The Birth of the FBI: Teddy Roosevelt, the Secret Service, and the Fight Over America’s Premier Law Enforcement Agency

Oliver, a professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, weaves together a wealth of information on the machinations that led to the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After the revolution, counterfeiting was one of the most serious crimes plaguing the U.S. The federal government used contractors—the legendary Pinkerton detectives—to ferret out counterfeiters. Eventually, the Treasury Department established its own anticounterfeiting unit, the Secret Service (which wouldn’t assume its current job of protecting the president until after the assassination of William McKinley). Its agents were often “borrowed” by other federal departments to investigate crimes such as the fraudulent federal land deals made by members of Congress in the first years of the 20th century. In 1908, Congress ended the borrowing practice, but, unwilling to lose this key crime-fighting tool, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration used a creative executive maneuver to set up a Bureau of Investigation under the aegis of the Justice Department. This inside-baseball deep dive into early-20th-century congressional-presidential relations is well-written and full of colorful personalities, among them detective Allan Pinkerton and James A. Tawney, Roosevelt’s nemesis in the law enforcement jurisdiction battle. Students of congressional-presidential relations will lap this up. (July)