In the predawn hours of a Saturday in September 1939, FBI agents in Iowa and Nebraska simultaneously descended on the homes of union leaders in Omaha, Des Moines, and Sioux City. Teamsters union officials in the three cities were rousted from bed and placed under arrest. They were held on newly filed charges that accused them of burning a bakery truck during a strike in Sioux City more than a year earlier.
Acting under the direction of the U.S. attorney general, the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., coordinated the FBI raids. The arrests occurred at a turning point in the U.S. class struggle--a turning point whose significance became fully clear only much later. The arrest of the Teamster leaders by the federal police marked the opening of the government’s systematic use of the FBI as a weapon against class-conscious workers and farmers and against determined fighters against racist discrimination and national oppression in the United States. The response to the raids and arrests also marked the opening of the fight by the working-class vanguard to mobilize all defenders of democratic rights to oppose the FBI’s subversion of the Bill of Rights....
For several years after the First World War, the FBI had functioned as a political police force, carrying out the arrest or deportation of some 3,000 unionists and political activists in 1920 (the infamous "Palmer Raids"). But following widespread protests over these and other FBI actions, and with the decline of the postwar labor radicalization, the capitalist rulers decided against a federal secret police agency. They relied instead on city and state cops with well-established "bomb squads" and "radical units" and on state national guard units in cases of extreme necessity. These local and state agencies had intimate connections with antilabor "citizens" organizations organized by the employers and with hated private detective agencies, such as the Pinkertons, with long experience in union busting.
By the mid-1930s, however, a vast social movement was on the rise, with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) at the forefront. The relationship of forces was shifting in favor of working-class organizations. The bosses’ old methods could no longer always be counted on. Communist perspectives did not come close to commanding majority support among working people, and in fact remained the views of a small minority, but the bosses were nonetheless concerned that progressive anticapitalist and anti-imperialist political positions advanced by class-struggle-minded union leaders were winning a hearing among a substantial section of the ranks of labor. Especially in times of crisis, such as war, minority points of view defended by established and respected working-class fighters could rapidly gain support.
With this in mind, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt expanded and centralized federal police power.
During and after the Watergate scandals of the mid-1970s, the immense scope of FBI disruption, spying, and provocations against the people of the United States came to light in an unprecedented way. But the origins of these operations are not--as most commentators place them--in the spread of McCarthyism in the 1950s or in Washington’s attempts to disrupt the anti-Vietnam War movement and social protests of the 1960s.
The fact is that these FBI operations began on the eve of the Second World War. They were central to preparations by the U.S. capitalist rulers to lead the nation into another carnage to promote their interests against their imperialist rivals and against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America struggling for liberation from colonial domination. These operations were directed against the leadership--and potential leadership--of the two major social forces in the United States that threatened to interfere with the ability of the U.S. ruling families to accomplish their objectives: the labor unions and the Black movement. The government’s aim was to isolate class-struggle leaders who could provide guidance to a broader movement that might develop.
World War II had begun in Europe in September 1939--just a few weeks before the arrests of the Teamster leaders in Iowa and Nebraska. On September 1 Germany’s armed forces invaded Poland. Two days later the British and French governments declared war on Germany. Washington proclaimed neutrality and would maintain this as its stated policy until Japanese naval air forces attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. But official neutrality was a cover allowing the Roosevelt administration and Congress to take concrete steps toward entry into the war, while avoiding the nationwide public discussion that would have been set off by a Senate debate over a proposed declaration of war.
The drive toward war necessitated an assault on working people at home and against democratic rights in general. Roosevelt gave FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover free rein to use the FBI against the labor movement and Black organizations. The White House and Justice Department secretly authorized many of the illegal methods used by the FBI and turned a blind eye toward others.
This authorization for the FBI to assume the functions of a political police force was done without legislation, which would have had to be proposed and debated in Congress. It was accomplished instead by "executive order," a device that was rapidly assuming a major place in the operations of the government and would increasingly become a major mode of governing in the decades to come.
On September 6, 1939, Roosevelt issued an executive order directing the FBI "to take charge of investigative work" in matters relating to "espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, subversive activities and violations of the neutrality laws." The key phrase was "subversive activities," and the most important decision was to include this slippery concept in the list of responsibilities given the FBI. While there were federal laws against espionage, sabotage, and violation of U.S. "neutrality," no law explained what "subversive activity" might consist of.
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