One hundred years of crime fighting A GREAT AMERICAN INSTITUTION NOW MUST FOCUS ON BIG THREATS
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100th anniversary of the FBI
Date published: 7/13/2008
SEWANEE, Tenn.--
This month a great American institution, the FBI, will mark its 100th anniversary. The bureau celebrates its official birthday on July 26, the day Theodore Roosevelt's attorney general Charles Bonaparte ordered a tiny force of 34 agents assembled from the Secret Service and the Justice Department to report to the bureau's first director, Stanley W. Finch. Today, the bureau has 30,847 employees, including 12,737 agents who are stationed at the Washington headquarters named after its most famous director, J. Edgar Hoover, as well as in 56 field offices, more than 400 smaller resident agencies, and 60 foreign countries, supported by a budget of more than $6 billion. It has really grown, some would say like Topsy.
So has the country, of course, but while the the United States has gone from 88 million to 301 million over the same years--that is to say, it is three and a half times as big as it was in 1908--the FBI is 375 times as big as when it started. Admittedly, that's not quite a fair comparison. The United States plays a different role in the world than it did in 1908, and government plays a bigger role, too, especially the national government, but that kind of growth can and has led to suspicions that the FBI has gotten too big to be the lean effective force Theodore Roosevelt had in mind when he started it.
THWARTING CONGRESS
What did Roosevelt have in mind, a question that should appeal to the original-intent enthusiasts among us? In 1908, Roosevelt had been waging a war against corrupt politicians and fat-cat financiers who had forged an effective alliance that made them almost invulnerable to any kind of regulation by a public incensed at their contempt for the common good. Teddy liked to say that putting J.P. Morgan in jail for even a single night would be the best thing anyone could do for the country. He was particularly infuriated by Congress' penchant for passing laws regulating financial trusts and industrial monopolies and then depriving the government of the tools--detectives--necessary to enforce those laws.
Richard Gid Powers is the author of "G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture"; "Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover"; and "Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI."
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