The Secret Service under Roosevelt
In the only excerpt in which he is discussed, Theodore Roosevelt figures in Pat Eddington’s account of how federal policing began. Eddington told Bob Zadek that the founders generally wanted states and localities to handle criminal law and criminal matters, and that this held true until about the beginning of the 20th century, when Congress began passing more laws asking federal agents to investigate specific crimes. The first semi-large-scale federal police force, Eddington said, was the Secret Service, created in the wake of the assassination of President Lincoln and initially concerned primarily with counterfeiting, though it later took on protecting the person of the President through congressional enactment. The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020)
Eddington placed Roosevelt at the center of the shift that followed. Looking at the first 10 years of the 20th century, he described a fundamental change in which, under President Theodore Roosevelt, the Secret Service was used extensively for domestic surveillance against a number of Roosevelt’s political opponents. Because many of these investigations were predicated on alleged congressional corruption, Eddington said, a lot of Roosevelt’s congressional opponents were reluctant to take him on to begin with. The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020)
The naval officer investigation and the 1908 prohibition
The episode ties the end of that arrangement to a specific case. Eddington recounted that in the fall of 1907 the Secret Service was used by the Department of the Navy to investigate a young naval officer, at the request of the parents of the officer’s wife, who believed their daughter’s husband was engaged in an extramarital affair and wanted the Secretary of the Navy to investigate. Eddington noted that in those days such a matter would have represented a serious career problem for a naval officer and could have led to separation from the service. The Secretary of the Navy asked the Treasury Secretary, or asked the Secret Service, to conduct the investigation. The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020)
It did not stay secret. When the matter came out in the late fall and early winter of 1907 and into early 1908, Eddington said, it produced a massive hue and cry from Congress and in the press, and led Congress to legislate in early 1908 a specific prohibition on the use of the Secret Service for anything other than protection of the person of the President and counterfeiting operations. The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020)
Creation of the FBI
Roosevelt’s response, in Eddington’s telling, was to go to his Attorney General, Charles Bonaparte, and say that he wanted an entire corps of agents created to conduct investigations into the other issues he was concerned about. That, Eddington said, is when the Federal Bureau of Investigation came into existence, on July 26, 1908 — the day, he noted, on which the program was being recorded, making it the official birthday of the FBI. The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020)
Eddington described the consequences over time. The Bureau’s reach was expanded, and when the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson got Congress to pass measures including the Espionage Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act and the Food Control Act, which led to massive use of both the FBI and the Secret Service to investigate Americans on the basis of those statutes. Eddington characterized the result as the creation of a de facto federal police force, adding that the FBI was more than that: it was primarily, and remained primarily, a domestic intelligence service, which he said is what tends to get the Bureau in trouble — spying on people and going after them for political reasons rather than chasing down espionage and similar matters. The whole issue of a federal investigative law enforcement capability, national in scope and national in power, he said, dates from just before the turn of the 20th century but gets on steroids once the FBI comes into existence and begins to expand. The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020)
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, the July 24, 2020 program on the ratchet effect, touches on Theodore Roosevelt, through Pat Eddington’s history of federal policing; the excerpts show no development in the treatment of Roosevelt across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Roosevelt’s presidency beyond the use of the Secret Service, his earlier or later career, his policies, his writings, or his death. They do not identify the naval officer investigated in 1907, the statute Congress passed in early 1908 by name, or the legal authority under which the Secret Service operated. Nothing in the excerpts addresses Roosevelt’s own views on federal policing or whether he commented on the creation of the Bureau that followed the prohibition.