The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935-1962

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In his book The Irish Diaspora in America , Lawrence J. McCaffery quoted the then-conservative columnist and former Nixon speech-writer Garry Wills as claiming that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover liked to employ Roman Catholics in the FBI "because of their intensive, almost neurotic loyalty to the United States" ([Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 205). While Wills's observation is hyperbolic, it nevertheless points up the narrative of Americanism within which Steven Rosswurm sets his well researched, much-needed, and remarkably illuminating book. Rosswurm's perceptive research skills aid in the creation of a flowing narrative grounded in the best-published and archival sources. For Rosswurm, it was "Hoover's profound admiration and respect for Catholicism and its values," which provided the basis for an institutional partnership that lasted from the "G-Man" era of the 1930s through the first decades of the Cold War.While studies of religion and religious organizations are becoming increasingly valued in the academy, Rosswurm's book offers much more than a political history of a church-state relationship. What is chronicled here, for the first time in any substantial way, is the history of a relationship between an American ecclesiastical community and a branch of the U.S. national security apparatus. As Rosswurm points out, this relationship was based not only in the shared institutional values of good social order and emerging Catholic ideas on masculinity, but also in the ability of Catholic theological concepts to easily conform to the dogmatic crime-fighting and anti-communist culture of the Bureau.Leo XIII was the first pope to theologize the internal safety of the state when he penned his encyclical Diuturnum as a response to a grave criminal act--the assassination of Czar Nicholas II in 1880. A decade later, Leo set the theological tone for the Catholic fight against socialism and communism in his more famous encyclical Rerum Novarum. "It is clear that the main tenet of socialism," the pope declared, "must be utterly rejected" (15). With these theological dispositions in place, Rosswurm asserts early twentieth-century American Catholics came to understand a friendly "convergence of values" which was emerging within one branch of the U.S. government--a government whose high officialdom was sometimes skeptical if not prejudiced against Roman Catholics (13).Rosswurm ably chronicles the astonishingly close relationships of the FBI with various bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. Although treated as subtext, the Bureau's relations with these prelates--most from immigrant origins--clearly were driven by the impulse toward Americanization deeply ingrained in the late 19th century American Catholic dioceses. The urge for patriotic approval may have been as much the product of American Catholic assimilationist aspirations as much as FBI director Hoover's pitches about parallel objectives. But while the Bureau's relationships with top prelates are examined superbly, much less space is dedicated to probing the religious "convergence" of rank-and-file field agents. In the era of Catholic Action, might the impressive Catholic permeation of the FBI be considered a proto-project of lay Catholic activism?The lay Catholic who held the most clout in the FBI during its years of politicization was, Edward A. Tamm. Tamm, an active Catholic from Montana and a graduate of Georgetown Law School, entered the FBI as a field agent in 1930 and rose be Assistant to the Director by 1942. It was Tamm who would supervise some of the most spectacular cases of the 1930's "War on Crime," including the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Although the winner of a legal ethics award at Georgetown Law, Tamm by 1940 seemed to participate "in what Athan Theoharis has shown to be the illegal and extralegal activities that came to be the norm at the Bureau" (107). …