Why was the FBI formed? J. Edgar Hoover did a lot to build the FBI, but it was actually started by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 to investigate corruption in government.
Policing goes back to the origins of the United States of America, but the police are not that old. In the early colonies that would become the United States, policing was generally carried out by citizens and volunteers. The police became official in 1838 when the city of Boston set up a publicly funded police service that was based on the style that had arisen in England. The UK service had been started by Sir Robert Peel, who believed that the police were citizens who had been chosen by the people, and they therefore had a strong responsibility to the public that they policed. That is possibly the origin behind the now famous Los Angeles police motto of “to protect and serve”. Over the next 70 years, police forces grew until every town had one or more and every state had one.
So, why was the FBI formed? The local and state police were often poorly funded and poorly trained. The United States was changing rapidly and the railway networks that crossed the country meant that criminals could easily move from one area to another. They could commit a crime and then vanish. The local police didn’t have the ability to follow them. The invention of the car at the end of the 19th century and the popularity of the Model T Ford made it even easier for criminals to move around. This, coupled with high levels of corruption in local, state, and national government gave a sense that the United States was giving way to lawlessness.
One good example of this, and possibly a reason why the FBI came into being was Leon Czolgosz. Leon F. Czolgosz was born in Detroit, Michigan, and he would grow up to work in a mill, work on a farm, and assassinate President William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States and the second president to be assassinated in the United States. (Interestingly, four US presidents have been assassinated, which is 8.69% – a rather high figure for a developed country.) In 1901, Czolgosz used the extensive rail network to go to New York where he shot President McKinley. McKinley died about a week later from an infection. McKinley was replaced by Theodore Roosevelt, who was a whole different kind of politician.
Roosevelt had been building his career on an anti-corruption base. He had been head of the New York Police Department, where he had organized the service more efficiently. Then he had been a Civil Service Commissioner in Washington and had fought against corruption there too. When he became president, his goal was to root out corruption and cut crime.
The formation of the FBI goes back to 1870 when the Department of Justice was formed. It was headed by the attorney general and was tasked with enforcing federal law and making judicial policy. It was a central base of criminal information, but it didn’t have any officers or agents of its own. Whenever something needed investigating, the Justice Department was forced to hire local private detectives or borrow agents from other agencies. Quiet often they would use agents from the Secret Service, which had been created by the Department of the Treasury in 1865. The Treasury was not very kind and charged a lot of money for the use of its agents.
In 1906, President Roosevelt made Charles Bonaparte the attorney general. (Yes, he was related to Napoleon.) Bonaparte very quickly got fed up having to hire agents from the Secret Service, so he and Roosevelt gave Congress an ultimatum. Congress responded by banning the Department of Justice from using Secret Service agents and Bonaparte and Roosevelt responded by stealing ten Secret Service agents and setting up his team of investigators. This was July 26th, 1908, the birth of the FBI. Bonaparte’s successor, George W. Wickersham, gave them the name “Bureau of Investigation”.
The Bureau expanded over the coming years, but it would be J. Edgar Hoover who became director in 1924 who put the bureau on the map and made it “Federal”. He was director, for good or for bad, until 1972 and because of that the law was changed so no one person could be director for more than ten years.
So, the Bureau of Investigation was set up in 1908 because the Department of Justice didn’t have any investigators of its own. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dillinger-rise-fbi/
https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Czolgosz
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fbi-founded
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-of-the-police