Not Just Spies Overhead but Also Underneath: Wastebasket Snoopers and Leftist Counter-Surveillance

As the term conveys, surveillance is usually considered the top-down process indicated by the title, Spy Overhead, a 1937 book by Clinch Calkins based on the La Follette Senate Subcommittee investigations of anti-labor espionage. Historians have tended to adopt the same focus on “top-down” surveillance either undertaken by state intelligence agencies or the industrial espionage investigated by the La Follette investigation between 1936 and 1940. Instead of taking this “top-down” definition of surveillance, this analysis combines a focus on “top-down,” “bottom-up”, and lateral counter-surveillance. It analyses a counter-surveillance archive compiled by a San Francisco labor law firm, originally called Gladstein, Grossman & Margolis, which defended union clients, and a related collection from a private investigator’s office in the same city.

The documents now included in the Norman Leonard papers and the California Surveillance Collection at San Francisco State University reveal undercover agent reports from state, city, and private investigators acquired through “top-down” surveillance by La Follette investigators, “bottom-up” surveillance by “wastebasket snoopers” in an industrial spy’s office, and lateral surveillance undertaken by an ACLU attorney in Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad” files and dossiers compiled by an anti-communist surveillance organization, the Better America Federation. Conducting counter-surveillance, from above, below, and laterally between 1936 and 1945 on groups engaged in anti-labor espionage, these groups protected union rights. The evidence surreptitiously acquired not only saved Harry Bridges, one of the key targets, from deportation, but convinced a Supreme Court Justice that “industrial and farming organizations, veterans’ groups, city police departments, and private undercover agents” had used “wiretapping, searches and seizures without warrants and other forms of invasion of the right of privacy” in their “deportation drive” to remove the CIO leader from the United States. (Justice Frank Murphy, concurring opinion, Bridges v. Wixon [1945]).