The Official Slanderer

February 27, 2010 at 5:10 pm | Posted in -- POLAND, Family History, Jacob Schiff, Jewish, Louis Brandeis, Marlborough Churchill, MID, Military Intelligence, Paul Warburg | Leave a comment

Looking to find one emblemmatic villain behind America’s decision to slam its doors against immigrant refugees in the early 1920s — especially Jewish people from Eastern Europe like my grandparents for whom failure to escape would mean death in the Holocaust? Look no further than this man: Brigadeer General Marlborough Churchill, head of American Military Intelligence (MID) from 1918 through 1920. During this time, Churchill’s MID generated a parade of reports painting Jews as undesirables, subversives, and Reds, as slanted as any Anti-Semitic propagrada of the era.

These became the chief ammunition xenophobic Congressmen used to justify imposing quotas in 1921 and 1924 designed to block all but a tiny trickle of immigrants, aimed primarily at Jews and Italians. Italy, which sent over 270,000 to Ellis Island in 1913, was restricted after 1924 to 3,845 per year. Poland, which had sent 174,000 — including about 100,000 Jews — was cut to 5,982 per year.

The American public backed restrictive quotas by a large margin. And for his part, General Churchill was probably not even a bigoted man. A distant relative of England’s Winston Churchill, product of Andover Academy and Harvard, he was a rigorous professional and brilliant staff officer. His job demanded that he protect the United States, which in 1919/1920 included two key points:

  • First, America was committed to supporting the new country of Poland, created in 1918 at the close of World War I and thrown immidiately into a life-or-death military struggle against Bolshevik Russia. Saving Poland was critical to stabilizing Europe after the War.
  • Second, Americans demanded safety against saboteurs and subversives, primarily leftists and Socialists who in 1919 had driven the country into the deliriums of the First Red Scare. The large majority of leftists were Eastern European immigrants.

Both these missions led Churchill and MID to focus on The Jews. It is alarming that today there survives a thick file of memos written by MID under General Churchill containing a barriage of slanders against Jews people as a group. They focus on Eastern Europeans but include surveillance of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, financiers Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff, and western Zionist leaders Chiam Weizman and Theoodore Herzl. The reports finger Jews as instigators of the Bolshevik Revolution and rulers of the Western Press, a secret conspiracy ready to subvert any country. They describe Jewish people as personally filthy and non-hygenic and, if allowed into the US, “a serious menace to our civilization.”

To Churchill’s MID, stories of violent anti-Jewish riots — pogroms — in Poland and the nearby Ukraine in 1919 were simply slanders spread by Jews to undermine Polish independence.

Think I’m exaggerating? Make a visit some time to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and ask them to show you Record Group 165 (Military Intelligence), file 245-15. That’s the Jewish File. Hold on to your socks while you read it!

Having recently discovered how the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920s almost cost the lives of my own grandpatents and family, I’ve now spent time studying these old archive records trying to figure out how intelligent and well-meaning professionals like General Churchill could do so much damage in the world. More on this to come….

New film on 1919 Red Scare

August 6, 2009 at 8:19 pm | Posted in David Strathairn, FBI, J. edgar hoover, Ken Ackerman, No God No Master, Palmer Raids, William F. Flynn, Young J. Edgar | Leave a comment

That’s William J. Flynn standing there in the dapper hat and trenchcoat. Back in 1919, he was very hot stuff. They called him “Big Bill,” the most famous detective in America, former chief of the U.S. Secret Service, former top gumshoe in New York City, recognied as the country’s top spy catcher, Red hunter, counterfeit tracker, enemy of gangsters, kidnappers, bank robbers, gamblers, and criminals of every type.
You could barely pick up a newspaper in the 1910s without seeing his name. He loved splashy midnight raids, and helped terrify the country against German saboteurs during World War I. In his spare time, he even wrote detective novels, mostly making himself the hero.
In 1919, Flynn landed in Washington, D.C. The Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, asked him, begged him, to leave New York and become the new Director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the FBI). Flynn would hold the job for two years. One of his lieutenants would be a skinny young kid named J. Edgar Hoover who later would head the FBI for 48 years, the most controversial law enforcement figure in Twentieth Century America.
Depite all his big headline-grabbing cases, nobody much remembers Bill Flynn these days. But that could change. A new movie is being made about Flynn’s Justice Department days that, if done right, could nicely poke a rarely-esposed sensitive raw nerve in the American past.
Mitchell Palmer had a special job in mind for Flynn when he invited him to come to Washington in 1919 and head the Bureau of Investigation. Palmer intended to launch a massive crackdown against subversives — communists, anarchists, labor radicals, and a few truly dangerous people — that would culminate in one of the worst civil liberty abuses in American history. Between late 1919 and early 1920, Justice Department agents, working with local police and vigilantees, rounded up some 10,000 people, locked them in overcrowded prisons, had them beaten, abused, cut off from lawyers, threatened with deportation, and then, months later, the large majority simply released, never accused of a crime. The reason? A massive case of paranoia and guilt by association known as the First Red Scare.
Flynn’s direct role in this affair has always been a mystery. Palmer himself and young Hoover played the visible leads — hence the “Palmer Raids”– but Flynn was the person actually in charge of the Bureau at the time. I tell the story of the Raids from Hoover’s point of view in my book Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. Now it’s time for Flynn’s.

 

The new movie, called No God, No Master, recently began shooting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (which has several streets that look like 1919 New York City). To play Flynn, it casts actor David Strathairn — who played Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 George Clooney film Good Night, and Good Luck. The production team describes the story this way:

 

“No God, No Master is the story of U.S. Bureau of Investigation agent William Flynn who is swept into the world of homegrown terrorism during the Red Scare of the early 1900s. His journey into the culture of anarchism sets the stage for a timely drama with rsounding parallels to the politics and issues of contemporary society.”

 

Let’s hope they do a good job. This is an important story, full of lessons clearly forgotten during the hysteria of our own generation’s War on Terror following the attacks on our country of September 11, 2001. Too often, movies get it wrong. I have my fingers crossed that this will be the exception. 

 

 

 

J. Edgar Hoover

July 9, 2009 at 1:32 pm | Posted in Bryan Burrough, Calvin Coolidge, FBI, j. edgar hooover, Jazz Age, Joe McCarthy, John Dillinger, Johnny Depp, Palmer Raids, Public Enemies, Richard Nixon | Leave a comment

In honor of the new movie
Public Enemies starring JohnnyDepp and based on the terrific book by Bryan Burrough, here is my favorite picture of that tough, gruff, civil-liberties-stomping autocratic crime-fighter J. Edgar Hoover.

The dark side: Hoover would grow up to be Director for Life of the FBI, holding the job for 48 years under nine presidents (Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon) from 1924 till his death in 1972. Hoover would use his secret FBI files to blackmail presidents, senators, and movie stars, and felt no scruples conducting sabotage, black bag jobs, or secret wiretaps against any person or group he considered “subversive.” By the 1960s, this included mostly civil rights leaders and anti-Viet Nam War dissenters.

Earlier, he aided Senator Joe McCarthy on his anti-Communist witch hunts. He remains one of the most-hated figures in American history.

On the good side, he used his organizational brilliance in the 1930s to build the then-disfunctional Bureau into a modern professional force with scientific methods, a national academy and lab, a Most Wanted List, finger print files, and a strict agent code of conduct. At his peak, he made the G-Man brand so popular that it was tougher to be accepted as a rookie FBI agent than it was to get into an Ivy League college.

How did he get this way? Here, we see young J. Edgar as a shockingly-normal boy playing with his bike. Hoover grew up in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C., son of a lifelong government clerk, youngest of four siblings, spoiled, his mother’s favorite. He was smart, eager, sang in a church choir, carried groceries for old ladies, and was the star of his high school track, debate, and cadet teams. His classmates elected him their valedictorian. He worked his way through Law School and graduated in 1917 as America entered World War I.

What changed him from this normal, smart, eager child of the Jazz Age into the corrupt autocrat of later years was the question behind my own book Young J. Edgar, which tells the story of Hoover’s first big assignment in the 1919 Justice Depatment, running the notorious anti-Communist crackdown known as the Palmer Raids.

In between, though, he brought in John Dillinger, the bank robber– played by Johnny Depp in the new movie. Enjoy.

The Beltway Unbuckled

March 15, 2009 at 6:42 pm | Posted in J. edgar hoover | Leave a comment

Be sure to tune in to The Beltway Unbuckled, a new History Channel documentary premiering this week. You’ll see me as a Talk Head during the segment on J. Edgar Hoover.

Here’s the writeup from History.com:

“Sex has played a role throughout America’s history. Did you know an extramarital affair was one of the causes of the Civil War? Or that one of the things that made George Washington so appealing as a presidential choice was his sterility? This special takes a serious but highly entertaining look at the fascinating ways the sex lives of our nation’s leaders have impacted American history and shaped the country we live in today. Some of the stories uncovered: how J. Edgar Hoover used his secret sex files to become one of the most powerful figures in Washington; although Woodrow Wilson may have won World War I, his wife Edith may have caused World War II; why FDR’s dreams for the post World War II world were contained in the long lost diary of one of the women who was with him when he died; and how JFK’s fling with an East German beauty nearly ended his administration. “

Eric Holder: "Nation of Cowards"? Not Really.

February 19, 2009 at 1:59 pm | Posted in Blanche Bruce, Clarence Darrow, Eric Holder, John Scopes, Ossian Sweet, Roscoe Conkling | Leave a comment

Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, raised hackles in Washington, D.C. yesterday for calling Americans a “national of cowards” on race relations, pointing to failures to build inter-racial ties outside the workplace. I certainly respect Holder for raising a sensitive and important issue. But on the history, I think he’s wrong.
The roster of heroes on this score is long and impressive and, to my mind, it deserves more attention than the cowards. Other countries have struggled with racism and zenophobia, but America is rare in addressing it so directly. Obviously, divisions and prejudice still exist. But we live in an tie of promise and good will, with Barack Obama in the White House and Holder himself making history at Justice.

As my brief contribution, I’d like to mention some heroes, specifically two relationships that crossed the divide during times when attitudes were ugly and simple handshakes required courage. Both helped lay groundwork for the civil rights successes to come later:
— A friendship among two US Senators, Roscoe Conkling and Blanche Bruce; and
— The work of a great lawyer, Clarence Darrow, for a ground-breaking client, Ossian Sweet.

Blanche Bruce (photo above) was the second African-American to reach the U.S. Senate (Riram Revels of Mississippi was the first), the first to serve a full term (1875-1881), and the only black senator during those years. Bruce had escaped slavery during the Civil War and gone north. He taught school in Hannibal, Missouri, and briefly attended Oberlin College. After the War, he returned to Mississippi to make money as a planter and rose in Reconstruction politics.

By 1875, when Bruce reached Washington, D.C., America had already lost its wartime idealism and grown tired of Reconstruction, spawning an attitude of resentment against freed slaves. Lynchings and other crackdowns were were on the rise. Bruce, as the only black Senator, confronted stark bigotry from colleagues — particularly fellow Mississippi Senator Lucius Lamar. On the day of his swearing-in on the Senator floor, Bruce rose to step forward and take the oath, but both of his Mississippi colleagues (Lamar and out-going Senator James Alcorn) refused to escort him. For a moment, Bruce stood absolutely alone — until one Senator finally saw his embarrassment, stood up, and walked over from across the chamber, took Bruce’s arm, and announced himself Bruce’s sponsor. It was Roscoe Conkling of New York.

Roscoe Conkling was one of Washington’s most powerful figures in 1975, boss of the NY State Republican machine, leader of the Republican Stalwarts and intimate with President US Grant. Conkling took Bruce under his wing, made him a protege, coached him in Senate procedures and helped him win key committee seats. They became fast friends, and Bruce would go so far as to name his first-born son after Conkling. Young men named Roscoe would populate the family tree for generations.

Clarence Darrow had never met Ossian Sweet in 1925 when he agreed to take Sweet’s case. Sweet, an African-American physician, had purchased a home in a white neighborhood in Detroit. A mob of neighbors tried to drive him out, but Sweet refused to be intimidated. Mobs started congregating around the Sweet home. One night, gunshots rang out, and Sweet fired back. A white man in the crowd was hit and died.
Local prosecutors quickly indicted Sweet for murder and set trial before an all-white jury.
The recently-formed NAACP had trouble at first finding a lawyer to take Sweet’s case, until they asked Darrow. Darrow was already famous from a lifetime defending headline clients from labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood to most recently John Scopes, the high school tachers accused in 1924 of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. Darrow quickly saw the importance of the case and agreed to lead the defense.
His appeal to the jury based on common humanity became an instant classic:

“You are facing a problem of two races, a problem that will take centuries to solve. If I felt none of you were prejudiced, I’d have no fear. I want you to be as unprejudiced as you can be…..Draw upon your imagination and think how you would feel if you fired at some black man in a black community, and then had to be tried by them…. The danger of a mob is not what it does, but what it might do. Mob psychology is the most dreadful thing with which man has to contend. Its action is like the starting of a prairie fire. A match in the stuble, and it spreads and spreads, devouring everything in its way….the mob was waiting to see the sacrifice of some helpless blacks. They came with malice in their hearts…”

It took two trials, but ultimately Darrow prevailed, presuading the jury to reach a unanimous verdict of not guilty on ground of self defense. Ossian Sweet went free, and a precedent against housing discrimination was set forty years before the Civil Rights Act.

We don’t often think of Clarance Darrow and Roscoe Conkling as civil rights heroes, and Blanche Bruce and Ossian Sweet rarely get attention for their ground-breaking roles. But if today we are keeping score on heroes versus cowards on achieving racial justice in America, then I am happy to offer them as evidence on the good side. Thanks. –KenA
For more background, see my two book recommendations for today:

— On Blanche Bruce, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty, by Lawrence Otis Graham.
— On Darrow and the Sweet trials, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle.

Hold your nose, but Blago deserves civil liberties too!

January 27, 2009 at 3:08 am | Posted in -- Impeachment, Anderson Cooper, Jesse Jackson, Patrick Fitzgerald, Rahm Emmanuel, Rod Blagojevich, Roland Burrus | Leave a comment

So much about this case stinks. Here is a sitting Governor, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, accused by Chicago Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of terrible things: trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, trying to blackmail the Chicago Tribune, trying to shake down a childrens’ hospital for money, and more. His scandal has stained an entire generation of talented Illinois public figures including Jesse Jackson Jr., Rahm Emanuel, and Obama himself, just for coming in contact with them.

But there’s more. The rampant public vilification of Blago since the charges, the ridicule (even from supposedly objective newsmen like CNN’s Anderson Cooper), the snide dismissals of him as crazy, the assumption of guilt, this stinks too. Yes, under our system of law, until proven guilty, even Blago deserves to be presumed innocent. He has denied the charges. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he’s not. I don’t know, but neither do you.

The treatment of his case, to a great extent brought on himself, has been abominable.

Can Blago really be innocent? So far, all we actually know are the prosecutor’s charges and the snippets of evidence he has decided to disclose. Patrick Fitzgerald may be a fine man and an exceptional lawyer, but prosecutors are not always right and not always fair. They sometimes get carried away with their crusades, even when acting in perfectly good faith. That’s why, in this country, before we deem anyone guilty of a crime and send them to jail, we first guarantee them due process of law, the right to state their case, to confront their accusers, to present their evidence and arguments, to speak in their own defense, to have a lawyer, to have their case decided by a jury.

So far, Blago has had none of these things. The media presumes him guilty. The US Senate presumes him guilty. The Illinois legislature presumes him guilty. He is an inconvenient, detested political pariah with poll rated in the single digits.

And worse, rather than a court of law, he faces the prospect of having his case heard first by a group of politicians in the Illinois State Senate. And one of the first decisions these politicians made was to limit his right to call witnesses in his defense. Bloggo asked for a slew of celebrities: Rahm Emanuel, Jesse Jackson, and others. Was this merely a publicity ploy? Maybe. Would it be embarrassing and uncomfortable for them to appear? Certainly. But that’s not the point. If they have evidence that could clear his name, then Blago has the right to have it presented before being found guilty. The legislature could have found a way to accommodate Emanual, Jackson, et al, perhaps by hearing them first in executive session before deciding whether to call them publicly. But it chose not to.

I certainly understand Blago’s decision to boycott his Illinois impeachment trial and instead flee to New York City to plead his case out TV talk shows. If Blago is indeed guilty, then he has nothing to lose. The State legislators will convict him anyways. And of he is innocent, then he preserves his rights for the better tribunal, a court of law, where he can avail himself of full legal rights. His presence before the illinois Senate would only lend legitimacy to a forum he claims is a stacked against him.

Maybe Blagojevich should have stepped down from office while his case was being heard so the State could function smoothy. But if he actually is innocent (and, again, he may be lying), what a terrible precedent that would be.

Blago is no fool. His handling of his appointment of Roland Burrus to the US Senate proves he is crazy as a fox. The Illinois Senate may impeach him and kick him out of office in the next few weeks, but that won’t end the story. If Blago goes kicking and screaming and protesting his innocence, then prepare yourselves for the huge book deal, the TV reality show, and the slew of revisionist literature that will surely clog the airwaves and bookstores pronouncing him a victim of prosecutorial abuse.

That’s what happens when you deny civil liberties, even to an apparent scoundrel like Blago.
Where is Clarence Darrow when we need him?

Awakening

February 17, 2008 at 4:12 pm | Posted in Alexander Lambert, Barack Obama, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, J. edgar hoover, John Adams, Joseph G. Cannon, Louis Brandeis, McCain, Nancy Pelosi | Leave a comment

Gasp!!! It’s been five months now since I last posted anything on this Blog. Is that pathetic, or what? Well, if you thought I was gone, you were wrong. I have not dropped off the face of the earth. You are not rid of me. I have decided to come back.

The truth be know, I have largely shelved my writing-historian life the past five months and happily returned to my first profession, practicing law. Yes, by day, I am a registered, card-carrying Washington lawyer-lobbyist. You can look it up. Here’s a link to my latest public report at OpenSecrets.Org: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobbyists/lobbyist.asp?txtname=Ackerman%2C+Kenneth&year=a&txttype=l ) The work has been interesting and productive and — no apologies here — it’s been lucrative too. Writers have to eat and pay bills, and I like to eat well. And a few months of hourly billings certainly helps.

But so much water has run under the bridge these past few months: Hillary, Obama, McCain, easily the most exciting Presidential sweepstakes in memory, not to mention the ongoing drama between George Bush’s last gasp White House and Nancy Pelosi’s stumbling Congress, and now the economy bumbling over, of all things, subprime mortgages. And that’s not even counting the New York Giants. What woeful, thrilling times we live in. How can a historian be silent?

Yet here I am, sitting silently all these months, a mere spectator. No, I haven’t given up being a fervid political junkie. I continue to read my three newspapers each day (the Washington Post, NY Times, and Roll Call). I listen to POTUS 08 on XM radio, check the DrudgeReport and other internet sites, and tune in pundits for hours on end. No excuses. I like it, and wouldn’t have it any other way. But every time I sit down to try and write a Blog post or an article, about politics, history, or anything else, I get distracted. Words dry up. I find other things needing attention. Writer’s block? Perhaps. But these blocks don’t come out of thin air.

Since my last book was published in May 2007 (Young J. Edgar: Hoover the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, 1919-1920), I admit that I’ve researched at least half a dozen good ideas for next topics, including possible narratives about figures as diverse as Emma Goldman, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, American socialist founder Eugene V. Debs, long-time autocratic House Speaker Joe Cannon, feminist pioneer Victoria Woodhull, John Adams and the Boston Tea Party, and even the adventures of a once-famous British ocean deep-sea diver from the 1880s named Alexander Lambert. All these ideas have great promise, real keepers. But here too, the writers block sets in. I find problem at every turn, and no path out of the forest.

So I’ve made a decision. To start writing again, I need to write. And be published. That’s the only way to beat writers block. And in this modern world of cyberspace, the way you do it is through a Blog. So here I am Blogging — and in this initial effort, I am Blogging in the worst stereotypical way: with a self-absorbed, nascissistic, whiney, inconclusive essay about nothing but myself. But I guess that’s how you start. It doesn’t become literature overnight.

So expect to see me posting more often on this space. What I’ll write about, what shape it will take, ony time will tell. But plan to spent time having Coffee with Ken. I am going into writer’s training. Any encouragement would be appreciated.

So that’s it from the home front. Hope you’ll put up with me in the meantime.

Thanks, and all the best. –KenA

Who on Earth let this happen?

August 5, 2007 at 10:22 pm | Posted in -- Civil Liberties, Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush, Sheila Jackson Lee | Leave a comment

In case anyone missed it, this past weekend, our United States Congress — led by Democrats, no less — caved in to pressure from the Bush White House and passed a bill essentially allowing Alberto Gonzalez, the most discredited Attorney General in our lifetimes, almost unilaterally to suspend the Bill of Right’s Fourth Amendment and allow warrantless surveillance of Americans by the NSA up to six months at a time, so long as a “significant purpose” of the intrusion involves obtaining foreign intelligence and the AG, Gonzalez, makes a finding that “reasonable procedures [are] in place” to determine that the intrusion involves “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.”

Make no mistake. This bill — already signed into law by President Bush as I write this on Sunday night — allows Bush to continue the worst abuses of the NSA secret surveillance program, continue to ignore oversight by any tribunal of law, and do it now under cover of a mealy-mouthed statute. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a link to the text of the bill, S. 1927, titled the Protect America Act of 2007: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:2:./temp/~c1105W4v7x:: Don’t take my word for it!! Read it yourselves!!

How did this happen? After all the talk and promises about protecting civil liberties? In the Senate, only 28 Democrats voted No on the proposal. That means all the rest caved in and went along for the ride — apparently intimidated by threats from the Bushites of being called unpatriotic or terrorist lovers so some such. And worst of all was the fact that the Democratic leadership agreed to bring up the bill at all — knowing they would lose the vote — in the final hours before leaving Washington on a month long August recess, rather than refusing and forcing the Bush White House to negotiate seriously for a responsible compromise that protects the country without sacrificing civil libeties — even if it meant that Senators and Congressmen might lose a few days at the beach, on a foreign trip, or back home. They had allowed the Bushites to out maneuver them, force them into a corner.

I hate to throw stones, but someone fell down on the job here.

For more details, here a link to the New York Times article on the story, posted by the Dandelion Salad blog. http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/house-passes-changes-in-eavesdropping-program-by-carl-hulse-and-edmund-l-andrews/
And here’s another link to an excellent speech on the subject by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tx), posted by the Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.0 blog: http://freddevan.com/wordpress/2007/08/05/rep-sheila-jackson-lee-d-tx-says-it-all-it%E2%80%99s-official-george-bush-and-alberto-gonzales-now-have-the-legal-authority-to-spy-on-you-and-i-without-a-warrant-at-any-time/
And here’s still another from the LeftWord blog (that mentions my book Young J. Edgar: http://leftword.blogdig.net/archives/articles/August2007/04/SENATE_DEMOCRATS_BEND_OVER__HAND_BUSH_THE_K_Y_AND_VOTE_FOR_WARRANTLESS_WIRETAPS_FOR_NO_REASON_OTHER_THAN_CRAVEN_COWARDICE.html

Please let me know if you think I’m overreacting or being unfair. I don’t think so.
Grumble grumble grumble. I need more cofffee.

From Washington Post Book World, June 24.

June 25, 2007 at 2:31 pm | Posted in FBI, J. edgar hoover, Ken Ackerman, Uncategorized, Young J. Edgar | Leave a comment

In Brief: Junior G-Man

Sunday, June 24, 2007; BW14

As Kenneth D. Ackerman explains in Young J. Edgar (Carroll & Graf, $28.95), the future FBI director first made his mark after the most dramatic outburst of terrorism to hit the United States before 9/11. On June 2, 1919, bombs went off in nine American cities, including Washington, D.C. In most cases, the target was the residence of a political figure or man of wealth. In Washington, it was the R Street house of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer; the house was badly damaged, anarchists were blamed, and Palmer pledged that “for the rest of his time in office, he would commit his Department of Justice to the singular task of tracking down and stopping this Red Menace.” He put his young assistant Hoover in charge.

Among the results of this campaign were the infamous Palmer Raids, which left their namesake, who had once entertained notions of succeeding Woodrow Wilson as president, so discredited that the man who got the Democratic nomination in his stead, James M. Cox, told Palmer not to campaign for him. Cox lost to Warren G. Harding anyway, but Hoover, in Ackerman’s words, “repackaged himself for the new regime.” His slickest maneuver was one that became a trademark: playing up the information to which his office made him privy. The new attorney general, Harry Daugherty, “became a convert” to Hoover’s view that the Red Menace had to be extirpated, and subsequent attorneys general, all the way up to Hoover’s death in 1972, fell into line. In Ackerman’s view, Hoover “was precisely the wrong person” for the job of leading this crusade: “Despite his clear genius for organization, Edgar lacked the other essential qualification for the job, the life experience and human context to appreciate the responsibility that came with power.”

Another J. Edgar Hoover?

June 16, 2007 at 4:15 pm | Posted in Albert Einstein, J. edgar hoover, Justice Department, Red Raids, War on Terror | Leave a comment

From this week’s LA Times (June 14, 2007)

The Red scare spawned the tyrannical FBI chief; will a similar homegrown villain emerge from the war on terror?

WHAT created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, until the day he died in 1972. By then, Hoover had evolved into an untouchable autocrat, a man who kept secret files on millions of Americans over the years and used them to blackmail presidents, senators and movie stars. He ordered burglaries, secret wiretaps or sabotage against anyone he personally considered subversive. His target list included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, even Eleanor Roosevelt.

Yet when Hoover showed up for his first day of work at the Department of Justice in June 1917, he was a bright 22-year-old, just out of law school. He still had boyish good looks and was cocky and driven. The country had just entered World War I, and Hoover had avoided the wartime draft. Instead, he was ready to help win the war at home, to save the country from spies and subversives.

What changed this young eager beaver into the crass, cynical tyrant of later years?

The fact is, Hoover learned his attitudes and worldview from teachers at the Justice Department during his early years there, when the country was going through a period much like today’s war on terror.

In March 1919, Hoover landed a dream assignment on the staff of new Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer just in time to participate in the first Red scare, in 1919-1920, and its signature outrage, the notorious Red Raids, also known as the Palmer Raids. For Hoover, it would shape his outlook for life.

On the night of June 2, 1919, bombs exploded in nine cities across the United States, leaving two people dead, including one of the bombers. One of these bombs destroyed Palmer’s Washington home, almost killing him, his wife and his teenage daughter.

These bombs capped months of escalating upheaval during which the country convinced itself that we sat on the verge of a Russian-style socialist revolution. The first Red scare came on the heels of multiple traumas: World War I, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Argentina. In the United States, the economy had collapsed, prompting waves of strikes, riots and political violence.

Americans vowed vengeance after the June 2 bombings, and the targeted Palmer pledged to crush the reign of terror. He ordered a massive preemptive strike, a nationwide roundup of radicals. To manage the operation, Palmer chose his talented new staff counsel, young J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover seized the opportunity. With Palmer’s blessing, he laid plans for a series of brutal raids across the country. Backed by local police and volunteer vigilantes, federal agents hit in dozens of cities and arrested more than 10,000 suspected communists and fellow travelers. They burst into homes, classrooms and meeting halls, seizing everyone in sight, breaking doors and heads with abandon. The agents ignored legal niceties such as search warrants or arrest warrants. They questioned suspects in secret, imposed prohibitive bail and kept them locked up for months in foul, overcrowded, makeshift prisons.

It turned out that virtually none of these prisoners had anything to do with violent radicalism. Nearly all were released without being charged with a crime. Palmer’s grand crackdown was one big exercise in guilt by association, based primarily on bogus fears of immigrants being connected to vilified radical groups such as the recently formed American Communist Party.

Still, Hoover relished his moment on the national stage. He appeared twice at Palmer’s side during congressional hearings, and he faced off against future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in a Boston courtroom in raid-related cases. Behind the scenes, Hoover demanded more arrests, higher bail and fewer rights for prisoners.

Ultimately, the public recoiled in disgust at the excesses and illegality of the raids, and Palmer saw his political career destroyed. But his young assistant fared much better.

Hoover never lost his anticommunist religion, nor his disdain for and distrust of “liberals” who defended “subversives” on grounds of free speech and civil liberties. He also never lost his sense of entitlement to bend the rules, either to protect the country or to protect himself.

Almost 90 years later, today’s war on terror exists in an echo chamber of the 1919 Red scare. The federal government demands more powers at the expense of individual rights: secret CIA prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, suspension of habeas corpus. Even the president openly claims powers that are beyond the reach of laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The same kinds of teachers who transformed the straight-laced, young Hoover in 1919 seem to be on the loose again in Washington. And that raises a troubling question: Are we today creating a whole new generation of young J. Edgar Hoovers, dedicated government agents learning the wrong lessons from the war on terror, who will stick around to haunt us for decades to come?

Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.