Proto-Cointelpro

"Yet, in all its activities, the government offered the rationale of 'national security,' claiming that internal dangers were sufficient to discard constitutional guarantees. In responding to criticism over the prosecution of the Christian Front, Hoover had retorted: 'It took only 23 men to overthrow Russia.' Administration reasoning in World War II set a precedent for far more massive government spying during the Cold War, particularly against civil rights organizations and opponents of the Vietnam conflict. The very Smith Act used in 1944 against domestic fascists was used with far more severity against Communists during the Cold War, the law's scope only being limited by the Supreme Court in 1957."

In a 2017 Daily Beast article, Justus D. Doenecke looks at civil liberties under Franklin Roosevelt.

"An Absolute Contempt for America's Stated Values of Freedom of Speech and Expression"

"Hoover was right about one thing: black bookstores were on the rise by the end of the 1960s. As late as 1966, black-owned bookstores operated in fewer than a dozen American cities, and most of them struggled to stay in business. Within just a few years, however, the number of stores had skyrocketed. Dozens of new stores opened throughout the country in the final years of the '60s, roughly tripling their numbers since the start of the decade. As The New York Times reported in 1969, 'A surge of book-buying is sweeping through Black communities across the country.' What had been about a dozen black bookstores operating in the mid-1960s grew to over 50 by the early 1970s, and around 75 by the middle of the decade.
"In Hoover's eyes, black-owned bookstores represented a coordinated network of hate-spewing extremists."

Joshua Clark Davis at The Atlantic writes about the FBI's "war against black bookstores."

"You Are Done"

"The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King's experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history."


Beverly Gage in The New York Times Magazine presents the anonymous letter sent by the F.B.I. to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964.

"The Best Account I’ve Read of How the FBI Corroded Due Process and Democracy"

"Here Reagan enters the multilayered narrative. The former movie star, who helmed TV’s General Electric Theater, begged the bureau to let him turn 'Communist Target—Youth' into a teleplay. Since the trial resulting from the FBI report had led to an embarrassing acquittal (the student who had supposedly started the riot by leaping a barricade and beating a policeman had been forty feet away when the incident occurred), Hoover shunted Reagan off. The one thing the FBI dreaded more than anything else was embarrassment, though it is typical of Reagan’s cast of mind that he would have been indifferent to such embarrassment. In Reaganland, there only were good guys and bad guys, and anyone who hunted Reds for a living was good. Which was why, long ago, T-10 had become one of the best informers the FBI ever had."

Rick Perlstein in Bookforum reviews Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power.

"A Record of an Agency That’s Failed"

"The harder truth is that most presidents since Woodrow Wilson have been less intimidated by the F.B.I. than seduced by it. Under the rubric of protecting the nation, they secretly authorized the F.B.I. to open mail, infiltrate political parties, tap phones, perform 'black bag' break-ins of homes and institutions, and draw up vast lists of Americans eligible for 'custodial detention' during a crisis.

"Or at least Hoover said they did."

Kevin Baker in The New York Times reviews Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI.

I'd Lurk in the Baddest Part of Town

"In fact, there is generally too much killing here. Dillinger's gang is responsible for the deaths of a dozen people, but the film makes it seem like many multiples of that number. During the entire yearlong spree between the summer of 1933 and summer 1934, Dillinger himself probably murdered just one man, but in Public Enemies, he is a killing machine."

Elliott J. Gorn in Slate checks the accuracy of Public Enemies.

Throat Closes

"'We know what’s leaked, and we know who leaked it,' Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, told the president on Oct. 19, 1972, four months after a team of washed-up Central Intelligence Agency personnel hired by the White House was caught trying to wiretap the Democratic Party’s national offices at the Watergate complex.
"'Somebody in the F.B.I.?' Nixon asked."

Tim Weiner in The New York Times reports the death of "Deep Throat," W. Mark Felt.

And Timothy Noah in Slate adds an un-appreciation.

"The War with Dynamite"

"There were six blasts in all. About 100 people had been at work, and now they were all trapped in flames, smoke and debris. Escape was a battle. Twenty-one people died.
"What caused the explosion? Was it a gas leak? An anarchist bomb? An attack by union members who opposed the adamantly closed-shop policies of the paper's owner, Harrison Gray Otis? Or was it an insurance scam, a scheme to benefit from the $100,000 policy the paper had recently taken on the structure?"

In the Los Angeles Times, Howard Blum tells the story of the 1910 bombing of the Times building.

And Richard Rayner reviews Blum's American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.

Clark Kerr's Campus

By way of an endnote in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, the Late Adopter finds that in 2002 the San Francisco Chronicle published "Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare," a special report revealing how the FBI's "covert campaign to disrupt the Free Speech Movement and topple UC President Clark Kerr helped launch the political career of an actor named Ronald Reagan."

Seduction of the Innocent

"The establishment response to delinquency was perhaps most vividly expressed in the pages of this very newspaper, which in June 1943 published a breathless opinion piece by none other than FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who warned that the war raging overseas wasn't the only threat to America's future.
"'This country is in deadly peril,' the iconic G-man (or his ghostwriter) declared. 'For a creeping rot of disintegration is eating into our nation. I am not easily shocked nor easily alarmed. But today, like thousands of others, I am both shocked and alarmed. The arrests of "teen-age" boys and girls, all over the country are staggering.' The piece went on to tell of boys shoplifting, stealing cars and robbing filling stations, as well as girls who drank in taverns, got 'coarse and vulgar' and ended up in 'houses of ill fame.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher reviews David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.

As does Laura Miller in Salon.

As does Louis Menand in The New Yorker.

In Slate, Jeet Heer defends anti-comics psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

You Get in Trouble with the Mann

"Amid early twentieth century media hysteria and a moral panic about white farm girls being lured into cities and forced into prostitution, progressive Illinois Congressman James Robert Mann sponsored the White-Slave Traffic Act. Against the wishes of states' rights advocates, the legislation federalized vice crimes that had previously been the purview of local law enforcement.
"Though primarily intended to fight prostitution, the Act substantially expanded the scope of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and soon became the starting point for a wide-range of cases, including many against consenting but unmarried couples. The first person prosecuted under the law was legendary boxer Jack Johnson."

In the wake of Eliot Spitzer's downfall, Omar Wasow at The Root takes a look at the Mann Act of 1910.

Hoovered Up

"Hoover’s plan called for 'the permanent detention' of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.
"So the bureau had arranged for 'detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended' in those states, he wrote."

Tim Weiner in The New York Times reports the declassification of J. Edgar Hoover's 1950 proposal to imprison thousands of Americans for suspected disloyalty.

And Slate reprints the Hoover memo.

Hoovering Up Dissent

"To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature."

In the Los Angeles Times, Allan M. Jalon marks the thirty-fifty anniversary of the public discovery of the FBI's COINTELPRO.