G-Man, page 33
Roosevelt appreciated the canny nature of the suggestion, and asked that Hoover come back for a follow-up meeting when Secretary of State Cordell Hull could be present. On August 25 or September 1 (Hoover later offered conflicting dates), Hoover slipped back into the White House for that meeting, “at which time the Secretary of State, at the President’s suggestion, requested of me . . . to have investigation made of the subversive activities in this country.” According to Hoover, Roosevelt had entertained the idea of a written order, to be kept secure in a White House safe. The president decided against it, though, and the entire exchange—Hoover’s official reentry into the world of “general intelligence”—took place quietly.[4]
After twelve years of tweaking administrative policies and learning to fight crime, Hoover was suddenly back where he had started: investigating subversives, communists, and German sympathizers. This time, though, he planned to move cautiously, with as little public attention as possible. In contrast to his anti-vice campaigns, nobody would know the full scale of what Hoover had initiated for many years to come. “It has been kept very secret and has not been generally known as being in existence,” he explained to Roosevelt in 1938, “for obvious reasons.”[5]
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One of Roosevelt’s most pressing concerns was domestic fascism, including activities being conducted or supported by the Nazi government on American soil. As early as 1933, just after Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, the president had requested that Hoover investigate “Nazi propaganda in this country.” The following May, even as Hoover was reeling from the Little Bohemia disaster, Roosevelt had reached out again with a request to keep an eye on “the Nazi movement” within the U.S., especially its “anti-racial” (or anti-Semitic) and “anti-American” activities. These had been isolated queries rather than any major shift in policy, but they had entailed departures from Stone’s instructions, hints of what was to come.[6]
Roosevelt’s 1936 directive licensed a broader inquiry. It also allowed Hoover considerable discretion to decide who would and would not be investigated under the “fascist” label. In the summer of 1936, “fascist” was among the most widely deployed epithets in American politics. Its boundaries, though, were far from self-evident. There were a small number of self-proclaimed “fascist” organizations, mainly populated by German and Italian immigrants enamored of Hitler and Mussolini. Beyond that, vast swaths of the public embraced what might be considered fascist ideas: anti-Semitism, corporatism, the belief that democratic capitalism was too weak and decadent to survive. In electoral politics, the term was often used to criticize strongman posturing and concentrated power—“demagoguery,” to use another popular word. At other times, fascist suggested a commitment to racial scapegoating. Critics of Jim Crow segregation, in particular, used the fascist label to highlight similarities between the American South and Hitler’s Germany, two societies that maintained strict racial hierarchies through a combination of law and violence.[7]
Hoover chose a narrower definition, interpreting Roosevelt’s directive to refer in the main to pro-Nazi groups that expressed outright admiration for Hitler. The most obvious target was the German-American Bund, by far the largest and most prominent of the pro-Nazi organizations operating within the U.S. Created in 1933 under the name Friends of New Germany, the Bund had quickly come under pressure for its open allegiance to the Third Reich. In the spring of 1936, a few months before Hoover’s meeting with Roosevelt, its leaders had reorganized around a more American name and theme, adopting a platform that affirmed “the right to cherish the German language and German customs” and “to oppose all racial intermixture” but also “to honor and defend the Constitution, the flag and institutions of the United States.”
Its Americanization effort only went so far. At the Bund’s first public meeting, in April 1936, “American Fuehrer” Fritz Kuhn had addressed an audience of some fifteen hundred followers while dressed in a Nazi military uniform, urging them toward full-throated support of the Third Reich. A few months later, Kuhn traveled to Germany and ended up in a surprise meeting with Hitler, who urged him to “continue the fight.” After his return, the Bund opened several summer camps modeled on Hitler Youth, designed to turn impressionable American boys into stalwart Nazis. The camps became the focus of Hoover’s investigation.[8]
Even in this clear instance of “fascist” sympathies, Hoover moved cautiously, willing to investigate but wary of pressing his case too hard, or of speaking too openly about what the FBI was doing. No doubt he hoped to be effective. But above all he wanted to keep his activities hidden, for fear of provoking the same backlash that had once followed the Palmer Raids. Throughout 1936 and into 1937, he said little about fascism or the Bund, even as he traveled the country railing against the “gutter scum” of the crime world and the “sob sisters” who sympathized with them. He said nothing when the Bund marched through the German neighborhood of Yorkville in Manhattan, clashing with anti-Nazi and Jewish protesters. And he said nothing after the FBI completed a thousand-page report on the Bund’s summer camps, delivered to the White House and the Justice Department in the first days of 1938. According to press accounts, the report described a highly disturbing Nazi culture being promoted at the camps: “parading in grey and black uniforms,” “displaying the swastika,” “use of the Nazi salute.” The FBI concluded, however, that these activities were not part of any plan for an armed revolutionary uprising, and that they fell within the bounds of protected political speech. According to one account, Bund headquarters “rocked with jubilation” at the news. Given a mandate to act on domestic fascism, Hoover chose to hold back, sanctioning the Bund to proceed with business as usual.[9]
Why did Hoover act with such caution, especially against a group so widely reviled? Certainly he feared the sort of criticism that had resulted from the Palmer Raids, when the Bureau had been accused of overstepping its bounds. Perhaps he also felt a measure of sympathy toward the Bund, with its devotion to racial hierarchy and its passionate opposition to “Jewish Marxism and Communism,” in Kuhn’s words. Over the next several decades, Hoover would go on to apply a similar standard to other far-right groups: investigating them, but without the same enthusiasm and commitment that he applied to groups on the left. The secret investigations of the 1930s provided a chance to experiment and establish patterns while few Americans were yet paying attention.[10]
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Hoover adopted a more expansive approach when it came to communism, but here, too, he proceeded in fits and starts, with a high degree of secrecy. What began in 1936 was less a rush back to the days of the Radical Division and more a chance to reengage with the subject that had once been his chief area of expertise. Some of the same adversaries were still around. William Z. Foster, who had led the 1919 steel strike, was now a leading communist figure; he ran for president on the party ticket in 1924, 1928, and 1932. So was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the fearless IWW “rebel girl,” second only to Emma Goldman in 1919 as the most famous female radical in the nation. They brought with them a small but devoted cohort of men and women who weathered the tribulations of the 1920s and lived to see global capitalism nearly collapse, just as Marx had predicted.
There were new elements within communism as well, developments that began to move the party from the revolutionary fringes into a thriving liberal-left mainstream. In 1933, Roosevelt formally recognized the Soviet Union, establishing diplomatic relations after a decade and a half of stalemate. Two years later, Stalin called for the creation of an international anti-facist front, in which party members around the world would set aside old animosities in the service of unity against a growing global threat. In the United States, communist leaders began reaching out to groups they had once considered hopelessly retrograde: trade unions, socialists, even New Deal reformers. All were to be part of the so-called Popular Front, a coalition that would punch back against the fascist threat while advancing revolutionary ideals.
By 1936, the Popular Front strategy had produced a level of unprecedented popularity and legitimacy for the Communist Party within the United States. Formal membership never rose above a hundred thousand, but the communists’ willingness to work with other groups made the party one of the practical and ideological centers of the Depression-era left. “Communism is the Americanism of the 20th century,” party leader Earl Browder proclaimed, and thousands of Americans seemed to think it was true. Most party members joined up openly, signing party cards and paying dues and marching in demonstrations. Others joined in secret, fearful that communist affiliation might damage their professional reputations or foreclose opportunities that might someday be useful to the cause. The party would later accuse its enemies of conjuring up fantastical allegations about who was and was not a secret member. But the policy of secret membership itself was real enough, if applied only selectively. So was the category of “fellow traveler,” used to identify left-leaning activists, workers, and professionals who sympathized with communist ideals and moved in a far-left circles but who never formally joined the party. To accommodate this extended circle, the party created a network of “front” organizations, such as the National Negro Congress and the American League Against War and Fascism. Front groups were communist in spirit and organization but not in name.
Millions of people fell into one or another of these categories in the 1930s. They came from nearly every walk of life, including government, Hollywood, journalism, and the labor movement. A few were famous: composer Aaron Copland, singer Paul Robeson, writers John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, folk troubadour Woody Guthrie. Most lived far more modest lives, balancing gainful employment with time spent on party activities. Communists were legendary for their militant work ethic; they showed up more often and stayed longer than everyone else. They were also known for their ideological rigidity, a problem only partly solved by the Popular Front dictum to cooperate with socialists and liberals.
Though inspired by urgent concerns over European fascism, the Popular Front party nudged members into struggles over unemployment, social welfare, and labor rights at a moment when such issues had real political momentum. They also engaged the cause of Black civil rights, on the premise that race was a pernicious social construct developed to divide the working class. At a time when few white-run organizations took any interest in civil rights issues, communists invested time and energy—and often risked their lives—in emerging fights against lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the economic oppression of Southern sharecroppers. As a result, the party gained a small but significant Black membership in places such as New York and Alabama, where the party’s defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths accused of raping a white woman, attracted international attention. In 1932, the party ran a Black man, James Ford, as its vice presidential candidate, with Foster at the top of the ticket. They won far less than 1 percent of the total but their support was rising.[11]
All of which worried Hoover. From the first, it was clear that communism—not fascism—occupied the greater part of his imagination, and that he viewed the party’s engagement with labor unions, civil rights, and reform politics as a growing internal threat. After his meetings with Roosevelt, Hoover set about demarcating the categories of dangerous activity most pressing for the Bureau to track, outlining a system for filing, sorting, and retrieving the information received from field offices much like the one he had created under Palmer. Only two of Hoover’s categories explicitly addressed the “Nazi” and “Fascisti” problems. All the rest—almost a dozen additional classifications—targeted areas of political life where communists were thought to play a significant or potentially significant role. One of these was the federal government, which by Hoover’s estimate now employed 2,850 open and secret CP members, especially in left-leaning bodies like the National Labor Relations Board. Another area was civil rights organizing—or as Hoover categorized it, “Negroes”—with agents sent south to investigate sharecropper organizing, among other activities. They found no evidence that Southern landlords violated federal law by throwing tenants off the land and onto government relief rolls, a conclusion that the head of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union characterized as “unfair, inaccurate and incomplete.”[12]
Of all the areas of concern identified in Hoover’s emerging intelligence system, none was more significant than organized labor, the sphere of political life to which communists devoted the lion’s share of their energies, and in which they therefore exercised the greatest influence. And no group loomed larger than the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the industrial-organizing powerhouse founded by the miners’ John Lewis. Though communists had once despised the idiosyncratic Lewis as a “Bosses’ Agent” and “Scab-Head,” under the aegis of the Popular Front they began to cooperate, with hundreds of experienced party hands signing on as CIO organizers. By one estimate, in the late 1930s some 40 percent of CIO unions were “either led by Communists and their close allies or significantly influenced by them,” a record that gave Hoover ample reason to investigate.[13]
Beyond the sprawling categories of “industry,” “general strike,” and “organized labor,” Hoover paid special attention to employment sectors in which the Communist Party or the CIO exerted some measure of power and influence. The designation “newspaper field” referred not only to general press coverage, but to the American Newspaper Guild, singled out by Hoover during his meeting with Roosevelt as a union “which has strong Communistic leanings.” The category of “maritime” included the National Maritime Union, an interracial seamen’s union affiliated with the CIO, as well as the International Longshoremen’s Association, which had helped to carry out the 1934 San Francisco strike under the leadership of Harry Bridges, whose membership in the Communist Party was widely alleged. At their August 1936 meeting, Hoover had warned Roosevelt that “the Bridges organization,” like the newspaper guild, “was practically controlled by Communists.” Over the next few years, the FBI began not only to watch the maritime situation but also to assist in deportation efforts against the Australian-born Bridges.[14]
Hoover also kept an eye on major industries, which despite Depression trauma still made up the lifeblood of the American economy. In a memo to Roosevelt, he singled out the steel industry as a special area of concern—for reasons that needed no explanation to the president. In 1935, party leader Earl Browder had committed the CP to “enter with all its forces and resources in the campaign of organizing the unorganized” in the steel industry. The following year, a newly created Steel Workers Organizing Committee within the CIO had taken them up on the offer, hiring dozens of party members to organize steel employees into a national union. For Foster, the CIO’s success fulfilled a dream that had begun a generation earlier, when he led the failed steel strike of 1919. For Hoover, who had been watching Foster during those early years, the confrontations that erupted once again in 1937—this time resulting in victory for the steelworkers—merely confirmed the need for increased surveillance. [15]
Dramatic events were also taking place in the auto and mining industries, similarly identified by Hoover as key areas of Bureau concern. In February 1937, workers at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, staged what came to be known as the great “sit-down strike,” occupying the factory and refusing to move until their bosses agreed to negotiate with the union. As in steel, several of the chief organizers at Flint were Communist Party members. So were some of the officials at the United Auto Workers, the confident new union empowered in the wake of the strike. Finally, there was Lewis’s own union, the United Mine Workers, where according to Hoover, “the Communists had now decided to make very definite plans to get control.” Like other union leaders, Lewis grudgingly worked with party members throughout the Popular Front era, despite his public disdain for communism. None of this made the UMW, UAW, or United Steelworkers into Communist-run or even Communist-dominated organizations, but it did mean that under Roosevelt’s directive, Hoover had permission to look into what they were doing.[16]
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Most of the FBI’s general intelligence work between 1936 and 1938 was just that: a matter of gathering intelligence and developing the “broad picture” that Roosevelt had requested, of compiling information rather than acting upon it. Despite Hoover’s evident alarm over the CIO and its potential to “paralyze” the country, there are few substantive reports of FBI interference with strikes during these years, or of direct intervention in employer-employee relations. The one great exception came in the workplace closest to Hoover’s heart. In 1936, just as Hoover was beginning to investigate the national labor situation, his own employees attempted to form a union under the auspices of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), bringing the passions of the age into the pristine confines of the FBI itself.
The situation burst into public view in mid-July, just before Hoover’s meeting with Roosevelt, when the union sent a six-page brief to the attorney general accusing Hoover of running a white-collar “sweatshop” and engaging in anti-union activity. The letter focused on conditions within the fingerprint division—still Hoover’s pride and joy but also the one area of the Bureau formally protected by civil service rules. Hoover had always considered its civil service protection a weak spot in his employment structure, and 1936 reminded him why. Unlike his agents, his fingerprint clerks had some outside recourse in matters of hiring and firing, the ability to appeal to something more than the director’s whims and policies.[17]
