Stanley Finch

Stanley Wellington Finch (July 20, 1872 – 22 November 1951) was the first director of the Bureau of Investigation (1908–1912), which would eventually become the FBI. He would soon retire from office.

Stanley Finch
Chief of the Bureau of Investigation
In office July 26, 1908 – April 30, 1912
President	Theodore Roosevelt William Howard Taft
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	A. Bruce Bielaski
Personal details
Born	(1872-07-20)July 20, 1872 Monticello, New York, U.S.
Died	November 22, 1951(1951-11-22) (aged 79) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Education	George Washington University (LLB, LLM)

Finch was born in Monticello, New York, in 1872. He became a clerk in the United States Department of Justice, where he worked off and on for almost 40 years.[1] Finch rose from the position of clerk to that of chief examiner between 1893 and 1908.

In 1903, Finch reported that involuntary servitude was indeed widespread across the state. He succinctly summed up the economics of the new slavery. "It is by no means confined to a few isolated communities. I have also been again and again informed by these persons that this peonage system is more cruel and inhumane than the slavery of antebellum days, since then the master conserved the life and health of the slave for business reasons just as he did that of his horse or mule, but now the master treated the slave unmercifully and with the sole object of getting the greatest possible amount of labor out of him. Moveover a peon cost but a few dollars while a slave used to cost several hundred."1[2][3] Warren Stone Reese, Jr. Resse was a United States district attorney in Alabama from 1897 to 1905 and from 1909 to 1913. He was prosecutor during the peonage cases of 1903.[4] Reese was born in 1866 in Montgomery, Montgomery Co., Ala., to Warren S. and Mary Elmore Reese. He graduated from the University of Ala. in 1890, where he obtained an LL.B degree. In 1897 he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the middle district of Ala. and he served at that post for fourteen years. He married Esse Whitfield and they had one son, Warren S. Jr., and was an Episcopalian. After serving in WWI as a major, Reese was appointed as special attorney of the U.S. and prosecuted the first peonage cases in Ala., which won him national fame. He died 1953 June 8.[5]

On July 26, 1908, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is born when U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte orders a group of newly hired federal investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch of the Department of Justice. One year later, the Office of the Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau of Investigation, and in 1935 it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[6] It was only while working in the Justice Department that Finch earned his LL.B degree (1908), followed by an LL.M degree (1909) from what is now The George Washington University Law School. He was admitted to the Washington, DC bar in 1911.

Former Washington, D.C. residence (left) of Stanley Finch

Previously when the Justice Department needed to investigate a crime it would borrow Secret Service personnel from the Treasury Department. As chief examiner, Finch advocated setting up a squad of detectives within the Justice Department.

Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte created a Special Agent force, and gave oversight of the force, later named the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), to Finch. Thus he created what would become the FBI.

One of the most significant developments under Finch was the passage of the 1910 Mann ("White Slave") Act. That law made it a crime to transport women over state lines for "immoral" purposes. And it meant that federal investigators could pursue criminals who sought to evade state laws by traveling over the borders.[7]

From 1913 to the 1930s, Finch alternated between private employment—primarily in the novelty manufacturing business—and positions in the Department of Justice. He finally retired from the Department of Justice in 1940.