The FBI in Peace and War

New and vigorous enforcement machinery accompanied this expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 asked Congress to create a federal detective force within the Department of Justice to enforce federal gambling and prostitution statutes. Congress refused to act, fearing, among other concerns, that its members would become subject to intimidation through investigation. Roosevelt, when Congress adjourned, created the new Bureau of Investigation (it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) by executive order. In 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named J. Edgar Hoover, a little-known bureaucrat, director of the bureau, and under his leadership it flourished. ²²

Hoover had a genuine gift for promoting the bureau by enhancing the federal role in police matters. He won a major victory in 1930 when Congress gave the bureau responsibility for administering the new Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). These yearly reports on criminal activity composed the first national crime records system. It suffered from serious flaws, most notably its emphasis on "crimes known to police" and the lack of auditing procedures so serious as to present "a distorted picture of criminal activity." ²³ Nonetheless, the UCR became the authoritative source of information on criminal activity for the next four decades, and through it the FBI called public and professional attention to the behavior of local police forces.

The FBI contributed to the professionalization of local police operations in other ways. It set a national standard for law enforcement officers by intensively training its own agents in the most modern police methods. In 1935, the bureau opened the National Police Academy training center, and since then tens of thousands of police officers have received training much beyond that provided by local forces. The bureau also gave great emphasis to scientific criminal detection, and the crime laboratory it opened in 1932 accepted samples of blood, cloth, and hair for analysis from throughout the country. The crime lab became the center of criminal identification through the use of fingerprints. This system had reached the United States in 1904, but the FBI in the early 1930s embarked on a campaign to collect and centralize as many fingerprints as possible. Between 1930 and 1974, the bureau gathered more than 158 million separate prints.

The bureau also reinforced the tendency in local police operations to rely on a military leadership structure. Police departments from throughout the nation copied the strong executive style of leadership Hoover exercised over the bureau. To be compared favorably with the FBI was for local police forces a high and much sought-after compliment. The military style laid heavy stress on weapons training, and "for the first time in their history the American police fully embraced a military mentality, complete with the ideology of a 'war' on crime and the weaponry to carry it out." ²⁴

The bureau also became deeply involved in dealing with matters of internal subversion. In 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the FBI to investigate various German-American groups. As in World War I, concern about "internal security" rationalized investigation and surveillance of suspect groups with ethnic and racial ties. Hoover correctly understood that the bureau's role in coordinating antiespionage and

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counterintelligence work would further enhance its reputation publicly and its power within the growing federal bureaucracy. The passage of the Smith Act in 1940 allowed the FBI to target Communists as well as Fascists. These intelligence gathering activities furthered the development of the national security state initiated during World War I.

The necessity of the bureau was beyond dispute, but Hoover badly abused the sensitive power entrusted to him. He developed extensive files on the personal lives of senators, congressmen, cabinet officers, and even presidents, exploiting them in ways that perpetuated his own control over the agency. Hoover became, as some members of Congress feared at the bureau's creation, an "institutional vigilante--a government within the government." ²⁵

The Bar and Pluralist Culture

As with the criminal justice system, the bar was also shaped by the social tensions associated with national security, nativism, and racism. Lawyers were at once part of the larger world of social and economic change and of a smaller subculture preoccupied with narrow professional concerns. The elite of the bar, through the ABA and state bar groups, pounded on the theme of reform, but their proposals had differing consequences depending on one's ethnic, racial, and economic standing. The organized bar, as the professional embodiment of the rule of law, also had a special responsibility to provide leadership when civil liberties and civil rights were under attack, a challenge that it seldom met. At the same time, other lawyers, animated by a strong sense of rights consciousness, attempted to deal with the new threats to individual liberty, carrying forth the tradition of moral and social change pioneered through the legal instrumentalism of the antislavery bar.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 650