THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AND THE LIMITS OF THE NEW DEAL STATE, 1933-1945 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Maria Ponomarenko December 2010 © 2011 by Maria Ponomarenko. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ms252by4094 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. David Kennedy, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Richard White, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Mariano-Florentino Cuellar Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Acknowledgements My principal thanks go to my adviser, David M. Kennedy. On my first day at Stanford, David informed me that I would be writing not a dissertation but a book – a prospect I found daunting, to say the least. I quickly came to appreciate that his high expectations reflected an underlying conviction that his students would eventually prove equal to the task. He championed this project from the beginning. Throughout, he was unfailingly supportive and generous with his time. Richard White consistently urged me to revisit my assumptions and to think far more broadly than I otherwise would have. An exemplary mentor and scholar, he set the standard toward which I will continue to aspire. Tino Cuellar provided indispensable advice at the early stages of the project, and generously agreed to step in as a third reader. The faculty and graduate student attendees of the United States History Workshop offered invaluable comments and suggestions on several draft chapters. I am likewise grateful for the support I have received over the years from Caroline Winterer, Lawrence Friedman, Jack Rakove, and Barton Bernstein. I have benefited from the financial assistance of several institutions during my years of study. The Stanford Department of History financed my graduate education, provided a generous stipend, and extended several timely travel grants. The Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library helped defray the cost of my many trips to Washington, D.C. and Hyde Park, NY. I spent an idyllic year writing my dissertation at the Stanford Humanities Center, which provided a vibrant intellectual atmosphere, a cozy office from which to work, and delicious daily lunches (especially Indian Mondays). Finally, the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney allowed me to spend the first three months of my postdoctoral iv fellowship completing this dissertation. I cannot think of a better place to have worked on revising the final draft. In the course of my research, I have worked with a wonderful group of archivists at the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, the Roosevelt Library, the American Heritage Center, and the National Archives. I am particularly grateful to Stephen Underhill, Gene Morris, and Edward Barnes at the National Archives in College Park, who helped me clear numerous bureaucratic hurdles and navigate the often perplexing filing system employed by the Justice Department and the FBI. Friends, office mates, and fellow students shared in the ups and downs of graduate school. As fellow TAs, Noah Millstone, Brad Bouley, and Dan Kupfert Heller helped alleviate many of the anxieties of first-time teaching. My colleagues at the Humanities Center – particularly Hanna Janiszewska, Vince Tomasso, Lael Weis, and Nicholas Guyatt – were a terrific source of friendship and support. Kathryn Ward helped distract me from this project with long and winding talks over coffee or tea. Devora Davis ensured that even in my busiest quarters I would emerge twice monthly from behind the stacks of books for lunch and conversation. She and her lovely family justified many a day off spent baking a cheesecake, eating a cheesecake, and playing Trivial Pursuit. My parents, to whom this project is dedicated, were a constant source of encouragement and support. Both software engineers, they only gently protested my decision to abandon computer science and major in history instead. They celebrated each of my accomplishments, and came to the rescue when my cavalier optimism proved v unfounded (when poor planning and bad weather threatened to unravel my research trip plans; or when my boisterous new puppy refused to bond with my cynophobic cat). Daniel Weitzenfeld – my husband, best friend, and partner in crime – did more than anyone to ensure that this project would at some point come to an end. He rarely grumbled as I worked through weekends, cancelled plans, and disappeared to Washington for weeks at a time. Though he shares little of my enthusiasm for the Roosevelt Era Department of Justice, he accepted his role as sounding board with few complaints. He seemed always to know when to listen, when to jump in with advice, and when to distract me from my obsessive ruminations with a strong gin and tonic or a “pack walk” with our Chihuahua. I really can’t thank him enough. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS: Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 PART I: Chapter 1: Hollywood on Trial: The Antitrust Division 11 and the Paramount Suit Chapter 2: Righting Labor’s Wrongs: Jurisdictional Disputes 75 and the Antimonopoly Ideal PART II: Chapter 3: Forging a National Police: Law Enforcement 129 Cooperation under Hoover’s FBI Chapter 4: Federal Prison Policy and the Limits of 185 Administrative Reform Chapter 5: Lawlessness in Law Enforcement: Federal 239 Investigations of Police Brutality Conclusion 302 Guide to Abbreviations 307 Bibliography 308 vii Introduction On February 23, 1933, using a trowel crafted from the wood and copper nails of the U.S.S. Constitution, outgoing President Herbert Clark Hoover laid the cornerstone for a sprawling edifice to house the United States Department of Justice. With nine days to go before the inauguration, Hoover could execute little more than the ceremonial functions of his lame-duck presidency. Even on this occasion, as he stood surrounded by an aging corps of Republican jurists and statesmen, it was evident that Hoover’s time had passed. While Hoover spoke in vague terms of law as “the foundation stone of organized society,” he remained deeply conflicted about its use as a tool of statecraft. Voluntarism – the very antithesis of law – had been the departing president’s creed. Hoover, writes Arthur Schlesinger, “did not see law as the means by which a community establishes equitable standards. He saw law as an invitation to the demon state to regiment the economy and crush individual freedom.”1 In his brief remarks delivered at the groundbreaking, Attorney General William Mitchell lamented the expansion of the national government epitomized by the immense structure now needed to accommodate his Department of Justice. He cautioned that “if the time comes when this new home…is outgrown, it will mean that local self-government and local initiative have been subverted.”2 It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and by extension, Roosevelt’s Department of Justice, who would more fully embrace the coercive dimensions of federal power in confronting the economic crisis of the Great Depression. At the dedication ceremony for the completed building the following year, Attorney General Homer Cummings too cast 1 Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (New York: Mariner Books, 1999, rev. ed.), 379. 2 William Mitchell, quoted in “Hoover Stresses Law Enforcement,” New York Times, February 24, 1933, 15. 1 the edifice as a visual symbol of institutional growth. He traced the history of the Attorney General’s office from its humble beginnings in the days of William Randolph – the “forgotten man” of the executive branch, “expected to furnish his own quarters, fuel, stationery, and clerk” – through 1870 when Congress, under pressures of war and Reconstruction, established a Department of Justice to oversee the nation’s legal affairs. Since that time, Cummings observed, the Department had grown in fits and starts but it remained “a governmental wanderer, with no local habitation of its own.”3 It was with “keen delight” that he welcomed the Justice Department to its permanent home. Echoing the substance, but not the tone, of Mitchell’s remarks, he observed that one “can easily visualize the growth and size of the Department by merely looking at this handsome and imposing structure.”4 Cummings had, in the words of one historian, “a ferocious appetite for bureaucratic power.” He possessed few of Mitchell’s misgivings about its use. As Attorney General, he initiated a campaign of “relentless bureaucratic imperialism” which established a department truly deserving of its 1.2 million-square-foot structure on Pennsylvania Avenue.5 Hoover may have laid the cornerstone for the Justice Department’s headquarters, but it was Cummings and his successors who ultimately shaped the character of the institution the building would house. This dissertation traces the history of the Department of Justice from the first days of the Roosevelt administration through the final days of World War II.6 While on one 3 Carl Brent Swisher, ed., Selected Papers of Homer Cummings, Attorney General of the United States 1933-1939 (New York: C.