The use by law enforcement agencies of disinformation, under-cover agents, provocateurs, hara**ment, and informants did not begin with the war against the Black Panther Party. Repression based on race, religion, and radicalism has a long history in the United States, and the tactics and strategies used against the BPP have been employed by the government since the nation's founding. This chapter will briefly outline examples of government repression and disregard for the constitutional rights of dissident groups in America since the turn of the century. A. The Haymarket Incident After the Civil War, American workers, led by social revolutionaries, focused their struggle on the eight-hour day. By 1867, six states had adopted the shorter work day and in 1868 Congress pa**ed the first federal law giving the eight-hour day to federal employees. The state laws, however, did not provide for enforcement, and in 1876 the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the federal law.
Labor recognized that it would have to win its own battle, and by mid 1886, 250,000 industrial workers were involved in the movement. In Chicago, which had become the center of the labor movement as well as of socialism in the United States, 400,000 workers had struck for the eight-hour day.
A ma** meeting in support of the eight-hour day was held on May 3, 1886; joining in the meeting were workers from the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, who had been on strike since February. While August Spies of the Social Revolutionary Club was speaking to the crowd, strikebreakers began to leave the nearby McCormick plant, and the striking workers began to demonstrate against the scabs. "A special detail of 200 police arrived and, without warning, attacked the strikers with clubs and revolvers, k**ing at least one striker, wounding five or six others, and injuring an undetermined number." A protest meeting was called for May 4 at Haymarket Square. As the final speaker, Samuel Fielden, addressed the small group, police suddenly began to disperse it. A dynamite bomb was thrown. One policeman was instantly k**ed. Six later died; about seventy were wounded. The police opened fire on the crowd, k**ing and wounding an unknown number.
A nationwide wave of repression followed the Haymarket incident. Socialists and anarchists were rounded up indiscriminately Raids were staged, homes were broken into and searched without warrants, suspects were beaten, and "witnesses" were bribed and coerced. Thirty-one persons were indicted; eight stood trial: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe. Although only two of the defendants, Spies and Fielden, were at Haymarket Square when the bomb exploded (Fielden with his wife and child), and although the state never established any connection of the defendants with the incident, an openly biased, handpicked jury convicted them solely on the basis of their political ideas. Worldwide efforts to free them failed, and on November 11, 1887, Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer were hanged. Lingg had committed suicide. It was not until 1893 that Neebe, who had been sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, and Fielden and Schwab, who had had their d**h sentences commuted, were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld. B. Domestic Intelligence, 1908-1936 In 1908, the attorney general under President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Investigation within the Justice Department to fill the gap caused by congressional prohibition of using the Secret Service for investigation and intelligence activities. Although there was no formal Congressional authorization for the bureau, once it was established its appropriations were regularly approved by Congress. It was not until 1916 that an amendment to the appropriations statute came to serve as an indirect congressional authorization for bureau investigations.
During World War I, the bureau, aided by the volunteer American Protective League, began to operate as a secret political police force. With the Justice Department, the Bureau investigated the activities of thousands of German immigrants as well as thousands of Americans accused of draft resistance. The 1918 "slacker raids" in New York and New Jersey involved the "ma** round-up of 50,000 persons (without warrants) to discover draft evaders. "6 The Espionage and Sedition Acts were invoked, resulting in 2,000 prosecutions for "disloyal utterances and activities," aimed mainly at socialist and labor groups critical of the government and its policies. During 1917-1918, bureau agents raided offices of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) across the country in a concentrated effort to gather evidence for a ma** trial of 166 IWW leaders.
In late 1919, strikes spread throughout America. In Europe there were socialist- and communist-led uprisings. Using these events as justification for increased funding for the bureau, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer told Congress, " ... the bureau is confronted with a very large and important task in connection with social and economic unrest . . . and radicalism. . . . " As the Bureau shifted its attention from critics of the war to the activities of political groups, a special division on radical activities was organized.
... Instead of performing their statutory mission of tracking down and apprehending criminals, federal directives were mounting a ma**ive and unfocused intelligence gathering operation involving the whole field of left wing dissent.
Information collected by bureau agents was given to the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division (GID), an office established by Palmer after a series of bombings in 1919. J. Edgar Hoover was appointed as head of the new division.
One of the bombings referred to above took place on June 2, 1919 near the White House. Two anarchists were taken into custody without formal charges. One was deported and the other, Andrea Salsedo, was held incommunicado by the bureau. A few days later, Salsedo "fell" to his d**h from the fourteenth floor of the building where he had been incarcerated. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a comrade of Salsedo, began an investigation into the d**h of his friend. Vanzetti, a Boston shoemaker, quickly came under bureau surveillance. On June 4, he and Nicola Sacco, a fish peddler, organized a protest meeting in Brockton, Ma**achusetts. On June 5, the two men were arrested on capital charges of which they were later convicted. A nationwide legal struggle for their release was waged for seven years without success, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1926.
The GID compiled a ma**ive card index containing 450,000 entries on individuals, groups, publications, and, "special circumstances," and also collected information on "matters of an international nature" as well as "economic and industrial disturbances". Since the only federal law enforceable in noncriminal cases was the deportation statute, the main target of the bureau's drive was aliens and, without congressional authorization, the Justice Department (through the GID) and the Bureau of Investigation jointly planned and organized a nationwide drive to deport foreign radicals from the U.S.. Among the deportees were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. American citizens, however, were not left out since prosecution might be possible under state or existing federal law or under legislation "which may hereinafter be enacted."
The drive to deport radicals culminated in the Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920. The first of these raids took place on November 7, 1919, when 450 people in eighteen cities were arrested. On the night of January 2, 1920, bureau agents, along with Immigration officials, rounded up some 10,000 persons in thirty-three cities.
Following the Palmer Raids, every major American city police department created intelligence divisions. From 1919 until 1925, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) arrested 504 union organizers and political activists on charges of "criminal syndicalism." These arrests resulted in 124 convictions, most of which were obtained through the perjured testimony of police informants. The LAPD "Red Squad" became a model intelligence division whose tactics were used by other police agencies across the country.
When Warren G. Harding took office in 1921, William J. Burns became director of the bureau. Burns, the former head of the International Detective Agency (IDA), a company specializing in labor spying, aided IDA in its campaign against the IWW, whose destruction was sought by southern California businessmen and southwest copper interests. Four days after taking office, Burns made Hoover a**istant director of the bureau. Although the Red Scare had virtually died in the United States, Burns testified before congressional hearings that radicalism was growing in the country. As a result, the bureau's budget rose from $2 million to $2.25 million dollars in 1923.
Despite the protests of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the bureau continued its illegal activities. It increasingly relied on the use of agents and paid informants, especially between 1921 and 1924.
On August 2, 1923, President Harding died in office and was succeeded by Calvin
Coolidge. And on March 28, 1924, Coolidge named Harlan Fiske Stone to succeed Harry Daugherty as attorney general. In May, Stone asked Burns to resign as bureau director. The new attorney general told the Senate that he opposed the repressive, lawless activities of the bureau under Daugherty's leadership, and that he, Stone, would reorganize the Bureau, abolishing the GID. He pledged that Justice Department agents would limit their investigations to violations of law.19 On December 10, 1924, Hoover was appointed director, having convinced Stone and the previously critical ACLU that he was an "unwilling" participant in the Palmer raids.
While the bureau's domestic political intelligence function was greatly curtailed from 1924 to 1936, efforts to gather such information were continued by state, private, and military intelligence agencies. [In addition], the bureau retained the ma**ive files it had accumulated in the period from 1916 to 1924 and readily transmitted data to other agencies to pursue.
In 1936, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) became by presidential directive "the primary civilian charged with domestic intelligence responsibilities." Events in Europe provided the rationale for resumption of domestic political investigations when President Franklin Roosevelt asked the FBI to gather intelligence on "subversive" political organizations. There still was no federal law authorizing the kind of probe Roosevelt wanted, but Hoover cited the obscure provision of the 1916 appropriations act to launch a new wave of FBI suppression of radicalism. C. Post-War Domestic Intelligence In 1938, with World War II under way in Europe, Congress created a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and Propaganda in the United States. In 1941, the Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) was pa**ed. This act, which made it a crime to teach or advocate the "duty, desirability, or propriety" of overthrowing the American government by violence, has been described by one of the country's bestknown authorities on the law of free speech, Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., as the "most drastic restriction on freedom of speech ever enacted in the United States during peace." A closely related act, the Voorhis Act of 1941, required registration of all "subversive organizations having foreign links and advocating the violent overthrow of the government." These sanctions inevitably were extended to include supporters and even latent sympathizers, facilitated by the use of wiretapping which had been authorized by presidential directive in 1940.
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the arrest and deportation of radicals and "undesirable" aliens increased. A major target of repression during the postwar years continued to be the Communist Party; between 1918 and 1956, U.S. Senate investigations of communism were conducted by eighteen standing committees and one select committee, and House investigations by sixteen standing committees. In 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act.
"The Crime of the Century," in the words of Director Hoover, was the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried and convicted without any convincing evidence of their guilt. Worldwide demonstrations and appeals failed during this period of "spy" hysteria, and they were executed on June 19, 1953.
On July 24, 1950, a month after the outbreak of the Korean War, President Harry Truman approved an order written by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, which served as the authority for FBI activities relating to espionage, sabotage, subversive activities, and "related matters." In the early 1950's, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, as well as then Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California, readily seized the opportunity to promote the Red Scare. McCarthy conducted indiscriminate witch hunts, aided by the FBI, and on the basis of falsified information held press conferences and congressional hearings to expose Communists. D. The Repression of Black America African slaves were first brought to America in 1619. These slaves and their descendants vehemently resisted their oppression, and for this resistance, they have suffered beatings, torture, castration, lynching, and other forms of violence.
In 1910, two years after the FBI was founded, Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight world boxing champion, became the first Black American to be hounded and hara**ed by the FBI. The Mann act was pa**ed in 1910 for the alleged purpose of preventing vice; the legislation outlawed the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. The language of the law was deliberately vague and the prosecution of offenders appears to have been loosened or tightened according to their importance. Reportedly, Johnson had induced a former prostitute to give up her profession and enter into a personal relationship with him. Their travels took them across a state border before their marriage, and Johnson was arrested by federal authorities under the terms of the Mann Act and sentenced to prison.
In the following years, numerous Black political leaders were hara**ed by the government. Marcus Garvey, who founded the popular Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1919, was convicted of using the mails to defraud. Garvey, who advocated that American Blacks return to Africa, served a federal prison term and died in poverty. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois and Paul Robeson were singled out for hara**ment for their a**ociation with the U.S. Communist Party. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, chairman of the powerful House Education Committee, was forced out of office because of his outspoken views on the oppression of American Blacks. Malcolm X, whose political views changed following his split with the Nation of Islam, [and who] helped to inspire the founding of the Black Panther Party was under constant police surveillance in the last year of his life. The two men convicted of his a**a**ination in February 1965 have demanded a new trial on the grounds that they were framed. The Congressional Black Caucus has called for a congressional investigation into Malcolm's d**h.
A main target of the FBI COINTELPRO operation during the late 1950's and early 1960's was the civil rights movement. Among the groups singled out for persecution were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Deacons for Defense, the Republic of New Africa (RNA), and the Nation of Islam. Targeted individuals included H. "Rap" Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammed, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From December 1963 until his a**a**ination on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was the subject of an intensive COINTELPRO campaign. In the testimony of William Sullivan, who was in charge of the FBI campaign against Dr. King:
No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization which we targeted. We did not differentiate.
Using its authority to investigate legitimate noncommunist groups suspected of being infiltrated by communists, the FBI sought to discredit and destroy Dr. King and the entire civil rights movement. E. United Farm Workers The United Farm Workers (UFW), founded and led by Cesar Chavez, has fought for over a decade for decent wages and living conditions for American farm workers. The strong opposition of business interests to the work of the UFW has made the union a constant target of government and intelligence repression. Informants, undercover agents, and provocateurs have continuously infiltrated the UFW in an effort to destroy the union. On several occasions, union headquarters in California have been burglarized and files stolen by FBI and other intelligence agents. F. American Indian Movement American Indians have been murdered, tortured, and isolated by the United States government longer than any other group of people in America. After launching numerous wars against Native Americans and forcing them from their lands in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the government forcibly moved them to reservations operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1970, the American Indian Movement (AIM), a nationwide political organization of Native Americans, was founded by Russell Means and Dennis Banks. Means, Banks, and other Native American leaders and activists have been a prime target of the FBI COINTELPRO campaign, a campaign which has led to numerous false charges, imprisonment, and murder.
As the preceding pages point out, the war against the Black Panther Party was a logical extension of ongoing police intelligence practices intensified by the explosive situation in American cities during the last sixteen years. Not only are the tactics of infiltration, hara**ment, and disinformation time-tested, but the tacticians are veterans.