

On July 26, 1908, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
is born when U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte orders a group of
newly hired federal investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W.
Finch of the Department of Justice. One year later, the Office of the
Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau of Investigation, and in 1935 it
became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
When the Department of
Justice was created in 1870 to enforce federal law and coordinate
judicial policy, it had no permanent investigators on its staff. At
first, it hired private detectives when it needed federal crimes
investigated and later rented out investigators from other federal
agencies, such as the Secret Service, which was created by the
Department of the Treasury in 1865 to investigate counterfeiting. In the
early part of the 20th century, the attorney general was authorized to
hire a few permanent investigators, and the Office of the Chief
Examiner, which consisted mostly of accountants, was created to review
financial transactions of the federal courts.

Seeking to form an
independent and more efficient investigative arm, in 1908 the Department
of Justice hired 10 former Secret Service employees to join an expanded
Office of the Chief Examiner. The date when these agents reported to
duty--July 26, 1908--is celebrated as the genesis of the FBI. By March
1909, the force included 34 agents, and Attorney General George
Wickersham, Bonaparte's successor, renamed it the Bureau of
Investigation.

The federal government used the bureau as a tool to
investigate criminals who evaded prosecution by passing over state
lines, and within a few years the number of agents had grown to more
than 300. The agency was opposed by some in Congress, who feared that
its growing authority could lead to abuse of power. With the entry of
the
United States into
World War I
in 1917, the bureau was given responsibility in investigating draft
resisters, violators of the Espionage Act of 1917, and immigrants
suspected of radicalism.



Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, a lawyer and
former librarian, joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and within
two years had become special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer. Deeply anti-radical in his ideology, Hoover came to the
forefront of federal law enforcement during the so-called "
Red Scare"
of 1919 to 1920. He set up a card index system listing every radical
leader, organization, and publication in the United States and by 1921
had amassed some 450,000 files. More than 10,000 suspected communists
were also arrested during this period, but the vast majority of these
people were briefly questioned and then released. Although the attorney
general was criticized for abusing his power during the so-called
"Palmer Raids," Hoover emerged unscathed, and on May 10, 1924, he was
appointed acting director of the Bureau of Investigation.



During the
1920s,
with Congress' approval, Director Hoover drastically restructured and
expanded the Bureau of Investigation. He built the agency into an
efficient crime-fighting machine, establishing a centralized fingerprint
file, a crime laboratory, and a training school for agents. In the
1930s,
the Bureau of Investigation launched a dramatic battle against the
epidemic of organized crime brought on by Prohibition. Notorious
gangsters such as George "Machine Gun" Kelly and John Dillinger met
their ends looking down the barrels of bureau-issued guns, while others,
like Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the elusive head of Murder, Inc., were
successfully investigated and prosecuted by Hoover's "G-men." Hoover,
who had a keen eye for public relations, participated in a number of
these widely publicized arrests, and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, as it was known after 1935, became highly regarded by
Congress and the American public.

With the outbreak of
World War II,
Hoover revived the anti-espionage techniques he had developed during
the first Red Scare, and domestic wiretaps and other electronic
surveillance expanded dramatically. After World War II, Hoover focused
on the threat of radical, especially communist, subversion. The FBI
compiled files on millions of Americans suspected of dissident activity,
and Hoover worked closely with the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy, the architect of America's
second Red Scare.

In 1956, Hoover initiated COINTELPRO, a secret
counterintelligence program that initially targeted the U.S. Communist
Party but later was expanded to infiltrate and disrupt any radical
organization in America. During the
1960s, the immense resources of COINTELPRO were used against dangerous groups such as the
Ku Klux Klan but also against African
American civil rights organizations and liberal anti-war organizations. One figure especially targeted was civil rights leader
Martin Luther King, Jr., who endured systematic harassment from the FBI.

By
the time Hoover entered service under his eighth president in 1969, the
media, the public, and Congress had grown suspicious that the FBI might
be abusing its authority. For the first time in his bureaucratic
career, Hoover endured widespread criticism, and Congress responded by
passing laws requiring Senate confirmation of future FBI directors and
limiting their tenure to 10 years. On May 2, 1972, with the
Watergate affair about to explode onto the national stage, J. Edgar Hoover died of heart disease at the age of 77.

The Watergate affair subsequently revealed that the FBI had illegally protected President
Richard Nixon
from investigation, and the agency was thoroughly investigated by
Congress. Revelations of the FBI's abuses of power and unconstitutional
surveillance motivated Congress and the media to become more vigilant in
the future monitoring of the FBI.
Taken from:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fbi-founded [26.07.12]
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