FBI director J. Edgar Hoover FBI subordinate  Clyde Tolson,, Hoover’s constant companion from the late 1920s to his death in 1972

J. Edgar Hoover(1895-1972)

J. Edgar Hoover and World War I

Born in Washington, D.C, in 1895, John Edgar Hoover joined the Justice Department in 1917 and became director of the scandal ridden Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1924.  Brought in as a reformer, Hoover was to lead the agency until his death in 1972, making him the longest serving head of a national police agency in history.  During his tenure as FBI director, Hoover ruled the bureau with an iron hand and helped to establish both it and himself in the American mind as  the embodiment of masculine virtue and the guardian of law, order, and national security.  Following Hoover ‘s death in 1972, accounts of his  crude violations of civil liberties and far-reaching personal corruption, along with prurient accounts of his hidden sex life,  which he had sought to suppress over decades, surfaced, making him an object of ridicule to large sections of the general public even as the FBI named their new national headquarters after him.

But, one might say, so what?  The FBI Building in Washington is still named after J. Edgar. Small numbers of victims of Purges and Blacklists that the Bureau either created or helped to bring about have received apologies and, in small numbers even some financial compensation. Hoover lives on in the Patriot Act,  warrantless searches and seizures  And there is little chance today of a national truth and reconciliation commission investigating the half century crimes of Hoover’s FBI as there is the Republican Party endorsing a National Health Service as a substitute to what they call “Obamacare.

Hoover’s skills were  first that of the modern bureaucrat,  either private or public.  He realized that controlling and or fixing the data, the files, would determine whether or not he would implement his political agendas. He also understood the use of mass media, first the press in the period that we are analyzing, later motion pictures, radio, and finally television.

Today he would be planting stories through the Internet on blogs  and websites while his agents were combing webistes for information(I am not saying that isn’t happening) and he would be vacationing in the Carribean with a stop at Guantanamo, the way he and Clyde Tolson, the FBI agent with whom he developed a close personal relationship with in the late 1920s that lasted the rest of his life, did for many years on taxpayers expense, showing up at FBI raids usually on illegal gambling facilities in the tourist areas for the photo ops.

  Hoover  did not create in any way the fear of radicalism of revolution, which earlier  produced the Salem Witch Trials, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the terroristic suppression of abolitionists before the idea of a “Red Scare” or the association of the color r ed with revolution existed

The “Red Scare”(not the first one should note) which really began during World War I and accelerated in the immediate postwar period was to be the foundation for J. Edgar Hoover’s long career. Graduating from George Washington Law School and passing the bar, Hoover, the son of a minor Interior Department Official who had retired do to severe depression,  got a position as  clerk in the Justice Department, which also gave him an exemption from the draft

Family influence, many believe, was essential in his gaining the position and draft  deferment, which enabled him to support his parents, particularly his mother, with whom he would live for the rest of her life.

Hoover  displayed his skills as an organization man/bureaucrat rose rapidly in the Justice Department .  Always adept at flattering those above him, he was chosen in 1918 by his supervisor , John Lord O’Brien, to direct a new Enemy Alien Registration section. In the department  Hoover’s  conservative religious outlook and emphasis on efficiency(or at least his ability to make those above him think that he was t he model of efficiency  made him a zealous prosecutor of aliens of all kinds  and an advocate inside the Justice Department  of the position that aliens from hostile foreign powers were not entitled to the constitutional protections of U.S. citizens.  From the outset, it is important to note that many of the “aliens” he went after were socialists and anarchists who in no way supported Germany and its allies, even though many were anti-war.

The end of the war saw the end of the Enemy Alien Registration section, but Hoover  saved himself bylobbied with O’Brien, who had returned to private practice, to intercede on his behalf with the new Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, to keep him  in the department   Now, if the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, he began to convince his superiors t hat we was an expert on the menace of Bolshevism and its domestic dangers, based his experience and achievements with the Alien Registration section 

As strikes swept the country, and the press generally denounced  trade unionists and immigrants as agents of a Bolshevik inspired “world revolution” in 1919,  Attorney General Palmer’s Washington home was bombed by an anarchist, who was killed in the attack.   Now Hoover had his great opportunity. Palmer responded by promoting Hoover, whom he supervisors saw as the Departments “Bolshevism expert”  to organize an attack on radicals and aliens. 

Hoover then devised a  scheme to launch national raids against radical organizations  and arrest and deport as many of the radicals as possible.  Under Palmer’s auspices, Hoover became director of a new section, the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department, to carry forward this campaign.  The GID  was to the  Hoover who would emerge from it  for the next half century  what Dr. Frankenstein’s Laboratory was to the Monster

Through the division, Hoover began to amass files on a huge number of people, many of them U.S. citizens., who were part of the Bolshevik menace  Hoover focused primarily on the Communist movement, then developing rapidly.  Hoover still hoped for mass deportations, a goal he had had in the Alien Registration Section during the war, which the rapidly developing Red Scare made possibel

 Having acquired files on over two hundred thousand people by the end of 1919, Hoover gained Palmer’s approval to launch a series of raids against radical groups.Hoover also began to plant stories of revolutionary plots in the press, through pliant reporters and editors, a policy that  he would continue for the rest of his life(for example, the FBI planted false stories over fifty years later in the press of Jane Fonda  partying with Black Panthers and making threats against Richard Nixon)

The raids, which occurred in thirty-three cities on January 2, 1920, were carried forward without arrest warrants, which were issued after the arrests.  Over ten thousand people were arrested, although nearly half were shortly released, primarily because they were not aliens.

Hoover sought to use the raids to mobilize public opinion for mass deportations and to associate socialist and Communist ideas with  Soviet directed conspiracies.  Hoover also sought gather information on anyone connected  to radical movements, to expand the files that he had opened in the General Intelligence Division and which, by the time Warren Harding would take office in 1921, would number 450,000.

Under Hoover’s influence, over 1,600 deportation warrants for those arrested in the raids were issued.  When Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, a progressive,  used his influence to veto over 1,000 of the warrants, Hoover opened a file on him.  Hoover  use ofthe press escalated as he   authored   and  disseminated  material which warned  daily of  coming armed Communist uprisings, with May 1, 1920,(May Day) being the day for apocalyptic revolution.  When May 1 passed uneventfully, in spite of a massive military and police buildup, in Washington(the White House did not fall as the Winter Palace had in 1917) the Red Scare began to decline.

Attacks on the Red Scare from prominent figures, including the former Republican presidential candidate Charles Evens Hughes, and Palmer’s disastrous attempt to gain the Democratic presidential nomination, effectively ended Hoover’s campaign for mass deportations, although Hoover himself was present for the publicity of course in New York  when over 500 Palmer Raid political prisoners, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were deported on the U.S.S. Buford, which the press dubbed the Soviet Ark.”

The new conservative Republican Harding  administration was to be a boon to J. Edgar Hoover even though his fate in that administration was initially uncertain.  O

 First the new Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, found that Hoover’s files contained materials on Harding’s enemies among the Democrats, which Hoover , the good bureaucrat for whom self-interest and national interest were one of the same, dutifully supplied.  Daugherty rewarded Hoover by appointing him Assistant Director of the Bureau of Investigation, under the leadership of William Burns, a former Secret Service official and director of a Private Detective Agency popular with businessmen (the main rival of the Pinkerton Agency)because of its anti-labor activities.

As the Harding administration was overwhelmed by scandals, some concerning the Bureau of Investigation, Calvin Coolidge , who became president with Harding’s death in 1923, appointed a leading Progressive Republican, Harlan Fiske Stone, Attorney General.  Although Stone had been a fierce opponent of the Palmer Raids, and would later distinguish himself as a progressive Supreme Court Justice, he listened to friends in the administration who suggested J. Edgar Hoover as a man of unimpeachable integrity.  Meeting with Stone on May 10, 1924, Hoover accepted the position of Acting Director, appealing to Stone’s progressive views with  promises  to take the bureau out of politics, make all appointments dependant on merit, and assure that the Bureau would be completely under the control of the Attorney General.  His role as “Acting Director” would last forty eight years and none of his promises would ever be fulfilled.

Norman Markowitz

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