User:Bobanny/History of the FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a contentious history dating back to the early twentieth-century and with antecedents in the nineteenth century. Widespread distrust concerning the establishment of a federal or national police force in the United States and constitutional constraints slowed the development of the FBI compared with national police forces in other western countries. The failure of prohibition and the Red Scare however, stimulated the expansion of the FBI under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. During his long tenure as "The Director," Hoover and the FBI were a leading force in police reform and modernization, the expansion of federal law enforcement, and anti-radicalism. The FBI has been heavily criticized at various periods of its history, particularly in the 1970s with the Church Committee investigation that revealed the extensive use of extra-legal and even illegal tactics, notably against the New Left with its counter-intellegence program, COINTELPRO. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the role of the FBI has been again scrutinized, leading to further increases to its policing powers under the USA PATRIOT Act.

Origins
With the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1870, the federal government began to take on some law enforcement responsibilities, which had been primarily handled at the state and local levels. A $50,000 appropriation was made for the Department of Justice (DOJ) for “the detection and prosecution of crimes against the United States.” In practice, the DOJ used agents borrowed from the Treasury Department’s Secret Service, which had been established after the Civil War to combat counterfeiting. These agents were largely Pinkerton National Detective Agency detectives and were hired on a part-time basis. This makeshift system came to an end during an anti-trust investigation under the administration of Theodore Roosevelt into land fraud in the west, in which senators and congressmen were implicated. With the help of William J. Burns and his International Detective Agency, the prosecution in the subsequent trials stacked the jury with opponents of the Republican Party and used threats and intimidation to compel witnesses to give perjured testimony. The use of spies by the Roosevelt administration came under attack, and on May 27 1908, Congress amended the Sundry Civil Appropriation Act to prohibit the DOJ and other executive departments from using Secret Service operatives for spying in the course of criminal investigations. Roosevelt then directed Attorney General Charles Bonaparte to create a permanent investigative agency within the DOJ that would “report to no one except the Attorney General” and, following a heated debate with Congress, Bonaparte issued the order on July 26 1908. Bonaparte issued assurances that the role of the Bureau would be confined to interstate commerce and anti-trust enforcement. The next Attorney General in the administration of President William Taft, George W. Wickersham, christened the agency the Bureau of Investigation on March 4 1909. In 1932 it was renamed the United States Bureau of Investigation. The following year it was renamed again to the Division of Investigation after it was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition. Its final name, the FBI, was adopted in 1935.

Red Scare
In 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer appointed William J. Flynn, a former head of the Secret Service, as the new director of the Bureau of Investigation. At the same time, Palmer created the General Intelligence Division in the Justice Department, led by J. Edgar Hoover, who had been the head of the Department's program for compiling information on enemy aliens during the war. The move was inspired by a series of bombings, including one on the doorstep of Palmer's house. Flynn set out to extend Bureau investigations to include targets that were "of anarchistic and similiar classes, Bolshevism, and kindred agitation advocating change in sedition and revolution, bomb throwing, and similar activities." The federal statute on deportation was the only legal tool available for such a crackdown, so Flynn ordered that investigations should focus on immigrants. Nevertheless, US citizens were also to be targeted on the basis of securing evidence for deportation trials. Recent amendments to the immigration act deprived legal counsel for non-citizen suspects and extended the grounds for deportation to include membership in a revolutionary organization and advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. The result of the initiative was the infamous Palmer Raids on January 2 1920, in which 10,000 people in 33 cities were rounded up ostensibly for being members of the Communist Party or related organizations. In reality, many of those arrested were not mentioned in warrants and were "seized simply because they had attended lawful political or social functions that Hoover and his staff regarded as subversive." Although the raids were carried out in a climate of national hysteria over radicalism, the first "Red Scare," the warrantless and wholesale arrests, forced confessions, and absence of due process drew strong and high-level criticism of the strategy. Church groups, civil liberties organizations, academics, and members of the legal community spearheaded a movement in response to the Palmer Raids to restore the political freedoms that were restricted during wartime. At the helm was the National Popular Government League (NPGL); Hoover responded by having members of the NPGL investigated, as well as others who were critical of the Justice Department's campaign.