Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars

7. Commonsense Anticommunism and Civil Liberties

C H A P T E R S E V E N Commonsense Anticommunism and Civil Liberties J. Edgar Hoover was in a delicate spot. Since his appointment as director of the federal Bureau of Investigation in 1924, Hoover had worked hard to rehabilitate the BI’s reputation. Under his predecessors, the BI had swelled into a loosely supervised force of freelance agents for hire, skilled in political skullduggery and labor espionage. Charged with cleaning up the corruption, Hoover fired crooked agents and shut down the BI’s political policing operations while beefing up the bureau’s crime-fighting forces. Enforcing federal law, not chasing radicals, became the BI’s policy. Now, in the spring of 1927, Ralph Easley was trying to undo Hoover’s work. Easley had been a regular patron of the old BI, relying on its intelligence as political capital, and he badly wanted the BI to resume tracking Communists and radicals. Easley proposed to engineer a change in the language of the BI’s congressional budget appropriation to create a back-door authorization for countersubversive surveillance. Hoover prepared a carefully worded letter, marked “personal and confidential ,” to explain his view on the matter “personally, not in my official capacity.” Not only did he doubt “the practicability of accomplishing such a change,” Hoover wrote, “I am in fact doubtful as to its desirability.” It was the process that was the problem. “If there is a radical menace existing in this country, and the American people feel that it should be handled by the Federal authorities, then through their properly elected spokesmen in Congress they should seek specific legislation for that purpose.” Hoover intended to protect his BI’s new bureaucratic autonomy from the antiradical clientele who had conspired with the BI in past scandals. The BI would “vigorously enforce 122 From Commonsense Anticommunism to Red-baiting any legislation enacted by Congress,” Hoover said. Groups such as Easley’s NCF, he made clear, would no longer call the shots.1 Easley’s appropriations gambit failed, but he did not give up on the effort. Through the mid-1930s the NCF agitated for the BI to resume political policing and, in 1930, helped mount a special congressional inquiry into the matter . These efforts failed. After the first Red Scare subsided and the Teapot Dome scandal wiped out the BI’s remaining political investigative units, professional patriots such as Easley lost the capacity to marshal federal raids on radicals. Moreover, Easley’s NCF had also lost the support of labor conservatives, who no longer supported his campaign to resurrect the old freewheeling Bureau of Investigation. Now labor conservatives articulated a commonsense anticommunism, based on a practical assessment of the revolutionary potential of the American Communist Party. As AFL president William Green explained of American Communism in 1930, “At the present time I do not regard it as of a serious nature or of a serious character.” The federation had demonstrated its ability to police itself. This level-headed view, based on unionists’ experience with actual Communists, differed from the wild “counter-subversive imagination” of people such as Ralph Easley. Armchair anticommunists like Easley favored muscular federal intervention to contain the vast red conspiracy they conjured. Through the late 1930s, the AFL’s voluntarist approach to containing Communism helped foil federal policing of political radicals. The fervor of labor anticommunism had not diminished, and AFL leaders fiercely attacked whenever Communists reared their heads inside AFL unions. Increasingly, Communist sectarianism and Stalinist orthodoxy turned oncetolerant socialist and liberal union leaders into anticommunist allies of labor conservatives. The ACLU, meanwhile, moved closer to the party. ACLU director Roger Baldwin became an ardent defender of Soviet Russia and American Communists, often to the dismay of fellow ACLU leaders. The ACLU and the AFL were uneasy allies, but their shared stance on civil liberties helped preserve newly won civil liberties from attack. G-Men When Attorney General Harlan F. Stone ordered the BI to cease political policing , Hoover shut down the bureau’s antiradical division, reassigned its officers , and adopted the ACLU’s interpretation of federal law. Ralph Easley was startled to find out about the BI’s reorganization. In May 1925, Easley had re- Commonsense Anticommunism and Civil Liberties 123 quested that the BI send an agent over to the AFL headquarters to brief staffer Hugh Frayne. The BI refused. As Easley explained to Frayne: “The Department of Justice has suspended all...