Policing Everyday Life: Federal Power, Local Elites, and Citizen Spies

Abstract

Just after World War I ended, Mrs. W Humphrey wrote to the US Food Office in Portland, indignant and humiliated that her home had been searched by federal agents acting on a tip that she was hoarding sugar. She listed her many activities in support of the war effort, including volunteer gardening and nursing work. She was sure that a woman on her street, who was “foreign,” unlike the native-born Mrs. Humphrey, had reported her unfairly. To make matters worse, the foreign woman “would abuse the Red Cross and its methods of collecting money.” There is suffering evident in her letter. She and her husband were of modest means, not young or in good health, and she was “today bare for things I need to help my dear homeland.” The government had humiliated her before her neighbors and she responded in the only way many individuals during the war felt able to: with proof of her active loyalty and intrinsic Americanism. She discredited her accuser by taking these characteristics away from the foreign woman who would remain anonymous.¹