The '''Attorney General's list''' originally known as the '''Biddle list''' named (after Attorney General [[Francis Biddle]]) began during the administration of U.S. President [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt]] in 1941 to track Soviet controlled [[subversion (political)|subversive]] front organizations. The original list had only eleven organizations but was greatly expanded by the end of the decade. <ref>M. Stanton Evans, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=tQt3AAAAMAAJ&pgis=1 Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies]'' (New York: Crown Forum, 2007) ISBN 978-1-4000-8105-9, pp. 55-60, notes).</ref> On 20 March 1948 it was published in the ''Federal Register.''<ref>Attorney General's list, ''Federal Register 13'', (20 March 1948).</ref> It did not list individuals.
Communist groups, which emerged both in the pre-war and the post-war list, are marked by one "". In the meantime some trade unions communists had excluded other openly communist groups from their membership lists, were dissolved, partially also by government resolution. The [[Venona project]] intercepted and translated messages of Soviet spies inside the U.S. reporting to Moscow, but the information was not translated until years later and was not used by the Attorney General to make the list.