This Day in Criminal Justice History (Precursor to FBI Founded)

July 26, 1908—It is difficult to imagine the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) earlier than the appointment of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover in 1924, but in fact it came into being as part of a departmental reorganization and struggle with Congress in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt on this date.

Even when it was established, the Bureau of Investigation (as it was known then) sparked fears that it might lead to “secret services,” “black cabinets,” “and a network of spies and detectives. Does this mean its critics were prescient civil libertarians? Hardly.

The beef that these critics—mostly on Capitol Hill—had with the new agency related to matters such as federal vs. state authority, the necessity to keep up with new legislation and executive directors—and, most galling to Congressional grandees, executive branch investigations of members of the legislative branch over land fraud.

For years, the Department of Justice relied on Secret Service agents on loan from the Treasury Department for ad hoc investigations. President Roosevelt’s vigorous use of his office through new executive orders and revived enforcement of dormant statutes made this no longer possible.

Things came to a head in 1907 when the President appointed as Attorney-General Charles J. Bonaparte (yes, he was the grandnephew of that Bonaparte). The new A-G not only didn’t like the idea of continually importing new agents, but also of having little budgetary control over them.

At the same time, Congress became up in arms when T.R. and Bonaparte used their borrowed Secret Service agents in an investigation of an Oregon land fraud case that resulted in the conviction of a U.S. senator and congressman. (One of these agents, the flamboyant Irish-American detective William J. Burns, went on to become Hoover’s immediate predecessor at the Bureau.)

In the spring of 1908, Roosevelt tried behind-the-scenes persuasion with Speaker of the House Joe Cannon, urging him to delete a provision in an appropriations bill calling for an end to the Secret Service loan practice, noting that it would “materially interfere with the administration of justice and will benefit only one class of people—and that is the criminal class.” In further elaboration of his theme, Roosevelt added a comment that has continued to be trotted out by politicians since then when it comes to crime programs: “There is no more foolish outcry against this than ‘spies’; only criminals need fear our detectives.”

Despite media coverage noting about “land sharks” and “the tools of thieves,” the House of Representatives paid no heed to T.R., even though as President he was, in effect, the head of their party. With the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, Bonaparte would have to do without Secret Service agents.

Except that the A-G proceeded to pull an end-run around the House. On July 26, he ordered nine Secret Service agents hired under the old rules, 13 civil-rights investigators, and 12 “examiners” (who audited the accounts of U.S. attorneys, marshals and clerks) to investigate such areas as antitrust, peonage and land fraud—an agenda resonant with a Progressive agenda of reform. That fall, he slipped a reference into his annual report about the reorganization/expansion of the department. Hardly anybody noticed.

Nobody, that is, until his boss, T.R., made his feelings known about what had happened and why it was needed. In his annual message to Congress that December, he announced, “The chief argument in favor of the [Secret Service] amendment was that Congressman themselves did not wish to be investigated.” Their amour proper wounded, Congress gave the enormously popular but annoying (to them, anyway) T.R. a nice little shove as he left the White House by overwhelmingly rebuking him.

Nevertheless, the President had his detective force, and in time it had more than its share of action. The first significant expansion of its agenda came following passage of the Mann Act in 1910, which banned the transport of women across states for immoral purposes. But its greatest period of growth came under Hoover—who, ironically, was hailed at the time of his appointment for bringing scientific management—one of the promises of governments of the Progressive Era—to the Bureau.