Domestic Surveillance in History
Historiography
New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era
Jennifer Fronc, 2009
This book seems to have increased in relevance since Jennifer Fronc wrote it. Fronc (who joined the UMass faculty while I was a grad student there, I think) argued that Progressive social activists used private investigators to spy on Americans in a variety of settings. They went looking for information to confirm their suspicions about their fellow citizens, “produced the knowledge necessary to alter conditions,” and because they were willing to “tamper with civil liberties, cross lines, and perform tasks that would have been illegal” for government employees, “they were central to the creation of a stronger federal state during the Progressive Era and World War I, one that became increasingly repressive in the interests of a national security agenda.” Fronc distinguished between the evangelical approach of earlier reformers and the “instrumentalist pragmatism” of these people (whom she called “social activists” to avoid using the term reformer, which she says “generations of historians have used in their desire to impose organizational synthesis on the contingency and chaos” of the actual situation). These activists sought to “enforce their own moral codes” upon society by creating “new types of knowledge about urban neighborhoods and their residents.” Fronc demonstrated that private, often untrained undercover investigators played an “essential role in creating social knowledge and constituting political authority.” And she called attention to the problem with this, saying the “entire process was teleological: the predominantly middle-class social activists set the parameters of the investigations, had their concerns confirmed by their investigators’ findings and reports, and then moved to solve the problems their employees uncovered (or caused).”
Fronc’s narrative revealed interesting glimpses of the little-seen underside of early-twentieth-century New York, through the reports of these investigators. She also described the activities of the main private organizations, like the Committee of Fourteen and the People’s Institute, as well as more the “liminal and vigilante” National Civic Federation. The evolution of “moral reform” from “benevolent societies” to “preventive societies,” and then to these semi-public committees and ultimately to government agencies, was interesting and disturbing. In some cases, like the “undercover investigation of midwives,” the reader can clearly see the hand of the medical profession lobbying to “safeguard against the usurpation of the function of the physician” -- a function the physician had only recently wrested away from its traditional practitioners. But overall, Fronc said, “The desire to control and regulate--rather than ‘save’ or ‘redeem’--differentiated Progressive Era activists from their predecessors.” The elite condescension contained in these programs, and their racial, ethnic, and class biases did not go completely unchallenged at the time. Fronc documented a series of letters between W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Whitin (Executive of the Committee of Fourteen), in which Du Bois challenged the legality of the segregation the Committee tried to enforce on New York businesses.
Fronc also highlighted aspects of the period that get much less notice than they ought. She called attention to the fact that the period of 1914-1916 saw “nearly two years of monthly bombings in munitions plants, explosions aboard ships in New York harbor, and the arrests of German, Austrian, and Italian immigrants for bomb making in their apartments.” She traced the National Civic Federation’s 1900 establishment back to its roots in Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. She pointed out that the NCF “opposed groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, which wanted the government to protect small business interests from competition at the hands of large corporations and the demands of organized labor.” And that “On August 1, 1914, ‘the day after war was declared by Germany,’ the New York City Police Department officially expanded the Italian Squad and renamed it the Anarchist and Bomb Squad.”
Surveillance was undertaken apparently with glee by these activist Progressives, but did this type of somewhat sinister elitism pervade only their part of Progressivism? Jane Addams was named several times in the text, but Fronc never suggested that she had any knowledge of the type of surveillance that was going on. However, in the sense that some of this spying was finding out interesting new things about people in the major cities (which is part of the reason the findings are still so interesting), isn’t this exactly the type of information Addams would have been interested in, if she had known it existed? I also wonder how far outside the limits of the major cities this type of surveillance extended? Clearly, by the time the government took this domestic spying over in WWI, they were looking for “enemies of the state” wherever they might be. But how did that develop, outside the cities?
And weren’t the vigilantes who worked with the government really manifesting the same principle that motivated the anarchists themselves? A new, different concept of public and private spheres? The anarchists and the vigilantes both seemed to believe it was within their legitimate scope of activities, to take on (violent) projects in the public sphere. This type of public violence would later come to be (and is still, for us) understood as the monopoly of the state. So really, in one sense, the same impulse is behind the vigilantes that allied with the government to attack outsiders, and with the outsiders who attacked the organs of the state.