Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)


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Bureau of Letters: Literary Federalism, the Hoover Raids, and the New Negro Renaissance / William J. Maxwell

 

Abstract: Examining J. Edgar Hoover's career as a literary federalist before he assumed the FBI directorship in 1924, "Bureau of Letters" traces the unexpected origins of the FBI's constitutive fascination with African-American modernism.


<1> "Wanted. A servant at 413 Seward Square": so reads an item in J. Edgar Hoover's earliest surviving literary production, an edition of a two-page neighborhood newspaper from 1906 that the future FBI director, then eleven years old, reported and published on his own (qtd. in Powers 20). Apart from demonstrating that Annie, Hoover's mother and hell on cooks, found it harder to keep good help than her son, "The Weekly Review" hints at several of Hoover's lasting rhetorical preferences. These include the proverbial saw ("Where there is a will, there is a way"); the prescriptive guide to better health and blameless appearance ("Eat slowly. Don't eat adulterated food. Don't eat too much. Don't eat between meals. Clean your teeth."); and the case study of disaster bravely averted ("Escaped from death. On Friday, about 12:15 o'clock, Mrs. Hoover, of 413 Seward Square. S.E. came near to losing her life. She was frying some eggs for lunch, and the blaze caught to her back . . . .") (qtd. in Powers 20). From the perspective of the subject of this essay, the origins of the FBI's long entanglement with Afro-modernist literature, the most revealing item arrives at the end of a feature on the bicentennial of Benjamin Franklin, the American thinker-tinker whose Autobiography (1793) shines through Hoover's maxims on the virtues of will and steady chewing. "Franklin's two-hundredth anniversary was celebrated on Wednesday last," notes the director-to-be, "At the Library [of Congress] there were books which he has printed, papers written by him, and the Declaration of Independence, signed by him" (qtd. in Powers 21). Both the Franklinian ideal of full-spectrum textual governance and the archival muscle that exhibited it deeply impressed Hoover's literary education, and molded the operation of his FBI, where he served as critic-in-chief from 1919 to 1972, not purely coincidentally the years from the dawning of the Harlem Renaissance to the height of the Black Arts movement's "Renaissance II." Within Hoover's document-squirreling bureaucracy, the last word of the director's signature was preceded by binding marginalia in distinctive blue ink and augmented by a torrent of scripts, books, files, leaflets, manuals, articles, index cards, press releases, top-secret reports, and mass-market hype vetted, bylined, or authored under Hoover's watch. Redrafted by Hoover, the traditional model of the FBI writer-director mushroomed into a thoroughgoing literarization, strategic and obsessive, of federal police administration.

<2> Had Hoover's schedule as FBI director allowed him to supervise the physical printing of the Bureau's various publications, he might have leaped at this literary task as well. "The Weekly Review" was run off by young Hoover himself, probably on the government-issued letterpress of the Steamboat Inspection Service, where his brother Dick built his own small kingdom in the state bureaucracy (Powers 20). Hoover's father, showing the way, had followed his male parent into the print shop of the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey (USCGS), and prepared for his managerial job by making plates for nautical charts. FBI scholars have relished speculating on the consequences of Hoover's upbringing in a patriarchal culture of cartography. Literary critic William Beverly is most inventive in claiming that the scientific national land survey that preoccupied the USCGS during the last decades of the nineteenth century provided a roadmap for the FBI's federalization of crime fighting. To Beverly's mind, the USCGS's transcontinental project ensured that "the unification and scientific refinement of regional representations into national maps [became] the family business" of Hoover men, a "tradition of "suturing . . . the nation's space" passed down through three generations (33). When a male Hoover graduated from removing local cartographic tics to eradicating interstate crime, his "effort to federalize police communication and surveillance" naturally "applied the nationalizing and mapping principles of his forefathers' work with the USCGS laterally to another medium" (33). The notion of a lateral pass from uniform USCGS national plans to uniform FBI national crime reports is not implausible; in the parallel case of Soviet intelligence, the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) thought it prudent to ingest the entire national map business (Postnikov 248). Yet the largest inheritance the USCGS left the Bureau was probably less abstract. Corroborating Franklin's self-publishing example, Hoover's print-shop legacy encouraged him to oversee Bureau representations at plate level, meddling everywhere from conception to consumption. Good press, the family business advised, belonged to those who effectively operated one.

<3> Guidelines for managing the publications of Bureau foes, meanwhile, emerged from another federal paper mill, the Library of Congress, where Hoover first saw Franklin's documents and worked for tuition money while studying law at George Washington University. In October 1913, Hoover was hired as a junior messenger, filling the Library's lowliest position to the tune of just $30 a month. When he left the Library in July 1917, he was taking home twice this salary and tipped as a curatorial star in the making (Powers 39-40). "I'm sure he would be the chief librarian if he'd stayed with us," a well-placed coworker later remarked (qtd. in Gentry 67). Over the four years in which Hoover discovered his talent for bibliography, the Library was pushed past the million-volume mark and into the front rank of American research collections by Herbert Putnam, the patrician Library superintendent described by historian Richard Gid Powers as an "early example of the bureaucratic empire builder" later embodied by Hoover himself (39). Putnam's first imperial scheme took aim at the Library's antiquated cataloging method, a "meager, rigid, and inelastic" tool, he protested, impotent to rescue the tons of paper rotting in the basement (qtd. in LaMontagne 229). Rejecting the Dewey Decimal system as arbitrary in its division and numeration of subjects, Putnam spearheaded the development of the entirely new Library of Congress classification, envisioned as a national standard from its auspicious origin in 1900.

<4> Posted to the Library's cataloging division, Hoover mastered the results of Putnam's overhaul, which replaced irregular, hand-written catalogs with mechanically reproducible printed cards, their finely differentiated subject headings bent on anatomizing the whole of human knowledge (Goodrum and Dalrymple 34). Posted afterwards to the FBI, Hoover took Putnam's cards with him, reorganizing Bureau records in an elaborate "Editorial File System" of his own (Ackerman 66). With this borrowing from the Library, Hoover turned the Foucault of Discipline and Punish (1975) on his head: the Bureau's police apparatus confiscated the card index from the human sciences, rather than vice versa, balancing the account with these unconfessed beneficiaries of sweeping penal surveillance (Foucault 281). More consciously, Hoover kept Putnam rightside-up by embracing Library-style multidirectional cataloging in a "scientific format," each new item in his system receiving a unique code, a generic classification, and all pertinent cross references (Goodrum and Dalrymple 34; U. S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1920 173). In Hoover's arrangement, crimes, actual and potential, were logged and inter-logged like the Library's books, and more than a few books like crimes. Possibly unlawful articles of language and literature ate up index cards as the FBI assumed the Library's national ambition, striving to become the criminological equivalent of Putnam's "bureau of information for the entire country" (qtd. in Goodrum and Dalrymple 37). Demands fostered by modern media of instantaneous communication - "inquiries received by telegraph" - and rapid transport stoking the "migratory nature" of modern radicals necessitated a central police directory, Hoover reasoned, a nationwide register able to "ascertain in a few minutes the numerous ramifications" of suspicious persons, places, and texts (U.S., House, Attorney General 166).

<5> Hoover's opportunity to revise the Library of Congress classification was provided by an unbookish summons: a suicide bomb that demolished the front porch of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's Washington home one evening in June 1919, hard on the heels of a May Day bombing campaign aimed less accurately at dozens of Senators, Cabinet Secretaries, Supreme Court Justices, and the commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island. "The outrages of last night," a shaken Palmer lectured reporters on the morning after, "indicate nothing but the lawless attempt of an anarchistic element in the population to terrorize the country and stay the hand of the government" (qtd. in Ackerman 25). "Free speech has been outraged long enough," roared a more vengeful Washington Post, "Let there be a few free treatments in the electric chair" (qtd. in Ackerman 25). The Red Summer best known to students of African-American culture, a season of labor strikes, white riot, and unprecedented black self-defense, was thus initiated by a wave of radical terrorism and untamed conservative recoil. In its own time, this wave was credited to the revolutionary contagion of the biennio rosso, the "Red Years" baptized by the Italian left and inaugurated by the 1917 Bolshevik takeover in Russia (Powers 56). Since the 2001 anthrax attacks and the devastation at the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the wave has been rediscovered as the "first 9/11," a suddenly legible precedent raising burning questions on the balance of patriotism and pluralism, civil liberty and public security (Ackerman 392).

<6> Like the second 9/11, the first presented a shaken and vengeful federal government, wounded in its city of refuge, the abrupt chance to secure a secret-policeman's wish list. No later than the end of June, Palmer's snap prediction that the bombings "will only increase and extend the activities of our crime detecting force" had been fulfilled (qtd. in Ackerman 25). Congress supplemented the Justice Department's $1.5 million anti-radical drive by $500,000 - about an extra $3,500,000 in today's currency (Donner 33). The increase went to fund a new unit within the Bureau of Investigation, the Radical Division, open for business on the first of August. Within a year, this forerunner of the Bureau's Domestic Intelligence section was the largest department in the FBI, boosting the number of Bureau agents from 301 to 579, occupying more than half of all headquarters' staff time, and confidently renaming itself the General Intelligence Division (GID) (Jeffreys-Jones 72; Preston 209-10; Post 269). The overt task of the Radical Division was to serve as a judicious, Department-of-Homeland-Security-style aggregator of terrorist threats to domestic tranquility, Palmer's eyes, ears, and editor in seeking "a thorough-going understanding of the situation as a whole" (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1919 13). Equally weighty was the unwritten charge to consolidate the Bureau's mounting advantage over the Secret Service and other intragovernmental police rivals while completing the federalization of specifically political intelligence, a transfer of countersubversive power-knowledge away from autonomous urban "bomb squads" and Pinkerton-style private-sector labor spies. This nationalizing of anti-radical data-collection, endorsed by the detective pulp of Bureau directors Flynn and Burns, was given an enduring rationale by the anti-statist Marxist internationalism of the Russian Revolution, and a trained constituency by World War I, the inspiration for blanket federal investigations of leftists under cover of the Espionage (1917), Sedition (1918), and Alien Acts (1918) (Kornweibel 178). According to Frank J. Donner, the dean of civil libertarian intelligence historians, the same Great War that bred "awareness of the potential effectiveness of intelligence as a weapon against domestic enemies" mustered a bonus army of intelligence operatives, a large class of "soldiers, ex-officers, reservists, [and] patriotic amateur detectives" schooled in espionage and "thirsting for peacetime assignments" once the firing stopped (47). The patriotic but draft-deferred Hoover did not have to wait long after the Armistice to reapply the craft of intelligence he had studied at the Enemy Alien Registration unit, a wartime annex of the Justice Department. Two years out of law school and the Library of Congress, he was tapped as the first head of Palmer's fledgling Radical Division, and ordered to ensure there would be no repeat of the first 9/11.

<7> "Modern life requires the nimble brain of youth for work like that of [the Bureau]," theorized the Louisville Courier-Journal, favorably spinning Hoover's tender age, "Courage, daring, intuition, what is known as the 'sixth sense,' boldness tempered always by prudence, are the requirements for success in intelligence work" (qtd. in Hoover). Off the feature page, the under-25 Bureau administrator applied more boldness than prudence to the role of the New Spy, an unsociable relative of the youthful New Negro, one in a string of smartly novel modernist social types. Hoover's preventative war against "red terror" found him micro-managing an unparalleled nationwide roundup of radicals, judged by scope alone one of the most audacious police actions in American history. In November 1919 and again in January 1920, agents of the Bureau burst simultaneously into meeting halls, bowling alleys, theaters, and cafés, seizing upwards of 10,000 mostly non-citizen communists in over thirty U.S. cities in total (U.S., House, Attorney General 28). Hundreds of unlucky casualties of the "dragnet inquiry" were then deported according to carefully extra-legal procedures Hoover had rehearsed at the Enemy Alien unit (invitingly, the banishment of non-citizen revolutionaries did not qualify as a criminal proceeding under a 1918 Congressional statute) (Preston 216; Schultz and Schultz 159-161). After this warrantless snatch-and-exile maneuver passed into history as "the deportations delirium," then as the first "Red Scare," a model eruption of the paranoid style in American politics, Hoover adopted a firm policy of declining all responsibility (Post). Don Whitehead's The FBI Story (1956), the closest thing to an authorized Bureau hagiography, paints the roundup as a dark pre-Hooverian episode, a relatively irresponsible witch-hunt in which "the Bureau's agents were not trained to protect civil liberties" (14). The anticommunism of Hoover's Cold War FBI inherited none of the excesses of "Palmer's 'Red Raids'" (46), the book attests, coining a formula for Palmer's responsibility more reductively possessive than even the more common "Palmer Raids." In truth, however, the facts and style of the matter suggest that history should recall the "Hoover Raids," sweeps designed amid the regimented bibliophilic delirium of the newborn Radical Division, the crux of the Bureau's makeover as a national countersubversive command center.

<8> The single major decision on the raids Hoover did not make - confining the ambush to non-citizens - was one he could be counted on to perfect, having received the Radical Division post primarily because of his qualifications as an "alien expert" (his credentials as a personification of Progressive managerial efficiency awaited recognition) (Powers 66; Jefferys-Jones 73). As for the rest, maintains Richard Gid Powers, Hoover took operational control of "the attack on radicalism during the summer and fall of 1919" (66). With the media-coached wits of the New Spy, he isolated particular communist factions and revolutionary celebrities to lend a face to the enemy: Emma Goldman, the feminist-anarchist and free-loving "Queen of the Reds," became the raids' totemic target after Hoover's shocked review of "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" (1908) and like-minded contributions to Mother Earth. He personally presented the government's case at Goldman's deportation hearing and other high-profile proceedings, writing a long brief against the Communist Party that became a touchstone of the anti-Communist imagination when reprinted during the Cold War. Perhaps relying on his father's contacts, he obtained detailed maps of northern Russian to assist the navigation of the U.S.S. Buford, the "Soviet Ark" that delivered Goldman and 248 other deported radicals to the infant Soviet Union (Powers 88; U.S., House, Attorney General 174). Most crucial for the Bureau's literary bearing, he prepared for all of the above by building the FBI into one of the world's great libraries of radical writing, a collection larger than any American peer, whether private, public, or, like the Bureau's, taxpayer-funded, shamelessly peddled, and aggressively off-limits.

<9> Hoover was unembarrassed to advance the impression that the Radical Division chief should more closely resemble Herbert Putnam of the Library of Congress than Sir Edward Henry of Scotland Yard, the modernizer of London's Metropolitan Police who survived an assassin's bullet in 1912, then testified on his assailant's behalf. Like Henry's detectives, Hoover's were brain-working investigators, unlicensed to carry guns until the gangster clashes of the 1930s (in FBI apocrypha, the Bureau's call to arms is commemorated in Machine Gun Kelly's panicky coinage of an undying nickname: "Don't shoot, G-Men!" [Burrough 10]). Yet unlike the tenants of Scotland Yard, Hoover's "fact finders" inspected more treatises than crime scenes. Ultraradicals responsible for "bomb outrages," Hoover explained through an Annual Report of the Attorney General, split their time between assembling explosives and arranging insurrectionary phrases (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1920 171). Their "sole purposes were to commit acts of terrorism and to advocate, by word of mouth and by the circulation of literature, the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force and violence" (172). To Hoover, eager for deportation-worthy verbal evidence of revolutionary intent, propaganda of the deed and word were barely distinguishable, and literary knowledge was a heavy weapon of both terrorism and its governing foe. Gone was the Victorian insistence that labor agitators understood but one rhetoric, physical force (Jefferys-Jones 43). In its place, Hoover's modern theory of bilingual extremism demanded that the Bureau swiftly obtain "[t]he nucleus for an excellent working library" (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1920 178).

<10> Even in the storm of the Hoover Raids, this working library was nourished by a systematic extraction of leftist texts. Following a 1919 bust at the Russian People's House in Manhattan, for example, "several trucks" were requisitioned to remove the treasure that escaped arrest: not crates of firearms, but reams of literature (qtd. in Powers 78). Entire institutional libraries were swallowed by Hoover's, twenty-five tons worth in New York in January 1920 alone, commandeered "almost say by the bale," in the boast of Attorney General Palmer (Schultz and Schultz 159; U.S., House, Attorney General 18). Private collections were also pinpointed for forced acquisition, with detectives prepared to infiltrate common hiding places for rare books: walls, ceilings, carpets, and mattresses, in addition to desks and safes (Lowenthal 88). One down-and-out Italian philosopher returned home to find his unique set of anarchist theory packed as an involuntary donation (Lowenthal 88). Sonia Kaross, a Lithuanian immigrant to Philadelphia detained in the second dragnet, marveled at the less selective attention paid to "all my books, all my letters...every little paper they could get hold of. They threw it all into big bags like the post office has . . . and I could never get anything back" (qtd. in Schultz and Schultz 162). Thanks to Hoover's librarian-pirates, the Radical Division's "collection of pamphlets and books" soon contained "[t]he constitutions, programs, and platforms of practically all of the extreme radical groups" (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1921 129). Every pound of the collection was "savage material," declared Palmer, "but much of it infernally well written and appealing to the thoughtless, dissatisfied crowd" (U.S., House, Attorney General 18). As conducted and advertised by the Bureau, the Hoover Raids were in no small part crusades to capture the left's devilishly appealing written relics.

<11> When it came to periodical literature, evidence of a fervent radical press apparently "backed by giant funds of stolen loot," the crusade had it comparatively easy, obtaining most titles at newsstands and through filtered subscriptions (U.S., House, Attorney General 18). By 1920, the Radical Division received, reviewed, and "carded" 625 newspapers and journals in search of left-wing news (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1920 179). Like Putnam's accessions for the Library of Congress, Hoover's were "international in scope; national in service": 236 of the publications were printed "in 25 foreign languages" and handled "by a corps of 40 multi-lingual translators, who prepared daily reports" (qtd. in Goodrum and Dalrymple 39; Donner 35). Pursuing the Bureau's first methodical agenda of literary scholarship, other division hires prepared "[b]iographies . . . of all authors, publishers, editors, etc., showing any connection with an ultraradical body or movement" (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1920 179). With typical haste, Hoover's radical depository grew well beyond the nuclear stage in shelf-weight and personnel, and credibly bragged of "a greater mass of data upon [radicalism] than is anywhere else available" (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1919 13). Its edge over its closest American rival, the Rand School's Meyer London Library in New York, was plain. In distinction to the socialist Meyer, shrunk after suffering its own 1919 police invasion, the Bureau's collection was more likely to raid than be raided.

<12> No surprise, then, that Hoover's cataloging of the spoils called upon the imperial scope of the Library of Congress classification, calculated to allow specification within great volume, and acutely attentive to literary distinctions. The largest and longest-to-construct grouping in the Library classification was the Language and Literature category, what cataloging historians honor as the "monumental Class P" (LaMontagne 246). In Hoover's revision, the matter of this grouping enjoyed comparable attention. Already in 1921, the cabinets of the Radical Division were crammed with "approximately 450,000" index cards addressing ominous "activities and subjects," many literary-criminal (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1921 129). The rhetoric of hijacked revolutionary banners, mixed with photographs of "Trotsky, Lenine [sic] and some of the other most noted Bolsheviks," crowed Hoover, decorated the walls above (qtd. in Powers 107). This interior design suggested a traditional rogue's gallery refracted through the montage technique of pre-Stalinist Soviet modernism - a style manifest, among other places, in the close encounter of text, placards, and photos in the first edition of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, an acknowledged object of Bureau fascination. Hoover's voracious library mounted and criminalized the enemy's most advanced aesthetic signature as a trophy of archival victory.

<13> For civil libertarians such as Louis Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor and the most effective contemporary critic of the Hoover Raids, the Radical Division's "card-index system" was the heart of a "kaiseristic police mechanism," an appliance of the same Old World despotism the United States had so recently battled at the Marne and Belleau Wood (U.S., Dept. of Justice, Annual, 1920 173; Post 47). For its fast-talking creator, however, this system was a welcome engine of publication as well as a signature apparatus of modern radical hunting. When not identifying candidates for deportation via "paper membership in a revolutionary group" (Donner 39), Hoover's index served as a writerly black box in which text collection modulated into text creation, and the stimulus of Putnam's Library of Congress merged with that of the USCGS print shop. An exceptional state archive arose as a result, flaunted as a national treasure but accessible to the public only through self-issued catalogues raisonnés. Rifling through the index for fresh affronts, the Radical Division furnished sympathetic newspapers with pre-composed printing plates (cartoons included) designed to warn "homes, religion and property" of the latest "menace of Bolshevism" (qtd. in Donner 39). Hoover edited a government-only paper of his own, the bi-weekly Bulletin of Radical Activities, its miscellaneous safety tips and atrocity exhibits recalling the recipe of his boyhood Weekly Review (Powers 108). A pamphlet dubbed The Red Radical Movement (1920), circulated more generously to "all the magazines and newspapers in the United States" (U.S., House, Attorney General 208), assembled photostats of the most militant publications grabbed during the Hoover Raids, a procession of radical spoils uncertain of historical victory (Powers 108). Attorney General Palmer, a reader experienced with bumps in the dark, blurbed the finished product as "interesting, significant, and entertaining" but unsafe for "late at night, when you are at home in your own house. It gives you the creeps a little" (U.S., House, Attorney General 155). More literal-minded than the CIA, whose headquarters came to disguise itself behind a plaque reading "Government Printing Office" (Dulles 6-7), the Bureau's Radical Division made itself a genuine government publisher, its central index inspiring gothic tales. Hoover's first formal titles, the index ensured, were essays in anticommunist bibliography embroidered with spy-thriller chills.

<14> Yet every other fruit of the Bureau card catalog paled next to a publication focused on the junction where literature engagée met confrontational New Negroism. Before The Red Radical Movement raised its eerie head, Hoover lent his library's authorial services to Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications, a twenty-six-page narrative written and released in late 1919. The FBI's maiden voyage into advanced book-talk, Radicalism and Sedition rates as the American state's earliest acknowledgment of the New Negro Renaissance and as a seminal document of African-Americanist criticism produced from any quarter. All bitter ironies admitted at the outset, this Hooverian production came to exert, imperviously and largely invisibly, as much shaping pressure within the black literary field as Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), Zora Neale Hurston's "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934), or Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), manifestos it prepared the Bureau to read as a matters of national gravity.

<15> Radicalism and Sedition, sometimes wrongly attributed to Hoover alone (Powers 128), was researched, slanted, and possibly partly ghostwritten by several hands within the federal espionage community, among them Robert Adger Bowen of the Post Office Translation Bureau and Major Arthur Loving of Army intelligence, the most valuable African-American secret agent of World War I (Lewis 7; Kornweibel 22). Whatever its standing as an interracial, interdepartmental collaboration, the text's primary inspiration in fact lay in Hoover's anxious scrutiny of the black share of the Red Summer. The finished text's schedule of deployment, moreover, was tightly bound with Hoover's ever-more-public role as a tract- and mind-reading Congressional informant, an expert purveyor, as David Levering Lewis terms it, "of confidences about the actions, ideas, and morals of American citizens" (7). Starting life as a special report to the Attorney Journal, Radicalism and Sedition was exposed to Congress in 1919 within the Senate-mandated publication Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, and distributed in pamphlet form by Hoover in 1920. Its opening sentence speaks ill of two repeat offenders: the summer 1919 "race riots in Washington, Knoxville, Chicago, Omaha, and Arkansas" and the "more radical Negro publications . . . quick to avail themselves of the situation as cause for the utterance of inflammatory statement - utterances which in some cases have reached the limit of open defiance and a counsel of retaliation" (U.S., Senate 161-62). With their flagrantly fighting words, the New Negro voices amplified by Radicalism and Sedition opened a domestic front in the war of verbal terrorism Hoover elsewhere fought against enemy aliens - a front identified, in this challenging case, with widespread civil disorder rather than targeted assassination. Hoover personally witnessed the first race riot on the list in the weeks before his posting to the Radical Division. Passing the worst of the Washington bloodshed on his way down Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House sidewalk a battle royale, Hoover's eyes were stung above all by "the Negro's pride in fighting back" (181). Radicalism and Sedition accordingly quotes, at astonished length, an insider's report that Washington blacks "openly declare the war here . . . the greatest event since the Civil War. The Negro has demonstrated right in sight of the White House and Congress which refuse to protect him or reward his loyalty that he is afraid neither to kill nor to die for so sacred a thing as liberty and home" (181). Facing "bands of armed mobs," the insider continues, D.C. blacks had organized themselves into gaily-disciplined ensembles "shouting jubilant war songs, as if it were a carnival and gala day" (181). Those veiled in the belated segregation of the capital had returned to light, noisily reinvented as volunteer militias on parade.

<16> With New Negro militancy blurring the color lines vigilantly drawn during Hoover's adolescence - lines in Washington social geography, and perhaps in his own ancestry - Radicalism and Sedition retaliates with flights of fantastically definitive intelligence. "[T]here can no longer be any question," it pronounces, "of a well-concerted movement among a certain class of Negro leaders of thought and action to constitute themselves a determined and persistent source of a radical opposition to the Government" (U.S., Senate 162). Trumpeting signs that the "ill-governed reaction toward race rioting" invited both an "outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki" and an "openly expressed demand for social" - read sexual - "equality," the publication solders together an epochal conceptual chain (162). Radicalism and Sedition documents, within a small margin of error, the very moment when Hoover's first-wave anticommunism was fused to his determined, half-defensive racism, and the Radical Division's speech-sensitive countersubversion program was bound with the early Bureau's structural New Negrophobia, crystallized in its 1912-13 Mann Act prosecution of defiant black heavyweight Jack Johnson. The rest, as they say, is history that climaxes with the Bureau's fixation on the love life and revolutionary agape of Dr. Martin Luther King.

<17> The derivation of the irregular history that climaxes in the Bureau's counterliterary COINTELPRO programs of the 1960s and early '70s can also be traced to Radicalism and Sedition. Attentive to several strains of African-American writing, the publication's survey of New Negro poetry, the groundwork genre of the Harlem Renaissance, is especially charged and scrupulous. Hoover and comrades cast this verse as the distillation of black-Red connection - the lyrical cement of the chain just mentioned - and reproduce nine poems encountered in an exhaustive survey of black periodicals. Surprised to learn that several of "the Negro magazines are expensive in manufacture, being on coated paper throughout, well-printed, and giving evidence of the possession of ample funds" (U.S., Senate 162), Radical Division translator-interpreters had launched a special project to monitor the "Negro Press" - the only ethnic press so tracked by the division's Publication Section, later designated the Book Review Section, the cultural pages within the Bureau's larger true-crime magazine (Kornweibel 7). Joined by their insistent director, Hoover's spy-readers pored over every issue of a who's who of groundbreaking Harlem Renaissance journals, the most intellectually significant black-run institutions of the New Negro movement. A. Philip Randolph's Messenger, later recognized for the tart anti-racialism of FBI suspects George Schuyler and J. A. Rogers, struck Hoover as a veritable "headquarters of revolutionary thought" (qtd. in Kornweibel 23). Marcus Garvey's multilingual Negro World impressed him as a disloyal advocate of "Soviet Russian Rule," despite the many pages of Pan-Africanist evidence to the contrary (qtd. in Kornweibel 23). The Harlem Crusader, Cyril Briggs' organ of the authentically Soviet-supporting African Blood Brotherhood, received the Bureau rating of "entirely radical" and unwittingly employed an undercover FBI source as an advertising agent (qtd. in Kornweibel 23). All three of these journals, and fourteen more, play credited roles in Radicalism and Sedition, ransacked to demonstrate that "[t]he Negro is 'seeing red" and quoted "as fully therefrom" as space allowed (U.S., Senate 163). Catching word of all the close reading, Du Bois acridly commented that "[w]e black folk have for some years been trying to get the United States Department of Justice to look into several matters that touch us," lynching first on the list (qtd. in Jefferys-Jones 6).

<18> What emerges from Radicalism and Sedition's thicket of citation is one of the finest and most illuminating precocious anthologies of New Negro poetry, beating James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry to the punch by three full years, and Locke's 1925 New Negro edition of the Survey Graphic by half a modernist generation. The fourteen end-rhymed lines of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" (1919) are reprinted with care, their Shakespearian call to martyrdom even then the designated driver of Harlem Renaissance literature. Couched as "a much-quoted poem about the negro [sic] with his back against the wall and fighting to the death" (U.S., Senate 163), the sonnet's viral spread throughout the Negro world is charted in some detail. Non-canonical hymns to martial self-sacrifice, McKay's silent partners in the tectonic shift from plantation dialect to a furiously elevated Standard English, are also presented in block. Carita Owens Collins' "This Must Not Be!" is transplanted from the Garveyite press ("that same blood / So freely spent on Flanders fields / Shall yet redeem your race" [ll. 11-13]). Jazz lyricist Andy Razaf's "Don't Tread on Me" is relocated from the Crusader ("It's time for us 'to do or die,' / To play a bolder part" [ll. 11-13]). Brows are creased over "Her Thirteen Black Soldiers," a poem by American Negro Academy president Archibald Grimké commemorating actual Negro troops who absorbed McKayite teaching and retaliated against white assailants in Houston ("in desperation they smote the reptilian thing, / They smote it as they had smitten before [the nation's] enemies" [ll. 13-14]). Without quite meaning to, the collected verse of Radicalism and Sedition argues that the renaissance-firing paradigm change traced to McKay's "violent sonnets" stems from a larger productive anomaly, the open-air laboratory of the New Negro's summer of retribution.

<19> Radicalism and Sedition's deliberate critical glosses, by contrast, offer little competition for Locke's or Weldon Johnson's. Most are thin, and steeped in a stunted interpretive code in which literary quality is measured by ideological admissibility rather than by truth, beauty, or a less romantic appetite for social action: "For certain of these publications there is not a good word to be said - all of their effort and product is bad, and intentionally bad" (U.S., Senate 87). Formal questions arise as pretexts for mockery, as in the aside noting "that a discriminating taste in verse structure and grammar was not one of the cultural effects of Harvard University upon the minds of the editors of the Messenger [sic]" (179). The uneasy comedy poking Ivy-covered New Negroes nonetheless shades into Radicalism and Sedition's confessed respect for black writers "of education," their brash lyrics "not to be dismissed lightly as the ignorant vaporing of untrained minds" (162). The Negro World's pride in race authors equipped with "fine, pure English, with a background of scholarship behind them," was "not an idle one," Hoover and company finally concede (162).

<20> The same Radical Division publication that made history by introducing Red Summer reaction to Red Years anticommunism thus also previewed the Bureau's ambivalent long-haul posture toward black literary modernism. Here, as later in the age of Hoover, that posture was flexibly conflicted: versed in industrious, sometimes unrivaled research; deathly serious, if often inexact, about the seeming hotline between black aesthetic defiance and urban restiveness; leavened by a forced derision about alleged technical deficiencies; yet shot through with nervous admiration for black erudition and sophistication of purpose, unwanted blows to the cultural crutches of racial hierarchy. How many refinements of "verse structure and grammar" finally separated McKay's barrack-room counsel and that of Hoover favorite Robert Service, the "Canadian Kipling" who hatched "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" (1907)? In the style of "If We Must Die," Service's lyrics of racial regeneration through polar violence advised strivers to grin and scrap when up against unbeatable, regularly metrical walls ("Grin"). How comfortably distinct was Razaf's "Don't Tread on Me" from the pugnacious sing-song of "The Bully Bolsheviki," a poem scrapbooked and perhaps composed by Hoover himself, disrespectfully "dedicated to 'Comrade' Louie Post," the original nemesis of the Hoover Raids: "The 'Reds' at Ellis Island / Are as happy as can be. / For Comrade Post at Washington / Is setting them all free" (ll.1-4). Confronting New Negro verse, as in confronting New Negro militancy, the margins of racial difference narrowed and blurred. Egged on by prickly likeness, enabled by a comprehensive indexed archive and its enticements to publication, the impulse to supervise African-American writing became a constitutive inclination of Hoover's FBI. In the long run, the Bureau's engagement with the darkening mirror of black literature was as vital to its cultural resonance as the "War on Crime," the deadly and glamorous Depression-era battle with Ma Barker, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other heartland mobsters/social bandits that ushered Hoover into the gossip columns and supposedly introduced the FBI to its classic self. When even shrewd Bureau chroniclers defer to Hoover's promotion engine and plug the gangster era as the crucible in which a "band of amateurish agents" picked up the gun and became "the professional crime-fighting machine of yore," they slight evidence that the original "Hoover boys" wet their teeth by professionalizing literary surveillance for the American Century (Burrough xiii). Decades after winning the first War on Crime, Hoover's G-Men continued their orderly hounding of public enemies armed only with book contracts and newspaper columns.


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