George Ruch

George Franklin Ruch (1898 – August 7, 1938) was an American federal investigator, intelligence official and business executive. A law-school classmate and close associate of J. Edgar Hoover, Ruch served in the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), from 1918 until the mid 1920s. He was one of Hoover's principal deputies in the Bureau's Radical Division, later called the General Intelligence Division, during the First Red Scare.

Ruch helped prepare legal briefs used to justify the Palmer Raids, investigated the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), directed investigations of Black political organizations and labor activists, and received reports from confidential informants placed inside or around Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. He also drafted reports portraying labor strikes and racial unrest as products of radical agitation. Historians have identified Ruch as one of Hoover's earliest ghostwriters and an important contributor to the political-surveillance system Hoover later expanded as director of the FBI.

Early life and education

Ruch was born in 1898 in Sayre, Pennsylvania.

Ruch graduated from Sayre High School in 1916. He subsequently entered George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he studied law and was a classmate of J. Edgar Hoover at the university's law school. Ruch and Hoover developed a close personal and professional relationship that continued after Ruch left federal service and lasted until Ruch's death.

Bureau of Investigation

Ruch joined the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation as a special agent in June 1918, while the United States was involved in World War I.

Radical and General Intelligence divisions

On August 1, 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer created the Radical Division within the Bureau of Investigation and selected the 24-year-old Hoover to direct it. Ruch served as his deputy. The division was initially responsible for collecting information about anarchists, communists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), antiwar organizations and other groups considered subversive. It was reorganized as the General Intelligence Division in 1920 and given broader responsibility for domestic and international political intelligence.

Ruch became one of Hoover's closest colleagues. Ruch specialized in legal and analytical work, investigations of Black political activity and the preparation of reports and briefs for the Justice Department and Congress. The Justice Department's campaign culminated in the Palmer Raids of November 1919 and January 1920. Thousands of suspected radicals and immigrants were detained, frequently without conventional warrants or adequate evidence of personal wrongdoing. Contemporary civil-liberties lawyers documented warrantless searches, prolonged detention, physical mistreatment and denial of access to counsel. Later congressional studies and legal scholarship have treated the raids as an important episode in the development and abuse of federal domestic-intelligence powers.

Investigation of the ACLU

Ruch participated in the Bureau's early investigation of the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization was founded in 1920 partly in response to the Palmer Raids and the government's treatment of antiwar activists, immigrants and labor organizers. On March 1, 1920, Ruch prepared a memorandum for Hoover concerning the new organization. The document condensed a longer report from an undercover source identified as Agent 836. According to historian Robert C. Cottrell, Ruch expressed disbelief that the ACLU's definition of free speech would permit anarchists, communists and members of the IWW to criticize the government. He recommended that the informant concentrate on monitoring the organization.

The investigation continued even after Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty's office concluded that the ACLU had committed no prosecutable federal offense. Bureau agents nevertheless gathered information about its meetings, finances, officers, speeches and mailing lists. Historians have cited the episode as evidence that the division treated lawful political advocacy as a proper subject of federal intelligence collection.

In 1920, Ruch prepared a report titled "Agitation Among the Negroes", which the Justice Department submitted to Congress. Ruch acknowledged that investigators had found no coordinated Black plan for a nationwide uprising and that the immediate causes of the disturbances were local. Nevertheless, he attributed some of the violence to Black militancy, alleged assaults on white women, labor organization and publications that he claimed aggravated racial hostility.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA

Ruch became directly involved in the Bureau's surveillance of Marcus Garvey, the Negro World and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Garvey investigation was one of the federal government's most extensive early campaigns against a Black political leader.

In 1920, Bureau officials sent Ruch to New York to improve the organization of investigations into Black activists. Agents compiled background files on individuals and organizations in Harlem, attended meetings, monitored publications and developed confidential sources. Ruch communicated regularly with field agents, Hoover, Bureau official W. W. Grimes and an informant identified as Confidential Informant 800.

Surviving reports sent to or by Ruch include:

a September 23, 1921 communication from Ruch to W. W. Grimes; a September 23 report from Confidential Informant 800 to Ruch; a September 29 report from Informant 800; 6 reports in October 1921; an October 10 memorandum from Ruch to Hoover; a November 5 memorandum from Ruch to Hoover and a November 17 memorandum from Hoover to Ruch; approximately 25 additional informant reports from November 1921 to May 1922

The reports covered UNIA meetings, Garvey's speeches, the Negro World, financial disputes and conflicts between Garvey and other Black radicals, including Cyril Briggs. Ruch evaluated reports, instructed or corresponded with investigators, relayed intelligence to Hoover and helped coordinate the investigation from Washington.

Labor investigations Ruch prepared the Radical Division's final report on the national coal strike of 1919. The Bureau's internal evidence disclosed little proof that communists or other revolutionaries controlled the strike. Ruch's public report nevertheless characterized the dispute as a struggle within the American Federation of Labor between "patriotic" unionists and radical forces."

Schmidt found that Whitney was given office space and access to federal files while preparing his work. The collaboration has been cited as an early example of the Bureau secretly assisting ostensibly independent anti-communist publicity campaigns.

Ruch's original corporate role was to direct a labor-espionage operation. Historians have argued that Hoover helped arrange the appointment and that it formed part of an emerging network in which former Bureau personnel moved into private corporate-security positions while retaining relationships with federal investigators.

The complete scope of Ruch's private intelligence work is less thoroughly documented than his federal activities. The historical literature nevertheless places him within the wider system of employee surveillance, private policing, informants and anti-union intelligence then used in the coal and steel industries. The H. C. Frick company and its predecessors had a long history of aggressive opposition to organized labor.

Ruch was subsequently promoted to assistant to the president of the company. Ruch's brother Eugene was also employed by the Frick company in Pittsburgh.

Legacy Historians regard Ruch as an important subordinate in the creation of Hoover's domestic-intelligence system. His work incorporated practices that became characteristic of the later FBI: extensive political indexing, reliance on confidential informants, surveillance of constitutionally protected activity, investigations of Black leaders, the presentation of labor unrest as subversion, anonymous preparation of official propaganda and the selective sharing of government information with private allies.

Ruch's move from the Bureau to the Frick company has also been examined as an early example of the relationship between government intelligence agencies and private corporate-security departments. Historians have argued that the exchange of personnel and information allowed federal investigative methods developed during the First Red Scare to be applied to industrial labor relations.