HOOVER, J. EDGAR

John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895–May 2, 1972) was appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1924 and served until his death forty-eight years later. Founded in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation (the word Federal was added in 1935), the FBI blossomed under Hoover during the Great Depression and particularly during the New Deal years.

A lifelong resident of Washington, D.C., Hoover worked in the Library of Congress while studying law at George Washington University. He joined the Department of Justice in 1917, working in the Alien Enemies Bureau. Appointed chief of the General Intelligence Division in 1919, Hoover helped organize the notorious Palmer Raids that rounded up aliens suspected of radicalism. Five years later, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone appointed the 29-year-old Hoover director of the Bureau of Investigation. In the wake of Teapot Dome and other Warren G. Harding administration scandals, the new director had a mandate to terminate all domestic political surveillance and confine all investigations to violations of federal law.

Having quickly purged the FBI of corrupt agents, Hoover had little to do because there were few federal criminal statutes on the books. He filled the time, in direct defiance of Stone's order, by dabbling in surveillance. This was especially true after the Great Depression commenced. The FBI opened files on such things as Communist Party involvement in the Scottsboro Boys rape case and occasionally provided political intelligence to the Herbert Hoover White House. For the Depression's first four years, however, the director's bureaucracy remained a tiny and relatively insignificant part of the federal government.

Things began to change in 1933 with the Depression era's creeping nationalization of crime control. In effect, the FBI emerged as one of the New Deal's alphabet agencies with a mission to investigate a rapidly expanding list of federal crimes. This included spectacular combat against John Dillinger and other high-profile bank robbers. For example, the New Deal's Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) provided the wherewithal for the FBI to investigate any robbery of a bank insured by the FDIC. The Roosevelt administration also helped Hoover with a massive media campaign to portray G-men as heroic defenders of public life and limb, property and virtue. A public relations genius in his own right, Hoover tilted this campaign to construct what might best be described, with only a hint of exaggeration, as a cult of personality.

Pumped up into a formidable crime fighting force as the Great Depression wound down in the late 1930s, Hoover's FBI moved on to exploit a cautious Roosevelt administration mandate to revive political surveillance under the rubric of "subversive activities." If the White House was principally concerned with native fascism as the nation reluctantly prepared for the possibility of war with Germany and Japan, Hoover was principally concerned with domestic Communist activities. In one of the Depression era's greater ironies, the director defined subversive activities on the left broadly enough to encompass the very New Deal liberals who had rescued the FBI from oblivion. Another irony is that the director did so while successfully cultivating what several cabinet officials described as a close personal relationship with the president. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, for one, claimed that Roosevelt believed that Hoover was devoted to him personally.

In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, Hoover and his FBI went on to help shape the history of McCarthyism and the modern civil rights movement. The latter included not only extensive surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (e.g., wiretaps), but systematic harassment pursued with a startling ferocity. The pressures of the Depression had simply reinforced the things Hoover had learned as a young man, in the aftermath of World War I, on his old Alien Enemies and General Intelligence desks. The pressures of the 1960s would do the same. By the time of his death, Hoover had, in his own way in both cases, enforced the law and spied on law abiding citizens in seven different decades.

HOOVER, J. EDGAR

BIBLIOGRAPHY