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Midwest Social Sciences Journal

ORCID

0000-0002-3170-3644

Abstract

Juliet Stuart Poyntz disappeared in June 1937 from Manhattan, New York. She was never seen again. The disappearance was not reported until December and the police did not begin a formal investigation until January 1938. Sick from lupus, without her prescriptions, the 50-year-old Poyntz was likely already dead, but her friends did not believe it was because of her untreated disease, it was more likely the Soviet Secret police killed her. One friend in particular, anarchist Carlo Tresca, was very loud in accusing the Soviet Union of her abduction and murder. Tresca gave a press statement, testified before a grand jury, and spent the remainder of his life, which ended by an assassin’s bullet in 1943, claiming that communists had his friend Juliet kidnapped and murdered. With the United States’ history of dogged and determined anticommunism, and its particularly fraught relationship with the Soviet Union, the presumption would be that federal intelligence agencies would have taken Poyntz’s alleged kidnapping and murder by a foreign power seriously and begun an investigation, but that did not happen. Explicating the history of the FBI using its own files demonstrates that the files are a better record of the Bureau’s interests than they are of the people who were being monitored. When a communist conspiracy fomented by a foreign power was alleged to have happened on American shores, the FBI was not interested. But when anticommunism gained the agency political capital and the ability to expand their surveillance powers, Poyntz’s disappearance became a useful tool. For the FBI enemies were made, made based on public and official opinion and based on the Director’s prejudices. The bureau was not a neutral arbiter of justice; rather it served as a unit that defined crime, criminality, and criminals according to its own standards and the historical imperatives of the time period.

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