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Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși (February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter, and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and others. However, other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.

Early years

Brâncuși grew up in the village of Hobița, Gorj, near Târgu Jiu, close to Romania's Carpathian Mountains, an area known for its rich tradition of folk crafts, particularly woodcarving. Geometric patterns of the region are seen in his later works such as the Endless Column created in 1918.

His parents Nicolae and Maria Brâncuși were poor peasants who earned a meagre living through back-breaking labor; from the age of seven, Constantin herded the family's flock of sheep. He showed talent for carving objects out of wood and often ran away from home to escape the bullying of his father and older brothers.

At the age of nine, Brâncuși left the village to work in the nearest large town. At the age of eleven, he went into the service of a grocer in Slatina; and then he became a domestic in a public house in Craiova, where he remained for several years. When he was 18, Brâncuși created a violin by hand with materials he found around his workplace. Impressed by Brâncuși's talent for carving, an industrialist enrolled him in the Craiova School of Arts and Crafts (școala de arte și meserii), where he pursued his love for woodworking, graduating with honors in 1898.

He then enrolled in the Bucharest School of Fine Arts, where he received academic training in sculpture. He worked hard and quickly distinguished himself as talented. One of his earliest surviving works, under the guidance of his anatomy teacher, Dimitrie Gerota, is a masterfully rendered écorché (statue of a man with skin removed to reveal the muscles underneath) which was exhibited at the Romanian Athenaeum in 1903. Though just an anatomical study, it foreshadowed the sculptor's later efforts to reveal essence rather than merely copy outward appearance.

Working in Paris

In 1903, Brâncuși traveled to Munich, and from there to Paris. In Paris, he was welcomed by the community of artists and intellectuals brimming with new ideas. He worked for two years in the workshop of Antonin Mercié of the École des Beaux-Arts and was invited to enter the workshop of Auguste Rodin. Even though he admired the eminent Rodin he left the Rodin studio after only two months, saying, "Nothing can grow under big trees."

After leaving Rodin's workshop, Brâncuși began developing the revolutionary style for which he is known. His first commissioned work, The Prayer, was part of a gravestone memorial. It depicts a young woman crossing herself as she kneels, and marks the first step toward abstracted, non-literal representation, and shows his drive to depict "not the outer form but the idea, the essence of things." He also began doing more carving, rather than the method popular with his contemporaries, that of modeling in clay or plaster which would be cast in metal, and by 1908 he worked almost exclusively by carving.

In the following few years, he made many versions of Sleeping Muse and The Kiss, further simplifying forms to geometrical and sparse objects.

His works became popular in France, Romania, and the United States. Collectors, notably John Quinn, bought his pieces, and reviewers praised his works. In 1913 Brâncuși's work was displayed at both the Salon des Indépendants and the first exhibition in the U.S. of modern art, the Armory Show.

In 1920, he developed a notorious reputation with the entry of Princess X in the Salon. The phallic appearance of this large, gleaming bronze piece scandalized the Salon and, despite Brâncuși's explanation that it was simply meant to represent the essence of womanhood, it was removed from the exhibition. Princess X was revealed to be Princess Marie Bonaparte, direct descendant of the younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. The sculpture has been interpreted by some as symbolizing her obsession with the penis and her lifelong quest to achieve vaginal orgasm, with the help of Sigmund Freud.

Around this time, Brâncuși began crafting the bases for his sculptures with much care and originality because he considered them important to the works themselves.

One of his major groups of sculptures involved the Bird in Space — simple abstract shapes representing a bird in flight. The works are based on his earlier Măiastra series. In Romanian folklore the Măiastra is a beautiful golden bird who foretells the future and cures the blind. Over the following 20 years, Brâncuși made multiple versions of Bird in Space out of marble or bronze. Athena Tacha Spear's book, Brâncuși's Birds, (CAA monographs XXI, NYU Press, New York, 1969), first sorted out the 36 versions and their development, from the early Măiastra, to the Golden Bird of the late teens, to the Bird in Space, which emerged in the early 1920s and which Brâncuși developed throughout his life.

One of these versions caused a major controversy in 1926 when photographer Edward Steichen purchased it and shipped it to the United States. Customs officers did not accept the Bird as a work of art and assessed customs duty on its import as an industrial item. After protracted court proceedings, this assessment was overturned, thus confirming the Bird's status as a duty-exempt work of art. The verdict was somewhat influenced by the Judge Justice Waite's personal appreciation of the art calling it 'beautiful', 'symmetrical', and 'ornamental'. The ruling also established the important principle that "art" does not have to involve a realistic representation of nature, and that it was legitimate for it to simply represent an abstract concept – in this case "flight".

His work became increasingly popular in the U.S, where he visited several times during his life. Worldwide fame in 1933 brought him the commission of building a meditation temple, the Temple of Deliverance, in India for the Maharajah of Indore, Yeshwant Rao Holkar. Holkar had commissioned three "L'Oiseau dans l'Espace"—in bronze, black and white marble—previously, but when Brâncuși went to India in 1937 to complete the plans and begin construction, the Mahrajah was away and, supposedly, lost interest in the project which was to be an homage to his wife, the Maharani Margaret Holkar, who had died when he returned. Of the three birds, the bronze one is in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, and the two marble birds are currently in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Australia.

In 1938, he finished the World War I monument in Târgu-Jiu where he had spent much of his childhood. Table of Silence, The Gate of the Kiss, and Endless Column commemorate the courage and sacrifice of Romanians who in 1916 defended Târgu Jiu from the forces of the Central Powers. The restoration of this ensemble was spearheaded by the World Monuments Fund and was completed in 2004.

The Târgu Jiu ensemble marks the apex of his artistic career. In his remaining 19 years he created fewer than 15 pieces, mostly reworking earlier themes, and while his fame grew, he withdrew. Brâncuși received his first retrospective in 1955 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1955 Life magazine reported, "Wearing white pajamas and a yellow gnome-like cap, Brâncuși today hobbles about his studio tenderly caring for and communing with the silent host of fish, birds, heads, and endless columns which he created."

Brâncuși was cared for in his later years by a Romanian refugee couple. He became a French citizen in 1952 in order to make the caregivers his heirs, and to bequeath his studio and its contents to the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. In 2021, for IRCAM and Centre Pompidou's Festival Manifeste, the intermedial large-scale installation Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of The Future, tribute to Constantin Brancusi by artists duo Arotin & Serghei has been installed on Renzo Piano's IRCAM Tower on Centre Pompidou Square, on the opposite site to Brancusi's Studio.

Personal life

Brâncuși dressed simply, reflective of his Romanian peasant background. His studio was reminiscent of the houses of the peasants from his native region: there was a big slab of rock as a table and a primitive fireplace, similar to those found in traditional houses in his native Oltenia, while the rest of the furniture was made by him out of wood. Brâncuși would cook his own food, traditional Romanian dishes, with which he would treat his guests.

Brâncuși held a large spectrum of interests, from science to music, and was known to play the violin. He would sing old Romanian folk songs, often expressing his feelings of homesickness. After the installment of communism, the artist never permanently returned to his native Romania, but did visit eight times.

His circle of friends included artists and intellectuals in Paris such as Amedeo Modigliani, Ezra Pound, Henri Pierre Roché, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Rousseau, Peggy Guggenheim, Tristan Tzara, and Fernand Léger. He was an old friend of Romany Marie, who was also Romanian, and referred Isamu Noguchi to her café in Greenwich Village. Although surrounded by the Parisian avant-garde, Brâncuși never lost contact with Romania and had friends from the community of Romanian artists and intellectuals living in Paris, including Benjamin Fondane, George Enescu, Theodor Pallady, Camil Ressu, Nicolae Dărăscu, Panait Istrati, Traian Vuia, Eugène Ionesco, Emil Cioran, Natalia Dumitresco, and Paul Celan. Another Romanian scholar wrote on Brâncuși, Mircea Eliade.

Brâncuși held a particular interest in mythology, especially Romanian mythology, folk tales, and traditional art (which also had a strong influence on his works), but he became interested in African and Mediterranean art as well.

A talented handyman, he built his own phonograph and made most of his furniture, utensils, and doorways. His worldview valued "differentiating the essential from the ephemeral," with Plato, Lao-Tzu, and Milarepa as influences. Reportedly, he had a copy of the first ever translation from the Tibetan into French of Jacques Bacot's Le poete tibetain Milarepa: ses crimes, ses épreuves, son Nirvana that he kept by his bedside. He identified closely with Milarepa's mountain existence since Brancusi himself came from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania and he often thought he was a reincarnation of Milarepa. He was a saint-like idealist and near ascetic, turning his workshop into a place where visitors noted the deep spiritual atmosphere. However, particularly through the 1910s and 1920s, he was known as a pleasure seeker and merrymaker in his bohemian circle. He enjoyed cigarettes, good wine, and the company of women. He had one child, John Moore, with the New Zealand pianist Vera Moore. He never acknowledged his son as his own.

Death and legacy

Brâncuși died on March 16, 1957, aged 81. He was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. This cemetery also displays statues that Brâncuși carved for deceased artists.

At his death, Brâncuși left 1200 photographs and 215 sculptures. He bequeathed part of his collection to the French state on condition that his workshop be rebuilt as it was on the day he died. This reconstruction of his studio, adjacent to the Pompidou Centre, is open to the public. Brâncuși's studio inspired Swedish architect Klas Anshelm's design of the Malmö Konsthall, which opened in 1975.

In September 1957, African American sculptor Richard Hunt traveled from Chicago to Paris to view Brancusi's studio. Hunt's visit left an enduring impression on the 22-year-old artist, not only because of the artistic influence of Brancusi and exploration of biomorphic abstraction in sculpture but also because of the way which Hunt chose to live the majority of his life. Like Brancusi, Hunt slept in his own studio surrounded by his art and the tools used in his practice for much of his life.

Brancusi's Bird in Space sculptures inspired the Modernist poet, Ezra Pound, specifically his late Cantos which were written in the mid-twentieth century. The literary critic Lucy Jeffery highlights ways in which Brancusi's sculptural form influenced Ezra Pound, analysing Pound's Canto CXVII et seq., 815. Through close textual analysis and with direct reference to Brancusi's comments on his own creative process, Jeffery highlights how Pound's and Brancusi's sculptural process and resulting style is one of ambiguity and tension between: levity and weight, simplicity and complexity, ease and struggle. As Jeffery remarks: 'Despite their drive towards an holistic artwork, neither Brancusi nor Pound could, to borrow [Albert] Boime's phrasing, "emancipate" their art from the material or social context to which it belonged.' In the article, Jeffery contextualises Brancusi's work in relation to the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, photographer Man Ray, and writers such as Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, and Peter Russell.

In 1962, Georg Olden used Brâncuși's Bird in Space as the inspiration behind his design of the Clio Award statuette.

In November 1971, Brâncuși Memorial House was established in his birth village Hobița, as a branch of the Gorj County Muzeum.

Brâncuși was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy in 1990.

Google commemorated his 135th birthday with a Doodle in 2011 consisting of seven of his works.

Brâncuși's works are housed in museums around the world: in Romania at the National Museum of Art and Craiova Art Museum, in the US at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the former holding the largest collection of Brâncuși sculptures in the United States.

Constantin Brâncuși University in Târgu Jiu and a metro station in Bucharest are named after him.

In 2015, the Romanian Parliament declared February 19 "The Brâncuși Day", a working holiday in Romania.

Director Mick Davis plans to make a biographical film about Brâncuși called The Sculptor, and British director Peter Greenaway said in 2017 that he is working on a film called Walking to Paris, a film which shows Brâncuși's journey from Bucharest to Paris.

Art market
Brâncuși's piece Madame L.R. sold for €29.185 million ($37.2 million) in 2009, setting a record price for a sculpture sold at auction.

In May 2018, La Jeune Fille Sophistiquée (Portrait de Nancy Cunard), a polished bronze on a carved marble base (1932), sold for US$71 million (with fees) at Christie's New York, setting a world record auction price for the artist.

Selected works
Both Bird in Space and Sleeping Muse I are sculptures of animate objects; however, unlike ones from Ancient Greece or Rome, or those from the High Renaissance period, these works of art are more abstract in style.

Bird in Space is a series from the 1920s. One of these, constructed in 1925 using wood, stone, and marble (Richler 178) stands around 72 inches tall and consists of a narrow feather standing erect on a wooden base. Similar models, but made from materials such as bronze, were also produced by Brâncuși and placed in exhibitions.

Sleeping Muse I has different versions as well; one, from 1909 to 1910, is made of marble and measures 6 ¾ in. in height (Adams 549). This is a model of a head, without a body, with markings to show features such as hair, nose, lips, and closed eyes. In A History of Western Art, Adams says that the sculpture has "an abstract, curvilinear quality and a smooth contour that create an impression of elegance" (549). The qualities which produce the effect can particularly be seen in the shape of the eyes and in the set of the mouth.

Other works

 * Bust of a boy (1906)
 * The Prayer (1907)
 * La Sagesse de la Terre (1908)
 * Sleeping Muse (1910), Metropolitan Museum of Art
 * Prometheus (1911)
 * Mademoiselle Pogany (1912), Philadelphia Museum of Art
 * Miss Pogany (1913,) drawing, the Botarro Collection
 * The Kiss (1916), Philadelphia Museum of Art
 * Princess X (1916),
 * Madame L.R. (1914–1918)
 * A Muse (1917)
 * Chimera (1918)
 * Eileen Lane (1922), the Botarro Collection
 * Bird in Space (1924), Philadelphia Museum of Art
 * Portrait of Nancy Cunard (also called Sophisticated Young Lady) (1925–1927)
 * Le Poisson (1926)
 * Portrait of James Joyce, for Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (Black Sun Press, Paris, 1929)
 * Le Coq (1935)
 * Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuși at Târgu Jiu (Endless Column) (1935)
 * Blonde Negress I (1926), Toledo Museum of Art
 * White Negress II (1928), Art Institute of Chicago

In fiction

 * Robert McAlmon's 1925 collection of short stories Distinguished Air includes one that revolves around an exhibition of Princess X. In 1930 the watercolour painter Charles Demuth painted Distinguished Air, based on this story.
 * In Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche remarks in relating a story to Charles Ryder that "I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things" [sic].
 * In the 1988 movie Short Circuit 2, a man walking through an outdoor exhibition speculates that the stationary Johnny 5 robot, who is also admiring the exhibit, is "an early Brâncuși."
 * In the 1999 science fiction series Total Recall 2070, one episode ("Astral Projections") featured an artifact called the "Brancusi Stone" because it looks like one of Brâncuși's sculptures.
 * In the 2000 film Mission to Mars, the "Face on Mars" is modeled after Brâncuși's Sleeping Muse.

Apeirogon by Colum McCann p212

title: Constantin Brâncuși


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Claus Sluter

Claus Sluter (1340s in Haarlem – 1405 or 1406 in Dijon) was a Dutch sculptor, living in the Duchy of Burgundy from about 1380. He was the most important northern European sculptor of his age and is considered a pioneer of the "northern realism" of the Early Netherlandish painting that came into full flower with the work of Jan van Eyck and others in the next generation.

Life
The name "Claes de Slutere van Herlam" is inscribed in the Register of the Corporation of Stonemasons and Sculptors of Brussels around the years 1379/1380. He then moved to the Burgundian capital of Dijon, where from 1385 to 1389 he was the assistant of Jean de Marville, court sculptor to Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. From 1389 to his death he was court sculptor himself, with the rank of valet de chambre. He was succeeded by his nephew Claus de Werve.

Work
Sluter's most significant work is the so-called Well of Moses (1395–1403), or the Great Cross. It was created for the Carthusian monastery of Champmol, which was founded by Philip the Bold right outside Dijon in 1383. For many years, the top portion was thought to have included (along with Christ on a cross), sculptures of the Virgin and John the Evangelist. However it was more likely just Christ, with Mary Magdalene kneeling at the foot of the cross. The cross, and whatever was on the terrace below, was destroyed at some point after 1736 and before 1789, probable because the roof of the building protecting the monument collapsed. Some fragments from the original Cross are preserved in the Musée Archéologique de Dijon. Life-sized figures representing Old Testament prophets and kings (Moses, David, Daniel, Jeremiah, Zachariah, and Isaiah) stand around the base, holding phylacteries and books inscribed with verses from their respective texts, which were interpreted in the Middle Ages as typological prefigurations of the sacrifice of Christ. The work's physical structure, in which the Old Testament figures support those of the New Dispensation, literalizes the typological iconography. The pedestal surmounts a hexagonal fountain. The entire monument is executed in limestone quarried from Tonnerre and Asnières.

The portal of the former mortuary chapel of Champmol is positioned a few feet away from the Well of Moses. It consists of three sculptural groups by Sluter: a standing Madonna and Child at the trumeau; the duke and St. John, his patron saint, at the left jamb and the duchess and her patron saint, Catherine, at the right one. Sluter was also responsible for the main part of the work on Philip's tomb, which (restored and partly reconstructed) has been moved to the Museum of Fine Arts which is housed in the former ducal palace in Dijon.

Sluter was one of the sculptors of the pleurants, or mourners, which occupy niches below the tombs of Philip the Bold, his wife Margaret, and John the Fearless.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Claus Sluter


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Cadillac, Michigan

Cadillac is a city in and county seat of Wexford County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 10,371 at the 2020 census, making it the second most-populated city in the Northern Michigan region, after Traverse City.

Cadillac was settled as early as 1871 and formerly known as the village of Clam Lake before incorporating as a city in 1877. The city is located upon the shores of Lake Cadillac, connected by the Clam Lake Canal to Lake Mitchell. The Clam River, which begins Cadillac, is part of the Muskegon River watershed. Cadillac is the junction of three major highways: US Highway 131, M-55, and M-115. The geographic center of Michigan is approximately 5 mi north-northwest of Cadillac. Cadillac is the primary city of the Cadillac micropolitan area, which includes all of Wexford County and Missaukee County to the east, and had population of 48,725 at the 2020 census.

Village of Clam Lake
European explorers and fur traders visited this area from the 18th century, most of them initially French and French-Canadians who traded with regional Native Americans. More permanent communities were not established until the late 19th century. Initial settlements developed from logging camps and the logging industry.

In 1871, the first sawmill began operations at Clam Lake. Originally called the Pioneer Mill, it was built by John R. Yale. That same year, George A. Mitchell, a prominent local banker and railroad entrepreneur, and Adam Gallinger, a local carpenter, formed the Clam Lake Canal Improvement and Construction Company. Two years later, the Clam Lake Canal was constructed between Big and Little Clam lakes, known as present-day Lakes Mitchell and Lake Cadillac. Sawmill owners used the canal to transport timber from Big Clam Lake to the mills and railroad sites on Little Clam Lake. The Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad (G.R. & I. Railroad) had reached the area in 1872.

The settlement of Clam Lake was incorporated as a village in 1874. George Mitchell was elected as the first mayor. The village was incorporated as a city in 1877 and renamed Cadillac, after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, a French colonist who started the first permanent settlement at Detroit in 1701.

Battle of Manton
The Wexford County seat of government, originally located in Sherman, was moved to Manton in 1881, as the result of a compromise between the feuding residents of Cadillac and Sherman. Cadillac partisans, however, won the county seat by a county-wide vote in April 1882. The day following the election, a sheriff's posse left the city for Manton by special train to seize the county records. After they arrived and collected a portion of the materials, however, an angry crowd confronted the Cadillac men and drove them out of town.

When the sheriff returned to Cadillac, he encountered a force consisting of several hundred armed men; this group reportedly included a brass band. The Sheriff's force, some of whom may have been intoxicated, traveled back to Manton to seize the remaining records. Although Manton residents confronted the Cadillac men and barricaded the courthouse, the posse successfully seized the documents. They returned to Cadillac in dubious glory.

City of Cadillac

In 1878, Ephraim Shay perfected his Shay locomotive, which was particularly effective in its ability to climb steep grades, maneuver sharp turns, and accommodate imperfections in railroad tracks. Cadillac was home to the Michigan Iron Works Company, which manufactured the Shay locomotive for a short time in the early 1880s. The lumber industry continued to dominate the city, attracting a large immigrant labor force, most of whom were Swedish. (Later, Cadillac made sister city arrangements with Mölnlycke, Sweden, and Rovaniemi, Finland).

In 1899, the Cadillac Club formed, the forerunner of the Cadillac Area Chamber of Commerce.

By the early 20th century, with the lumber depleted, the timber industry was in decline. Today, manufacturers employ 30% of residents. Cadillac's range of industries includes the manufacture of pleasure boats, automotive parts, water-well components, vacuum cleaners, and rubber products.

In 1936, the U.S. Forest Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps developed the Caberfae Ski Area during the Great Depression as an investment in future economic development. This resulted in promotion of this area as a tourist center. Caberfae remains in operation today, as the oldest ski resort in the midwest. Tourism and outdoor recreation have since become an important sector of Cadillac's economy.

In the summer, tourists travel to the city and region for boating, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, and camping. During the fall, hunting and color tours are popular. The winter is possibly the busiest season; the area can be found packed with downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, ice-fishers, snow-shoers and–most of all–snowmobilers. The North American Snowmobile Festival (NASF) is held on frozen Lake Cadillac every winter.

Thirsty's, a gas station on M-55 west of Cadillac, was the home of Samantha or "Sam The Bear" from the 1970s through the late 1990s, when Sam died of old age. Sam was the only brown bear in captivity in the US at the time to hibernate naturally. Sam lived in a large cage in front of the gas station and was fed ice cream cones by tourists every summer.

In October 1975 the rock group Kiss visited Cadillac and performed at the Cadillac High School gymnasium. They played the concert to honor the Cadillac High School football team. In previous years, the team had compiled a record of sixteen consecutive victories, but the 1974 squad opened the season with two losses. The assistant coach, Jim Neff, an English teacher and rock'n'roll fan, thought to inspire the team by playing Kiss music in the locker room. He also connected the team's game plan, K-I-S-S or "Keep It Simple Stupid", with the band. The team went on to win seven straight games and their conference co-championship. After learning of their association with the team's success, the band decided to visit the school and play for the homecoming game.

Topography
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 9.02 sqmi, of which 7.16 sqmi is land and 1.86 sqmi is water.

The 1150 acre Lake Cadillac is entirely within the city limits. The larger, 2580 acre Lake Mitchell is nearby on the west side of the city, with 1760 ft of shoreline within the city's municipal boundary. The lakes were connected by a stream which was replaced in 1873 by the Clam Lake Canal. The canal was featured on Ripley's Believe It or Not in the 1970s due to the phenomenon that in winter the canal freezes before the lakes and then after the lakes freeze, the canal thaws and remains unfrozen for the rest of the winter.

Cadillac is located at the eastern edge of what is now managed as the Manistee National Forest. The surrounding area is heavily wooded, with mixed hardwood and conifer forests. Christmas tree farming has been important to the area agricultural industry. Cadillac was chosen in 1988 to donate the holiday tree installed at the lawn of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

The area surrounding Cadillac is primarily rural, and is considered to be part of Northern Michigan. Given the small size of nearby communities, the city is a major commercial and industrial hub of the region.

Cityscape
The commercial center of the city is located on the eastern edge of Lake Cadillac. Most downtown buildings range from two to five stories in height. Many face Mitchell Street, the city's tree-lined main street and traditional corridor of travel through town. The downtown contains a movie theater, gift shops, restaurants, a bookstore, specialty food stores, jewelers, clothing retailers, and various other businesses.

The Courthouse Hill Historic District, recognized in April 2005, lies adjacent to the city's commercial center. The District contains a number of large Victorian-style residences built by the lumber barons and businessmen who helped develop the city in the 1870s. Population and building density is highest in this area.

On the western bank of Lake Cadillac, where M-55 intersects M-115, is what is locally referred to as Cadillac West. This is a small commercial district, bordering Mitchell State Park and the two lakes; it caters mostly to tourists. It contains a number of motels and restaurants.

Along the northern and southern stretches of the lake are the main residential areas of the city. They are generally of low to moderate density, characterized primarily by single-family structures.

Climate
Cadillac experiences a typical northern Michigan climate, undergoing temperate seasonal changes, influenced by the presence of Lake Michigan and the inevitable lake effect. Winters are generally cold with large amounts of snowfall. Summers are warm. The average high temperature in July is 80 °F and the average low in January is 12 °F. Summer temperatures can exceed 90 °F, and winter temperatures can drop below 0 °F. Average annual rainfall is 30 in, and average annual snowfall is 81 in. Snowfall typically occurs between the months of November and March. According to the Köppen climate classification system, Cadillac has a humid continental climate, abbreviated "Dfb" on climate maps.

Superfund sites
Cadillac has two superfund sites, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. One is located at 1100 Wright Street, the former site of Kysor Industrial Corp, which operations resulted in toxic wastes. The other is located at 1002 6th Street, the former site of Northernaire Plating. Its operations also produced hazardous wastes, which produced contamination.

2010 census
As of the census of 2010, there were 10,355 people, 4,280 households, and 2,625 families residing in the city. The population density was 1446.2 PD/sqmi. There were 4,927 housing units at an average density of 688.1 /sqmi. The racial makeup of the city was 95.6% White, 0.5% African American, 0.6% Native American, 1.0% Asian, 0.4% from other races, and 1.8% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.8% of the population.

There were 4,280 households, of which 32.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 39.2% were married couples living together, 16.4% had a female householder with no husband present, 5.7% had a male householder with no wife present, and 38.7% were non-families. 32.0% of all households were made up of individuals, and 14% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.34 and the average family size was 2.90.

The median age in the city was 36.5 years. 24.7% of residents were under the age of 18; 10% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 24.4% were from 25 to 44; 23.8% were from 45 to 64; and 17.1% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 47.4% male and 52.6% female.

2000 census
As of the census of 2000, there were 10,000 people, 4,118 households, and 2,577 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,466.0 PD/sqmi. There were 4,466 housing units at an average density of 654.7 /sqmi. The racial makeup of the city was 96.55% White, 0.21% Black or African American, 0.92% Native American, 0.63% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 0.28% from other races, and 1.38% from two or more races. 1.18% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There were 4,118 households, out of which 32.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 43.9% were married couples living together, 14.2% had a female householder with no husband present, and 37.4% were non-families. 31.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 14.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.37 and the average family size was 2.96.

In the city, the population was spread out, with 26.2% under the age of 18, 9.6% from 18 to 24, 27.9% from 25 to 44, 19.6% from 45 to 64, and 16.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females, there were 91.4 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 84.4 males.

The median income for a household in the city was $29,899, and the median income for a family was $36,825. Males had a median income of $29,773 versus $21,283 for females. The per capita income for the city was $16,801. About 10.9% of families and 13.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 15.4% of those under age 18 and 13.3% of those age 65 or over.

Economy

Manufacturing has been the greatest employer in Cadillac since the logging industry. More than 26% of the city's labor force is employed in manufacturing. Three industrial parks are located within the city limits, comprising 7% of the total land use in Cadillac. Their operations generate 47% of the city's tax base. Much of the city's economic performance is determined by the fortunes of local industry.

The center of the city is generally perceived to have a "small-town-feel". In the summer, the downtown fills with tourists, many from southern Michigan. The city center is one block from Lake Cadillac. For visitors by boat who dock at the public docks, it is nearly as accessible by boat as it is by car. The city's immediate proximity to two lakes, as well as Manistee National Forest, Pere Marquette State Forest, Mitchell State Park and a number of major highways, has established tourism as a significant sector of the local economy.

During the winter months, Lake Cadillac and Lake Mitchell freeze over and the city becomes covered with snow. Cadillac is connected to a number of trail systems popular with winter recreation enthusiasts. The city integrates unusually well into the corridors of travel created by snowmobilers.

Cadillac is also known as Chestnut Town, USA. The local area has a relatively high number of American chestnut trees, planted by pioneers from New York and Pennsylvania who settled in western Michigan. A blight in the early 20th century killed nearly every American Chestnut tree, but those in western Michigan had developed a mysterious resistance and survived.

Top employers
According to the city's 2019 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the principal employers in the city were:

Arts and culture

Sites in Cadillac with Michigan historical markers include: Cadillac Carnegie Library, Charles T. Mitchell House, Clam Lake Canal, Cobbs and Mitchell Building, Cobbs and Mitchell No. 1, and the Shay Locomotive.

Government
Cadillac was incorporated as a city in 1877. It is a home rule city with a Council-Manager form of government-one.

Current council members are Shari Spoelman, Antoinette Schippers, Arthur Stevens, James Dean and Carla Filkins (mayor). The present City Manager is Marcus Peccia.

Cadillac is located in Michigan's 2nd congressional district, represented by Republican John Moolenaar.

Education
Cadillac's public education system has a total of 10 schools, with approximately 3,100 students and 166 teachers with a student:teacher ratio of 19.1:1. Cadillac has 4 private primary and secondary schools with approximately 394 students, 20 teachers and a student:teacher ratio of 20:1.

Cadillac Area Public Schools
Public education is administered by Cadillac Area Public Schools. The city has two high schools: Cadillac High School and Innovation High School. The area also has a middle school, Mackinaw Trail Middle School, covering grades 6, 7 and 8. There are three elementary schools, Forest View Elementary, Franklin Elementary, and Lincoln Elementary. There is one early childhood center, Viking Learning Center. Cadillac also has an alternative high school.

Private schools
Cadillac Heritage Christian offers nondenominational Christian education from pre-K through 12th grade.

Northview Adventist School has 16 students in grades 1–10 as of 2020.

St. Ann School is a coed private Roman Catholic school with 236 students in grades pre-K through 7.

Training schools
Northwoods Aviation, located at Wexford County Airport, offers training programs for piloting and servicing aircraft.

The Cadillac Institute of Cosmetology is a full service teaching salon in downtown Cadillac that offers training for general cosmetologists and specialized technicians to high school students through a partnership with Wexford-Missaukee Intermediate School District.

Colleges
The Baker College-Cadillac campus occupies 66 acre just outside the City of Cadillac. The school has an enrollment of more than 1,300 students and offers Associate's and bachelor's degrees, in addition to professional certifications.

Newspapers

 * The Cadillac News

Radio

 * WATT (1240 am) – news and talk
 * WLJW (1370 am) – religious
 * WOLW (91.1 FM) – religious "Northern Christian Radio"
 * WGCP (91.9 FM) – religious Strong Tower Radio
 * WJZQ (92.9 FM) – Top 40 "Z-93"
 * WKAD (93.7 FM) – "The Ticket" (Fox Sports Radio)
 * WLXV (96.7 FM) – 96.7 The Bull
 * WAIR (104.9 FM) – contemporary Christian "Smile-FM"
 * WCKC (107.1 FM) – classic rock "The Drive"
 * WCDY (107.9 FM) – hot AC "107.9 CDY"

Television

 * WWTV (Channel 9) – CBS, branded as "9 &10 News"
 * WMNN (Channel 26) – flagship station of national news network NewsNet, branded as "NewsNet Northern Michigan"
 * WCMV (Channel 27) – PBS, satellite of WCMU in Mount Pleasant, Michigan
 * WFQX (Channel 32) – Fox, branded as "Local 32"
 * WFQX-DT2 (Channel 32.2) - The CW Plus, branded as "The CW Northern Michigan"
 * W23EB-D (Channel 23.1-23.7) - 3ABN, Amazing Facts TV, Strong Tower Radio

Major highways
Cadillac is situated as the confluence of three highways: US 131, M-55 and M-115. Prior to 2001, the northern end of the freeway portion of US 131 was located at the southern entrance to Cadillac. With the construction of a bypass, the US 131 freeway was extended around the east side of the city. The former route of the highway through downtown Cadillac was redesignated as BUS US 131. In the city, BUS US 131 is named Mitchell Street, after George Mitchell, but may be referred to as main street.

 * bypasses the city to the east. The freeway continues southerly toward Big Rapids and Grand Rapids and northerly toward Manton before transitioning to a two-lane highway for the remainder of the distance to Petoskey.
 * , a loop route through downtown, running largely along the former route of US 131 through the city.
 * is a major two-lane east–west route across the state, connecting with Manistee on the west and Lake City, Houghton Lake, West Branch, and Tawas City on the east.
 * , another major two-lane route, runs diagonally from Clare to the southeast to Frankfort to the northwest.

Rail
The city is serviced by rail via the Great Lakes Central Railroad. This is primarily a freight line, although passenger service is expected in the future.

Public transit

 * Cadillac and Wexford County jointly operate a local public bus service. The Wexford Transit Authority is a demand-response, public transportation system, and has been in operation since 1974.
 * Indian Trails provides daily intercity bus service between Grand Rapids and St. Ignace and stops in Cadillac.

Non-motorized transportation
The White Pine Trail's northern terminus is in Cadillac. The trail, which stretches 92 mi and originates from Comstock Park, follows an abandoned railroad bed into the center of the city. The trail is paved from the village of Leroy 16 miles north to Cadillac.

Notable people

 * Jim Bowman, NFL player
 * Jan Harold Brunvand, American folklorist, born in Cadillac
 * Larry Joe Campbell, actor (According to Jim); born in Cadillac
 * George A. Mitchell, father of the city of Cadillac (first developer).
 * Jackie Swanson, actress (Cheers), attended high school in Cadillac
 * Guy Vander Jagt, U.S. congressman from Michigan's 9th congressional district; born in Cadillac
 * Luke Winslow-King, musician; born in Cadillac
 * Ad Wolgast, professional boxer; born in Cadillac
 * Paul McMullen, middle-distance runner; grew up in Cadillac

title: Cadillac, Michigan


text:
COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party). Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, it also targeted some right-wing, white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.

The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception; however, covert operations under the official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. However, the official chronology of the program is the subject of the debate. According to a senate investigation, "If COINTELPRO had been a short-lived aberration, the thorny problems of motivation, techniques, and control presented might be safely relegated to history. However, COINTELPRO existed for years on an 'ad hoc basis before the formal programs were instituted, and more significantly, COINTELPRO-type activities may continue today under the rubric of 'investigation." Many of the tactics used in COINTELPRO are alleged to have seen continued use, including discrediting targets through psychological warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; illegal violence; and assassination. According to a Senate report, the FBI's motivation was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order".

Beginning in 1969, leaders of the Black Panther Party were targeted by the COINTELPRO and "neutralized" by being assassinated, imprisoned, publicly humiliated or falsely charged with crimes. Some of the Black Panthers targeted include Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Zayd Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Marshall Conway. Common tactics used by COINTELPRO were perjury, witness harassment, witness intimidation, and withholding of exculpatory evidence.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and especially their leaders. Under Hoover, the official in charge of COINTELPRO was assistant director William C. Sullivan. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs, giving written approval for limited wiretapping of Martin Luther King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so". Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.

History
The FBI initiated COINTELPRO, an abbreviation for Counterintelligence Program, in 1956 with the aim of undermining the operations of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, the scope of the organization was broadened to encompass various additional domestic factions, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. The cessation of all COINTELPRO operations occurred in 1971. Despite its relatively small scale (constituting approximately 0.2% of the FBI's overall workload during a 15-year timeframe), COINTELPRO was subsequently subject to justified criticism from both Congress and the American public for infringing upon first amendment rights and other grounds.

Tactics included anonymous phone calls, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally. An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified the FBI's ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it within COINTELPRO, with the justification that the movement was infiltrated by communists. In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other African Americans in the South. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an African-American civil rights organization, was founded in 1957, the FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately, focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison, and eventually Martin Luther King Jr. After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote:

"In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech ... We must mark him now if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security."

Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms, as they were now aware that King was growing in stature daily as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement.

In the mid-1960s, King began to publicly criticize the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most "notorious liar" in the United States. In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous "suicide package" sent by the FBI on November 21, 1964, that contained audio recordings obtained through tapping King's phone and placing bugs throughout various hotel rooms over the past two years, and that was created two days after the announcement of King's impending Nobel Peace Prize. The tape, which was prepared by FBI audio technician John Matter, documented a series of sexual indiscretions by King combined with a letter telling him: "There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation". King was subsequently informed that the audio would be released to the media if he did not acquiesce and commit suicide prior to accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. When King refused to satisfy their coercion tactics, FBI Associate Director, Cartha D. DeLoach, commenced a media campaign offering the surveillance transcript to various news organizations, including Newsweek and Newsday. Even by 1969, as has been noted elsewhere, "[FBI] efforts to 'expose' Martin Luther King Jr. had not slackened even though King had been dead for a year. [The Bureau] furnished ammunition to opponents that enabled attacks on King's memory, and ... tried to block efforts to honor the slain leader."

During the same period the program also targeted Malcolm X. While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was "directly" involved in Malcolm's murder in 1965, it is documented that the Bureau worked to "widen the rift" between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad through infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization", rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes, which ultimately led to Malcolm's assassination. The FBI heavily infiltrated Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity in the final months of his life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm's assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI's involvement in his death cannot be known.

Amidst the urban unrest of July–August 1967, the FBI began "COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE", which focused on King and the SCLC, as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Nation of Islam. BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations".

A March 1968 memo stated the program's goal was to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups"; to "Prevent the RISE OF A 'MESSIAH' who could unify ... the militant black nationalist movement"; "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence [against authorities]"; to "Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to ... both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy"; and to "prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth". Dr. King was said to have potential to be the "messiah" figure, should he abandon nonviolence and integrationism, and Kwame Ture was noted to have "the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way" as he was portrayed as someone who espoused a much more militant vision of "black power". While the FBI was particularly concerned with leaders and organizers, they did not limit their scope of target to the heads of organizations. Individuals such as writers were also listed among the targets of operations.

This program coincided with a broader federal effort to prepare military responses for urban riots and began increased collaboration between the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense. The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation CHAOS. A particular target was the Poor People's Campaign, a national effort organized by King and the SCLC to occupy Washington, DC. The FBI monitored and disrupted the campaign on a national level, while using targeted smear tactics locally to undermine support for the march. The Black Panther Party was another targeted organization, wherein the FBI collaborated to destroy the party from the inside out.

Overall, COINTELPRO encompassed disruption and sabotage of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party (1967), and the entire New Left social/political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by the Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that "COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident groups." Official congressional committees and several court cases have concluded that COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.

Program revealed
The program was secret until March 8, 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies. The boxing match known as the Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in March 1971 provided cover for the activist group to successfully pull off the burglary. Muhammad Ali was a COINTELPRO target because he had joined the Nation of Islam and the anti-war movement.

Many news organizations initially refused to immediately publish the information, with the notable exception of The Washington Post. After affirming the reliability of the documents, it published them on the front page (in defiance of the Attorney General's request), prompting other organizations to follow suit. Within the year, Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled case by case.

Additional documents were revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the Socialist Workers Party, and a number of other groups. In 1976 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the "Church Committee" after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), launched a major investigation of the FBI and COINTELPRO. Many released documents have been partly or entirely redacted.

The Final Report of the Select Committee castigated the conduct of the intelligence community in its domestic operations (including COINTELPRO) in no uncertain terms:

"The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the 'national security' the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.

Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence."

The Church Committee documented a history of the FBI (initially called BOI until 1936) exercising political repression as far back as World War I, and through the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up "anarchists, communists, socialists, reformists and revolutionaries" for deportation. From 1936 through 1976, the domestic operations were increased against political and anti-war groups.

FBI claimed intent of COINTELPRO
The FBI claimed that the purpose behind COINTELPRO was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize" groups that the FBI officials believed were "subversive" by instructing FBI field operatives to:
 * 1) Create a negative public image for target groups (for example through surveilling activists and then releasing negative personal information to the public)
 * 2) Break down internal organization by creating conflicts (for example, by having agents exacerbate racial tensions, or send anonymous letters to try to create conflicts)
 * 3) Create dissension between groups (for example, by spreading rumors that other groups were stealing money)
 * 4) Restrict access to public resources (for example, by pressuring non-profit organizations to cut off funding or material support)
 * 5) Restrict the ability to organize protest (for example, through agents promoting violence against police during planning and at protests)
 * 6) Restrict the ability of individuals to participate in group activities (for example, by character assassinations, false arrests, surveillance)

Range of targets
At its inception, the program's main target was the Communist Party.

In an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr in February 1996, Noam Chomsky—a political activist and MIT professor of linguistics—spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO, saying:

"COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations ... by the time it got through, I won't run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the women's movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination."

According to the Church Committee:

"While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a "potential" for violence—and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave "aid and comfort" to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.

The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included "a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black". Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist "Hate Group".

Furthermore, the actual targets were chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply. The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently "anti-Communist". The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College ("vanguard of the New Left") to the New Mexico Free University and other "alternate" schools, and from underground newspapers to students' protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them."

Examples of surveillance, spanning all presidents from FDR to Nixon, both legal and illegal, contained in the Church Committee report:
 * President Roosevelt (1933–1945) asked the FBI to put in its files the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his "national defense" policy and supporting Col. Charles Lindbergh.
 * President Truman (1945–1953) received inside information on a former Roosevelt aide's efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists.
 * President Eisenhower (1953–1961) received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
 * The Kennedy administration (1961–1963) had the FBI wiretap a congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm. US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received the fruits of an FBI wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr. and an electronic listening device targeting a congressman, both of which yielded information of a political nature.
 * President Johnson (1963–1969) asked the FBI to conduct "name checks" of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance.
 * President Nixon (1969–1974) authorized a program of wiretaps, which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court Justice.

Groups that were known to be targets of COINTELPRO operations include: Various Church Committee reports reproduced online at ICDC: Final Report, 2A ; Final Report, 2Cb ; Final Report, 3A ; Final Report, 3G. Various COINTELPRO documents reproduced online at ICDC: CPUSA ; SWP ; Black Nationalist ; White Hate ; New Left ; Puerto Rico.
 * Communist and socialist organizations.
 * Organizations and individuals associated with the civil rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and other civil rights organizations.
 * Black nationalist groups.
 * The Young Lords.
 * The American Indian Movement.
 * White supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
 * The National States' Rights Party.
 * A broad range of organizations labeled "New Left", Students for a Democratic Society the Weathermen, and environmental activists.
 * Almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, as well as individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation.
 * The National Lawyers Guild.
 * Organizations and individuals associated with the women's rights movement.
 * Nationalist groups such as those seeking independence for Puerto Rico, reunification of Ireland, and Cuban exile movements including Orlando Bosch's Cuban Power and the Cuban Nationalist Movement.
 * Additional notable American individuals.

The COINTELPRO operators targeted multiple groups at once and encouraged splintering of these groups from within. In letter-writing campaigns (wherein false letters were sent on behalf of members of parties), the FBI ensured that groups would not unite in their causes. For instance, they launched a campaign specifically to alienate the Black Panther Party from the Mau Maus, Young Lords, Young Patriots and SDS. These racially diverse groups had been building alliances, in part due to charismatic leaders such as Fred Hampton and his attempts to create a "Rainbow Coalition". The FBI was concerned with ensuring that groups could not gain traction through unity, specifically across racial lines. One of the main ways of targeting these groups was to arouse suspicion between the different parties and causes. In this way the bureau took on a divide-and-conquer offensive.

The COINTELPRO documents show numerous cases of the FBI's intentions to prevent and disrupt protests against the Vietnam War. Many techniques were used to accomplish this task. "These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations." One 1966 COINTELPRO operation tried to redirect the Socialist Workers Party from their pledge of support for the antiwar movement.

The FBI has said that it no longer undertakes COINTELPRO or COINTELPRO-like operations. However, critics have claimed that agency programs in the spirit of COINTELPRO targeted groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, the American Indian Movement, Earth First!, and the anti-globalization movement.

Methods

According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used five main methods during COINTELPRO:
 * 1) Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit, disrupt and negatively redirect action. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
 * 2) Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used a myriad of "dirty tricks" to undermine movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials, and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.
 * 3) Harassment via the legal system: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, "investigative" interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.
 * 4) Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The objective was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements.
 * 5) Undermine public opinion: One of the primary ways the FBI targeted organizations was by challenging their reputations in the community and denying them a platform to gain legitimacy. Hoover specifically designed programs to block leaders from "spreading their philosophy publicly or through the communications media". Furthermore, the organization created and controlled negative media meant to undermine black power organizations. For instance, they oversaw the creation of "documentaries" skillfully edited to paint the Black Panther Party as aggressive, and false newspapers that spread misinformation about party members. The ability of the FBI to create distrust within and between revolutionary organizations tainted their public image and weakened chances at unity and public support.

The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten tension and hostility between various factions in the black power movement, for example between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. For instance, the FBI sent a fake letter to the US Organization exposing a supposed Black Panther plot to murder the head of the US Organization, Ron Karenga. They then intensified this by spreading falsely attributed cartoons in the black communities pitting the Black Panther Party against the US Organization. This resulted in numerous deaths, among which were San Diego Black Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell. Another example of the FBI's anonymous letter writing campaign is how they turned the Blackstone Rangers head, Jeff Fort, against former ally Fred Hampton, by stating that Hampton had a hit on Fort. They also were instrumental in developing the rift between Black Panther Party leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, as executed through false letters inciting the two leaders of the Black Panther Party.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a former Black Panther, reflects on how these tactics made him feel, saying he had a combat mentality and felt like he was at war with the government. When asked about why he thinks the Black Panthers were targeted he said, "In the United States, the equivalent of the military was the local police. During the early sixties, at the height of the civil rights movement, and the human rights movement, the police in the United States became increasingly militaristic. They began to train out of military bases in the United States. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act supplied local police with military technology, everything from assault rifles to army personnel carriers. In his opinion, the Counterintelligence Program went hand-in-hand with the militarization of the police in the Black community, with the militarization of police in America."

The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party, most notably Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969. Whether or not the FBI sanctioned his killing remains unproven. Before the death of Hampton, long-term infiltrator, William O'Neal, shared floor plans of his apartment with the COINTELPRO team. He then gave Hampton a dose of secobarbital that rendered Hampton unconscious during the raid on his home.

In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them. Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a Black Panther Party leader, was incarcerated for 27 years before a California Superior Court vacated his murder conviction, ultimately freeing him. Appearing before the court, an FBI agent testified that he believed Pratt had been framed, because both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department knew he had not been in the area at the time the murder occurred.

Some sources claim that the FBI conducted more than 200 "black bag jobs", which were warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members.

In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party had concluded that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily engaged in feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent's career goals would be directly affected by his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the Black Panther Party was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means".

Hoover supported using false claims to attack his political enemies. In one memo he wrote: "Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the Black Panther Party and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge."

In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen, who gave chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young black man; one of the Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an acknowledged FBI informant. The FBI spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement. FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson.

FBI informant Rowe has also been implicated in some of the most violent crimes of the 1960s civil rights era, including attacks on the Freedom Riders and the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

The ACLU has claimed the FBI supported an extreme right-wing group of former Minutemen, transforming it into a group called the Secret Army Organization that targeted groups, activists, and leaders involved in the Anti-War Movement, using both intimidation and violent acts.

Hoover ordered preemptive action "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence."

Illegal surveillance
The final report of the Church Committee concluded:

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been illegally collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous—and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations—have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.

Groups and individuals have been assaulted, repressed, harassed and disrupted because of their political views, social beliefs and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory, harmful and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.

Governmental officials—including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law—have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.

The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them.

Later similar operations
While COINTELPRO was officially terminated in April 1971, domestic espionage continued. Between 1972 and 1974, it is documented that the Bureau planted over 500 bugs without a warrant and opened over 2,000 pieces of personal mail. More recent targets of covert action include the American Indian Movement (AIM), Earth First!, and Committees in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Documents released under the FOIA show that the FBI tracked the late David Halberstam—a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author—for more than two decades. "Counterterrorism" guidelines implemented during the Reagan administration have been described as allowing a return to COINTELPRO tactics. Some radical groups accuse factional opponents of being FBI informants or assume the FBI is infiltrating the movement. COINTELPRO survivor Filiberto Ojeda Rios was killed by the FBI's hostage rescue team in 2005, his death described by a United Nations special committee as an assassination.

Environmentalist Eric McDavid convicted on arson charges was released after documents emerged demonstrating that the FBI informant in his Earth Liberation Front group provided crucial leadership, information, and material without which the crime could not have been committed, repeating the same pattern of behavior of COINTELPRO. It has been claimed these sorts of practices have become widespread in FBI "counter-terrorism" cases targeting Muslims in the 2009 Bronx terrorism plot and others.

Authors such as Ward Churchill, Rex Weyler, and Peter Matthiessen allege that the federal government intended to acquire uranium deposits on the Lakota tribe's reservation land, and that this motivated a larger government conspiracy against AIM activists on the Pine Ridge reservation. Others believe COINTELPRO continues and similar actions are being taken against activist groups. Caroline Woidat says that, with respect to Native Americans, COINTELPRO should be understood within a historical context in which "Native Americans have been viewed and have viewed the world themselves through the lens of conspiracy theory." Other authors argue that while some conspiracy theories related to COINTELPRO are unfounded, the issue of ongoing government surveillance and repression is real.

FBI Agent Richard G. Held is known to have increased FBI support for the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON) squads, who were a private paramilitary group established in 1972 by the elected tribal chairman, Dick Wilson under authority of the Oglala Sioux. AIM accused GOONs of involvement in 300 assaults and 64 homicides of political opponents. Despite this, The Bureau rarely investigated them and instead used its resources overwhelmingly to prosecute AIM. In 2000, the FBI released a report regarding these alleged unsolved violent deaths on Pine Ridge reservation and accounted for most of the deaths and disputed the claims of unsolved murders. The report stated that only four deaths were unsolved and that some deaths were not murders.

A lawsuit filed by Dhoruba bin-Wahad, a former member of the Black Panther Party, revealed the existence of multiple programs similar to COINTELPRO including "Newkill" (New York Police Killings), Chesrob (a program focused on Panther Assata Shakur), and PRISACTS (The Prison Activists Surveillance Program), a program that focused on "neutralizing" political activists who were already in prison, many of whom (like bin-Wahad) had been targeted by COINTELPRO.

In April 2018, the Atlanta Black Star characterized the FBI as still engaging in COINTELPRO behavior by surveilling the Black Lives Matter movement. Internal documents dated as late as 2017 showed that the FBI had surveilled the movement. In 2014, the FBI tracked a Black Lives Matter activist using surveillance tactics which The Intercept found "reminiscent of a rich American history of targeting black Americans," including COINTELPRO. This practice, along with the imprisonment of black activists for their views, has been associated with the new FBI designation of "Black Identity Extremists".

Defending Rights & Dissent, a civil liberties group, cataloged known instances of First Amendment abuses and political surveillance by the FBI since 2010. The organization found that the FBI devoted disproportionate resources to spy on peaceful left-leaning civil society groups, including Occupy Wall Street, economic justice advocates, racial justice movements, environmentalists, Abolish ICE, and various anti-war movements.

In December 2012, the FBI released redacted documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of PCJF, said the documents showed that FBI counterterrorism agents had monitored the Occupy movement from its inception in August 2011 and that the FBI acted improperly by collecting "information on people's free-speech actions" and entering it into "unregulated databases, a vast storehouse of information widely disseminated to a range of law-enforcement and, apparently, private entities" (see Domestic Security Alliance Council). The FBI also communicated with the New York Stock Exchange, banks, private businesses and state and local police forces about the movement. In 2014, the PCJF obtained an additional 4,000 pages of unclassified documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, showing "details of the scrutiny of the Occupy protests in 2011 and 2012 by law enforcement officers, federal officials, security contractors and others."

In October 2020, Katie Reiter, chief of staff to Michigan state Senator Rosemary Bayer, had an FBI task force come to her house and aggressively question her about a draft bill she had recently discussed which would have limited the use of tear gas against protesters. Reiter had discussed the proposed ban on tear gas on a private 90-minute Zoom call with Bayer and a handful of other staffers. Reiter says the two officers refused to answer any questions about how they became aware of her private meeting. The Intercept reported about the incident: “Reiter said that the FBI’s visit left her confused and fearful. ‘It has impacted my sleep, it has caused me quite a bit of anxiety,’ she said. ‘And it has certainly impacted how we talk. I try not to let it, I’ll just be like, ‘No, we’re going to talk about this.’ But it's in my mind all the time.’” A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the record, as did a spokesperson for Zoom.

Notable people targeted

 * Ralph Abernathy
 * Mumia Abu-Jamal
 * Muhammad Ali
 * James Baldwin
 * Judi Bari
 * Dhoruba bin-Wahad
 * H. Rap Brown
 * Kwame Ture
 * Bunchy Carter
 * Eldridge Cleaver
 * Marshall Conway
 * Jeff Fort
 * Howard Bruce Franklin
 * Fred Hampton
 * Tom Hayden
 * Ernest Hemingway
 * Abbie Hoffman
 * Ericka Huggins
 * Jose Cha Cha Jimenez
 * Muhammad Kenyatta
 * Clark Kerr
 * Martin Luther King Jr.
 * Stanley Levison
 * Viola Liuzzo
 * Malcolm X
 * Jessica Mitford
 * Huey P. Newton
 * Geronimo Pratt
 * Filiberto Ojeda Ríos
 * Mario Savio
 * Jean Seberg
 * Assata Shakur
 * Morris Starsky
 * John Trudell

Books

 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
 * Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).

Lessons

 * Wolfe-Rocca, Ursula. "COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI's War on the Black Freedom Movement", Zinn Education Project.

FBI files

 * Files on FBI's website
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on Espionage Program
 * FBI COINTELPRO file on Hoodwink
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on Puerto Rican Groups
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on Cuban Matters
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on the New Left
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on the Socialist Workers Party
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on Black Extremist Groups
 * FBI COINTELPRO files on White Hate Groups
 * FBI COINTELPRO files Las Vegas
 * FBI COINTELPRO files Miami
 * FBI COINTELPRO files Baltimore
 * FBI COINTELPRO files Alexandria
 * FBI COINTELPRO files Charlotte
 * FBI COINTELPRO files Indianapolis

U.S. government reports

 * U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Internal Security. Hearings on Domestic Intelligence Operations for Internal Security Purposes. 93rd Cong., 2d sess, 1974.
 * U.S. Congress. House. Select Committee on Intelligence. Hearings on Domestic Intelligence Programs. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
 * U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Government Operations. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Hearings on Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders. 90th Cong., 1st sess. – 91st Cong., 2d sess, 1967–1970.
 * U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hearings – The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights. Vol. 6. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
 * U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hearings – Federal Bureau of Investigation. Vol. 6. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
 * U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Final Report – Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Cong., 2d sess, 1976.
 * U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Final Report – Book III, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Cong., 2d sess, 1976.
 * Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 26 (legislative day, April 14), 1976. [AKA "Church Committee Report"]. Archived at Archive.org by the Boston Public Library
 * Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities: Intelligence Reports and the Rights of Americans: Book II. April 24, 1976.

title: COINTELPRO