1 DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER OF THE FB(P)I BLACKMAILER-IN-CHIEF 1905 The Department of Justice created a Bureau of Criminal Identification as a centralized reference collection for the fingerprints of American citizens.2 FBI The United States Military Academy had always been merely an engineering school. Late in this year, wrestling and boxing were added to its curriculum to satisfy President Theodore Roosevelt. The Point’s wrestling coach from 1906 until 1942 would be one-eyed Tom Jenkins, a former national champion from Cleveland whose motto was “There ain’t no hold that can’t be broke.” 1907 The Hoover vacuum cleaner and Maytag washer were introduced. 1. The Federal Bureau of Persecution through “Investigation.” 2. No standard would ever be developed as to precisely how many points of similarity a crime scene fingerprint needs to possess, in order to constitute “a positive match” with a fingerprint from this file. Some investigators would require 18 points of similarity, some as few as 8 — it appears that this has come to depend entirely upon how identified an individual investigator is, with the incarceration of the guilty as opposed to the freedom of the innocent, and with how apt that expert is at approximating an attitude of sincerity while on the witness stand. If, some fine day, someone accuses you of having been in a place where you have never been, and of having done something that you know you would never do, please do not take this personally — it’s just our system. HDT WHAT? INDEX DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER 1921 August 22, Monday: With the return of the country to “normalcy” under President Warren G. Harding, the federal Bureau of Investigation returned to its pre-WWI role of fighting the few federal crimes. The years until 1933 would be sometimes referred to as “the lawless years” due to the ill-advised Prohibition, which had made it illegal to sell or import intoxicating beverages, and due to the public disregard for this new Constitutional amendment — which had granted to gangsters a steady stream of income, and had granted to the federal government a continuous self-legitimation as “fighting the bad guys.” Because this ignoring of Prohibition amounted to an economic crime, it was the Department of the Treasury rather than the Department of Justice, that had jurisdiction. When the federal Bureau of Investigation, as part of the Department of Justice, went to investigate the economic activities of Al Capone, therefore, they would seek him as a “fugitive federal witness,” and when it very belatedly and reluctantly moved to control race lynchings sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan, it needed to resort to the Mann Act to take out Louisiana’s hot-blooded “Imperial Kleagle.” A new federal Bureau of Investigation Director, William J. Burns, who had previously run his own detective agency, would appoint a 26-year-old graduate of George Washington University Law School, J. Edgar Hoover, as Assistant Director. Hoover had been working at the Department of Justice since 1917, where he had made a name for himself as the head of the enemy alien operations of WWI and as the leader of the investigation of suspected anarchists and communists in the General Intelligence Division under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. FBI 2 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER (Jesus had tried in the Sermon on the Mount to advise us not to trust the agenda of “resisting evil,” a righteous cause, and we had, of course, ignored him. What J. Edgar was all about, of course, was the resisting of evil, a righteous cause — those evil enemy aliens among us, who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic anarchists who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic communists who needed to be persecuted, and homosexuals, and black-hearted men like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., et cetera ad infinitum. Who would have supposed at the time, that this former head of a private detective agency, in appointing this clean-cut, well-educated young man in a suit –a force for decency– was appointing someone who was going to disgrace our nation and get a federal building named after him?) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER 1924 May 10, Saturday: Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone selected J. Edgar Hoover to be Acting Director of the federal Bureau of Investigation, headquartered in Washington DC. When Hoover took over, the Bureau had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents who worked out of field offices in nine cities. By the end of the year, Hoover would be Director. By the end of the decade, there would be approximately 30 field offices, with Divisional headquarters in New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Kansas City, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Portland. (Jesus had tried in the Sermon on the Mount to advise us not to trust the agenda of “resisting evil,” a righteous cause, and we had, of course, ignored him. What J. Edgar was all about all along, of course, was the resisting of evil, a righteous cause — those evil enemy aliens among us, who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic anarchists who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic communists who needed to be persecuted, and homosexuals, and black-hearted men like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., et cetera ad infinitum. Who would have supposed at the time, that this former head of a private detective agency, in appointing this clean-cut, well-educated young man in a suit –a force for decency– was appointing someone who was going to disgrace our nation and get a federal building named after him?) FBI 4 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER May 21, Wednesday: In what will become one of the most celebrated crimes of the century, two teenagers from well- to-do families, Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr., 19, and Richard A. Loeb, 18, already college graduates, abducted 14-year-old Bobby Franks off a Chicago street and killed him, taking his body to a marshland where they poured hydrochloric acid over it and then stuffed it in a drainage pipe. Their intent was to commit the “perfect crime.” That evening they called the Franks family to inform them that their son had been kidnapped, demanding a ransom. May 22, Thursday: As Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb attempted to hatch their ransom scheme, the body of their victim Bobby Franks was discovered. Leopold’s glasses were found at the scene and the two were taken into custody by Chicago police. The Concerto for piano and winds by Igor Stravinsky was performed publicly for the initial time, at the Paris Opéra, with the composer himself at the keyboard. Although at the beginning of the largo movement conductor Serge Koussevitzky needed to hum the first few bars to the composer, who had forgotten them, the work was a triumphant success. 1928 January 1, Sunday: Director of the federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover established a formal training course for new Agents consisting of a 2-month initial assignment to the Washington Field Office, and indicated that only new Agents between 25 and 35 years of age would be hired. He returned to the earlier preference for Special Agents with law or accounting experience. FBI 1933 During this year 42 black Americans would be offed by white lynch mobs. The federal government, including the FBI, would do absolutely nothing about this because our president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a Democrat. It was an uneasy alliance between “liberal” Northern Democrats and “conservative” Southern Democrats that, election after election, would be keeping him in power. For him to support anti-lynching legislation would be for him to split his support base, which was made up in roughly equal parts of white Northerners who did not much care what was happening to black Americans down south, and white Southerners who cared not at all that bad things would occasionally happen to the “uppity” among their black neighbors. (How do we know this? –We know this because FDR himself clearly explained his situation to the NAACP’s Walter White: saving the lives of these black men would cost him more, in terms of support, than their lives were worth to him.) John R. Kellam attended a long lecture by the new Director of the federal Bureau of Investigation, later to become known as the FBI, named J. Edgar Hoover, and was for the time being suitably impressed: He was full of what a wonderful organization that was and he was seeing to it that it was increasing in efficiency and effectiveness, catching only the bad guys, only doing that when their evidence was straight and true and sufficient for “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER convictions. If you were innocent, you’d welcome the FBI coming to ask about anything. If you were guilty, you’d better not see the FBI. John would have occasion, later in life, to adjust this favorable first impression: All that good first impression was blown away in January 1945, during my own trial in Toledo federal district court without benefit of in-court counsel and representation, when two of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI operatives would easily resort to entirely unnecessary lies in order to “prove” all but one of my character witnesses wrong about my reasons for claiming to be a conscientious objector. 1936 May 24, Sunday: Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were notified that authority to investigate “foreign” associations inside the United States of America, to discover possible subversiveness, had been granted to Director J.