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

by Beverly Gage

He was taught instead that he was part of a special population: those Americans who made the government run but who stood outside of electoral politics, freed from its turmoil and temptations.

To the degree that Annie sought control over her household and children, it may have been because the men in her life proved unreliable—a matter of necessity as much as desire.

Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, one of the movement’s leaders, recommended that Christ himself be buffed up as a way of increasing Protestantism’s appeal. In a public opinion survey, Hall discovered that most viewers turned to words like “sick, unwashed, sissy, ugly, feeble” when presented with a standard painting of Christ on the cross. Hall advocated a Jesus with muscles and bulk, fighting back against his persecutors rather than succumbing meekly to crucifixion.

Whether Hoover understood the distinction between affection and admiration is hard to say.

Founded in 1865 to preserve the cause of the white South, Kappa Alpha became a model for the FBI’s institutional culture.

Kappa Alpha actively promoted the Lost Cause myth, in which a noble South had been defeated by Yankee interlopers and Black agitators who misunderstood its way of life.

He got his job there in the usual Washington fashion, through a combination of merit and personal pull.

World War I marked a turning point in the history of civil liberties, the moment that the federal government began to watch its citizens and residents on a mass scale, and to keep files on their political activities.

What stood out to many federal employees was not how powerful the government was but how weak it seemed, and how little anyone appeared to know what they were doing.

During his war address in April, Wilson had delivered a warning to foreign-born residents who had neglected to become American citizens, vowing to use the “firm hand of stern repression” in all cases of “disloyalty.” Millions of Americans had responded to his call by purging their communities of all things German: no more Beethoven or Wagner, no more German-language instruction, no more “sauerkraut” or “hamburgers” (instead, Americans ate “liberty cabbage” and “liberty sandwiches”).

Neither one described him as especially brilliant or creative. Rather, they emphasized his capacity and willingness to complete high volumes of tedious work.

In that sense, Prohibition was actually a gift to Hoover, a chance to prove that his agents were different from the dissolute, cynical, and easily bribed local police.

As he built his new Bureau, Hoover sought to enforce the vision of white Christian masculinity imparted to him through the institutions of his youth.

The Purvis letters show that Hoover actively sought out the affections of other Bureau men, and used his position as director to push the boundaries of his relationships.

If Hoover had one great personal failing, it was perhaps not his inability to love, but his inability to establish relationships outside of formal and controlling hierarchies.

Their bullets struck a local federal work-camp employee, killing him instantly. They also injured two other innocent men. It was the first time in Bureau history that agents had killed civilians. Far from being the avenging warriors of the federal government, they showed themselves to be inept, poorly trained, and at least as dangerous as the gangsters inside the lodge.

In the wake of the Dillinger case, Hoover lost one of his most cherished friendships, coming to view Purvis as a disloyal grandstander rather than an affectionate confidant. He also lost part of what he had built as a young man, leaving behind the fraternal atmosphere of the early Bureau years in favor of the more serious, violent, and ambitious mien of the New Deal state.

Working for the Bureau now meant being a crack shot as well as a scientist and gentleman.

His strengths lay not in any great instinct for media manipulation or press management, but in the areas that had always served him well: the ability to learn quickly, to adapt to new situations, and to deliver what he believed his bosses wanted.

At that point Hoover undertook a campaign of harassment so petty and vindictive that it can be explained only in personal terms.

And yet what is most striking about their budding relationship is not its furtive quality but its openness, vitality, and broad social acceptance. Far from hiding their affection, Hoover and Tolson moved freely together during the 1930s. When Edgar received an invitation, so did Clyde.

The most that can be said is that the stories fit with Hoover’s pattern of using his status as FBI director to develop intimate relationships with his subordinates.

Lawes thought Hoover’s approach revealed a fundamental lack of empathy—not only toward those convicted of crimes but also toward men and women struggling to help them change.

what Rev. MacLeod had taught him as a boy: that crime was above all a matter of sin and personal responsibility.

Hoover tended to underplay such social factors, describing crime as an individual problem to be solved through self-control, discipline, and resistance to temptation.[11]

Prompt response to citizen inquiries had long been a Hoover policy, but now such letters entailed a brush with celebrity, the thrilling idea that a man as busy and famous as J. Edgar Hoover still cared about the little people of America.

All made roughly the same point, championing Hoover as a uniquely effective public servant in a Washington establishment riddled with corruption and inefficiency.

Hoover complained that his brother and sister abandoned him during these years, too wrapped up in their own families to step forward and help ease their mother’s way. And he resented their absence, the final indignity in a lifetime of being cast as a mama’s boy. Years later, he would point out bitterly that Annie had failed to change her will, distributing her possessions among all three children despite the fact that he alone took charge of caring for her.

Like mental illness, cancer was often kept secret in the 1930s, a source of shame, confusion, and regret. Her death came and went without public discussion, another chapter of Hoover’s family life consigned to shadows and silence.

Upon returning east, Hoover spent the weekend not in Washington but in New York, where Winchell spotted him at Yankee Stadium surrounded by “a trio of G-lamour Men,” the closest thing Hoover now had to a family.[8]

The problem was not that he was uninterested in women, his words implied, but that he cared about them too deeply.

In that sense, Tolson and Hoover already had the affectionate, supportive marriage they were supposed to want.

It was in the months after Annie’s death that his dogs began to take on this increased importance—no longer merely pets, but the primary members of his near-suburban family.

After the move, they developed a new routine, with Crawford arriving in the morning to pick up Hoover, then stopping along the way to collect Tolson. Crawford usually dropped them off a bit east of the Justice Department, around the White House. Hoover and Tolson liked to walk the last six or seven blocks together, a transition from one part of their shared life to another.

Once again, he warned, the country faced a regime of “terror by index cards.” Far from calming the nation’s fears, Hoover was promoting “the very kind of hysteria that leads a country into war” and into another nightmare of political repression.

As in 1939, he counseled Americans to avoid vigilante action, but there was no mistaking the overall message: the Trojan horse was real, it had already passed through America’s gates, and it was up to the FBI, above all other agencies, to stop it.

But whatever possibility there had been for a broader national discussion of free speech and civil liberties, of Hoover’s failings and the desirable limits on federal power, disappeared with the invasion of France.

Under the logic of war, however, the distinction between political disagreement and “disloyalty” or “subversion” was less clear than ever.

These two efforts—the establishment of a British intelligence service in the United States and an American intelligence service in Latin America—proved to be intimately linked, a process of negotiation, exchange, deception, and mutual learning on the fly.

The British had been everywhere for what seemed like forever, keepers of an empire that had once spanned half the globe.

Still, the British found Hoover hopelessly ill suited for international intrigue, a man whose literal mind and by-the-book policies jarred with the quick feints and dark alliances of global spy craft.

Some of the confusion stemmed from the FBI’s nebulous criteria for inclusion on the detention index. Despite its appearance of clinical accuracy, Hoover’s system could be highly subjective, a matter of assessing for loyalty and potential danger in the absence of any overt act.

“Americans, unlike other nationals, are not a race. Americanism is an idea.”

More than 70 percent of the detainees were American citizens, born and raised in the country that now accused them of disloyalty.

The report reminded federal officials of what Hoover had said from the start: that the entire mass internment endeavor was doomed to fail.

He also believed that the best counter-sabotage strategy would be to convince Hitler—like the American public—that the FBI had unimaginable and unassailable powers of detection.

All agreed that Hoover refused to speak with Dasch, turning his back on the man who had helped to make the FBI’s greatest wartime case.

After more than two decades in government, Hoover faced a world in which remaining unmarried or socializing primarily with other men—both distinctive features of his public persona—could be grounds for official scrutiny.

By Rooseveltian standards, Truman was a political nobody: “the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men” to take the helm of a great nation in the midst of a cataclysmic war, in the words of one biographer.

While the rest of Washington mourned, he began to strategize about how to extend the FBI’s reach throughout the world.