Book Review: The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade against Smut, by Douglas M. Charles

Abstract

The FBI's Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau's Crusade against Smut. Douglas M. Charles. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. 200 pp. $24.95 hbk. plank: Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced. Indeed, in July of that year, the Daily Caller reported that a top adviser for Mitt Romney promised Patrick Trueman, current head of Morality in Media and former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, that if elected president, Romney would ramp up federal obscenity prosecutions after years of relaxed oversight.If Romney had prevailed and, in turn, made good on his promise, it certainly would not have been the first time that politicians, moralists, and federal law enforcement officials triangulated around sexually explicit expression during times of sociocultural shifts. Douglas M. Charles makes that abundantly clear in his fascinating and wellwritten new book, The FBI's Obscene File.Charles, assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who describes himself in the preface as an FBI scholar, charts, in chronological fashion, a century of involvement and intervention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with all varieties of sexual materials. These range from filthy images on playing cards to nudity in plays like Oh! Calcutta to sexual acts in movies like Deep Throat and even to the generally unintelligible lyrics of the Kingsman's song Louie Louie. Some of the more notable public figures who play prominent roles in The FBI's Obscene File include J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Charles Keating, the last of whom gained widespread attention in the 1980s not for his assault on sexual content, but for his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association scandal.The centerpiece of the documentation from which Charles draws much of his material is the administrative portion of the FBI's Obscene File, which Charles obtained in redacted form via a Freedom of Information Act request. The other portion of the Obscene File, which was created in 1942 and eventually abandoned during the administration of President Bill Clinton and FBI head Louis Freeh, consisted of a vast library of sexually explicit material housed in the FBI's vaunted crime laboratory. The fact that the FBI possessed its very own large collection of pornography-it was so large that, on several occasions, parts of it had to be incinerated to make way for newer material-was always a source of potential embarrassment for the Bureau. One of the primary purposes of this collection of content was as a reference point against which to compare new specimens of obscene material to identify their sources.But the Obscene File was often misused and abused over the years by the FBI, from cracking down on the of African Americans during the 1940s-so-called race music featuring suggestive lyrics-to ferreting out gays in government service. …