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Murder, mayhem and treason were not the only business of the FBI. Its 4,100 agents also are responsible for enforcing more than 120 major federal laws—from crimes on the high seas to train wreckings (which usually turn out to be the work of thoughtless youngsters trying to flatten chunks of metal on the tracks). They hunt down such prosaic criminals as copyright violators and offenders of the laws protecting migratory birds. In March 1947, Harry Truman had given the FBI its toughest, most controversial assignment: to check the loyalty of 2,500,000 federal employees.
Last week the FBI, revered by many, feared by a few and respected by all, celebrated the 41st anniversary of its organization as the investigating arm of the Department of Justice. It was also the 32nd anniversary of the day a young law-school graduate named John E. Hoover reported for work in the department as a $1,200-a-year file reviewer.
Justice Under the Brim. This year a quarter of a million U.S. tourists will descend on the FBI's impressive, air-conditioned Washington headquarters to see for themselves how the FBI has grown. Not many will leave without the firm conviction that Director Hoover's G-man is still the scourge of the underworld, the snap-brimmed symbol of dauntless justice in a covert-cloth topcoat.
Neat, well-pressed guides direct the tourists to glass-enclosed trophies of familiar FBI triumphs. In the center of a cabinet is the death mask of onetime Public Enemy No. 1, John Dillinger, surrounded by the contents of his pockets on the night he was shot down near Chicago's Biograph theater: a pair of smashed steel-rimmed glasses, a cigar, a snapshot of a gum-chewing Dillinger moll.
With a fine sense of showmanship, the tourists are led through the department's law library (85,000 volumes) to a basement range where they are treated to an ear-splitting exhibition of FBI marksmanship with the service .38, the Tommy gun, the .357 Magnum revolver. They are shown spotless laboratories (where a crook can be traced by the sweat on his collar) and elaborate crime-busting files (2,500 kinds of auto paints, 3,000 designs of tire treads, 125 soil samples).
FBI men reassuringly point out that the bureau's file of 112,500,000 fingerprints (increasing at the rate of about two a second) is used to identify amnesia victims and mangled corpses as well as such underworld characters as Airbrake Smith and Rooster Face Fannie.
But what no tourist will see is the bureau's investigative file covering thousands of ordinary U.S. citizens.
Dossiers & Doubts. It was the existence of those files—important strands in the nation's gigantic net to catch a few disloyal citizens—which gave even the most ardent admirer of the FBI a slightly uneasy feeling. It was not that very many people objected to flushing out Communists and potential saboteurs. But it was a suspicion that any such collection was bound to damn the innocent as well as the guilty.