BY LARRY SEIGLE  
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....  
 
Target: Black fight for equal rights
As Washington prepared to enter the war under the banner of fighting the white-supremacist Nazi regime and its allies, Blacks in the United States were battling racist oppression. This struggle centered on the fight to overturn segregation, which existed not just in the South but in every federal government institution throughout the land and to a large extent in private industry and many aspects of social life.

During the decade of the Great Depression, Black working people had suffered even more than their white counterparts. Unemployment among workers who were Black was much higher than among workers who were white. Black farmers lost their land at an even higher rate than did white farmers. Education, health care, and other social services were qualitatively worse for Blacks.

In many parts of the country, particularly in the South, Blacks were systematically denied the right to vote. Segregation laws were backed up with extralegal terror to intimidate those who tried to organize to change these conditions. Lynchings were frequent in the Jim Crow South. The membership of racist terror outfits such as the Ku Klux Klan was intertwined with the cops, courts, and government officials. Throughout the country, police violence and frame-ups of Black defendants were widespread....

More and more Black people decided that the time had come to step up the fight against this kind of racist oppression. If the United States had entered the war in the name of democracy and against Nazi doctrines of white race superiority, then the fight for changes at home could no longer be postponed. Moreover, as the war unfolded overseas, the rise of national liberation struggles, particularly in Asia and the Pacific, inspired confidence and greater militancy in the fight against racial oppression at home. While the imperialist powers fought each other over redivision of the planet, many colonial peoples seized the opportunity to advance the fight to take control of their own destinies. Inside the United States, peoples of color likewise saw an opportunity to step up the fight for their rights.

The U.S. rulers, however, portrayed the fight for equal rights for Blacks as "disruption of the war effort." Supporters of the government in the labor movement and in Black organizations argued that the battle against racism at home, while a worthy one, should nonetheless be kept in check until after a U.S. victory in the war. The fight against racist discrimination, they argued, must not be allowed to go so far as to interfere with the "national unity" needed to win the war. This position was advanced by liberals, by the social democratic Socialist Party, and by the Stalinized Communist Party....  
 
'Double V' campaign for democracy
The FBI focused particular attention on newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, whose nationwide circulation had skyrocketed with its Double V campaign.1 The report decried the fact that "the Negro press is a strong provocator of discontent among Negroes." (Like all cops, the FBI insists that "discontent" is created not by injustice and oppression but by instigators and agitators.) The secret FBI report went on to complain that the "general tone" of the Black press "is not at all, in many instances, informative or helpful to its own race.... More space is devoted to alleged instances of discrimination or mistreatment of Negroes than there is to matters which are educational or helpful."

To drive this point home to editors and writers for Black newspapers who insisted on saying things that were not "helpful," FBI agents began systematically visiting them. FBI agents also began calling on members of groups such as the NAACP, who were often enthusiastic supporters of the Double V campaign. The NAACP in particular, which was growing rapidly in size and activity, was targeted for infiltration by FBI stool pigeons and provocateurs. When fifteen Black sailors assigned as waiters for white officers in Washington, D.C., protested racial discrimination, the navy's response was to ask the FBI to investigate the protesters. The FBI obliged by opening a full-fledged, nationwide "investigation," including the massive use of informers, against the NAACP.

"FBI investigation of the NAACP [during the war]...produced massive information in Bureau files about the organization, its members, their legitimate activities to oppose racial discrimination, and internal disputes within some of the chapters," a U.S. Senate committee concluded in 1975. But these "reports and their summaries contained little if any information about specific activities or planned activities in violation of federal law."

In mid-1942 Attorney General Francis Biddle summoned several editors of Black weeklies to Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. Biddle arrogantly told the editors that their coverage of clashes between white and Black soldiers at army bases was a disservice to the war effort. Biddle did not challenge the accuracy of the reports but nonetheless insisted that the information should not have been printed. The attorney general, a liberal and staunch Roosevelt supporter, told the editors that if they did not change the tone of their papers, he was "going to shut them all up" on charges of sedition.

Then, according to one account of the meeting, Biddle picked up a copy of the Chicago Defender and

complained about an article on nine black soldiers being transported through Alabama and having to wait twenty-two hours to eat because white restaurants in railroad stations would not feed them. Biddle said it would have been better if such an article had not appeared. In addition, he said, a number of the paper's other articles "came very close to sedition," and the Justice Department was watching it closely "for seditious matter."²

Biddle's threats of prosecution for sedition did not come out of the blue. The editors he was threatening knew that leaders of the Teamster union and the Socialist Workers Party had been convicted in Minneapolis in 1941 for violation of the Smith Act, which outlawed advocacy of revolutionary ideas.

In addition, sedition indictments had been brought in September 1942 against sixty-three members of the Temple of Islam (the Black Muslims), including its leader Elijah Muhammad. The Muslims were accused of sedition because they refused to accept the racist, anti-Japanese stereotypes that were a major part of U.S. war propaganda and expressed solidarity with the Japanese as a people of color. Although the Justice Department could not make the sedition charge stick, it did succeed in convicting Elijah Muhammad and the other defendants on draft-evasion charges.  
 
Newspapers banned from U.S. mail
The government blocked shipment to troops overseas of Black newspapers that continued to publish condemnations of racism and other "unhelpful" facts and opinions. These papers were also often confiscated on military bases in the United States.

Early in 1943, at Biddle's urging, the U.S. Post Office began proceedings to suspend the second-class mailing rights of several newspapers with uncompromising stands against race discrimination. These included the Militant, whose contributors and editors included members of the Socialist Workers Party. The Postmaster General banned the Militant from the mails on the grounds, among others, that its articles included "stimulation of race issues." All fighters for Black rights were supposed to get the point. The Militant won restoration of its mailing rights after a year-long battle that included the mobilization of protests from leaders of Black groups, trade unions, and civil liberties organizations.³

The race discrimination that Blacks fought against during the war had its counterpart in the treatment of other peoples of color at the hands of the government. While Mexican-American soldiers were not segregated into separate units, they nonetheless faced racist discrimination and abuse inside the U.S. armed forces. In 1943 hundreds of Chicanos in Los Angeles were beaten up by cops and white vigilantes during several consecutive nights of a rampage through Mexican-American neighborhoods. Many of the racist gangs were made up of off-duty navy sailors or marines, but U.S. military officials did nothing to stop the nightly attacks or punish those involved. Although none of the vigilantes were arrested, some seventy of their Chicano victims were picked up by the cops.

Exploitation of immigrant workers intensified during the war. In 1942 Washington began the so-called Bracero Program, which provided capitalist growers with a steady flow of superexploited immigrant farm labor from Mexico. The U.S. government underwrote $120 million in costs to organize the teams that went to Mexico to recruit laborers and transport them into the United States during harvest seasons. These workers had no rights, were legally barred from joining unions, and were subject to deportation at their employers' whim.

The Bracero Program was in part designed to offset the upward pressure on agricultural wages caused by the internment of many Japanese-American farm laborers in the months just after U.S. entry into the war. These workers were among the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

This infamous action was carried out under the authority of an executive order issued by Roosevelt in February 1942. Roosevelt authorized military commanders to designate "military" areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded...." This power was immediately used to declare California, Oregon, and Washington "strategic" areas. Every Japanese-American living in those states was ordered into concentration camps. Compelled to settle their affairs in a matter of only days or a couple of weeks, they were forced to sell their farms, businesses, and homes at far below their market value. They were locked up in camps unfit for human habitation--not on the basis of anything they had done but on the grounds of their Japanese ancestry. Not only interned, they were thus expropriated to the benefit of the propertied classes.

In the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico, many working people were unwilling to postpone their fight for national independence and against miserable living and working conditions in the name of a "wartime emergency." Sugar workers in the island's fields and mills waged strike battles for higher wages and decent working conditions. Puerto Rican independence fighters were a special target of the FBI during the war.

Several years earlier, in 1936, Pedro Albizu Campos, the central leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, had been railroaded to a federal prison in Atlanta on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government and "inciting rebellion" against the United States. When Washington entered the war, the U.S. government offered to free Albizu Campos and some sixty other imprisoned Nationalists if they would agree to suspend all proindependence activity during the war. The Puerto Rican patriots unanimously refused. The Nationalist Party voted to reject conscription into the U.S. Army, since "the United States holds Puerto Rico under a military, illegal government." Some 60,000 Puerto Ricans--about one-fifth of those eligible--refused to register for the draft. Washington prosecuted a number of Nationalist Party members for draft evasion, including its former secretary-general, Julio Pinto Gandía. In a June 1945 interview with the Militant, Gandía explained:

I do not evade anything. I simply refuse to fight as a slave of an imperialist power. I will fight as much as is needed, but only for the freedom and independence of my people. I know there are many young men from Puerto Rico in the U.S. army.... They think they are fighting for freedom and democracy. But they will learn...that kind of fight begins at home.

1. In 1942 the Pittsburgh Courier launched what it called the "Double V" campaign after publishing a letter written by a young Black worker in an aircraft plant in Wichita, Kansas, who called for a "double victory" for democracy at home and abroad. The campaign reverberated throughout the country as Blacks began expressing a growing determination to not accept continued postponement of their demands for full citizenship rights.

2. Recounted in Charles Washburn, A Question of Sedition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p 90. This is one of the most substantial existing resources documenting government harassment of the Black press during World War II.

3. An important part of the fight against racism and political repression during World War II is told in the Pathfinder book Fighting Racism in World War II, a collection of articles from the Militant.  
 
 
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