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of Investigation, with Frank Burke, the Secret Service’s former Russian expert, as second-in-command. As he cast around for assistants in his own department, Palmer remembered Edgar Hoover – one of only two wartime legal staffers who had asked to stay on.
    A Secret Service check on Edgar turned up nothing remarkable – except that his father was now ‘very ill’ in an asylum, and that Edgar was paying the bills. At twenty-four, Edgar became a Special Assistant to Palmer and head of a new section formed to gather evidence on ‘revolutionary and ultra-radical groups.’
    His day-to-day chores were directed by Assistant Attorney General Francis Garvan, a counter-subversion zealot with a visceral hatred of foreigners – and Edgar soon became known as ‘Garvan’s pet.’ The job was tailor-made for the young man who had once delighted in sorting his books and keeping a record of his clothes sizes, then gone on to toil among the stacks at the Library of Congress. He now used his experience at the Library to build a massive card index on left-wingers.
    The index proved to be astoundingly efficient by the standards of the time, the nearest thing to today’s instantaneous retrieval by computer. Names and cross-references could be located within minutes. Half a million names were indexed during this, Edgar’s first big operation, along with biographical notes on 60,000 people.
    Edgar immersed himself in Communist literature. ‘I studied,’ he was to recall, ‘the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as the activities of the Third International.’Those doctrines, he reported to his superiors, ‘threaten the happiness of the community, the safety of every individual … They would destroy the peace of the country …’
    As a reading of Soviet Communism, this was accurate enough. Yet few historians believe there was any real risk of violent revolution in the United States in the twenties. In the wake of the bombings, however – not least thanks to Palmer and his bright young men – the country lost its balance.
    Edgar’s chosen assistant was George Ruch, a friend from high school days who held extreme right-wing views. Ruch’s concept of democracy is summed up in one of his reports, which expressed astonishment that left-wingers – like other citizens – ‘should be allowed to speak and write all they wish against this government …’
    Later, when Ruch left the Bureau to head the Industrial Police for a Pittsburgh coal company, Edgar would assign agents to train the thugs he used against labor activists. Ruch named his son J. Edgar, and Edgar described Ruch as ‘one of my most personal friends.’ He addressed him affectionately as ‘Blimp.’
    One way to deal with dangerous radicals, the pair advised their superiors, was to throw them out of the country – by applying a law that made mere membership in radical organizations a deportable offense.
    There followed a season of oppression remembered by Judge Lawrence Brooks of Massachusetts, who personally witnessed some of its outrages, as ‘the sorriest episode in the history of our country, not excepting the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy.’
    It began on November 7, 1919 – carefully selected because it was the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution – with raids on the offices of the Union of Russian Workers in a dozen cities. Hundreds of suspected revolutionaries were arrested, many severely beaten. Almost all were subsequently released, either because they were not foreigners at all, or could not conceivably be called revolutionaries. The raidswere carried out by police and Bureau of Investigation agents, but ‘handled’ at the Justice Department by Edgar.
    The next stage of the operation gave Edgar his first taste of publicity, and one of the few opportunities he ever had to present a case in court. It was he who