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F.B. Eyes
How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
By William J. Maxwell PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5206-2
CHAPTER 1
Thesis One
The Birth of the Bureau, Coupled with the Birth of J. Edgar Hoover, Ensured the FBI's Attention to African American Literature
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who added the "Federal" to the Bureau's name, managed and symbolized American state power for a longer term than any U.S. president. The photograph of this national bulwark on the jacket of J. Edgar Hoover on Communism (1969), one sequel to Hoover's anticommunist classic Masters of Deceit (1958), depicts a ruddy, graying, older man, stocky and tidy. He sits at the edge of a desk and balances an anonymous book on his right thigh, the red of the binding offsetting his neatly coordinated blue suit and tie. His face is dominated by the loose jaw, spatulate nose, and wide, baggy eyes that inspired his frequent caricature as a bulldog (see figure 1.1).
Yet for all its resonance, this familiar image of the sturdy, vigilantly literate Hoover, the Cold War icon who personified a watchful "Fourth Branch of Government," has blocked our view of the comparably significant young Hoover first hired by the Bureau's Radical Division in 1919. Then pictured as a "slender bundle of high-charged electric wire" (Vaile), this twenty-four-year-old Hoover embodied a clean-cut, streamlined, dynamically modernized shift in American police leadership. In shades of Nick Carraway, the true star of The Great Gatsby (1925), one Jazz Age newspaper feature cast him as a dead ringer for "an active young bond salesman" (qtd. in Hoover, Scrapbooks).
While the FBI was attracting some of its first headlines by chasing African American boxer Jack Johnson, an even younger John Edgar Hoover was earning the modern nickname "Speed" by delivering groceries in his native Washington, D.C., grinding out the grades that made him valedictorian of the Central High class of 1913, and drilling Company A in his school's corps of cadets. His zealous neatness, watertight memory for written detail, gift for steering conversations and agendas, and piercing staccato speech (perfect for the debate team but too rapid for stenographers, went the story) expedited success in all these lines (Gentry 65). A family photo from the period shows a three-quarter-profile view of Hoover in his cadet uniform, a white-gloved, stern-faced teenaged captain almost as thin as his ceremonial sword (see figure 1.2). Descended on his mother's side from Swiss mercenaries, he practiced a rapid military step even off the parade field.
Hoover's paramilitarized Bureau, its squad division designed with reference to the Central High cadets, gave no quarter to the thoughtfully hard-hitting New Negroes who followed Jack Johnson. Even so, the FBI's longest-serving director matured in thrall to parallel "martial technologies for racial becoming" (Gilroy, Against 233), disciplines of drill, uniform, and mass pageant suitable to rearm white American manhood for a new century of racial challenge at home and abroad. Hoover's cadet photo seems a world away from his portrait as an anticommunist heavyweight but ironically resembles the images of the young and restless New Negroes that so alarmed him at the FBI's Radical Division. There, pictures of dignified, soldierly, and sometimes armed black men printed in the Crisis, the D.C. Bee, and dozens of other African American papers were collected with dismay (see figure 1.3).
Supplanting the "Old Crowd Negro" Vanity Fair tunefully identified with "the Cotton-Picker, the Mammy Singer and the Darky Banjo-Player" ("Enter" 61), pugnacious New Crowd Negroes—the first avant-garde of the Harlem Renaissance—were urged to rehabilitate the face of the race through "education and physical action in self defense" (Randolph and Owen 74). W.E.B. Du Bois's 1919 editorial "Returning Soldiers" pushed the black veterans in the front ranks of the New Crowd to march for liberty even after leaving the killing fields of World War I. "Make way for Democracy!" Du Bois ventriloquized ("Returning Soldiers"). "We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why" (13). While Hoover spent the war years as a stateside employee of the Justice Department, and the Red Summer of 1919 as a foe of the African Americans who met vigilantes with bullets and invective, his highest ambition could have inhabited much the same language—language underlined, in fact, in an early FBI exposé protesting Du Bois's supposed encouragement of "radicalism and sedition" in the souls of black folk (U.S., Senate, Radicalism 1).
Part 1 of F.B. Eyes aims to add depth and detail to less-familiar portraits of Hoover as a young militant, and to establish the character of the also young law enforcement agency he joined in the wake of World War I. Starting with these two beginnings, one personal and one institutional, is not knee-jerk biographism, since together they opened the FBI's appointment with black letters. Explaining why Hoover and the Bureau began to pursue African American writing, this part of the book presents the first of its five theses: namely, The birth of the Bureau, coupled with the birth of J. Edgar Hoover, ensured the FBI's attention to African American literature. Section 1 recounts how the pre-Hoover Bureau emerged amid the social divisions of early twentieth-century America, and how it cultivated both literary publicity and public anti-New Negroism to whet an undivided national appetite for federal policing. Section 2 examines how the pre-Bureau Hoover managed his surprising familiarity with Afro-America—a familiarity possibly genetic as well as disciplinary in nature. Asking if Hoover was secretly blacker than Huck Finn, it turns out, promises more than idle race fiction. Section 3 establishes that with Hoover's hiring by the Bureau during the first Red Scare and the dawn of Harlem's cultural rebirth, the FBI's racial and literary preoccupations only deepened. Under Hoover's watch, the earliest Harlem Renaissance writing became the common passion of Bureau anti–New Negroism and "lit.-cop federalism," the latter defined below as the effort to inject a compelling federal police presence into the U.S. print public sphere. Among Hoover's many organizational coups, this is to say, was seizing on Afro-modernism to link the racial and literary means through which the FBI had sought nationwide public approval. Years before Hoover and his "Hoover boys" battled machine-gunning gangsters and entered the heroes' gallery of Depression America, they aimed to make a national public enemy of the Harlem Renaissance. In the process, they helped to modernize literary surveillance for the American Century.
The Bureau before Hoover
During Hoover's drawn-out administration, when the four Bureau heads that preceded him were virtually impossible to recall, the director received birthday greetings every July 26. The anniversary was not his, precisely, but the FBI's. On July 26, 1908, the year that also premiered the Model T and the Geiger counter, a thirty-four-person "Special Agent Force" was established as a permanent investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. Members of Congress, unaware that the Bureau's founding would mark a permanent increase in federal police power, foresaw enough to protest the imperial aura of "a general system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such as has prevailed in Russia, in France under the Empire, and at one time in Ireland" (Walter I. Smith). But Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, a grandnephew of the French emperor, relied on a congressional recess and an executive order from President Theodore Roosevelt to charge the proto-FBI with detecting and prosecuting a short list of federal crimes. A handful of postal, banking, and antitrust violations were placed under its watch, along with criminal acts against the national government. (By way of comparison, a full 3,300 offenses fell under Bureau jurisdiction by 2001 [Jeffreys-Jones 2].) Bonaparte and Roosevelt, the two fathers of invention in the executive branch, joined fellow Progressive reformers of their era in revering morality, efficiency, and managerial expertise, disdaining the constitutional niceties that threatened the president's reign over the national good. They pressed the Bureau's earliest bosses to reconcile the cool-headed administrative efficiency vital to President Roosevelt's Progressive reforms with a light American gloss on authoritarian Bonapartism—a synthesis perfected, with a twist, under Hoover's uniquely charismatic bureaucracy, part Progressive archetype in its standardization, professionalization, and quasi-scientific management, and part cult of anticommunist personality. Stanley W. Finch, the first head of the new force, fit Roosevelt and Bonaparte's bill by commanding his "brick agents," or street-level investigators, to wire itemized expense accounts directly to the Justice Department. Finch's successors were usually as demanding yet notably more flamboyant, supervisors of a Progressive corruption hunt not always cut out to embody Progressive standards of moral probity. Together, they cleared the way for the immersion in literature and the drive against black American dissent that stamped Hoover's tenure.
From Clemenceau to Sarkozy, French presidents and prime ministers have longed to fuse the man of government with the man of letters. Across the Atlantic, this desire more commonly infected chiefs of the federal police. Judging from library catalogs, the directors who led the Bureau through World War I and the early 1920s considered the hunt for literary fame a part of their job description. National law enforcement, they assumed, required tales of gallant crime fighting to justify itself to a relatively underpoliced country, one in which private political detectives such as the Pinkerton Agency exerted unusual influence and the hostile powers that united to defeat radical Reconstruction—southern Democrats and northern industry—greeted the twentieth century equally wary of federal investigation. Adapting the literary formula of Allan Pinkerton, whose illustrated history The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877) suspensefully advertised his labor spy business, early FBI leaders sought to transform the mutual advantages of high book sales, personal celebrity, and conservative political catechism into countrywide support for what was, in effect, America's national detective agency.
In 1919, New Yorker William J. Flynn took the reins of what was now called the "Bureau of Investigation," renamed the FBI proper in 1935. His humbly titled crime magazine, Flynn's Weekly, endeavored to close Pinkerton's sale of the credentialed professional detective and to polish Flynn's own reputation as America's top anarchist chaser–turned–top cop. Flynn's replacement, William J. Burns, was an ex–Secret Service operative and likeably crooked nightclub fixture whose wooden acting in the silent film The Exposure of the Land Swindlers (1913) did not stop the New York Times from reviewing him as the only detective of genius produced on American soil (Richard Gid Powers, Broken 123). When not playing the part of the virtuoso bloodhound, connecting with friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or facilitating the Justice Department's descent into the "Department of Easy Virtue," Burns found time to produce books such as The Masked War: The Story of a Peril That Threatened the United States by the Man Who Uncovered the Dynamite Conspirators and Sent Them to Jail (1913). A shelf of self-promoting follow-ups made true-crime renown into Bureau-building pulp. For Burns and Flynn, literary success was also a means of low-cost crime deterrence. Why cross the government man who always gets his anarchist? their readers were coached to ask. As Richard Gid Powers suggests, Hoover's own nonfiction, initially just at home in True Detective Mysteries as in Masters of Deceit, could draw from an old Bureau recipe for turning Pinkerton-style marketing to public account (Broken 44).
The young FBI's attitude to non-Bureau authorship, meanwhile, was less indulgent. In February 1911, fewer than three years after its founding, the Bureau opened its first two files on civilian literary perpetrators. In one of them, the Justice Department confronted American modernism's transatlantic high in the person of Ezra Pound. "This bureau has been advised that Dr. Ezra Pound ... left the United States in February 1911 and proceeded to Rapallo, Italy," reports the file's first entry (qtd. in Robins 32). Between Finch's directorship and Hoover's death, the documentation of Pound's geographic and political migrations swelled to a Cantos-sized 1,512 pages. In its other earliest literary file, the Bureau acknowledged American modernism's socialist front in the form of the Masses, the magazine "of outstanding liberals and radicals" founded the same month as Pound's departure for Rapallo (qtd. in Robins 34). Agents underlined the presence of John Reed in the editorial mix, zeroing in on the author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), a classic eyewitness sketch of the Russian Revolution whose notes they briefly seized in 1918. Pound and Reed, the latter an actual Soviet secret agent, were each suspected of treasonous behavior that exceeded his literary bad manners. The traffic they inspired at FBI headquarters nonetheless reveals the Bureau's concern, in advance of the formal "Publication Section" created in 1920, that radical enemies also recognized the links among law, letters, and ideas of justice. A broad-minded spectator of literary modernism under construction, the Bureau anticipated the new modernist studies of twenty-first-century English departments in regarding Pound and Reed's diverging roads as equally iconoclastic.
It was not until Hoover's employment in 1919 that the FBI acknowledged African American literary modernism as such. Yet the Bureau's encounter with New Negro combativeness, this modernism's starter fuel, can be dated from what is sometimes called the FBI's first great case. In 1912, Chicago police did what a posse of Great White Hopes could not and overcame African American boxer Jack Johnson, crowned the first black heavyweight champion of the world the year the Bureau was founded. A Texan with a patient uppercut and a "golden smile," Johnson had a talent for punishment that led African Americans to consider the physical inferiority of the Caucasian. In the opposite corner, novelist Jack London forgot the best of his socialism long enough to vow that the "White Man must be rescued" (4). For his part, Johnson was not always enchanted by his role as a racial symbol, agonizing over the near-riots that shadowed his victories over white opponents. But he lacked all hesitation when defying those who invoked white supremacy to condemn his freewheeling love life. "I am not a slave and ... I have the right to choose who my mate shall be without the dictation of any man," he insisted (qtd. in Ward 310). Johnson's most galling social crime—enthusiastically consensual relations with an overlapping series of white wives and girlfriend "sports"—was technically not a federal offense. Chicago-based FBI agents were eager to accompany city cops in collecting evidence against him, however, once the local district attorney invoked the Mann Act, a 1910 law elevating interstate trade for the purpose of prostitution into a federal felony. As noted by intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, the act's official title, the White Slave Traffic Act, "told its own story" (6), divulging a textbook case of ideological inversion, the world of American racial slavery turned upside down. "All of the horrors which have ever been urged, either truthfully or fancifully, against the black-slave traffic," pledged the law's author, Illinois representative James Mann, "pale into insignificance as compared to the horrors of the so-called 'white slave traffic'" (Mann).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from F.B. Eyes by William J. Maxwell. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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