For much of its history the FBI has been linked inextricably in the public mind with its first director, J. Edgar Hoover. Since the 1970s, critics have highlighted many of Hoover’s excesses and introduced periodic reforms. But, with his passing, the agency reshaped its public image without examining some fundamental questions about the relationship between a police organization and a democratic society. Praising Hoover for creating a strong law-enforcement agency the organization has been slow to eliminate all of his unconstitutional practices. Subsequently it has used some of the same fears that created Hoover’s organization to forestall change, calling it into question in cases like its assaults on militias and on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX, as well as its responsiveness to outside oversight.

The FBI’s roots were planted in the aftermath of the First World War, a period of widespread violation of constitutional rights in the name of national security. Anxieties engendered by the 1917 Russian Revolution, concerns about domestic radical organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the association in the mind of many Americans of socialism and anarchism with immigrants, allowed AttorneyGeneral A. Mitchell Palmer, and his assistant, Hoover, to undertake widespread arrests and deportations. The first “red scare,” however, was insufficient to provide legitimacy for a large federal police organization. The fears of the early 1920s gave way to late 1920s complacency. During the early 1930s, therefore, the organization’s director, Hoover, turned to another stereotype of immigration, the identification of immigrants with organized crime, for his bureau’s meal ticket. In this process he was helped significantly by the efforts of Hollywood in the early 1930s, and particularly the movies of James Cagney (Public Enemy, 1931), Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar, 1931) and George Raft (Scarface, 1932), depicting dangerous, larger-than-life gangsters. Lined up against these villains were Hoover’s G-Men (1935). The FBI director undertook a massive publicrelations campaign to create an image of the federal agent as fearless and incorruptible, presenting his agents as clean-cut, white and middleclass men. Events like the killing of Dillinger became public spectacles, virtual lynchings, with trophies from the shooting displayed on the director’s desk. Just as lynching established particular social practices in the South, Hoover’s publicly performed law-enforcement practices normalized the role of the FBI agency.

The Second World War brought a new role of locating the foreign agent on American soil, but the most significant modern developments for the growing FBI occurred in response to the emergent civil-rights movement. The movement arose in part out of a new relationship between the federal government and segregationist southern states, and this relationship required increased federal police intervention. The FBI was very slow to fulfill this new role, notwithstanding movie portrayals as in Mississippi Burning (1988), which erroneously depicted the Bureau as a key force for change. Only when freedom riders refused to halt their journeys through the South, and when other civil-rights activists refused to stop their work registering rural blacks, forcing the Kennedy administration to protect them, did FBI agents act. Civil-rights activists themselves often believed that the FBI remained on the sidelines until after their beatings.

But the FBI once again used events to bolster its public image. The murders of three activists (two of them white) in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, led to a very public investigation undertaken by the FBI, which eventually unearthed the bodies of the young men who had been killed with the collusion of local police authorities. This performance, reassuring as it was for many northern liberals, and played for all its worth to television audiences in the Hoover-endorsed FBI series (ABC, 1965–74), masked Hoover’s other more sinister work during this period.

This work involved the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home and office on the assumption that he was working with known communists. Endorsed by the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy (who worried about his brother’s identification with civil-rights leaders), this wiretapping revealed no “reds” under beds, but did produce salacious material that Hoover could add to his files (which most likely also covered John Kennedy’s philandering).

Hoover also turned to his counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate black militant organizations, the new left and the antiwar movement. The growing number of race riots in the mid-1960s led to the establishment of a “Ghetto Informant Program” in 1968, in which 3,250 agent provocateurs were employed to infiltrate organizations like the Black Panthers. Just as Hoover had helped create a “red scare” in the 1920s by sometimes creating organizations where there were none, so the FBI contributed to the exacerbation of racial tensions in black ghettos.

This work is now generally acknowledged as part of Hoover’s excesses. What is less clearly recognized is the manner in which such actions contributed to the understanding of the direction in which the movement towards racial equality was moving, and the extent to which their legacy has scarred American society. Hoover’s vision that the riots were the result of the work of Black Power advocates was in direct contrast to the arguments of the Kerner Commission, which recognized the social roots of discontent.

While Hoover has been vilified for his work during this period, his understanding of the period has survived, contributing to the backlash that occurred against the Civil Rights movement.

During the Watergate years, many of the FBI and CIA’s illegal activities came to light. Reforms occurred to such an extent that many conservatives began to feel that the federal policing agencies had been eviscerated, leaving the nation vulnerable. Now the Bureau benignly advertises itself as an enforcement agency complementing other local and state police forces, providing a sophisticated laboratory (to which Homicide, (NBC, 1993–9) detectives could turn when necessary) for studying fingerprint, DNA and other forensic evidence. It also undertakes investigation of telemarketing fraud, security fraud, bombings and major art thefts—not to mention the paranormal, as seen on the X-Files (FOX, 1993–). Yet the feeling that there may have been some legitimacy to Hoover’s methods has been rekindled among many Americans by events like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and fears associated with “foreign” (usually cast as Muslim, sometimes also immigrant) threats associated, once again, with increased involvement of American forces overseas. However, as in the case of the FBI’s handling of the Waco confrontation with the Branch Davidians and the apparent cover-up of its agents’ use of incendiary tear gas, such sentiments of legitimacy are quickly turned to excess.