F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

Abstract

Established in 1908 as the investigative division of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon moved beyond law enforcement to include monitoring of radical activists and organizations and then after 1936 to conducting “intelligence” investigations. The purpose of the latter was not simply to anticipate planned espionage and sabotage threats but also to monitor those who could influence the political culture. The targets included Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors; German émigré writers and playwrights; prominent writers (including prominent sociologists); and liberal and radical journals of opinion (The Nation; I. F. Stone's Weekly). In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized a special index, the Reserve Index, to list for possible detention any individuals who “are in a position to influence others against the national interest or are likely to furnish financial or other material aid to subversive elements due to their subversive associations or ideology.” Hoover specified that the Index should include “writers, lecturers, news men and others in the mass media field,” and, as one example, he cited the author Norman Mailer. Two responses by senior FBI officials highlight the capriciousness of the FBI's surveillance operations. First, after Hoover learned that he himself was allegedly the model for one of the characters in Walt Kelley's comic strip Pogo, her ordered his aides to conduct a content analysis of the strip to ascertain whether the portrayal was positive or negative. Second, after learning that Hollywood actor Rock Hudson was gay, FBI officials worried that Hudson might play an FBI agent in a movie.In this vein, William Maxwell's recently published monograph F. B. Eyes offers the promise of expanding our understanding of FBI surveillance operations and the role that race played in determining the targets of FBI investigations. To research this issue, Maxwell filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking all FBI files on “Afro-modernist writers” (his characterization) listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He eventually obtained 51 files while discovering that the FBI had no records on 53 other writers and that the records on an additional six either had been destroyed or were “missing” when transferred to the National Archives. In the introduction, Maxwell posits that during the years 1919 through 1972 “a who's who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted by Hoover's FBI” (p. 3).As it turns out, Maxwell's principal contribution to FBI scholarship is his decision to post 49 of the accessible FBI files online at http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes. Unfortunately, his own analysis of these files is disappointingly thin. For one, his cursory account of the contents of the FBI files on these 51 African American writers resembles the contents of FBI files on other writers and political activists: namely, information on their personal conduct and political beliefs and associations and at times a close analysis of their published writing. Second, these files confirm that they were compiled because of FBI officials’ ideological conviction that “subversive” writers could possibly influence their readers and not because the writer violated federal laws (including espionage and sabotage). Maxwell, however, does not fully develop this theme, which is not the central focus of his at times rambling, impressionistic assessment of African-American literature and the FBI's response.