevelt's decision to regularize the Justice Department force came against the background of a thoroughgoing and successful investigation, by special agents, of corruption in business and in Congress. At the end of a half century of rapid and largely unregulated industrialization, some businessmen had become Robber Barons who expected regular favors from the "Millionaire Congress" of the day. Roosevelt had been determined to stamp out capitalistic excesses that threatened to bring capitalism itself into disrepute. When his initiative is considered in tandem with special agents' previous work to protect African American rights, it is clear that the FBI has reason to be proud of its origins.

The year 1908 is still a significant founding date for the bureau, then, even if it does need to be paired with 1871. While it was the end of a proud beginning, however, it also marked the start of a time when the bureau slipped out of character.

The bureau soon began to display the racial biases for which it later became notorious. These prejudices became prominent following the passage in 1910 of the Mann Act, making interstate trade in prostitution a federal crime. The official title of the law, the White Slave Traffic Act, told its own story. Exploiting its provisions, the bureau began hounding the black boxing champion Jack Johnson. As the writer Damon Runyon observed, Johnson had never "stinted himself in the matter of indulgence," but the black fighter's real offense was not wild living as such-it was his thrashing of white boxers and sleeping with white women. The bureau pursued the African American champ partly out of its own prejudice and partly because, in the words of Johnson's biographer Geoffrey Ward, its leaders "felt that the public would never be satisfied until Jack Johnson was behind bars." The opinion of voters was important to an agency that was already eyeing the readiness of Congress to make appropriations.

Johnson fled the country to avoid jail, but he later returned and ended up behind bars anyway. To African Americans, his persecution sent a signal-one that became louder as the bureau stepped up its investigations of black citizens while apparently treading water in cases of racial harassment. Hearing in 1919 that the Justice Department was planning an inquiry into radicalism among African Americans, the celebrated intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois acidly observed: "We black folk have for some years been trying to get the United States Department of Justice to look into several matters that touch us." In the previous year, U.S. military intelligence had withheld a commission from Du Bois, evidently on account of his race. Prejudicial hiring soon came to characterize the bureau, too. Henceforth it would be judged by three criteria in racial matters: its efficacy against white terrorism, the degree to which its agents covertly harassed nonwhite minorities, and the diversity of its hiring practices.

When Du Bois made his remark, the Red Scare was raging in America. This prompts the observation that while race may be the dominant theme in the history of the FBI, it is by no means the only significant thread. The bureau had a wider list of mission deviations. In 1919 and subsequently, it threatened the civil liberties of white as well as black citizens. Its dubious surveillance practices did not apply just to the oppressed, but extended also to the powerful. Individuals who came under scrutiny included, for example, senators who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. The bureau discriminated against citizens for reasons that varied from gender to lifestyle, from sexual orientation to politics. There were periodic challenges to these out-of-character transgressions, but comprehensive recovery did not begin until the 1970s, and even then it was only partial.

To depict the FBI as having been out of character with itself and with America for much of its existence is to accept as a premise a positive view of U.S. history. In more pessimistic style, it could be argued that the Feds as established in the 1870s were out of character, as Reconstruction was an anomalous period in American history. Continuing in this vein, the contention would be that, by the second decade of the twentieth century, America had reverted to its true conservative, fearful, nativist, xenophobic character, and that the FBI simply fell into line. It rather depends how you define the American character-is it about justice, fairness, and democracy, or not? Mindful of the fact that other nations have worse records of bigotry, the assumption in this book is that the United States is, characteristically, devoted to just and democratic values, and that an agency that flouts them is, therefore, out of character.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE FBI by rhodri jeffreys-jones Copyright © 2007 by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. Excerpted by permission.
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