Once more, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you

J. Edgar Hoover figured it was his job to track down witches

People who worried that the federal government might be planning mass roundups in the Red Scare after the Second World War ("red" meant Communist back then, not Republican) weren't entirely wrong, as we see in Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950 by Tim Weiner 12/23/07. Weiner reports:

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage." The F.B.I would "apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under "a master warrant attached to a list of names" provided by the bureau.

Congress did explicitly legislate the authority to do round up suspected subversives and detain them in camps. As I recall, that authorization stayed on the books until the 1970s, when the Watergate scandal prompted the press (which wasn't decimated then the way it is now) and Congress to take a harder look at shady things like that, including various Executive declarations of emergency that had never been formally terminated.

Harry Truman's administration had the good sense to decline Hoover's roundup proposal. Although Weiner reports that fact oddly, writing "no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover's proposal".

Tags: authoritarianism, j edgar hoover, harry truman