The FBI Figures Things Out

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re taking a look at personal data collection– when Americans embrace it and when they hate it.

ED: One of the people who famously embraced data collection in the early 20th century was a young Department of Justice lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover.

In 1919, at the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed head of a brand new department within the Bureau of Investigation– the Radical Division.

BRIAN: Historian Beverly Gage is writing a biography of Hoover. I sat down with her recently to ask, why Hoover? What qualified this 24-year-old to take over the government surveillance of radicals?

BEVERLY GAGE: One of the things that actually made Hoover so appealing for this job was not only that he had worked in the Justice Department looking at enemy alien issues, but before that, he had earned his way through law school working at the Library of Congress.

And we don’t often think of this as being terribly revolutionary, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, libraries were devising all of these new ways of classifying information, of figuring out how to get people the books they wanted, as there are more and more and more books being printed.

BRIAN: Hey, the Dewey Decimal System. When did that start?

BEVERLY GAGE: Right. That started in the late 19th century, as did the Library of Congress System. And these are, still, in many libraries, the two main ways of classifying books.

And so when Hoover was at the Library of Congress, they were just in the process of kind of finishing this massive, massive cataloging task. So Hoover had certain skills as a lawyer, but his real skills and the thing that made him valuable was that he knew how to manage and classify information.

Because when he stepped into the Bureau, the way that he describes it, they had been kind of keeping tabs on people during the first World War, but it was all really, really disorganized.

So if you wanted some report that had come in on someone, it would take hours and hours and hours, and you’d just be going through these stacks of information. And well Hoover does is he actually systematizes that.

And the first thing that he does when he arrives is saying, we are setting up an index card system to keep track of political radicals in the United States. And that’s his first big innovation and the thing that kind of makes his name within the Bureau.

BRIAN: So what did he have on those index cards– I assume that there was an index card on individuals– that was the basic organizing principle. And what would be on the card?

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, what would happen basically was that you would have investigators out in the field and they might be undercover investigators, they might be agents of the Bureau, and they would go to a meeting or they would get a tip from someone, and they would write up a report.

And Hoover said, OK, copies of this report are going to come in here, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to figure out how we can file that report so that we can get it the moment we need it.

So he had a whole staff of people who would sit down, read through each report, and set up these index cards. So if a person’s name is mentioned in this report, the number of the report goes on that person’s index card. If there’s a particular organization mentioned there, that organization has an index card and the name of that file or the number of that file goes on that index card.

BRIAN: I see.

BEVERLY GAGE: Same thing for places, same thing for ideas. And this seems ridiculously straightforward to us, and seems like– in the age of Google, oh my gosh, how many meticulous and laborious is that? But, in fact, it was this kind of technological marvel in its moment.

BRIAN: Can you cite any breakthroughs or big busts that came as a result of his filing system? Did he cite any?

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, the funny thing is that though this is his great claim to fame, his first attempts to really do something big with this on a massive scale actually turns out to be quite a disaster.

So Hoover comes in to the Radical Division in August of 1919. As I said, he’s 24 years old. He’s very confident about his filing system. And it’s already floating through the Justice Department that what they’re going to do with all of this new information is begin a campaign of deportation against radical non-citizens– so mostly at this point anarchists and communists.

Add Hoover is basically put in charge of that effort. And so a few months into his tenure at the Radical Division, we have the first of what are known as the Palmer Raids. And those are raids on a group called the Union of Russian Workers– an anarchist organization.

And so they conduct this first round of raids in November, the second much bigger round of raids against the brand new communist parties in January of 1920. And these are massive informational enterprises, because it requires figuring out where all of these meetings are happening, getting thousands of warrants for people, and then going in and sweeping them all up.

But as it turns, the information is not so well organized. There are all sorts of people for whom they don’t have warrants. They’re sweeping up citizens and non-citizens.

And so the first attempt really to use in this kind of grand dramatic way is actually something of a failure, and has gone down as one of the great civil liberties violations in American history.

BRIAN: I’m assuming that didn’t deter Hoover’s confidence in his system.

BEVERLY GAGE: It did not deter Hoover’s confidence in his filing system, which he was very confident about for a very long time. It did, actually, teach him a lesson that a lot of this probably ought to be done, first of all, more secretly. The Palmer raids were very, very public.

And he didn’t also want the law too well defined. He wanted to be able to kind of operates in a kind of gray area where it was going to be up to the intelligence agencies, up to the intelligence establishment and up to him, in particular, to decide what was proper and what was necessary.

BRIAN: How long did the card filing system last in what became the FBI? Did it make it to the FBI in the ’30s? Did it make it beyond?

BEVERLY GAGE: Oh, yes. It made it well beyond. Hoover became actually finally director of the Bureau in 1924. And he died there, still as director of the Bureau, in 1972. And for most of that period, the card system went through some evolution, but it was the basic way that the FBI conducted its filing system.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, they were beginning to engage computer systems. But this was the basics.

BRIAN: I think they’re still beginning to engage computer systems at these–

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, exactly. These bureaucracies move slowly, and especially under J. Edgar Hoover, he has his ideas, and they stayed pretty consistent most of his life.

BRIAN: Beverly Gage in an historian at Yale University. Her forthcoming biography of J. Edgar Hoover is called G-Man.