When Theodore Roosevelt was still a Civil Commissioner in Baltimore, creating campaigns to help reduce crime in the city, he met Charles Bonaparte, a Harvard-trained lawyer (and grandson of the younger brother of Napoleon I.) Sharing the same political philosophy, the two struck up an easy friendship, and when Roosevelt was elected into office, he appointed Bonaparte to the office of Attorney General, to help create a government corps of investigators, rather than rely on private agencies as was the practice until then.

On this day, July 26, in 1908, U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte ordered a group of newly hired federal investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch of the Department of Justice, the office that would soon be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Meanwhile a zealous young bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover brought his meticulous record-keeping of suspected communists and radicals to the office of A. Mitchell Palmer, Assistant to Attorney General. Hoover’s contributions were considered invaluable at containing the threat, and he was nominated to head up the newly-formed FBI in 1924.