J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was born in Washington, DC, son of a career government employee who rose to become superintendent of engraving and printing in the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Young Hoover’s mother taught her children the tenets of Calvinism and would not let them forget the sinfulness of human ways. Because of her and the example of a Presbyterian preacher whom he admired excessively, J. Edgar wanted to be a minister. He graduated from high school as valedictorian of the class of 1913 and began law school at night, working days in the Library of Congress as a messenger.
Exactly why he turned from the ministry to law is not known, but during this time he still continued to participate in Bible classes and to preach moral values to anyone within earshot. Those who knew him in youth remembered that he loved sports, was a loner, and was humorless. In 1916, George Washington University awarded him the LL.B. degree and the following year the LL.M. degree.
His first law job was with the Department of Justice as a file reviewer. He enjoyed the detail work that others disliked and pleased his superiors with his diligence and organizational skills. In 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer choose Hoover to help with prosecution of alien agitators, deportation of every ”red” being the goal. Hoover wrote a report on the ”communist conspiracy” and prepared numerous legal briefs sanctioning government raids of suspected ”red” hideouts. The raids terrorized hundreds of innocent aliens, though in a major legal action Hoover and other Department of Justice lawyers won the deportation of anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Hoover was later to regret his role in the mostly unwarranted persecution.
Favorable political winds blew his way on August 22, 1921. President Warren G. Harding’s attorney general, Harry Daugherty, had fired William J. Flynn, chief of the Bureau of Investigation, and replaced him with William J. Burns, the celebrated detective. On that date the highly visible Hoover was named assistant director. The bureau’s sphere of activity before World War I had encompassed investigating violations of neutrality, bankruptcy, antitrust laws, and white-slave trafficking. During the war it had focused on sabotage, espionage, and other subversive activities. Vice President Calvin Coolidge fired Harry Daugherty and gave the job of attorney general to Harlan Fiske Stone. When Burns announced that he planned to retire soon, Stone and Secretary of Commerce
Herbert Hoover (no relation) jointly recommended promotion of the assistant director. So on May 10, 1924, J. Edgar Hoover took control of the Bureau of Investigation (at first as acting director; full confirmation came seven months later). Hoover would not relinquish that control for the next forty-eight years.
Hoover’s early changes in the bureau’s functioning included the hiring of lawyers and public accountants as special agents, expansion of the central fingerprint bureau, and introduction of the latest scientific methods of detection. On June 11, 1930, a congressional act authorized the compiling of crime statistics gathered from police agencies throughout the nation. Hoover, the premier detail man, delighted in this task. To this day, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports is the standard work by which the incidence of American crime is measured.
Federal legislation such as the National Kidnapping Act, the National Extortion Act, and the Bank Robbery Act gave FBI agents more leverage in the fight against crime and also more crime to contend with. ”Public enemies” fled from state to state, posing a difficult problem for local authorities, who could not easily cross jurisdictional lines. But FBI agents could, and because they were Hoover’s men, bent on subduing gangsterism, they often conducted their business ruthlessly. Hoover wanted quick results once he had committed his ”G-men”—so called by the press and popularized in the movies—to running down a public enemy. His methods of ensuring capture garnered criticism, since at times he appeared to flaunt the law. However, faultfinding by the legal and law enforcement establishments did not diminish the fact that the FBI was very effective in apprehending the foremost criminals of the day.
In 1935, the Bureau of Investigation officially became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in that same year the FBI Training Academy at Quantico, Virginia, opened. The academy’s purpose was to train ”selected police officers from every State in the Union and many foreign countries” in state-of-the-art law enforcement techniques. Inception of the academy may have been the single most important event in Hoover’s tenure in office. But no matter what the event, he was swift to publicize it. Hoover knew that the press created public opinion, and he wanted the best press possible for his FBI. So while G-men risked their lives in volatile confrontations, he spoke at public gatherings of their exploits, and before long the FBI assumed a legendary status. To acquaint America further with the bureau, he wrote Persons in Hiding (1938), which was filled with thrilling accounts of criminal cases. The topic added considerable luster to the federal arm of the law and told Americans who had not yet heard of J. Edgar Hoover just who he was.
As World War II dawned, President Franklin Roosevelt directed Hoover to engage in the same activities as he had in World War I, namely, stamping out subversion at home. Hoover already had a list of enemy aliens, so within twenty-four hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor 1,771 of them were in custody. The usual number of FBI agents, six hundred, was increased to a wartime peak of five thousand. This buildup successfully prevented any major instance of ”foreign-directed sabotage.” Hoover was rewarded with the Medal for Merit, the U.S. Selective Service Medal, and the Order of Honor and Merit of the Cuban Red Cross for his domestic peacekeeping efforts.
When the war was over, the FBI undertook a prodigious assignment: to test the loyalty of more than 2.8 million federal employees. In addition, it was to investigate all violations of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Hoover made the transition from war to peace easily and with his customary zeal for any assignment soon asserted publicly that the FBI had matters in hand.
On May 10, 1949, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment as director, Hoover could justifiably take pride in his accomplishments. Due to his leadership, about four thousand agents enforced some 120 major federal laws with a conviction rate of 97.2%—the envy of the law enforcement world. That was surely his high point. By the late 1950s, he was talked about in a much different way. Prolific wiretapping and McCarthyism fueled the debate over his unchecked power. He listened in on private conversations of whomever he desired, and not necessarily of those who threatened the country. He assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy’s purge of communists, even though the memory of his earlier red-baiting still haunted him. Yet he continued to direct his men to ferret out communists and in 1958 promulgated his fear in Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, a topic that sold 2.5 million copies.
Sharp criticism of Hoover did not prevent President John F. Kennedy from reappointing him as director in 1960. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, though, did not get along with the feisty director and broke with him completely after his brother’s assassination. Hoover disliked taking orders from the attorney general when before he had always gone straight to the head man. Besides, Robert Kennedy demanded that he assign more agents to civil rights and organized crime cases, which he had neglected to do. Networking the country with wiretaps and hunting communists had been Hoover’s priorities for too long.
Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon also reappointed the indomitable Hoover, waiving the mandatory retirement age of seventy. Hoover was at his imperial best in the latter stage of his career. He told off the Warren Commission, investigating President Kennedy’s assassination, when he was accused of not sharing FBI intelligence with it, and he called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ”the most notorious liar in the country” when the civil rights leader had said that the FBI cared little or nothing about protecting blacks.
In his final years and particularly after his death, Hoover attracted many written appraisals of his character and influence. The tendency has been to expose the roots of his power. The jurist, the politician, the psychiatrist, and the law enforcement officer can all find much to ponder in his life, but none should forget that J. Edgar Hoover turned a politically subservient bureau into a globally recognized force, suppressed kidnapping and gangsterism during the 1930s, stopped the infiltration of spies during World War II, and muffled the voice of communism in the postwar period.
His honorary academic degrees filled a wall, as did his awards for good citizenship. Never married, he died alone in his bedroom after having worked a full day in his office. High blood pressure had overtaxed his heart.
