The prominent role of this position in contemporary American society was fashioned by A. Mitchell Palmer, a progressive Democratic Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson, who attempted to circumvent Bill of Rights freedoms to prosecute those who opposed American involvement in the First World War and later to purge the United States of communists and anarchists. These expanding powers, however, were constrained during the 1920s and early 1930s by the Republican Party’s ascendancy and the growing visibility of J. Edgar Hoover at the nascent FBI. Many Republicans had opposed the war or Palmer’s actions; they also made few demands on the Justice Department to bust trusts or other illegal economic combinations. Meanwhile, Hoover’s very public campaign against crime elevated his own public image and deflected attention away from the Attorney-General.

President Roosevelt’s New Deal changed the role of federal officials dramatically. By transferring power from the states to the federal government, New Deal programs led to larger roles for federal officials. If states accepted aid from the federal government, then they would also have to accept some oversight in the allocation of funds and abide by federal laws outlawing discrimination (especially on the basis of race). Moreover, as government expenditure on defense increased, federal influence grew in both the South and the West.

The federal government was slow to use the new powers at its disposal, especially in the South, which remained a strong force within the Democratic Party. No Attorney-General intervened on behalf of victims of lynch mobs, but civil rights activists were quick to see the possibilities that came from the growing significance of the Justice Department. In the 1960s, James Foreman of CORE recognized that if Supreme Court decisions desegregating schools and interstate buses were ever to be enforced, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy would have to be prodded into action. Activists’ success in this endeavor, leading an Attorney-General who was skeptical about any political advantages for his brother in being outspoken in favor of civil rights to oppose the governors of several states, helped establish the position of the Attorney-General both positively and negatively in the consciousness of many Americans.

The Attorney-General is a presidential appointee, often closely identified with the sitting president—as were Robert Kennedy with his brother and Ed Meese with Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon’s appointee, John Mitchell, previously a member of Nixon’s law firm, became the head of the president’s re-election committee, where he was responsible for organizing a break-in at Democratic headquarters. Resigning at the beginning of the Watergate scandal in 1972, he was subsequently convicted of conspiracy obstruction of justice, and perjury, and served nineteen months in prison.

This tension concerning the Attorney-General has only intensified in recent years. The backlash against civil rights was motivated not only by a white racist reaction to African American and other minority advances in the last third of the twentieth century, but also by a sense of the growing intrusiveness of the federal government. The exaggeration of the role of the Justice Department in bringing about change in the South (recalling Reconstruction) has helped to cement some tightly knit, secretive hate groups and neoFascist organizations—the Ku Klux Klan, survivalists and militias. These focus their ire on the Justice Department and its agents in the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (Agency).

Janet Reno, Bill Clinton’s Attorney-General and the first woman appointed to this position, found herself at the center of a continuing conflict between the Justice Department and organizations that believe the Founding Fathers would have opposed the kind of power wielded by federal authorities. Reno’s first crisis came when the FBI confronted the Branch Davidians, a religious cult in Waco, Texas, whose siege turned into a blood-bath, although she was cleared by a congressional investigation.

On occasions, the position of Attorney-General in seeking American justice has placed the incumbent in the difficult position of overseeing the presidency itself. Meese needed to investigate the involvement of Reagan in the Iran-Contra scandal. Reno had to investigate allegations of misconduct in the Clinton administration, withstanding initial calls from the Republican Party but later succumbing to pressure to investigate Whitewater allegations. She also expanded the purview of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to include many other issues, including those covered in the Linda Tripp tapes of Monica Lewinsky that led to the final impeachment process, an outcome that would have been less likely had Reno not initially given Starr his broad mandate.