F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature by William J. Maxwell (review)

In F.B. Eyes, William J. Maxwell sets out to analyze the relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and African American writers over the span of more than five decades. Maxwell does an excellent job in thoroughly exploring FBI investigations of black writers and this unique writer–critic interplay.

Maxwell has organized his book into five chapters, each of which sets out to prove a thesis. Thesis 1 argues that the birth of the bureau and Hoover ensured the FBI’s attention to African American literature. Maxwell looks to Hoover’s racial background, with speculation on his black lineage, as well as his formative years in a racially exclusive environment. He then examines the coincident birth of the Harlem Renaissance and the creation of the FBI and Hoover’s efforts to compile and index writing by New Negroes, searching their publications for evidence of radicalism and sedition. Thesis 2 builds on this point by arguing that the FBI’s collection and analysis of black literature was important to the bureau’s evolution under Hoover’s leadership. Maxwell discusses the height of the investigation of black writers during World War II and how FBI agents imitated black radical writing—engaging in a form of minstrelsy—during the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) era (1956–1971).

Thesis 3 contends that the bureau is the most important forgotten critic of African American literature and examines the life and work of two FBI critic-spies, Robert Adger Bowen and William C. Sullivan. Maxwell shows how the bureau adopted New Critical reading, searching for multiple meanings and hidden assumptions in black literature, believing that it was meant to teach and convert its audience to radical activism. Thesis 4 turns its attention to FBI investigations of black writers in exile, translations of foreign-language material, and attempts to direct and restrict travel, arguing that Hoover’s agents were important in defining the Black Atlantic in the twentieth century. Finally, Thesis 5 looks at how black writers responded and asserts that their consciousness of bureau ghostreading created an important vein in African American literature. Maxwell discusses a number of authors, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, analyzing how the bureau and state surveillance were treated in their works.

Maxwell’s monograph represents another important contribution to our understanding of the importance of race in FBI history and the challenges writers and activists for racial justice faced from the state. However, it seems the author overestimates the impact these investigations had on African American writing and the evolution of the FBI. This is a point the author at times acknowledges, though it does not make its way into his larger theses. Even though the poem by Richard Wright from which the book draws its title imagines an omnipresent and omniscient bureau that can even see into dreams, the extent of bureau knowledge fell well short of that. The FBI agenda Maxwell terms “Total Literary Awareness” is acknowledged by the author to have holes and “was wholly realized hardly ever” (107). Later, Maxwell points out that there is no evidence that the bureau censored or stopped the printing of any book. Instead, he suggests there may have been self-censorship. The state was more engaged in “exploration than repression of the literary marketplace” (43), and Maxwell does caution that one should not credit the FBI “with super-supple powers they did not possess” (220).

Beyond that, it remains to be seen whether the bureau had a depth of contact that made it “an institution tightly knit to African American literature” (7) given that less than half of the noteworthy black authors were ever investigated by the FBI and fourteen of these files number less than one-hundred pages. It also seems difficult to make the case for these fifty-one investigations being fundamental to the FBI’s successful evolution, helping to build its clout with the executive and legislative branches, without a...