G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

by Beverly Gage

The fact that these two men have since exchanged places in our preferred national narrative should not obscure the less palatable historical realities.

Though Hoover had grown up in a segregating city, it was through his fraternity that he first formalized his racial outlook, adopting a Southern ideology that linked segregation with order and virtue and the “gentleman’s” way of life.

Hoover’s studying and writing had a single aim: the deportation of foreign-born communists in another spectacular round of raids.

The mechanism he chose was laughably simple. Rather than process Hoover’s deportation cases en masse, in the spring of 1920 Post began to review each case individually, applying his own standard.

“As a rule the hearings show the aliens arrested to be working men of good character,” he declared. Post’s words reflected the human sympathy missing from Hoover’s late nights checking lists, reading manifestos, and assembling affidavits. “It is pitiful to consider the hardship to which they and their families have been subjected,” Post mourned, all “for nothing more dangerous than affiliating with friends of their own race, country and language.”[21]

For the first time, Hoover helped to mobilize federal agents to gather intelligence on his critics, a practice that would later become routine at his Bureau.

To Post, they were human beings—“simple-minded, hard-working men, who have joined an organization that they thought was legitimate, and did not know it was illegitimate until they got arrested in the raids.” Far from being revolutionary communists, Post alleged, most were simply befuddled immigrants who showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Prohibition had taken effect nationwide in early 1920, a grand experiment in enforcing virtue through law.

On a doctor’s advice, he took up smoking cigarettes, hoping to relax the growing tightness in his gut and restore proper digestion.

As one scholar has noted, successful bureaucrats need at least three attributes to achieve true independence: a clear vision, a loyal popular constituency, and a reputation for attaining genuine results. Hoover had begun to create all three during his early years as director. In the early 1930s, he accelerated the process.[1]

That afternoon, as the nation’s headlines demanded answers about the massacre at Kansas City, he was not a visionary but a frightened and unsettled man, faced with a violent situation that he was not at all sure his gentleman agents could handle.

The problem in Wisconsin, the cowboy humorist Will Rogers pointed out, was not that Hoover’s men lacked sufficient weaponry; it was that they shot the wrong people. “Well, they had John Dillinger surrounded and was all ready to shoot him when he come out,” Rogers quipped in a widely quoted column. “But another bunch of folks came out ahead, so they just shot them instead.”[11]

Beginning in March 1933, Roosevelt invited the press back into the White House, holding regular conferences in which he identified reporters by name and encouraged them to ask questions. In situations where the press could not be cajoled and flattered into reflecting his message, Roosevelt took his case straight to the people. His first “fireside chat,” delivered by radio on March 12, 1933, asked Americans to “unite in banishing fear” while Washington reorganized the banking system.

Others saw something dangerous in his outlook, a tendency to reduce the complexities of human existence to a few inflammatory phrases.

The final language of the bill ensured that the FBI would not be forced to share information with the CIA unless “essential to national security.”

He attacked the Birchers (“I have no respect for the head of the society”), gun owners (“There are licenses for automobiles and dogs; why not guns?”), even Congress itself (“Naturally I get more and more irritated when I see Congress passing along to us matters that should be handled by the states”).

Carmichael, Brown, and King found receptive audiences not because of communist manipulation, but because they described some of the real despair, racism, and struggle in American society and politics.[23]

the final tally, he barely edged out Humphrey in the popular vote, with 31.8 million to Humphrey’s 31.3 million, and an alarming 9.9 million for Wallace.