Crime and Reform: An Underworld of Journalism

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the shrouded career of undercover reporter Natalie de Bogory (mostly from 1911–1922) to illustrate how reporters collaborated with public-private networks to regulate real or perceived crime and extend the reach of the security state, before the practice later expanded within the FBI. De Bogory was twice a guide. Undercover for newspapers, she escorted readers through an urban working-class underworld of dance, sex, and employed single women. Her journalism, however, obscured her more covert work. For private reformers who partnered with city officials, she investigated social issues, including allegations of “White slavery,” the alleged sex trafficking of immigrant women. That work, during the nativist hysteria of World War I, drew de Bogory into a scheme to promote the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was later dubbed a “Warrant for Genocide.” This history of de Bogory is an argument for studying the careers of relatively unknown journalists who often worked multiple jobs to understand their impact, and expose the interconnectivity of journalism with other professions and institutions. This article reconstructs de Bogory’s career to reclaim the tradition of reporters collaborating with reformist public-private networks. Then, that neglected history is framed as a model for Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which publicized the Protocols.

KEYWORDS:

• Activist journalism
• crime
• journalism history
• public-private networks
• undercover journalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Natalie de Bogory, “A Greenhorn at the Gate,” Outlook, November 30, 1921, 534. De Bogory’s article reenacted the 1913 film, Traffic of the Souls. In it, two young Swedish sisters descend into the underworld of White slavery. For de Bogory and other reformers, Poland, newly independent after the Treaty of Versailles, was imagined as a protective barrier against encroaching Jewish conspiracies from Russia. De Bogory had briefly helped famous philosopher John Dewey, then professor at Columbia University writing a report for the Military Intelligence Division (MID), titled Conditions Among the Poles in the United States. In a letter, de Bogory claimed she collected much of the data Dewey obtained. She also worked public relations for the Polish National Defense Committee, a US group of Polish expats who had openly declared “long live the armed struggle” for Polish independence against Bolshevik Russia. The missing Polish girls of de Bogory’s story represented a wider belief of Jewish Bolsheviks undermining the Polish State. See letters between de Bogory and Albert C. Barnes, February 10 and 12, 1919, Box 108, Folder 1, Natalie De Bogory, Barnes Foundation Archives, Philadelphia.

2. In the 1920s, refugees from eastern Europe fled poverty and genocidal pogroms in eastern Europe. See Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt, 2021). For scholarship on Jews and White slavery, see Mara Keire, “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, 1907–1917,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 5–41, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3789262; Gil Ribak, “‘The Jew Usually Left Those Crimes to Esau’: The Jewish Responses to Accusations about Jewish Criminality in New York, 1908–1913,” AJS Review 38, no. 1 (April 2014): 1–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24273557; and Mia Brett, “The Murdered Jewess: Jewish Immigration and the Problem of Citizenship in the Courtroom in Late Nineteenth Century New York” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2020).

3. Other female reporters had simultaneously served both publishers and the state. One example is Jane McManus Storm Cazneau of the New York Sun. Secretary of State James Buchanan dispatched her during the Mexican-American War in 1846 to collect information. Additionally, UP reporter Ruby Black, who later established the Ruby A. Black News Bureau, worked informally for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt during the New Deal. Black monitored the Spanish-language press, lobbied, and acquired information, and was paid by Luis Munoz Marin, an editor and Liberal Party senator in Puerto Rico, to provide advice and a diplomatic backchannel to help obtain relief for the impoverished island. So de Bogory was not alone in terms of female reporters who worked with the state, but this article uses her as a lens through which to examine this journalistic phenomenon as it pertains to crime and reform. See Linda S. Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001); and Maurine H. Beasley, Ruby A. Black: Eleanor Roosevelt, Puerto Rico, and Political Journalism in Washington (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

4. For the history of American political development on voluntary cooperative action to expand national authority, see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). For work on FBI-press collaboration, see Matthew Cecil, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2014), 112, 195, 202; and Marc Perrusquia, A Spy in Canaan (New York: Melville House, 2018). In the late 1960s, CIA-press connections were revealed, though those relationships focused on foreign affairs and international relations, not domestic crime. For example, see Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, 55–67; and David P. Hadley, Rising Clamor: The American Press, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Cold War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019).

5. The national security state typically refers to a network of institutions created by the 1947 National Security Act for US foreign and defense policymaking. For this article, the national security state refers to a much looser network of public and private institutions and groups for which “national security” (a rare term during WWI), became an organizing principle, such as the National Security League, police departments searching for foreign saboteurs, and federal agencies, such as the BOI. The term “national defense” was more common in the early twentieth century. As a reporting tactic, undercover journalism dates back to at least the 1850s. However, it was not until the early 1890s that undercover reporting began to increasingly focus on urban crime, as opposed to previous interests, such as slavery and corruption. For a history of undercover reporting, see Brooke Kroeger, Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012); and Mark Pittenger, Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

6. As Jennifer Fronc, whose research has been essential to this article, has written, “undercover investigation was central to the constitution of political authority and the extension of state power during the Progressive Era and beyond.” Other cities mobilized private groups to police urban crime. Chicago exhibited partnerships between police, private purity groups, and journalism. In 1908, the Immigration Bureau investigated White slavery in at last fifteen cities. Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Survelliance in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 7.

7. De Bogory’s gender helped conceal her conspiracy work. In 1901, an article in Ladies’ Home Journal asked, “Is the Newspaper Office the Place for a Girl?” Some publishers replied “no,” while others, seeking female consumers, hired women who, like pioneer reporter Nellie Bly, had escaped the society beat with sensational stunt coverage. For de Bogory, then, undercover “stunt girl” reporting concealed her role in covert networks by focusing attention on the stunts she employed to investigate the underclass while doubling as a private investigator. However, in the late nineteenth century, to court female consumers, many newspapers hired women reporters. See Brooke Kroeger, Undaunted, How Women Changed American Journalism (New York: Knopf, 2023); and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). Quoted from Jean Marie Lutes, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1; and Edward Bok, “Is the Newspaper Office the Place for a Girl,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1901, 18.

8. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, UK: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967).

9. Some additional relevant reporting by de Bogory includes, “The Russian Woman that is Coming,” Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1917, 16; “Adventures in Marriage,” Outlook, August 17, 1921, 618; and “How Europe Teaches Americanism,” Outlook, February 2, 1921, 178.

10. Other scholars, including Christopher Daly, have made this observation. Since then, a considerable amount of scholarship has been published. Christopher Daly, “The Historiography of Journalism History: Part 1: ‘An Overview,’” American Journalism 26, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 141–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2009.10677703. A summary of such research can be found in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

11. See Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny; and Beasley, Ruby A. Black.

12. See John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 2020); Nancy E. Bernhard, US Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947–1960 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Schulman and Zelizer, Media Nation; and Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

13. Perhaps most noted are the collaborative CIA-press scandals of the 1970s. However, the Church Committee investigation and reporter Carl Bernstein’s Rolling Stone article, “The CIA and the Media,” along with investigative reporting from the New York Times and others, constitute a likely conclusion of the story. Its beginning and middle had not yet been comprehensively told.

14. See Natalie de Bogory, “Shop Girl Spends $6.61 a Week and Then Just Barely Exists,” Report of the Senate Vice Committee (Chicago, IL: Allied Printing, 1916), 117–18; and “Arrested as White Slaver,” New York Times, July 9, 1915.

15. U.S. Employment Service Bulletin 1, no. 49 (January 31, 1919): 5, https://www.google.com/books/edition/U_S_Employment_Service_Bulletin/nkAoAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Natalie%20De%20Bogory.

16. For example, see Natalie de Bogory, “Ellis Island Through Russian Eyes,” Outlook, December 20, 1922, 701; and Natalie De Bogory, “The Greenhorn Within Our Gates,” Outlook, April 1922, 114. For a picture of de Bogory not in disguise, see Norman Hapgood, “Inside Story of Henry Ford’s Jew-Mania, Henry Swallows Old Bait, Part 4,” Hearst’s International Magazine, September 1922, 45.

17. See Marcia A. Zug, Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 198; “Clergyman’s Wife Charges Cruelty: Mrs. Rolt-Wheeler, In Separation,” New York Times, July 17, 1915, 7; and Natalie de Bogory and Stanley Frost, “Their Hands,” Collier’s, May 7, 1921, 14.

18. Maria Todorova, The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins: Imagining Utopia, 1870s-1920s (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 124.

19. Frederick Whitin to Sigrid Wynbladh, September 27, 1913, Box 16, Folder “Gen. correspondence, Wi—Z,” New York Public Library, CFR, NYPL.

20. de Bogory, “Ellis Island Through Russian Eyes,” 701.

21. In the 1830s, the job of the full-time reporter was born of, and for, the urban masses, to cover its crime. On September 3, 1833, at 222 William Street, in a three-story building, in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot room, the job of the reporter was likely invented. There, Sun publisher Benjamin Day hired George W. Wisner, an unemployed printer and abolitionist, at four dollars a week, to daily cover, at 4 a.m., a daybreak police court. Wisner was one of the few, if not the first, full-time reporters in America. See Frank O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 38.

22. See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Andie Tucher, “‘I Believe in Faking’: The Dilemma of Photographic Realism at the Dawn of Photojournalism, Photography and Culture,” Photography and Culture 10, no. 3 (June 2017): 195–214, https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2017.1322397.

23. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (London: Penguin, 1990).

24. Allen Pinkerton, who founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850, was a con man who, adopting emerging “objective” values and investigative tactics, hunted other conmen. During his long career, Pinkerton, in pamphlets and books, embellished invisible internal threats—the labor radical, gangster, German spy, and communist—to promote his business and image. Like his fictional contemporary, the deductive detective Sherlock Holmes, Pinkerton required publicity to obtain work, especially lucrative government contracts. For a history of intelligence conman and Pinkerton’s role in it, see Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Service (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Damien Van Puyvelde, Outsourcing US Intelligence: Contractors and Government Accountability (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

25. “Journalism as Detective Agency,” New York Times, November 17, 1872.

26. LeRoy Panek, The Origins of the American Detective Story (London: McFarland, 2015), 111.

27. See David R. Spencer, The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power (Evanston: IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 111–17.

28. The case fit within the trend of increasing real and alleged terrorist attacks. By 1907, during the ongoing violent clash of business and labor, revolutionary movements of militant socialists, communists, and anarchists—all dedicated to the violent overthrow of a corrupt and despotic capitalist society—had mailed bombs to governors or mayors and set dynamite at industrial sites. For decades, newspapers had narrated an underworld of immigrant terrorist plots. And now, anarchists, especially before the Bolshevik revolution, loomed largest in the public nightmare, a disproportionate fear wrought from the Haymarket bombing (1886), steel magnate Henry Clay Frick’s shooting (1892), and the assassination of President William McKinley (1901). Enough bombs had exploded that the “infernal machine” made easily sensational headlines. For a summary of scholarship on “terrorism,” see Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (June 2011): 73–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar106.

29. “Beale Fell into His Own Pit When He Prosecuted the World For Publishing Story of His Misdeeds,” New York World, January 2, 1911, World Papers, Columbia University, New York City, Box 50; and Howard Harriman, “Criminal Newspapers: A Document of Necessity,” (Anti-Criminal Press League, 1914), World Papers, Box 55. Had the court system been bullied by the publicity of crooked journalism? Possibly. Still, the critic overstated his argument. He had ignored reporting that exposed police baton-bashing brutality, and the traditional cooperation between reporters and officials. For example, see Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens: The Life Story of America’s Greatest Reporter (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), 208–15.

30. Marilynn Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 106.

31. In 1913, the World had thirty-eight pending libel cases, and appointed White to lead the first fact-checking department, the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play. However, the pattern of newspapers defending against libel cases that concerned crime coverage began as early as the 1830s. At first, reporting urban crime was mostly grim entertainment that sold papers. John Baker stole a ham and died in a Bellevue cell, Wisner reported. Ann McDonough drank a pint of rum on a wager and died. But, on slavery, Wisner was righteous. On Wall Street, Mr. Boudinot, a slave tracker, who “has no SOUL,” Wisner wrote, had directed a mob to pelt “down with stones” Martin Palmer, likely a runaway slave. Boudinot threatened a libel suit. The Sun published its retort. “Try it, Mr. Boudinot!” Quoted from O’Brien, Story of the Sun, 53–54.

32. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson sought to pardon New York Tribune editor George Burdick—cited for contempt and fined $500—who had refused, citing the Fifth Amendment, to reveal a confidential source in a story about Lucius Littauer, a former five-term congressman, and a divorced couple, who had smuggled precious stones into New York City. The scoop exposed Tammany Hall’s corrupt patronage machine, especially import tax Port Collector Dudley Field Malone, and publicized a secret grand jury investigation. The Tribune, in print and court, decried government censorship. Previously, in 1871, two Tribune reporters, who had printed the confidential text of a pending treaty between the US and Great Britain, were cited with contempt of Congress. In 1974, after President Gerald R. Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon—preemptively “for all offenses against the U.S”—he allegedly kept in his wallet a scrap of paper quoting the Tribune editor Burdick case from 1915, Burdick v. United States, that declared a pardon accepted was guilt confessed. A case about a failed bribe had helped, at least in part, pardon Nixon.

33. Of course, the muckrakers had helped spur federal legislation to help resolve social issues.

34. William G. Shepherd, “Eyewitness at the Triangle,” Milwaukee (WI) Journal, March 27, 1911.

35. David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 48, 265.

36. Second Report of the Factory Investigating Commission, 1913: Appendix 2. General Report of the Director of Investigation (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon, 1913), 1192, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hms.count:132791.

37. In 1912, another private group, the Committee on Amusement Resources of Working Girls, titled part of its investigation, “The Way of the Girl.” See A Report of the Committee on Amusement Resources of Working Girls (Inc.) (New York, 1912). It was published by New York City’s Committee on Amusement Resources of Working girls, https://books.google.com/books?id=7tgeAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

38. Brett, “The Murdered Jewess.”

39. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 66.

40. Addams, 62.

41. See Val Marie Johnson, “‘Look for the Moral and Sex Sides of the Problem’: Investigating Jewishness, Desire, and Discipline at Macy’s Department Store, New York City, 1913,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3 (September 2009): 457–85, https://doi.org/10.1353/sex.0.0060. De Bogory also investigated for the Society of the Prevention of Crime and the Committee on Amusement Resources for Working Girls.

42. “Harlem River Casino,” October 19, 1912, Box 28, Folder “Invest Rep,” Committee of Fourteen Records, CFR, NYPL.

43. “Harlem River Casino.”

44. See, for example, Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

45. Jane Addams, reprinted from McClure’s Magazine, “Alcohol Indispensable Vehicle of White Slave Traffic,” American, March 1912, 7. The author quotes Addams here to establish the believed connection between alcohol and White slavery.

46. “The Arbor Casino,” October 16, 1912, Box 28, Folder “Invest Rep,” CFR, NYPL.

47. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 131; and Erwin R. A. Seligman, ed., The Social Evil: With Special Reference to Conditions Existing in the City of New York (New York: Putnam’s, 1912), 8.

48. “Correspondent of War Actions Died Yesterday,” Waterbury Democrat, August 17, 1931.

49. “Oakland Journalist Missing in Macedonia,” San Francisco Call, February 24, 1906.

50. See Albert Sonnichsen, Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit (Cambridge: Duffield, 1909), 19.

51. “Investigation of Five Brooklyn Hotels,” Box 29, Folder 1, 1–5, CFR, NYPL.

52. Frederick Whitin to Natalie Sonnichsen, December 23, 1913, Box 28, Folder “Sn-Sp,” CFR, NYPL.

53. Natalie Sonnichsen to Frederick Whitin, December 6, 1914, Box 28, Folder “Sn-Sp,” CFR, NYPL.

54. Frederick Whitin to Natalie Sonnichsen, May 28, 1914, Box 28, Folder “S—General, 1927–1932,” CFR, NYPL.

55. For histories of Whiteness see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1950): 199–222, https://doi.org/10.2307/1917157; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso Books, 2007). For contemporaneous fearmongering against Jews, see George Kibbe Turner, “Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slavery Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall,” McClure’s Magazine, November 1909, 45–62; Stanley Finch, The Federal Campaign Against the White Slave Traffic (New York: New York Probation Association, 1912); and Natalie de Bogory, “The Greenhorn Within Our Gates,” Outlook, April 1922, 114.

56. The conception of investigation as an extension of official inspection was not new, nor uniquely American. For example, see Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 68.

57. Land fraud had a similar pattern of investigative exposure inspiring state intervention. In 1907, for American Magazine, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens manufactured government heroes who were combating rampant land fraud in California and Oregon. Steffens characterized prosecutor Francis J. Heney, who stoically battled corporate and political corruption. Next came William J. Burns, a Secret Service detective. The press, out of true crime land fraud cases and their famous trials, manufactured a heroic image of a team of government officers that President Roosevelt leveraged against Congressional resistance on July 26, 1908, to create the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), which later led the fight against White slavery. Lincoln Steffens, “The Making of a Fighter,” American Magazine, August 1907, 339–56; and Lincoln Steffens, “The Taming of the West,” American Magazine, September 1907, 493. For the origins of the BOI, see William Oliver, The Birth of the FBI (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

58. K. M. Allerfeldt, “Marcus Braun and ‘White Slavery’: Shifting Perceptions of People Smuggling and Human Trafficking in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Global Slavery 4, no. 3 (August 2019): 343–71. See also Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 56.

59. At first, the bureau had about sixty-one agents, mostly in Washington, DC. Then, the agency expanded with unofficial local agents, some from activist groups like C14, who coordinated with local police and lobbied Congress with tales of Jewish sex trafficking, which increased BOI funding.

60. Howard Brown Woolston, Prostitution in the United States: Prior to the Entrance of the United States into the World War Volume 1 (New York: Century, 1921), 38.

61. For a history of mass civil liberty crackdowns during WWI, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

62. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, UK: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967).

63. Boris Brasol, The World at a Crossroads (London, UK: Hutchinson, 1921), 396.

64. Brasol investigated for the US War Trade Board, which regulated strategic material, and he advised the attorney general. The US Secret Service codenamed Brasol, an informant or adviser, “B1.” See Albert Kahn and Michael Sayers, The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia (New York: Little Brown, 1946); and George F. Kennan, “The Sisson Documents,” Journal of Modern History 28, no. 2 (June 1956): 130–54, https://doi.org/10.1086/237884. During WWII, the FBI briefly investigated Brasol, who supported the Nazi Party. Brasol had also likely convinced the State Department that the forged “Sisson Documents”—which Edgar Sisson and George Creel had hustled into American newspapers—were authentic. Sisson, a reporter and employee of the US Committee on Public Information, obtained forged records that were published to allege a German-Bolshevik conspiracy during WWI.

65. Around this time, de Bogory was still publishing news articles in reputable outlets. See, for example, Natalie de Bogory, “Polish, Bohemian, and Slovak Leaders Pin Their Faith Upon President Wilson and Russia,” Bridgeport (CT) Times, January 25, 1918, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92051227/1918-01-25/ed-1/seq-9/.

66. Benderksy, The Jewish Threat, xiii-xiv.

67. Bendersky, 49, 51; and Roy Talbert Jr., Negative Intelligence: The Army and the American Left, 1917–1941 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 9.

68. Dunn, the chief of the United States Military Intelligence Division’s Positive Branch, was able to account for four typescript copies of the Protocols at the time he prepared his analysis in 1918, and determined the documents were fake. MID was not unique in its interest in the “Jewish Question.” The departments of Justice, State, and Immigration investigated or monitored Jews in the US to some extent. However, some MID officers were enthralled with the Protocols. From New York City, MID collaborated with police to surveil civilians, charting an “Ethnic Map of New York” to plan against “an organized uprising.” On the map, MID noted that Russian Jews constituted the largest threat. Bendersky, 124.

69. Alvin Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress: An Autobiography (New York: Viking Press, 1952), 260; and Alvin Johnson, “The Jewish Problem in America,” Social Research 14, no. 4 (December 1947): 399–412, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40982181.

70. It is possible that de Bogory and Johnson had met before, or at least previously knew of each other. The Committee of Fifteen had recruited Johnson to research prostitution in New York City. See Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, The Social Evil With Special Reference to Conditions Existing in the City of New York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902).

71. Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress, 260; and Johnson, “The Jewish Problem in America,” 399–412.

72. It was published in different formats by different people. At first, it was in the form of a book. Later it came out in newspapers.

73. Robert Singerman, “The American Career of ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” American Jewish History 71, no. 1 (September 1981), 54, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23882005.

74. Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Sixty-Fifth Congress, Third Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1919), 135.

75. Singerman, American Careers, 53.

76. Bendersky, 78.

77. “Red ‘Bible’ Counsels Appeal to violence. ‘Right Is Might’ Is Cardinal Text of Doctrines Expounded in Guidebook of World Revolutionists,” Public (Philadelphia) Ledger, October 27, 1919, Philadelphia, PA; and Carl W. Ackerman, “Reds Plot to Smash World and Then Rule with Universal Czar,” Public (Philadelphia) Ledger, October 28, 1919.

78. Serge Nilus, The Protocols and World Revolution (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1920), 4.

79. See Michael Mark Cohen, The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).

80. Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Pasadena, CA: Self-Published, 1920), 222.

81. Alexander Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism (New York: Dover, 2005), 59.

82. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People (New York: Doubleday, 1918), 35.

83. Sinclair, The Brass Check, 353.

84. In 1894, a federal grand jury indicted Eugene V. Debs, an activist and five-time Socialist candidate for president, with conspiracy to commit an unlawful act during the deadly Chicago railway strikes. “CONSPIRATORS,” a bold headline stated. “CONSPIRATORS,” Indianapolis (IN) Journal, July 11, 1894.

85. Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (Sweden: Ulwencreutz Media, 2015), 179.

86. Imagined conspiracy also abetted anti-Semitic hate. In 1913, in a paranoid race-conspiracy climate, Leo Frank, a Jew, was wrongly convicted of the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta, Georgia. The case drew sustained national attention, with Frank’s appeal reaching the Supreme Court. Two years later, after Frank’s death sentence was commuted, he was lynched by a mob spurred by local anti-Semitic press coverage. Meanwhile, a nationally resurgent Ku Klux Klan distributed fabricated anti-Semitic propaganda. See Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017); and Robert Allen Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 15.

87. Theodore Kornweibel, Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 135.

88. About the same time, Lucia Maxwell, librarian for the War Department Chemical Warfare Service, drew a “spider web chart” depicting a conspiratorial network of women reform groups plotting a Bolshevik coup. Maxwell’s chart appeared in Ford’s Dearborn (MI) Independent. Lucia Maxwell, “Spider Web Chart: The Socialist-Pacifist Movement in America Is an Absolutely Fundamental and Integral Part of International Socialism,” Dearborn (MI) Independent, March 22, 1924; and Janice Andrews and Michael Reisch, The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States (Oxford: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), 39–60. President Harding stored the chart in his desk. J. Edgar Hoover, with the DOJ before he ran the BOI, considered it more informative than “voluminous reports.” Michael J. McVicar, “Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Visualization of Subversion in Mainline Protestantism,” Religion and American Culture 30, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 307–60, https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.13.

89. See McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 121–57; and Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: The Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

90. Charles Y. Glock and Harold E. Quinley, Anti-Semitism in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), 163. Ford claimed he wanted to control the Jewish menace through “mere exposure.” Henry Ford, My Life and Work (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1922), 251.

91. In the 1950s, historian John Higham dubbed the 1920s the “tribal 20s.” See also Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, “John Higham and Immigration History,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 3–25, https://doi.org/10.2307/27501529.

92. The International Jew (Dearborn, MI: Dearborn Publishing, 1920), Vol. 1, 116.

93. Ford’s ant-Semitism has been a subject of many Ford biographies and studies. See Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (New York: Random House, 1986); Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Dynasty (New York: Summit Books, 1987); and William C. Richards, The Last Billionaire: Henry Ford (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976). For a more thorough analysis see David Lanier Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1976); Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009); Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Mass Production of Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2002); and Max Wallace, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003). One scholar has argued that Ford’s anti-Semitism was rooted in the belief that Jews controlled institutions that were necessary to construct the “rural-mercantile economy he wanted to build.” Victoria Saker Woeste, Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 4.

94. Kevin Walby and Randy Lippert, eds., Corporate Security in the 21st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The quote “People’s Tycoon” is not from the book. It’s a name Ford was called by some. Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. The book is a relevant history of Ford’s internal security practices.

95. Ford, My Life and Work, 168.

96. Norman Hapgood, “Inside Story of Henry Ford’s Jew-Mania,” Hearst’s International Magazine, June-November 1922, 145.

97. For example, see the Dearborn (MI) Independent, cover page, May 8, 1926. The International Jew was the title of a series the newspaper published between 1920 and 1922.

98. For example, in 1911, a federal commission on immigration published a massive forty-one-volume study that promoted a paranoid nativism of Jewish criminality. “To hold Jews,” Marshall pleaded, “responsible for the White slave trade throughout the world has never occurred to any right-thinking man.” Quoted in Pliley, Policing Sexuality, 53.

99. Bernstein’s relationship with the American Jewish Committee, which also purchased and distributed his book, was minimized in print, though no secret. Later, Bernstein, alleging he had been defamed by Henry Ford in January 1922, sued for libel, but dropped the case. In coverage of the case, Bernstein’s relationship with Louis Marshall, president of AJC, was typically mentioned. For a brief summary of Louis Marshall and Ford’s relationship, see Robert S. Rifkind, “Confronting Antisemitism in America: Louis Marshall and Henry Ford,” American Jewish History 94, no. 1–2 (March-June 2008): 71–90, https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.0.0053.

100. Herman Bernstein, The History of A Lie (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1921), 3.

101. In 1921, the Times of London, with the help of Allen Dulles, exposed the Protocols as a forgery. Dulles had also alerted the State Department to the documents’ forged origin. See “London Times Publishes an Exposure Showing How They Are a Paraphrase of a French Book Attacking Governmental Abuses Under Napoleon III,” New York Times, September 4, 1921. See also Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 112–13.

102. “Herman Bernstein Exposes Henry Ford in Third Article,” Sentinel (Chicago, IL), April 1, 1921. Two years earlier, Houghton had requested Bernstein examine the Protocols, which is likely how he first heard about de Bogory.

103. Herman Bernstein to Louis Marshall, January 12 and 19, 1921, February 4 and 7, 1921, Louis Marshall Papers, Box 60, Folder 1, The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.

104. See “The Reminiscences of Mr. J. L. McCloud,” Ford Motor Company Archives, Benson Ford Research Center, August 1953, 407.

105. A concise outline of this story comes from Leo P. Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and ‘The International Jew,’” American Jewish History 69, no. 4 (June 1980): 437–77, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23881872.

106. Liebold letter to Clifford Longley, “Mr. X. is Brasol,” Box 2, August 24, 1927, Acc 572, The Henry Ford Archive, Dearborn, Michigan.

107. For Liebold’s recollection of the Protocols, see “The Reminiscences of Mr. E. G. Liebold,” 1953, Ford Motor Company Archives, Benson Ford Research Center.

108. “The Reminiscences of Mr. E. G. Liebold,” 467.

109. Raleigh News and Observer proudly championed White supremacy. “The greatest folly and crime in our national history was the establishment of negro suffrage,” the News and Observer stated January, 28, 1900.

110. Hapgood likely meant MID’s Harris Houghton, Chief Marlborough Churchill, and General Ralph C. Van Deman.

111. See Norman Hapgood, “The Inside Story of Henry Ford’s Jew Mania,” for de Bogory’s picture, see part four, “Henry Swallows Old Bait,” Hearst’s International Magazine, September 1922, 134.

112. Wallace, The American Axis, 30.

113. “The Reminiscences of Mr. E. G. Liebold,” 471.

114. From Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. For a summary of research on the Protocols, see Ronald S. Green, “Scholars Contending with Delusional Ideology: Historians, Antisemitic Lore, and The Protocols,” Shofar 18, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 82–100, https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2000.0127.

115. McGirr, The War on Alcohol, preface.

116. Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded, 1–9.

117. Government secrecy had increased, while press-government relations declined, especially during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Timothy L. Ericson, “Building Our Own ‘Iron Curtain’: The Emergence of Secrecy in American Government,” American Archivist 68, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 18–52, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.1.9m260j244177p553; and Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values that Shaped the News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

118. From 1964 to 1967, the Times received five subpoenas. The Times received three subpoenas in 1968, six in 1969, and twelve in 1970. NBC, CBS, and their affiliates, from 1969 to 1971, were served about 123 subpoenas. At the time, Times editor Abraham Rosenthal declared himself an “absolutist on the subpoena issue.” However, while a subpoena to the Times was sometimes national news, other smaller outlets received less publicity, and were therefore more likely to comply. See Abraham Rosenthal memo to Harding Bancroft, September 24, 1971, Box 78, Folder 8, Abraham Rosenthal Papers, New York Times Company Records, New York Public Library; and Harding F. Bancroft, executive vice president of the New York Times Company, testimony before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate, September 28, 1971 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 18.

119. For a brief history of Branzburg v. Hayes, see Christopher B. Daly Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

120. “Natalie de Bogory,” New York Times, September 7, 1939.

121. Michael Fyodrov, Death My Generation: An Autobiography (New York: Roy Publishers, 1946), 143.

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Daniel Defraia

Daniel DeFraia holds a doctor of philosophy in American Studies from Boston University. He is a visiting professor at Emerson College, where he teaches journalism history, reporting and writing skills, and journalism law and ethics. He is completing his first book, Shadow Press: A History of Reporting for the American State, a narrative history that excavates the ways reporters served as instruments of national power outside the evolving limits of their profession to impact policy and news.