{"id":297,"date":"2016-08-28T00:15:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-28T06:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/wordpress\/?p=297"},"modified":"2022-01-21T16:37:28","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T23:37:28","slug":"vile-vault-the-fbi-gets-its-man-or-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/28\/vile-vault-the-fbi-gets-its-man-or-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Vile Vault: The FBI Gets Its Man (or Woman)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Federal Bureau of Investigation turned 108 this year, originally having been considered a reform of what the New York Times<\/em> called a \u201ctangle\u201d of the Secret Service.\u00a0\u201cThe plan is nothing less,\u201d wrote the Times<\/em> in 1908, \u201cthan the merging of the Secret Service and the detective agencies of all departments of the Government into a Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a sort of Federal police, to be incorporated under the Department of Justice.\u201d\u00a0Lest the notion of such a Federal force strike fear, the Christian Science Monitor<\/em> cooed:<\/p>\n

These employees of the government are not \u2018police spies\u2019 and should not be denominated as such even by those who entertain a passing resentment toward the system. In the great majority of cases they are simply confidential agents of the government, and their calling is just as legitimate as that of the confidential agents of corporate and private business concerns.<\/p>\n

People interested in what the FBI has been up to during the last century can browse its Vault<\/a>, an online treasure trove of thousands of documents released either via Freedom of Information Act requests, or by\u00a0the Bureau\u2019s own largesse.<\/p>\n

A sexually circumscribed stroll through The Vault\u2019s index<\/a> reveals files on several shady characters: Alfred Kinsey, Amelia Earhart, Alger Hiss, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Black Dahlia aka Elizabeth Short, Bayard Rustin, Bettie Page\u2014that\u2019s just the A\u2019s and B\u2019s. (All subjects are listed\u2014but not precisely sorted\u2014by first names.) The C\u2019s are worth a gander, revealing the Bureau\u2019s political inquiries: Cardinal Francis Spellman, Clark Gable, Carl Sagan, Casey Kasem, Christic Institute, C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez, Carl Sandburg, Coretta Scott King, COINTELPRO, and none other than Clyde A. Tolson\u2014J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s first mate in the FBI.<\/p>\n

Vile Vault<\/a> examines the FBI investigation of the Mattachine Society and ONE<\/em> magazine. And the identity of a snitch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Examining the FBI investigation of the Mattachine Society and ONE magazine. And the identity of a snitch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[176,34,101,187],"tags":[186,150,177,179,183,180,184,185,178,171,198,182,135,172,164,181],"class_list":["post-297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fbi","category-lgbt-history","category-publishing","category-sexism","tag-ann-carll-reid","tag-chuck-rowland","tag-clyde-tolson","tag-david-l-freeman","tag-donald-webster-cory","tag-dorr-legg","tag-douglas-m-charles","tag-hoovers-war-on-gays","tag-j-edgar-hoover","tag-jim-kepner","tag-los-angeles","tag-lynn-pederson","tag-mattachine","tag-one-magazine","tag-tangent-group","tag-william-lambert"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/put-up-or-shut-up.jpg?fit=1522%2C862&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paF2cn-4N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}