It’s all up with the “black cabinet” of Washington,” read the Washington Evening Star. Congressional hearings were then underway into the practice by which the U.S. Secret Service loaned investigators to other federal agencies, primarily the Justice Department. As a result of these hearings, Rep. Walter Smith (R-IA) declared that “Nothing is more opposed to our race than a belief that a general system of espionage is being conducted by the general government,” and Rep. John Fitzgerald (D-NY) warned against the dangers of a federal secret police.1 As a result of these hearings Congress forbade the Secret Service from loaning investigators to other departments. Having lost access to those investigators, Attorney General Bonaparte created a small force of detectives for the Department of Justice (DOJ); this was the predecessor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Because Congress had condemned “secret services,” “black cabinets,” spies, and detectives at this time, many Bureau critics have charged that the FBI was created in opposition to Congress’s will and so was born illegitimately.2 This was not so.
Prior to 1908, the Justice Department had no organized force of investigators to gather evidence. It relied on detectives hired from the Secret Service and, for a while private detectives. Under President Theodore Roosevelt, this began to change. The vigorous application of older laws and the increase in new ones that occurred during his administration began to tax the Justice Department’s ability to detect crime. In 1906, 60 Secret Service operatives were needed; the next year, 65. These investigators came from a reserve force of about 20 that the Secret Service kept to help other departments as well as a list maintained by Chief John Wilkie of some 300 other investigators who had applied for Secret Service positions, were already vetted by the Treasury Department, but for whom no position was available.3
