"First Line of Defense": Early Labor Anti-Communists and the FBI

The plot of early American anticommunism is well-established. A young J. Edgar Hoover apprenticed in the FBI during the 1919 Red Scare, learning the techniques of repression that his FBI increasingly wielded against radicals, trade unionists, and dissenters through the 1960s. This paper tells a different story: from the mid-1920s through the late 1930s, Hoover's FBI and union leaders switched roles, as the FBI ceased antiradical investigation, and American Federation of Labor officials carried on their own anticommunist crusade while lobbying for legislation forcing the FBI to resume redhunting. Labor leaders and FBI detectives built a close working relationship during and after World War I. Plagued by Communists agitating among union members, union officers hunted radicals within AFL unions, relying on intelligence freely shared by FBI officials. After the Teapot Dome scandal shook the Justice Department in 1924, J. Edgar Hoover took over as FBI director with orders to clean it up. Among Hoover's first acts was the elimination of antiradical investigations. Over the next fifteen years, some union leaders and the National Civic Federation advocated statutory authority for the FBI to conduct domestic antiradical surveillance, over the private objections of J. Edgar Hoover, but failed to get the statute passed. It took a secret Presidential order and the 1940 Smith Act to restore domestic antiradicalism to the FBI's portfolio. This account reveals the complex politics driving early American anticommunism. Union leaders were organizers, not victims, of anticommunist initiatives, and popular pressure often compelled state repression of radicals. At the same time, the struggle over the FBI exposed conflicts over state power among labor anticommunists; accustomed to repression of strikes, unionists feared that antiradical initiatives could be turned against labor. Stridently anticommunist but hesitant voices for civil liberties, labor anticommunists helped usher in the age of McCarthy.