J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Privately, Gregory put most of the blame on the American Protective League, which, though helpful at the start of the war, had by now become something of a monster. The attorney general’s files were bulging with complaints charging APL operatives with illegal arrests, strikebreaking, wiretapping, bugging, frame-ups, extortion, blackmail, kidnappings, rapes, and even—in the case of Frank Little, an IWW organizer who was kidnapped and lynched—murder. All the files lacked was a single documented instance of their having caught a genuine German spy.

  The two men most responsible for the slacker roundups were Attorney General Thomas Gregory and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.

  Each had an especially bright subordinate who would in time rise to a position of immense power. Gregory’s was his special assistant in the enemy alien registration section, John Edgar Hoover. Baker’s was his confidential secretary, Clyde Anderson Tolson.

  J. Edgar Hoover’s exact duties during World War I have long been a mystery, obscured by time, missing documentation, and perhaps some intentional camouflage. Having been in the Justice Department less than two months when the September 1917 IWW raids occurred, it seems unlikely he played any significant role in their planning or execution, while the slacker roundup of the following September would seem to have had little to do with the Enemy Alien Registration Section.

  There is, however, one clue. In the mid-1930s Hoover asked two of his closest associates, Harold “Pop” Nathan and Charles Appel, to write a history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Appel, their manuscript, which they titled “A Digested History of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” and which traced the growth of the Bureau from its inception in 1908 through Hoover’s first ten years as director, was based on dozens of interviews with former BI agents and Justice Department staffers, as well as “many, many” documents culled from Justice Department files.

  On reading the manuscript, and seeing that it gave others credit for many of the accomplishments he had himself claimed, Hoover had the work suppressed.

  But the former attorney general Homer S. Cummings had access to a copy, for in a footnote to his 1937 book Federal Justice he quotes from it. Discussing the start of the General Intelligence Division in 1919, Cummings quotes the “Digested History” as stating that it was organized “under the direct administrative supervision of J. Edgar Hoover, since 1917 in charge of counter-radical activities as special assistant to the attorney general” (italics added).5

  If Nathan and Appel were correct, this means that Hoover was involved in antiradical activities as early as 1917, two years before “authorized” FBI histories say he was assigned—almost reluctantly and in a wholly minor capacity—to that role. It also means that he was concerned with combating radicalism long before A. Mitchell Palmer discovered the “alien threat.”

  What is known with certainty is that, even if not directly involved in them, Hoover studied both the IWW and the slacker roundups closely, becoming one of the department’s strongest proponents of the dragnet-type raid—knowledge which he, in a far from minor capacity, soon put to use in the even more infamous “Red raids” of 1919-20.

  By March 1918, less than a year after joining the department, the young counterradical specialist had enough responsibilities to rate his own full-time secretary. Already demanding that those who worked for him share his dedication, he interviewed a number of applicants before finding one who stated that she had no immediate plans to marry. His choice, who was already working in the department as a file clerk, was a twenty-one-year-old woman from Port Norris, New Jersey. Helen Gandy would remain Hoover’s secretary until his death fifty-four years later.

  Following the armistice there were numerous departures from the Department of Justice. In February 1919 Attorney General Thomas Gregory submitted his resignation. The next to leave was A. Bruce Bielaski, who was replaced as chief of the Bureau of Investigation by William E. Allen, one of John Lord O’Brian’s assistants. And, shortly afterward, O’Brian himself resigned, to return to private practice.

  Although Hoover was apparently a dutiful subordinate, he and his boss were never close. In later years O’Brian was one of those who would not recommend Hoover for permanent appointment as director of the Bureau of Investigation, while his law partner and protégé, William Donovan, would become Hoover’s most-hated nemesis. For Hoover’s part, it was O’Brian who first instilled in him a lifelong distrust of what he called “pseudo-liberals” (or “swaydo-liberals,” as Hoover always mispronounced the term).

  Before the war O’Brian had been known as a Progressive Republican, his political views compatible with those of both Taft and Wilson; after it, he was called “a justly famous defender of human rights.”6 But, during it, as Hoover observed, he played the game. It was O’Brian who prosecuted the most important Espionage Act cases, including that of the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who was given a ten-year sentence for an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio (O’Brian argued that the pacifist’s utterances were not the “free speech” mentioned in the First Amendment). It was also O’Brian who, behind the scenes, urged Gregory to make the American Protective League an auxiliary of the Justice Department and defended it against attacks by Treasury Secretary William McAdoo and others. And it was O’Brian who, when the convictions of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman triggered worldwide protests, gave reporters a bogus story linking them with an imaginary ring of German spies.

  Yet it was to O’Brian that Hoover now went to ask for help in retaining his job. O’Brian later recalled, “At the end of the war, at the time of the Armistice, he told me he would like to continue in the permanent side of the Department of Justice, and I took that up personally with the new Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.”7

  * * *

  *Established by Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte in 1908, the Bureau of Investigation was renamed several times, before becoming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935.

  *Exactly how many “slackers” were apprehended remains unclear, BI Chief Bielaski having issued various contradictory figures. In his final report he claimed that out of 50,000 arrested, 1,505 had been inducted into military service and 15,000 referred to their draft boards. However, one of his assistants injudiciously admitted that out of every 200 arrests, 199 were clearly mistakes.

  6

  “Palmer-Do Not Let This Country See Red!”

  For some the armistice meant not the end of the war but only a change of enemies. Those Americans fortunate enough to return from the European battlefields found their country more deeply divided than it had been at any other time since the Civil War.

  As in any war, there was violence.

  At about eleven-fifteen on the night of June 2, 1919, the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, turned out the downstairs lights of his Washington residence and was walking upstairs to join his wife in bed when he heard something heavy thump against the front door. The blast that almost instantaneously followed shattered windows all over the neighborhood.

  Across Dupont Circle, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, had just returned home from a dinner party. Had they been one minute later, they would have still been outside, directly in line with the blast. After running upstairs to make sure his son James was all right, and stilling the cook—who kept shouting, “The world has come to an end!”—Roosevelt hurried over to see if the Palmers needed help. But first he had to step over the mangled bits of flesh that had landed on his front steps.

  Neither of the Palmers had been hurt, Roosevelt reported on his return. The only victim was the bomber himself, who had apparently stumbled coming up Palmer’s walk. But, according to James, all this seemed of less interest to his father than another discovery he had made. “Say,” Franklin exclaimed to Eleanor, “I never knew that Mitchell Palmer was a Quaker. He was ‘theeing’ and ‘thouing’ me all over the place.”1

  “The morning after my house was blown up,” Palmer later
testified, “I stood in the middle of the wreckage of my library with congressmen and senators, and without a dissenting voice they called upon me in strong terms to exercise all the power that was possible…to run to earth the criminals who were behind that kind of outrage.”2

  The following day the New York Times, without any evidence whatsoever, authoritatively stated, “The crimes are plainly of Bolshevik or IWW origin.”3

  The Red scare was on.

  Actually it had been building since the Russian Revolution of November 1917, which had excited those in the American Left almost—but not quite—as much as it had frightened their conservative counterparts.

  The notion that this was the work of a solitary madman was quickly dispelled. Within an hour of the Palmer blast, similar explosions occurred in eight other cities, causing one death, that of a night watchman outside a judge’s residence in New York. And prior to this, in late April, explosive devices had been mailed to thirty-six of the most prominent men in America, including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Although most never reached their intended victims—the Post Office having held them up because of insufficient postage—a package that arrived at the home of the ex-senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia blew off both hands of the maid who opened it and severely injured Mrs. Hardwick, who was standing nearby. The next day irate citizens, often aided by local police and APL units, broke up May Day demonstrations in more than a dozen cities.

  Although the body of the man believed responsible for the Palmer bombing remained unidentified, there was one clue—some fifty copies of an anarchist flier entitled Plain Words were found scattered around the neighborhood.

  But Palmer was not content to hunt down a few dangerous anarchists. He declared war on all radicals and, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it, at the same time “generalized his own experience into a national emergency.”4

  Immediately after the bombing, Palmer made several changes in the Department of Justice. He appointed his own assistant, Francis P. Garvan, assistant attorney general in charge of all investigation and prosecution of radicals, and he replaced William Allen, O’Brian’s former assistant, as head of the Bureau of Investigation, appointing in his place William J. Flynn.*

  Palmer, Garvan, and Flynn made a remarkable trio.

  A. Mitchell Palmer was a paradoxical man. While in Congress, where he served five terms, he called himself a “radical friend” of labor, but as attorney general he proudly took credit for breaking half a dozen major strikes. Being a pacifist by religion, he had turned down President Wilson’s offer of the post of secretary of war, but while heading the alien property custodian’s office his belligerency had earned him the nickname the Fighting Quaker. Once considered one of the most progressive members of Wilson’s Cabinet, he would soon decide that in times of national crisis it was perfectly legal to abrogate the Bill of Rights.

  Francis P. Garvan, Palmer’s chief investigator during the war, was the son of a wealthy contractor and a graduate of Yale. But he was ever sensitive to the fact that his father had been an Irish immigrant and, in referring to the more recently arrived, was given to imitating Palmer and using such terms as “alien filth.” According to Palmer’s biographer Stanley Coben, the attorney general and his assistant had three things in common: “an aversion to certain types of ‘foreigners,’ a feeling that dangerous internal enemies were plotting against the country, and a powerful devotion to Palmer’s career.”5 And not necessarily in that order. A. Mitchell Palmer’s one great obsession was to become president of the United States.

  The new BI chief, William J. Flynn, was a former head of the Secret Service. He was also, Palmer noted in announcing his appointment, the country’s leading “anarchist chaser”: “He knows all the men of that class. He can pretty nearly call them by name.”6

  To this trio would soon be added a fourth and, in time, much more famous member.

  One of John Lord O’Brian’s last tasks before leaving Justice had been to cut the department’s staffing back to prewar size. But now, armed with a new menace, Palmer saw an opportunity to restore the cuts. On June 13 he asked Congress for an emergency supplemental appropriation of $500,000, bringing the department’s yearly budget up to $2 million.

  When the House balked at the increase, Palmer and Garvan went to the Senate.

  Senator Smoot of Utah: “Do you think that if we increased this to $2,000,000 you could discover one bomb thrower—just get one?”

  Mr. Garvan: “I can try; that’s all I can say.”

  Palmer, however, had a hole card. He revealed that the recent bombings were part of a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. Not only that, but the danger was imminent. He told the senators, “We have received so many notices and got so much information that it has almost come to be accepted as fact that on a certain day, which we have been advised of, there will be another [attempt] to rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.”7 Privately Palmer leaked the information that the date of the attempted revolution would be July 4.

  He got the money.

  On June 17, 1919, the attorney general held an all-day meeting with Garvan, Flynn, and their assistants. The best way to deal with the new menace, it was decided, would be a mass roundup and deportation of alien radicals.

  There were several problems with this decision. Not all the radicals were aliens; many were either native-born or naturalized Americans. And the Justice Department had no authority whatsoever when it came to deportations, this being the province of the Immigration Department, which was under the secretary of labor. Moreover, since the expiration of the Espionage Act at the end of the war, there was no federal law which prohibited being a Socialist, Communist, IWW member, or anarchist.

  Despite these slight obstacles, the group began making secret plans for the raids.

  As in any war, up-to-date intelligence on the enemy was essential. It was decided that the additional funds Congress had appropriated would be used to set up a General Intelligence Division (GID) in the Justice Department, its function to collect and correlate information on radicals supplied by the Bureau of Investigation, other governmental agencies, the military, local police, and the private sector.

  Garvan had just the man in mind to head the new division—the twenty-four-year-old John Edgar Hoover, a two-year veteran of the Justice Department, whom Garvan had noticed while he was heading a unit in Enemy Alien Registration.

  On July 2, pressed by reporters as to what progress had been made in the bombing investigations, BI Chief Flynn, apparently still fighting the last war, announced that the men who had committed these vile outrages were “connected with Russian Bolshevism, aided by Hun money.”8 In truth, the Bureau still didn’t know who the bombers were.

  July 4 came and passed, with the biggest explosion that of fireworks. But Palmer hinted at later dates, and the press built upon the hysteria, seeing portents of revolution in everything from the recent race riots in Washington and Chicago, which had left hundreds wounded and scores dead, to the “labor unrest” which had erupted in almost every major industry. Since 1914 the cost of living had doubled, but during that same five-year period wages had dropped 14 percent, while with the war’s end unemployment soared. With labor cheap and plentiful, the National Association of Manufacturers launched a heavily financed campaign for the open shop, which it now called the American Plan. By the end of 1919, more than four million workers were on strike. The steel strike alone, which broke out in September, spread to fifty cities in ten states, before being “terminated,” the attorney general bragged, “through the actions of the Department of Justice.”

  Some interpreted these upheavals as America’s uneasy settling into a postwar economy. Palmer had a different vision:

  “Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every institution of law and order…It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping
into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.”9

  A. Mitchell Palmer had found his campaign issue.

  The General Intelligence Division was officially organized on August 1, 1919. Acting on Garvan’s recommendation, Palmer appointed John Edgar Hoover, special assistant to the attorney general, chief of the GID.*

  Hoover quickly proved that his reputation was well deserved. As his first project, the former librarian set up a card index system listing every radical leader, organization, and publication in the United States. Finding it just as easy to categorize people as he once did books—a simplification he’d follow for the rest of his life—within three months he had amassed 150,000 names and by 1921 some 450,000. Moreover, they were cross-indexed by localities, so when a strike broke out in, say, Gary, Indiana, all the local “agitators” could be quickly identified.

  The more important persons, groups, and periodicals merited more-comprehensive biographies; soon Hoover and his staff had assembled 60,000 of these. They included anyone showing “any connection with an ultra radical body or movement.”

  Initially Hoover was aided considerably by the APL reports, IWW membership lists, Emma Goldman’s mailing list, which had been seized during one of her many arrests, and the Bureau’s own already extensive files. But he didn’t stop there. Local police were encouraged to set up their own “Red squads” and share their findings with Washington. Private detective agencies, employed by the struck companies, supplied huge lists of names. Under a variety of pretexts—which included purchase, seizure, and theft—whole radical libraries were obtained. Newspapers were collected “by the bale” and pamphlets “by the ton.” Forty multilingual translators searched foreign-language periodicals for names and inflammatory quotations. Stenographers were sent to public meetings to take down the content of speeches. In Washington one-third of the BI’s special agents were assigned to antiradical work; in the field, over one-half, many of them undercover. “During the steel strike, coal strike and threatened railway strikes,” BI Chief Flynn later proudly admitted, “secret agents moved constantly among the more radical of the agitators and collected a mass of evidence.”11