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

Even as Hoover’s personal and social life became more indulgent, he also used his fame to double down on a public message of strict professionalism and moralism. Surrounded by New Deal liberals, he became a hero to many for his desire to use government power to enforce traditional morality. He attacked the idea of parole as being a gift to criminals, giving them an opportunity to commit more offenses and blaming it for the deaths of his own agents. He rallied populist, tough-on-crime sensibilities against soft-hearted bureaucrats removed from the concerns of ordinary people. As his fame grew, his language concerning criminals, and even defense attorneys, became increasingly harsh and dehumanizing. His public-facing rhetoric on crime coincided with his efforts to build a national academy for the FBI, which he hoped would influence both local and international police departments. Hoover spoke extensively to various civic groups on the horrors of crime and the need for strong families and churches to keep the youth in line. When Hoover encountered a minor obstacle from a senator who objected to a budget increase, he had enough Senate support to overcome the objection. Shortly thereafter he made his first personal arrest, albeit a staged one, of one of the last prominent gangsters who had so far eluded capture. The result was an increasingly complex public profile for Hoover.

Hoover enjoyed a strong relationship with FDR, who in 1936 charged the onetime head of the Radical Division to tackle fascism and communism at home. The two ideologies were at war in Spain, and with the Depression still raging, FDR worried that extremism could take root in the United States. Hoover devised a program of political surveillance, without congressional approval or even knowledge, in which he narrowed the definition of “fascist” to explicit Nazi sympathizers such as the German American Bund. While the FBI monitored and reported on their activities, Hoover did little to disrupt them. He was much more concerned with communism, which at that time was at the height of its popularity due to its leading role in containing fascism. Hoover closely monitored labor organizations and other so-called front groups who might either lean communist or be co-opted by them. At that time some of his own employees tried to form their own union, protesting long hours and punitive rules of conduct, but the leadership of the Association of Federal Government Employees sided with Hoover, as they were reluctant to set a precedent that encouraged federal employees to strike. When Hoover was informed of a German spy ring, only to have most of its members escape capture, he turned failure into success by asking FDR for greater resources for intelligence gathering, and receiving them.

Hoover’s mother, Annie, died of cancer in February of 1938. This strengthened his bond with Tolson, who showed kindness to Annie in her decline and joined Hoover on vacations after her death. Her death also removed the excuse that Hoover had put forth for his bachelorhood, and Walter Winchell subsequently spread rumors linking Hoover with various Broadway and Hollywood figures. Hoover finally left his childhood home and bought a house in Forest Hills, decorating it with nude statues (mostly male) and Western-themed tchotchkes. In the months that followed, Hoover and Tolson traveled nationwide investigating gruesome kidnapping-murder cases, until Hoover succumbed to exhaustion and illness.

Hoover was on vacation in California when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. The FBI faced a dilemma. It had prepared for such an eventuality and had developed an intelligence apparatus designed to monitor and root out domestic threats, but it was also reluctant to replay the harsh and clumsy repressions of the First World War. When the bureau created a list of potential subversives and arrested members of a pro-Nazi group, the action drew immediate criticism from civil liberties groups and from within the government. Surprisingly, Hoover offered his resignation to the attorney general to avoid a scandal, but he was allowed to keep his job provided that the FBI submit to Justice Department monitoring.

The sudden collapse of France before the Nazi onslaught in the spring of 1940 left Americans stunned and dismayed. While the United States maintained formal neutrality, FDR expanded the FBI’s powers of surveillance, including outside the United States. As concerns over the constitutionality of Hoover’s actions receded into the background, he enjoyed a massive expansion of his budget. Intelligence gathering became the FBI’s top priority, while a new influx of agents stretched the bureau’s facilities to the limit. Hoover made full use of his new powers by investigating both Nazi sympathizers and critics of the Roosevelt administration such as Charles Lindbergh. Also, since Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies at the time, there was little objection to Hoover’s monitoring of suspected communists. However, the bureau was largely untrained in intelligence work, and the recent celebrity of the G-men made them ill-suited for clandestine operations. Hoover accepted an offer of help from the British government, essentially ceding domestic intelligence to a foreign power while the United States was still neutral. The FBI learned a great deal from British assistance, although the British thought little of Hoover’s potential as a spymaster, and initial attempts to deploy FBI spies in Latin America bore little fruit. Ultimately, Hoover lost the role of chief wartime intelligence officer to “Wild Bill” Donovan, who founded the wartime organization that later became the Central Intelligence Agency. Toward the end of 1941, Hoover was recording more success in netting Nazi agents, but the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced him to recalibrate his priorities once again.

Formal US entry into the war in December 1941 vastly accelerated FBI efforts to round up noncitizens suspected of disloyalty, with Japanese people being the top priority. Hoover had made promises that the FBI would be more attentive to constitutional rights than the Radical Division had been in the First World War, but there was little public outcry against the mass roundup of Italians, Germans, and Japanese, many of whom ended up in camps. Hoover was also charged with managing the press, particularly making sure that they did not publish anything overly critical of the administration and its failure to anticipate or prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor. The most drastic wartime measures, however, had nothing to do with Hoover and proceeded over his objections. The War Department, with congressional approval, began the widespread internment of both Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans. For all of his prejudices, Hoover regarded race-based internment as a step too far, although the FBI continued to round up and in many cases intern thousands of people.

In 1942, the FBI made a big break when it apprehended a group of Germans attempting to infiltrate the United States via submarine and sabotage military facilities. Although this compared favorably with earlier botched efforts to catch spies, Hoover was aided by a Coast Guard sighting of the submarine and by one of the saboteurs immediately betraying the plot after landing. In reporting the event to the press, Hoover concealed this detail, depicting the arrests as proof of FBI competence. The ensuing trial proceeded quickly, as Hoover hoped it would, and the conviction of the saboteurs and their receiving the death penalty (with the exception of the defector, who received a sentence of 30 years), proved to be a favorable story for him. That the trial proceeded as a military commission with very little public scrutiny did raise questions about its constitutionality, given that civilian courts were operating, but the Supreme Court’s approval of the commission allowed it to proceed with deliberations; the court issued its final ruling on the constitutionality of the commission only after the executions took place. The saboteur case established the FBI in its dual roles of law enforcement and intelligence, and sealed the partnership between FDR and Hoover.

With a broader remit and the support of the president, Hoover secured approval for the construction of a training facility in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI Academy remains to this day. The war also saw a massive upsurge in the employment of women, although not in the role of agents. The FBI expanded its operations in Latin America, as well as domestic surveillance programs that had little plausible connection to criminal investigations. Hoover was also involved in the investigation and ultimate dismissal of Sumner Welles, an undersecretary of state who had been propositioning men on a train.

Another issue raised by the war racism: how the United States could uphold itself as fighting for freedom while denying equality to its own Black citizens. With the United States at war with a white supremacist state, many Black activists called for racial justice. Roosevelt was broadly sympathetic and began to consider the desegregation of the federal workforce, which put Hoover’s overwhelmingly white FBI under scrutiny. For the next several years, Hoover would occasionally recruit “token” Black agents while doing little to change its dominant culture. At the same time, Hoover was willing to maintain open channels with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and publicly recognized that overt American racism was harmful to the war effort. Just as surprisingly, he reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), promising to curb abuses if they in turn moderated their criticism of the FBI. Toward the end of the war, Hoover had somehow managed to build a public profile as a New Deal liberal. Hoover did prove loyal to FDR to the end, taking and burying an Army intelligence file alleging the First Lady’s extramarital affair, but FDR’s death in April 1945, with the war drawing to a close, once again left Hoover in an uncertain position.