Archives Unbound:
Law, Politics, and Radical Studies
 
Archives Unbound: Law, Politics, and Radical Studies

The political and legal history of the United States is highlighted in the papers of politicians and the organizations that supported them, and documentation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department. These collections also feature materials about world communism and the evolution of the American militia movement.

Legal History

FBI File: Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers - No single episode did more to set off alarms of a diabolic “Red” conspiracy within the national government than the case of Alger Hiss. During the 1948 presidential campaign, the House Un-American Activities Committee conducted a hearing in which Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and former Soviet agent who had broken with the communists in 1938, identified Hiss, who had worked as an aide to the assistant secretary of state, as an underground party member in the 1930s. This file traces the machinations of the many figures involved in one of the era’s most famous witch hunts. Trails of evidence are followed through correspondence between alleged Communist Party members and sympathizers, as well as interviews with associates of the accused. The archive is an invaluable resource on the Second Red Scare and the internal politics of the United States during the early years of the Cold War.

FBI File: Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. - The assassination on April 4, 1968, of Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, triggered a massive manhunt culminating in the arrest of James Earl Ray. The 44,000-page case file of the Federal Bureau of Investigation documents the bureau’s role in finding Ray and obtaining his conviction. The file also includes background information amassed by the FBI on Dr. King’s social activism. This archive is of particular interest to students of the civil rights movement and the continuing controversy surrounding Dr. King’s murder.

FBI File: Watergate - The Watergate scandal grew out of the scheme to conceal the connection between the White House and the accused Watergate burglars, who had succeeded in a plan to wiretap telephones at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, a security guard foiled the break-in to install the bugs. After the election, a federal judge refused to accept the claim of those on trial for the break-in that they had acted on their own. In February 1973, the U.S. Senate established the Special Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to investigate alleged election misdeeds. This archive is a valuable resource for students of the Watergate scandal and modern American political history. Included here are all of the reports and evidence acquired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as data that was gathered in the campaign activities of the 1972 presidential candidates.

FBI File on Harry Dexter White - Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White (1892–1948) was one of the highest-ranking New Deal officials accused of espionage. Instrumental in shaping post-war international monetary policy, White co-authored the plans which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and served as the American executive director of the International Monetary Fund. This FBI file contains reports, correspondence, news clippings, and four pages of White's documents that were found in a hollow pumpkin on Chambers's Maryland farm in 1948. This file is an excellent resource for the study of the anticommunism fervor in the formative years of the Cold War.

Lincoln at the Bar: Extant Case Files from the U.S. District and Circuit Courts, Southern District of Illinois 1855-1861 - This collection consists of the extant files of cases from the records of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts at Springfield with which Abraham Lincoln has been identified as legal counsel, and date from 1855 to 1861. The 122 case files reproduced here include civil actions brought under both statute and common law, admiralty litigation, and a few criminal cases.

Price Control in the Courts: The U.S. Emergency Court of Appeals, 1941-1961 - In the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, Congress established a comprehensive system of administrative controls over prices, as a means of checking the inflation that accompanied America’s entry into World War II. The Act created a temporary Emergency Court of Appeals, staffed by federal judges from the district courts and courts of appeals, with exclusive jurisdiction to determine the validity of price control regulations.

Spiro T. Agnew Case: The Investigative and Legal Documents - Spiro T. Agnew (1918–1996) was Vice President to Richard Nixon from 1969 until his resignation in 1973 following an investigation on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. This collection contains the legal documents of the case, the correspondence surrounding the investigation and trial, Agnew's records, and related newspaper and magazine articles. Few criminal investigations have ever uncovered such detailed evidence of wrongdoing, with near mathematical precision. These documents are also noteworthy because they detail a most unusual occurrence, in which the second-highest official of a government has been investigated, prosecuted, and forced from office by the Justice Department of that same administration.

The Scopes Case - This collection records one of the most famous cases of the 20th century, which pitted lawyer Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) against the politician and fundamentalist William Jennings Bryant (1860–1925). The Scopes Case, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, took place in July 1925. The trial highlighted the ongoing debates in the United States between creationism and evolutionism and involved a high school teacher, John T. Scopes (1900–1970), who was accused of teaching evolution at a school in Dayton, Tennessee. His trial became a highly controversial spectacle, sparking debates across the country. The so-called "Monkey Trial" became less about a law getting broken and more about whether science or religion should take priority in U.S. education.