Is Clarence Darrow Dead? The Public and Government Information Stockpiles
In this post, Matthew Guariglia reflects on his piece ‘Is Clarence Darrow Dead?: A Reflection on the FBI, Surveillance, and Hoarded Information’, which appeared in the 21(4) issue of Surveillance & Society.
I have always been fascinated by public reaction to government surveillance — not just the (sometimes purposely induced) paranoia, but also the general awareness that somewhere there is a file with your name on it. This is why I was so excited when I finally got back documents pertaining to my Freedom of Information Act Request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation pertaining to the famed civil right attorney Clarence Darrow — I share these reflections in my research note for the latest issue of Surveillance & Society.
On the one hand, the file was a major disappointment. It did not include FBI agents pontificating on the role of defense attorneys in the United States or harshly condemning Darrow’s solidly anti-death penalty stance. Instead, what I found was a number of personal letters written to the FBI or its director, J. Edgar Hoover, asking basic biographical information about Darrow. I soon realized, however, that this file helped me make a more novel argument about U.S. government surveillance in mid-twentieth century than if it had, like the files on hundreds of other notable left-wing intellectuals of the era, just contained basic investigation findings. Instead, I got to ask the question I had always wondered about: Were people in the United States really so aware of FBI surveillance and record hoarding that they considered it a semi-accessible reference library? The answer, apparently, is yes. After all, don’t we as scholars in 2024 often send requests to the FBI to see if they have any insider knowledge about a notable 20th century figure we’re researching? Just as people were in 1933, we’re still aware of the FBI’s stockpile of information and its implications for researchers.
I recently published a book about the history of the New York City Police Department which concluded with the impact the “information revolution” — that is, the rapid rise in the capacity for governments or corporations to store and organize information and the bureaucratic systems that enabled it — had on policing and the lives of the individuals that were most heavily policed. Thinking about Clarence Darrow’s FBI file and the public’s general awareness of its existence, and the useful information it must have contained, has been a useful transition to my next research project: a history of the U.S. government’s relationship to information between the U.S. Civil War and the era of mass incarceration and digital mass surveillance. Already I am finding that with awareness of the government’s stockpiling of information comes activism to both make those documents accessible, and also to destroy them.
