61 pages • 2 hours read
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Content Warning: The source text contains discussions of suicide, mental illness, sexual assault, racist violence, and anti-gay bias.
The book begins by examining J. Edgar Hoover’s family background in Washington, DC, which was a fairly small city throughout the 19th century. The first Hoovers arrived shortly after the city’s burning during the War of 1812 and participated in its early rebuilding efforts. Several Hoovers owned slaves before the Civil War. Hoover’s grandfather John Thomas joined the Coast Survey, an early office in a then-tiny federal bureaucracy, but one that took pride in its dedication to science and professionalism without partisan biases. Hoover’s mother, Annie, descended from Hans Hinz, the first Swiss consul general to the United States, and her uncle set up the German-American Bank. She grew up wealthy, but then the bank collapsed in 1878, and her father later drowned himself in the Anacostia River. Around this time, Annie met Dickerson Hoover, while he was reeling from the loss of his own father at a relatively young age. Their shared struggle seemed to bind them together, even as the family suffered a terrible loss when their third child, Sadie, died of diphtheria at the age of three. Born 17 months after her death, John Edgar carried the weight of family history from his first moments.
By New Year’s Day, 1895—the day of Hoover’s birth—the population of Washington, DC, had doubled twice over since his mother’s birth in 1861, but it still had the culture of a small city, where the president was a local celebrity and moved around without a phalanx of guards surrounding him. The young Hoover showed an early interest in record-keeping and political gossip. Although his mother had a reputation for being stern, his parents were by all accounts loving, and his father, who had succeeded his own father in working for the Coast Survey, had just enough means to keep them in the whiter and more desirable neighborhoods in the city. Although Jim Crow segregation had not yet come to Washington, DC, the city was still experiencing backlash from the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), a short-lived experiment in racial equality during which Black people could vote and hold office. In 1878, the district stripped away everyone’s right to vote based on the rationale that federal employees should be nonpartisan public servants. The young J. Edgar displayed a willingness to work, taking a job as a delivery boy for a local market, as well as an eagerness to please his parents, his much older siblings, and his teachers.
A major scandal struck the family when the wife of Annie’s brother was shot and killed by an adulterous lover, who then shot himself. The story was a local sensation and, due to a cultural obsession with a crisis of masculinity, was interpreted as Annie’s brother lacking the fortitude to control his wayward wife. The president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, preached the virtues of boxing, hunting, and other physically strenuous endeavors to shore up the manly virtues. Hoover himself was short, skinny, and prone to illness, with little appetite for outdoor adventures. He also suffered from a stutter, which he would conceal for the rest of his life with a distinctively fast cadence. Often alone, he took diligent notes on neighborhood events, with a focus on crime and death. Around that same time, his father, Dickerson, showed signs of what would likely now be called severe depression but at the time was viewed as a failure of character. His mother’s uncle, John Hirz, provided some stability until he died, when Hoover was 13. His main influence then became his brother Dick, who brought him to church to learn “Muscular Christianity,” which imagined Jesus as a muscular and tough figure in order to recruit more men to the church. He remained close to his older brother and sister, although he resented them when their own marriages and families left him as the only child in the house with a demanding mother and depressed father.
Hoover attended the prestigious Central High School, part of a relatively new effort to provide a first-class education to the district’s white students at no charge. Hoover thrived in its culture of academic achievement but failed to live up to its expectations of masculine vigor when he was cut from the football team. He instead joined the cadet corps, excelling at drills and reveling in the company of other boys within a context of discipline and rigorous hierarchies. Hoover also performed exceptionally well in debate, exhibiting an inexhaustible capacity for study and the elegant construction of arguments. During high school he and his brother Dick switched from Lutheranism to Presbyterianism and attended services in which the pastor, Donald MacLeod, preached strict self-control, particularly with respect to sexual impulses and the consumption of alcohol. MacLeod rejected the “Social Gospel,” which called for good works and reforms of unjust social institutions, and called instead for a revival of traditional moral values, which included strict racial segregation on the presumption that Black people were a corrupting influence. Around that same time, Hoover’s father was committed to a private mental-health facility, a source of profound shame given the cultural emphasis on manly toughness and stoicism. Despite these difficulties, he accomplished much in high school and regarded it as a high point in his life, although he seemed to earn the respect of his peers and not their admiration.
After high school, Hoover began law school at George Washington University and clerked at the Library of Congress, living at home with his parents while most of his associates and mentors either left or were caught up in their own responsibilities. He still did well academically and found a social outlet in Kappa Alpha, a Southern fraternity that championed the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy as a noble attempt to preserve an idyllic plantation system. At that time, President Wilson had resegregated the federal workforce, but he was also a progressive who believed in the ability of a professional bureaucracy to improve the effectiveness of government, such as by establishing the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Hoover’s work at the library provided him with an early example of this progressive ethos, as his supervisor, Herbert Putnam, was revolutionizing methods for cataloging and searching for information. Hoover’s college years were thus steeped in the ideals of government professionalism and a resurgent racism. During his third year, a fellow member of KA, Thomas Dixon, wrote the novel that became the film Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan. Through KA, Hoover discovered a template for a virtuous brotherhood that would influence his building of the FBI. As in high school, his fellow students respected his abilities but found connecting with him personally difficult.
The United States had just formally entered the First World War when Hoover graduated from George Washington in 1917. While the vast majority of his comrades joined the military, Hoover remained in Washington and took his first job with the Justice Department, where he would remain for his entire life. He most likely stayed home not out of cowardice but out of concern for his family: His troubled father lost his job with the Coast Survey and so Hoover needed to provide income for his parents. The war led to a massive growth in the federal government as new agencies sprang up to oversee the draft, raise funds, mobilize domestic support, and, critically for Hoover, crack down on possible enemies at the home front. The main focus of government surveillance was German Americans, who President Wilson warned would be punished for any disloyalty. As schools started banning German-language instruction and several Germans suffered at the hands of vigilante mobs, Hoover was charged with interrogating Germans with any spot on their record, even when they clearly no posed no threat to national security. Whenever Hoover tried to show mercy, his superiors ordered their internment as a deterrent to others. Although Hoover focused on Germans, the Justice Department at the time was also concerned with left-wing activists who vocally denounced the war. In the meantime, Hoover proved himself adept at registering German American citizens with the federal government, quickly earning the attention of his superiors for his diligence. This made it easy for him to secure a permanent job with the Justice Department once the war ended in late 1918.
Hoover’s postwar job was within the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor to the FBI. At only 24 years of age, he was the head of its Radical Division, which continued the wartime surveillance regime and directed it against anarchists and socialists. This marked the first Red Scare in the United States, when the communist seizure of power in Russia coincided with bouts of labor unrest in the United States, triggering fears of revolutionary upheaval. Congress passed a law requiring the deportation of any noncitizen affiliated with radical organizations or activity, after which there was a series of bombing attempts on politicians, including the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The bureau resumed a wartime footing, and Hoover amassed a huge file of targets for potential deportation. After several months’ delay, the bureau launched what would become known as the Palmer Raids, arresting over 1,000 people and ultimately deporting 249. The entire episode hardened Hoover’s attitudes toward left-wing radicalism, and for the rest of his life he would never shake his conviction that it posed an existential threat to the United States.
Hoover became the bureau’s expert on communism, regarding it as a wicked criminal conspiracy bent on wholesale destruction. He then orchestrated a nationwide raid against various communist organizations on January 2, 1920, with arrests numbering in the thousands. These raids drew widespread criticism, with Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post denouncing them to Congress as a brutal and poorly executed violation of constitutional principles. John Palmer, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, provided cover for Hoover, blaming a sensationalist press for blowing the bureau’s actions out of proportion. However, after a bomb in September 1920 killed 38 people on Wall Street, Palmer publicly blamed Hoover for failing to find the right targets for deportation. From that point forward, Hoover’s animus to radicals extended to elite liberals, whom he regarded as too soft and idealistic to accept the hard realities of the leftist threat to the American way of life.
Hoover worried that the criticism of the raids would cost him his job, especially when the incoming Harding administration sought to staff the government with loyal Republicans after eight years of the Democrat Wilson. Around that same time, his father died, with “melancholia” listed as the official cause. Hoover managed to hang on, becoming assistant director of the bureau to William J. Burns, but it proved a difficult time for him. Where Wilson had championed bureaucratic professionalism, Harding operated on the ethos of machine politics, valuing loyalty and personal interest over competence. Hoover’s high rank concealed his modest job, which amounted to organizing paperwork with little impact on policy, although he did work to cultivate loyal subordinates and was able to advance administrative reforms, including developing a record of fingerprints for police departments nationwide. Hoover also oversaw some criminal investigations, many involving what were then considered sexual crimes, such as commercial sex work or interracial marriage. In addition, he secured the deportation of Black activist Marcus Garvey, while largely ignoring the widespread lynching throughout the Jim Crow South, which disproportionately targeted Black men. However, he also cracked down on the Ku Klux Klan: While he shared some of their racial animus, he saw them as a force of lawlessness. During this time, the Justice Department was riddled with incompetence and scandal, including the suicide of a man reputed to be the lover of the Attorney General Harry Daugherty. President Harding died suddenly, and the rest of his administration was consumed with reports of corruption, including at the highest levels of the Justice Department. In response, Daugherty blamed the reports on communist misinformation and tried to use the bureau to intimidate critics, but President Coolidge demanded his resignation. The 29-year-old Hoover would fill the vacancy and hold it for the rest of his life.
A major concern for any biography is discovering the root causes of the qualities that would ultimately make someone famous. Not all subjects are equally susceptible to that kind of study, but Gage finds many elements within Hoover’s family background and early life that influenced the person J. Edgar Hoover would become. Family scandals before and during his childhood all reinforced the notion that masculine weakness led to the collapse of businesses and families, and so he came to regard male vigor as the necessary underpinning of social order. This foreshadows his work with the Justice Department where he was an arch-conservative, intent on preserving a traditional social order against all forms of what he considered to be moral degeneracy and disloyalty. The fact that his family history was filled with stories of failed men, along with his own lack of physical vigor or interest in the opposite sex, heightened those anxieties even further. If he himself was not going to be the ideal American man, he would work tirelessly to defend a social order that preserved such men at the top of the social hierarchy. As FBI director, he would disproportionately target the political left since it criticized traditional institutions, including government and the police. While the threat of left-wing activism was at times real—a wave of socialist and anarchist bombings and other acts of political violence took place after the First World War—Hoover’s hypervigilance tended to exaggerate or even invent a threat from the left.
Gage also connects Hoover to the changing climate of race relations during Hoover’s lifetime. Washington, DC, had been on the edge of progress during and immediately after the Civil War, abolishing slavery in the second year of the war, welcoming a massive influx of runaway slaves, and then hosting Black members of Congress during the Reconstruction era. As Hoover was growing up, a backlash against this era of racial progress was underway. After attending segregated schools, Hoover became enmeshed in the culture of the “Lost Cause” while attending college. Although Confederate leaders had been insisting on the rightness of their fight ever since the end of the Civil War, the early 20th century saw that memories of the conflict were beginning to fade and a greater emphasis on national unity was emerging, especially after soldiers and sailors from both the North and the South came together to achieve a decisive victory over Spain in 1898. The price of this reconciliation was that the North would turn a blind eye to the increasing persecution of Black people under the system of segregation commonly known as Jim Crow, along with the rampant lynching of Black men by white mobs. These racist attitudes surely influenced Hoover’s prosecution of Marcus Garvey, a champion of Black self-determination and pride (Malcolm X’s father was one of his followers).
Hoover’s conservative attitudes on gender and race did not sit easily alongside his role as a public servant. The professionalization of the civil service was a project of the Progressive movement, rooted in the belief that a restructuring of government institutions to make them more efficient would bring about tremendous social change. The goal was in many respects the creation of a more equal society. The role of women in the workforce vastly increased during World War I, and the Nineteenth Amendment secured their right to vote shortly thereafter. This posed a direct challenge to the traditional notion that women were too weak and emotional to participate in political life and thus required the guiding hand of firm and rational men. The Progressive movement also prioritized the rights of workers, whom Hoover viewed as a hotbed of radical activity. However, although the expansion of federal power should have entailed greater protections for Black citizens, Jim Crow persisted throughout the Progressive era, which saw little progress in the area of civil rights. Wilson himself embodied the contradictions of the time, as he was both a progressive committed to a more democratic society and a white supremacist who championed the Klan and segregated the federal workforce. Once Wilson was out of office and the Progressive era over, Hoover would take its contradictions into the Bureau of Investigation, where they would continue to shape the law-enforcement policy of the ensuing half century.
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