J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover was a prominent American civil servant, best known as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a position he held from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972. Born in 1895 in Washington, D.C., Hoover was educated in public schools and later earned law degrees from George Washington University. He gained early recognition for his leadership abilities, which would later define his long and controversial career within the government. Hoover became a national figure during the Red Scare of 1919-1920, where he led anti-radical efforts that established him as an expert on communism.
Throughout his tenure, Hoover greatly influenced the FBI's operations, implementing professional standards and scientific methods in law enforcement and leading high-profile investigations against notorious criminals in the 1930s. However, his legacy is complex; he became known for controversial tactics, including surveillance and harassment of civil rights leaders and political dissenters, reflecting deep-seated fears of communism and social change. Hoover's leadership style and methods sparked significant debate about civil liberties and government power, culminating in a tarnished reputation following his death, as public opinion shifted dramatically due to revelations of FBI abuses. His career remains a significant chapter in American history, illustrating the tension between national security and individual rights.
Subject Terms
J. Edgar Hoover
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
- Born: January 1, 1895
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
- Died: May 2, 1972
- Place of death: Washington, D.C.
American bureaucrat
Head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, Hoover was one of the most controversial figures in American politics, the first and most durable leader of the anticommunist movement that ruled American public life for much of the century.
Areas of achievement Law, government and politics
Early Life
J. Edgar Hoover was born to a family of civil servants in Seward Square, Washington, D.C., a few blocks behind the Capitol. Educated in District of Columbia public schools, Hoover showed early signs of the drive and the leadership abilities that would make him one of the most powerful bureaucrats in American history. At Washington’s elite Central High, he was a leader of the student cadet corps and a champion debater; at the Old First Presbyterian Church, he was a teacher in the Sunday school. Photographs of him show a sword-slim figure of suppressed nervous energy, his expression one of intense determination. The values he absorbed from Seward Square, from Central High, and from the Old First Church were his guiding principles throughout his life: absolute assurance that his middle-class Protestant morality was the essential core of American values and a deep distrust of alien ideas and movements that called those certainties into question.
Life’s Work
After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law from George Washington University’s night school, Hoover joined the Justice Department as a clerk on July 26, 1917, four months after the beginning of World War I. Hoover spent the war working for John Lord O’Brian’s War Emergency Division in the Alien Enemies Bureau, administering the regulations that governed the hundreds of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian aliens interned or supervised by the department.
While Hoover was wrapping up the affairs of the expiring Alien Enemies Bureau after the November 8, 1918, armistice, the Bolshevik Revolution was breaking out of Russia and spreading across central Europe to Germany and Hungary; general strikes in Vancouver and Seattle seemed to be the opening shots in an American class war. A sense of crisis took hold of the country as the Comintern, organized in Moscow on March 4, 1919, predicted a worldwide proletarian revolution by the end of the year. Forever after, Hoover would see communism through a perspective colored by the crisis of 1919, when the world seemed on the brink of a communist revolution.
A series of bombings in the spring of 1919, including an explosion at the Washington home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, gave rise to irresistible demands for action against radicals. Palmer, a candidate for the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination, decided to respond with a Justice Department drive that would concentrate on aliens, since they could be deported en masse administratively without the protection of legal due process. Hoover’s experience dealing with aliens brought him to the attention of Palmer, who put the twenty-four-year-old attorney in charge of the antiradical campaign known as the Red Scare.
As leader of the 1919-1920 antiradical drive, Hoover became the government’s first expert on the communist movement. He established an “antiradical division” in the Justice Department and then, when the American Communist and Communist Labor parties were established in the late summer of 1919, prepared briefs arguing that their alien members were subject to deportation under the immigration laws. Hoover planned a raid of the headquarters of the anarchist Union of Russian Workers in November, 1919; on December 21, 1919, he put 249 radicals, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, two of the most noted radicals of the day, on a ship to the Soviet Union. Then, on January 2, 1920, Hoover led a nationwide roundup of alien communists, arresting more than four thousand. The Justice Department was hoping to use the arrests to spur passage of a peacetime sedition bill that would have outlawed expression of revolutionary opinions by citizens, but widespread abuses of the prisoners’ rights and the overbearing behavior of the Justice Department stirred up the opposition of liberals and civil libertarians, who brought the drive to a halt. Hoover, however, emerged with an enhanced reputation as an expert on radicalism and an organizational genius.
Hoover served as assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1921 to 1924, when he was placed in charge of the scandal-plagued bureau. Acting quickly to bring his agents, previously loosely supervised, under tight control, Hoover turned the bureau’s newly acquired (1924) fingerprint collection into a national law enforcement resource and, in the spirit of the progressivism of Herbert Hoover (no relation), made the bureau a force for professional standards and scientific methods.
During the 1930’s, Hoover and his staff became national heroes as the result of a series of sensational hunts for gangsters such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson. FBI agents, called “G-men,” were celebrated by Hollywood, radio, and the adventure magazines; their exploits convinced the public that the New Deal had the determination necessary to restore the national unity and morale that had been weakened by the Depression. Meanwhile, as part of his secret defense preparations, Roosevelt had Hoover rebuild and expand the domestic intelligence system that had been dismantled during the 1924 reorganization of the bureau.
With the coming of war, Hoover’s widely heralded successes against Nazi spies in the United States reassured the public that the “home front” was secure. Hoover was also notably successful in countering the Axis underground in South America.
After the war, as Cold War tensions heightened between the Soviet Union and the United States, Hoover interpreted the post-World War II international conflicts as a prelude to a war with the Soviet Union; this meant the bureau would have to be prepared to counter sabotage and subversion and to round up domestic communists. Hoover quickly lost confidence in Harry S. Truman’s resolve to deal effectively with the issue of communists in the government and broke with the administration in 1947, siding with such congressional Republicans as Richard M. Nixon of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy. As part of his assault on domestic communists, Hoover’s bureau pursued the investigation of Alger Hiss that discredited the domestic security policies of the Truman administration, and uncovered the alleged atomic spy conspiracy of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In 1949, Hoover’s bureau provided the evidence for the Smith Act convictions of the top leadership of the American Communist Party, effectively destroying American Communism.
During the late 1950’s, Hoover’s bureau shifted to a counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of covert harassment of the remnants of the American Communist Party. Under Lyndon B. Johnson, who indefinitely deferred Hoover’s mandatory retirement, which should have taken place in 1965, when he turned seventy, Hoover extended COINTELPRO to include harassment and disruption of the Ku Klux Klan at first, and then the black militant and antiwar movements, the Black Panthers, and the Students for a Democratic Society in particular. By this time, Hoover, with his pronouncements in favor of traditional Americanism and his denunciations of civil rights and antiwar protests as communist-inspired, had gained a sacrosanct position as the hero of the anticommunist Right; his public attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Ramsey Clark confirmed liberals and the Left in their conviction that Hoover was a dangerous and malevolent force on the American political scene.
During the Nixon administration, Hoover’s acute political instincts told him that the bureau’s illegal investigative techniques (including wiretapping and microphone surveillance) and its programs of political harassment (COINTELPRO) could no longer be concealed and would no longer be tolerated; he radically curtailed them and had to resist the strenuous efforts of the White House to enlist the FBI in the comprehensive drive against dissent called the Huston Plan (1970).
Hoover’s state funeral in 1972 was a final gathering of the standard-bearers of Cold War anticommunism. After his death, post-Watergate investigations of the bureau’s abuses of civil liberties, together with releases of FBI files made possible by the Freedom of Information Act, all but destroyed his reputation; within a few years, public opinion about Hoover had so shifted that the mention of his name was enough to conjure up the image of a government at war with the rights and liberties of its citizens.
Significance
The broad sweep of Hoover’s unusual career has been obscured, not to say eclipsed, by the revelations of FBI abuses of civil liberties, particularly his vendetta against King, who was recognized after his assassination as one of the true moral leaders of the nation. Hoover’s most tangible and lasting achievement was to mold the FBI into a progressive force that promoted professional standards and scientific techniques for American law enforcement. His real historic significance, however, is of the sort that afterward cannot be measured accurately: the day-to-day leadership he furnished over so many years as a spokesman for traditional values and a reassuring symbol of stability for millions of Americans who were frightened by change and international tensions.
That he did, on many occasions, misuse this trust is undeniable, and he eventually came to see any criticism of himself or his bureau as an attack on the nation’s security. Any assessment of Hoover’s achievement, therefore, must combine respect for his political judgment, bureaucratic skills, and leadership abilities with a condemnation of his willingness to take unto himself the roles of judge, jury, and executioner when he saw a danger to the country, instead of relying on the legal process and confining himself to open and constitutional methods. Even in his worst excesses, however, it is essential to see Hoover’s career not as an anomaly but as an expression of American opinion and values during a trying and crisis-filled half century.
Further Reading
Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Describes Hoover’s two-year battle against John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, and other notorious criminals during the 1930’s.
Demaris, Ovid. The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975. An indispensable collection of interviews with the people who knew Hoover best.
Garrow, David. From Solo to Memphis: The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. An exemplary investigation, based on FBI files, of the most disgraceful episode in Hoover’s career: his attempt to destroy the leader of the Civil Rights movement.
O’Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Based on FBI files, a study of Hoover’s relationship with congressional anti-Communists that surveys a broad spectrum of Hoover’s assaults on political dissent.
Powers, Richard Gid. G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. A study of Hoover’s public role as a symbol of patriotism and law enforcement, with particular attention to his reputation and the function of the FBI in American popular entertainment.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1986. A comprehensive study of Hoover’s career, based on interviews, FBI records, and official documents.
Radosh, Ronald, and Joyce Milton. The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. The definitive investigation of the case, which endorses the FBI’s conclusions regarding the spy ring.
Sullivan, William C. The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. A vitriolic portrait of Hoover by the man who headed the bureau’s domestic intelligence programs during the 1960’s. Factually unreliable but valuable for its insights.
Theoharis, Athan. Spying on Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. A brilliant investigation of Hoover’s surveillance and disruption of the Left, based on FBI files and records in presidential libraries.
Whitehead, Donald. The FBI Story. New York: Random House, 1956. An authorized history of the bureau, often an earnest defense of Hoover in his controversies. Nevertheless, a well-organized account of a complex subject, extremely accurate as far as facts are concerned.