In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T E R S I X Surveillance Scandals and the Downfall of the Bureau of Investigation During the Harding administration, the AFL was embroiled in fights on all fronts, attacking Communists, the attorney general, and the ACLU. Behind the scenes, AFL leaders were colluding with the Bureau of Investigation. Poking around the offices of “professional patriots” such as the National Civic Federation and the American Defense Society, veteran journalist Sidney Howard figured out the connection. In a series of articles for the New Republic, published in August and September 1924, Howard charged that “the militant patriots were publicity agents for Mr. Burns,” the head of the federal Bureau of Investigation. Ralph Easley of the National Civic Foundation was the worst offender, according to Howard. Easley’s contacts with Burns “provided, one surmises, a convenient link between sworn enemies, Mr. Burns and Easley’s pal Sam Gompers; provided, too, a convenient source of A.F. of L. propaganda against renegade unions.” Howard’s explosive allegations threatened to expose the whole network of collusion between the AFL and the BI.1 By the time Howard’s articles came out, however, the relationship between the BI and the AFL had ended. Burns had been fired in the spring of 1924, replaced by a temporary director, J. Edgar Hoover, who promised to shut down the BI’s channels of communication with the professional patriots. Howard described a scandal that had already run its course. Roger Baldwin, whose lobbying against the BI’s “spy system” helped drive Burns from office, was delighted with the new BI director. The new bureau “meets every suggestion we could possibly make,” he told his colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union. The AFL’s confederate in the fight against Communism was gone. To the federation, it was just as well. Labor anticommunists had grown increasingly wary of the concentration of federal power in the Department of The Downfall of the Bureau of Investigation 101 Justice.The BI’s collusion had sometimes been helpful to the AFL, but Burns’s agents had attacked AFL unionists as well, and the potential for the BI to abuse its authority had been amply demonstrated. Moreover, the Communist threat to AFL leaders had subsided. Strategic missteps cost the party its closest labor allies and discredited Communist credibility with potential recruits . By the summer of 1924, labor leaders no longer needed the BI’s help. The AFL had come to agree with its old adversary, the ACLU: protecting civil liberties required restraints on federal police powers. Impeachment In September 1922, the huge railroad shopmen’s strike entered its second month. The shopmen built and maintained railcars, performing skilled work as blacksmiths, electricians, and the like. Over 400,000 shopmen struck all the nation’s major railroads after managers imposed wage cuts and company unions.The railroads refused to concede the shopmen’s demands for restored seniority rights on the strikers’ return to work. Instead they attempted to run the repair shops with strikebreakers. As railcars backed up in the repair shops and irate strikers ripped up track lines, train service slowed. Harding was desperate to end the strike. Burns warned that Communist agitators were behind the walkout, and he had good reason to think so. William Z. Foster had been active in the Railway Carmen’s union, and his TUEL had attracted many supporters of union amalgamation among the railroad unions, although few railroad workers knew of Foster’s Communist ties. BI agents tailed Foster on his TUEL speaking tours and reported that “Foster was gaining a foothold among all the radical unions in this country.”2 Attorney General Daugherty counseled a hard line against the strikers. On September 1, Daugherty traveled to the federal courthouse in Chicago, presided over by Judge James Wilkerson, appointed by Harding to the bench two weeks earlier. Wilkerson granted Daugherty a restraining order first. Then he issued a sweeping injunction that banned strikers from picketing, giving newspaper interviews, or holding meetings. It also enjoined them from interfering with road operations or strikebreakers and declared the strike itself an illegal act. It was the most dramatic judicial attack unions had ever seen.3 Unionists howled in fury. “To hell with the injunction,” said the president of the Railway Carmen. “Most outrageous!” Gompers said. “Mr. Daugherty may find he has stirred up a hornet’s nest.”4 In New York, a Machinists’ union officer called Daugherty “the most monumental ass who ever lived.” In September 1922, as...

Share