Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars

5. Secrecy and Surveillance: Anticommunism and the Bureau of Investigation

C H A P T E R F I V E Secrecy and Surveillance Anticommunism and the Bureau of Investigation Official Washington was laughing at Samuel Gompers. His stature in the nation’s capital, so dizzyingly elevated during the war, when President Wilson solicited his advice on matters foreign and domestic, had plunged. Republicans swept the 1920 elections, sending Ohio banker Warren G. Harding to the White House. A humiliating skit at a Gridiron Club dinner showed Gompers’s reduced circumstance. A seer, gazing into a crystal ball, divined Gompers returning the White House key to Harding. Harding sent it back with a note: “May I not, my dear Mr. Gompers, ask you to keep this key as souvenir. I have changed the lock.”1 The AFL’s demotion was underlined in late July 1921. Gompers got a phone call from Harry M. Daugherty, the new attorney general, inviting him to an urgent meeting at the Justice Department. Gompers caught a cab and arrived at Daugherty’s office within twenty minutes. Daugherty greeted him “cordially ” then told Gompers that he intended to name detectiveWilliam J. Burns to head the Bureau of Investigation, because “he knew Burns and thought well of him.” “It would be a public scandal and would bring discredit to the department and to the Government of the United States if any such man was appointed to such a post,” Gompers retorted. Burns was a sworn enemy and strikebreaker who had once called Gompers a “bunko man who has been deceiving his followers for years.”2 To even consider appointing Burns to head the BI was an open insult from the new administration. But Gompers needed Burns and the BI. As it turned out, Burns had been keeping an eye on the international Communist movement.William Z. Foster was on his way back from Moscow, and his Trade Union Educational League was about to throw the American labor movement into new turmoil. Foster’s 82 Becoming Commonsense Anticommunists Communist members worked hard to follow Lenin’s instructions and infiltrate AFL unions, which drove federation leaders mad and sparked a campaign to purge Communist organizers. Figuring out exactly who was a Communist and who was merely a radical unionist was not easy, though, especially as the TUEL embraced popular labor-reform issues. By collaborating with the BI, AFL leaders could corroborate their suspicions. In the early 1920s, labor anticommunism matured from antipathy to ideology . Conservative labor leaders bound their critique of Soviet Russia to attacks on domestic Communist radicals, and, increasingly, they collaborated with a new network of antiradical crusaders outside of the labor movement. But even at the height of anticommunist purges, labor anticommunists took care to substantiate their attacks on Communist organizers. Under William J. Burns, the Bureau of Investigation showed less care in investigating radicals, often indiscriminately labeling strikers and protestors as Reds. Burns operated the bureau as an extension of his private detective agency, deploying federal agents on cases with dubious legality. During Burns’s tenure, civil libertarians became increasingly aware that political freedom could be imperiled by unregulated federal police. The AFL under Siege Everything was going wrong for Gompers in the summer of 1921. The Republican electoral sweep and postwar retrenchment the previous November had pushed labor back to the sidelines. President Harding named William Howard Taft, a longtime AFL adversary, to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Taft Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions rolling back Wilson-era legislative gains, including union immunity from antitrust prosecution. Taft’s court invalidated the Clayton Act’s labor provisions, and the court also struck down state laws forbidding labor injunctions. Alert to the changing climate, employers across the country lined up for a massive open-shop onslaught. Between 1920 and 1923, AFL membership fell from 4 million to less than 3 million, a 25 percent decline that wiped out most of the wartime membership increase.3 At the 1921 AFL convention in June, a bloc of unions fed up with Gompers’s leadership caucused to challenge him for the federation presidency. Since the armistice, the AFL’s steadfast conservatism seemed increasingly antiquated to many unionists, and so did Gompers. As his opponents charged, “he is reactionary and he is slipping.”4 An early sign of restiveness came in 1920, when the AFL convention overwhelmingly overrode the executive council’s recom- Secrecy and Surveillance 83 mendation to endorse...