January 4, 2024: 2024 Anniversaries: J. Edgar Hoover in 1924

[As I’vedone for each of thelast few years, this week I’ll start 2024 by AmericanStudying a fewanniversaries for the new year. Leading up to a special post on the 200thanniversary of a frustratingly familiar election.]

On what J.Edgar Hoover brought to his new role asDirector of the Bureau of Investigation, and two early examples of hisleadership style.

JohnEdgar Hoover (1895-1972) became a clerk with the Justice Department’s new WarEmergency Division in 1917, when he was just 22 years old, and within a fewmonths had taken on a leadership role with another new organization, the Alien Enemy Bureau.In that role, authorized by President Woodrow Wilson and the 1917Espionage Act, Hoover had the power to arrest and jail foreign nationalswithout trial. When the war ended those extreme powers most definitely did not,and two years later Hoover was able to expand them as head of the Bureau of Investigation’snew GeneralIntelligence Division, known as the Radical Division as it focused onrooting out supposed domestic radicals through actions like the PalmerRaids. All of that constituted Hoover’s resume was he was appointed theBureau of Investigation’s fifth Director in May 1924.

As hequickly demonstrated in that new role, Hoover’s extreme attitudes weren’tlimited to those he perceived to be direct threats (whether foreign ordomestic) to the United States. In 1924 the Bureau of Investigation had threefemale special agents; upon taking over the Director’s role Hooverfired two of them and transferred the third against her wishes from the Washingtonfield office to Philadelphia, after which she resigned. Hoover argued thatwomen’s “unpredictable nature” made them unfit for the role, even though heacknowledged that they “probably could learn to fire a gun.” He also believedthat they were far more suited for the role of secretary, since “a man’s secretarymakes or breaks him”—and his own executivesecretary, Helen Gandy, was indeed with him for his whole 50-year run asdirector. Hoover’s personal issueswith sex and gender have been well documented, but he was pretty awful withthem on a professional level as well.

Much ofHoover’s leadership of the FBI (as it came to be known) throughout his tenureas Director was very much in that discriminatory and exclusionary vein. But obviouslyhe did other things too across those five decades, and one of his more positiveinfluences was in connecting the agency to other layers of the federalgovernment, especially more symbolic ones. Hoover had an opportunity toshowcase that side of the Bureau in 1929, when members of the JapaneseNaval Delegation visited Washington on their way to take part in the 1930London Naval Treaty. Hoover volunteered the Bureau to serve as thedelegates’ protection detail, and the international recognition was animportant step in the FBI’s development from a facet of the Justice Departmentto its own, significant part of the U.S. federal government. The reality thatthat part has been pretty consistently awful is vital to acknowledge, but notthe only part of the Bureau’s story, nor of Hoover’s.

Lastanniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?