| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The FBI: A History. By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. viii, 317 pp. $27.50, ISBN 978-0-300-11914-5.)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) celebrates its centennial in 2008. Few federal agencies have had as important and as controversial a role in shaping the history of the United States over the past one hundred years. Yet, no definitive history of the FBI has been written. That is due, in part, to the dominance of the agency by J. Edgar Hoover, who joined the agency during World War I and served as its director from 1924 until his death in 1972. Hoover has attracted several biographers, but less scholarly attention has been paid to what came before the longtime director.	1
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones attempts to correct the Hoover-centricity of FBI historiography in The FBI. Three early chapters trace the history of the agency back, not only to its institutional origin in 1908, but to 1871, the year that the Department of Justice received its first appropriation from Congress for the investigation and prosecution of federal crimes and began borrowing special agents from the Secret Service to undertake such work. The FBI, Jeffreys-Jones argues, should be seen as a child of Reconstruction rather than Progressivism.	. . .

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