J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Equally romanticized was Reynolds’s version of the Hoover nose. However, considering he knew Hoover during his “Stork Club era,” when the FBI director palled around with such famous newspaper men as “Quint” and Walter Winchell and such sports luminaries as Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the errors are understandable.

  Practical jokers all, they probably wouldn’t have let Hoover forget had he told them the truth: that he got the nickname as a delivery boy and that his mashed nose was the result of a childhood boil.

  One interest overshadowed all his others at Central High: the school cadet corps. Working hard, applying the same intense concentration he gave to debating, he quickly moved up through the ranks. By the start of his senior year, he had passed the ROTC officers’ exam, been promoted to captain, and been given command of Company B. Since Pennsylvania Avenue intersected Seward Square, his parents were able to watch from their upper windows as their son, on March 4, 1913, led his unit in Woodrow Wilson’s first inaugural parade. The school paper, perhaps a less than unbiased critic, rated their performance second only to that of the West Pointers.

  The paper also reported Hoover’s promotion to command of Company A, and the changes he immediately made. Officers’ meetings, once infrequently held, were now weekly, and mandatory, while stress was placed on three essentials: attendance, a fighting spirit, and excellence in drill and dress.

  He’d pattern the FBI on Company A down to even its division into squads.

  “The saddest moment of the year,” Captain Hoover told his troops in his farewell address shortly before graduation, “was when I realized that I must part with a group of fellows who had become a part of my life.”6

  Yet none of his friendships survived graduation, for Hoover wasn’t close to any of his men. According to his niece Margaret, J.E. “had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people.”7 This attitude also extended to the opposite sex.

  Years later, former classmates, asked if Hoover had dated during high school, answered that they were sure he had, although none could remember his being interested in any particular girl. As one put it, “He was in love with Company A.”

  Still later, special agents, questioned as to why the director had never married, responded, “He is married, to the FBI.” It was a “pat” but—even more important—“safe” answer.8

  By the time his senior yearbook appeared, Hoover had already chosen his career. It was neither the ministry nor the military. Central High School’s 1913 Annual, which described him as “a gentleman of dauntless courage and stainless honor,” noted, “Speed intends to study the law at college, and will undoubtedly make as good in that as he has at Central.”9

  Just when and why he made the decision is unclear. Perhaps, as he later suggested to the Reverend Elson, it was the result of an agonizing inner conflict, with religion coming in a close second. Or it may be that once having decided to follow the family tradition, he observed that few in the lower levels of government had a law degree, while most of those in the upper levels had.

  Graduating near the top of his class and elected its valedictorian, Hoover was offered a scholarship to the University of Virginia. He turned it down, instead remaining at home under the watchful eye of his mother and enrolling in night school at George Washington University. He would always remain conscious that he hadn’t attended one of the more prestigious law schools, perhaps explaining both his lifelong antipathy toward Harvard and its graduates and, in later years, his almost insatiable hunger for honorary degrees.

  At that time George Washington offered special accelerated programs of late-afternoon and evening classes for government employees. To qualify, he found a job only four blocks from home, in the world’s largest filing cabinet, the Library of Congress.

  Although hired as a messenger, at $360 a year, he soon advanced to cataloger, then clerk. By the time he left, three years later, his salary had risen to $840. His ambitious drive, coupled with his willingness to take on any job, whether large or small, did not go unnoticed. Later a former coworker remarked, “I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us.”10

  Working at the Library of Congress, he mastered the Dewey decimal system, which, with its classifications and numbered subdivisions, became the model for the FBI’s Central Files and General Indices.

  While research requests rarely brought him into actual contact with senators or representatives, he did learn what interested them, and, equally important, he discovered the key role played by their clerks and aides, who usually wrote their speeches, prepared their hearings, handled their campaigns, and, in more than a few cases, did everything except cast their votes.

  What little social life Hoover’s busy schedule permitted was mostly restricted to the activities of his fraternity, Kappa Alpha, and even it was carefully monitored. Annie Hoover became the fraternity’s unofficial housemother.

  While he seemed to enjoy masculine camaraderie, and loved playing practical jokes, one member later recalled that Hoover “took a dim view of such antics as crap games, poker and drinking bouts.”11

  His one, and only, close friend, Frank Baughman, enjoyed them all, and women as well. Good-natured, extroverted, a “spiffy” dresser who loved a night on the town, and occasionally even lured Edgar along, Baughman also won the approval of “Mother Hoover” and was a frequent visitor to the house on Seward Square. When Baughman enlisted and was shipped overseas in 1917, Hoover and his mother went to Union Station to see him off.

  Hoover himself did not go overseas. He didn’t even enlist, although, with his ROTC background, he would have qualified for a commission. Instead, on July 26, 1917 (a date every future FBI agent would have to memorize), he accepted a $990-a-year clerkship in the U.S. Department of Justice. Unlike his position at the Library of Congress, his new job was draft exempt.

  This would, in future years, cause problems for adulatory biographers. According to one, “Though Hoover had wanted to enlist when war broke out, he was declared ‘essential’ by the Attorney General and did not serve.”12 The problem with this explanation was one of dates. Although the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, John Edgar Hoover did not join the Department of Justice until three months later, more than adequate time to enlist before he became essential.

  It does not follow that Hoover was a “draft dodger” or “slacker,” the term most commonly used at the time. More pertinent are several other dates and facts. Hoover received his bachelor of laws degree in 1916, his master’s in 1917, at which time he passed the District of Columbia bar. The Library of Congress job was never anything more than temporary employment until he finished law school. With that now behind him, he was ready to pursue his career. For an ambitious young attorney the job at Justice provided an excellent start.

  Probably even more significant were two other dates. In 1913, while Hoover was still a senior at Central High, his father was placed in a sanatorium near Laurel, Maryland, for what was then termed a nervous breakdown. Although released after several months, his condition—which was characterized by alternating moods of irritability and inconsolable sadness—worsened, and on April 5, 1917, the day before war was declared, he was forced to resign his $2,000-a-year job with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Although he had been in government service for forty-two years, he was not entitled to a pension.

  John Edgar Hoover could not afford to enlist. Since their sister Lillian was herself ill and in straitened circumstances, he and his brother, Dickerson, Jr., were their parents’ sole support.

  Mental illness was a taboo subject in polite society of the time, the term “acute depression” not even listed in medical dictionaries. The shame he apparently felt because of the nature of his father’s sickness made it easier for Hoover to tell future biographers that his work was essential to the war effort.

  Nor is there any question that he believed he was serving his country in an essential role—even though, in years to come, he would go to extreme lengths to mini
mize the importance of the part he played.

  In July 1917, the month Hoover reported for work, the chief topic of conversation in the hallways and offices of the Department of Justice was Assistant U.S. Attorney Harold A. Conant’s successful prosecution of the notorious anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, on charges of conspiring to induce young men not to register for the draft.

  Conant was the man of the hour. The compliments, the praise, and, above all, the newspaper headlines must have had their effect on the impressionable young attorney, for Hoover made a point of studying the case. Of its kind, it was a classic. Unable to prove that either Goldman or Berkman had actually advised youths not to register, Conant played on the strong nationalistic fervor of the time, used out-of-context quotations from their writings and speeches to establish that they advocated violence, smeared them with the taint of German money, and, in his final argument, tossed in the entirely bogus claim that Emma Goldman had been involved in the 1901 assassination of President McKinley.

  Hoover learned his lessons well. Two years later, in 1919, when the aging anarchists emerged from prison, Hoover would be waiting, with new warrants for their arrests. In their subsequent “trial,” Hoover involved himself in every aspect of their prosecution. Using Conant’s tactics, plus some of his own, he even bettered his model: garnering far bigger headlines, he succeeded in having Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and 247 others, deported from the United States.

  Hoover’s rise was rapid. That Justice was understaffed, many of its bright young men having enlisted, was only part of the reason. Far more important was Hoover’s ability. “From the day he entered the Department, certain things marked Hoover apart from scores of other young law clerks,” Jack Alexander wrote in a 1937 New Yorker profile which drew heavily on interviews with people who recalled Hoover’s early years at Justice. “He dressed better than most, and a bit on the dandyish side. He had an exceptional capacity for detail work, and he handled small chores with enthusiasm and thoroughness. He constantly sought new responsibilities to shoulder and welcomed chances to work overtime. When he was in conference with an official of his department, his manner was that of a young man who confidently expected to rise. His superiors were duly impressed.”13

  So impressed that less than three months after his arrival, in 1917, he was promoted. And then, three months later, promoted again. Because of the mammoth number of new cases brought by the war, Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory appointed John Lord O’Brian, a progressive Republican from Buffalo, New York, as special assistant to the attorney general for war work. It didn’t take O’Brian long to notice Hoover, for he was ever present. He alone seemed to know where things were, how to get something done quickly and well. “I discovered he worked Sundays and nights,” O’Brian later recalled. “I promoted him several times, simply on merits.”14 Picked by O’Brian as one of his assistants, Hoover was placed in charge of a unit in the Enemy Alien Registration Section.

  At age twenty-two John Edgar Hoover had found his niche in life. He had become a hunter of men.

  * * *

  *One of Hoover’s early ghostwriters, Courtney Ryley Cooper—who wrote the FBI director’s first book, Persons in Hiding—adroitly handled both Hoover’s height and weight problems by describing him as “a well-built man, tall, but sufficiently well-proportioned to make his height less apparent.”5

  5

  The Missing Years

  With the advent of war anything German became anathema. Teaching of the language was banned in most schools; Beethoven and Bach disappeared from symphony programs; sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage. The fact that most brewers were of German nationality was used by the Anti-Saloon League and its intemperate allies to help push the Eighteenth Amendment through a few more state legislatures, enough to make Prohibition inevitable. The suppression of the International Workers of the World (IWW) was given new impetus with the charge (belatedly disproven) that the union had “enemy funding.” With the passage, in quick succession, of the Espionage Act (1917), the Sedition Act (1918), and the Alien Deportation Act (1918), pacifism became disloyalty, complaints about wages or working conditions were called “seditious utterances,” and neighborhood quarrels or barroom brawls were elevated to the level of treason.

  Rumors and suspicions contributed to the “contagious madness.” According to Hoover’s boss, John Lord O’Brian, “There was no community in the country so small that it did not produce a complaint because of failure to intern or execute at least one alleged German spy.”1

  In addition to state and local police, at least half a dozen federal agencies were in the spy-chasing business, including the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI),* Treasury’s Secret Service, and the Military Intelligence Division (MID). “There was at all times an enormous overlapping of investigative activities among the various agencies charged with winning the war,” the veteran BI agent F. X. O’Donnell would recall. “It was not an uncommon experience for an Agent of this Bureau to call upon an individual in the course of his investigation, to find out that six or seven other government agencies had been around to interview the party about the same matter.”2

  However, convinced the government was doing too little too late—and often acting on motivations that had nothing to do with patriotism—vigilante groups sprang up everywhere. The largest and most active was the American Protective League (APL), a business-supported volunteer organization which achieved quasi-official status as an adjunct to the Department of Justice. Its avowed goal to plant an APL operative in every bank, business, and industrial concern in the nation, the league saw its membership grow astronomically, from 100,000 just a few months after its founding in 1917 to a claimed quarter million in 1918. Aside from the chance to serve one’s country, and engage in some hometown heroics, there was also a financial lure. For a seventy-five-cent membership fee, each APL agent was given a police-type badge reading “American Protective League, Auxiliary to the U.S. Department of Justice.” For each enemy spy captured there was a reward; for each draft dodger, a fifty-dollar bounty.

  There was one big problem with all this, a wartime shortage, as it were: there weren’t enough German spies to go around. Nearly all of those considered “dangerous” had been apprehended and interned within hours after Wilson signed the declaration of war against Germany. These and subsequent detentions almost obliterated the German spy system in the United States.

  There were, however, enough “Wobblies” (International Workers of the World members) to keep both the Bureau of Investigation and the American Protective League busy for a time.

  On September 5, 1917, BI agents, assisted by APL members, conducted simultaneous raids on IWW headquarters in twenty-four cities, seizing the organization’s books, minutes, financial records, correspondence, and membership lists. In Chicago alone, one hundred Wobblies were subsequently brought to trial; ninety-eight were convicted under various wartime statutes; twenty of them, including the IWW leader William “Big Bill” Haywood, received $20,000 fines and twenty-year sentences. As intended, the raids and drawn-out trials destroyed the fledgling “one big union” movement. That their real purpose had more to do with profits than with patriotism was evident in a report one of the U.S. attorneys sent Attorney General Gregory: “I thought it a good idea to keep these IWW aliens so busy defending prosecutions for failure to register that they would not have time to plot against the industrial interests.”3

  A year after the IWW raids, the Bureau of Investigation and the American Protective League staged their biggest combined operation; in just two days, in just four cities, they arrested fifty thousand suspects. These were, however, neither Wobblies, radicals, nor aliens but ordinary American citizens.

  The May 1917 Selective Service Act required that all males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty register for the draft. Convinced that many young men had failed to sign up, and aware that a number of others had deserted once they were inducted, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker
and Attorney General Gregory gave BI Chief A. Bruce Bielaski permission to conduct a number of small experimental “roundups” in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Boston. Pleased with the results, Bielaski decided to try something more ambitious. On September 3, 1918, thirty-five BI agents, two thousand APL operatives, an equal number of military personnel, and several hundred policemen fanned out over New York City, Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Newark. At bayonet point, they confronted men on street corners and streetcars and yanked them from barber chairs, theaters, pool halls, hotel lobbies, and offices, demanding that each produce either a draft-registration card or a birth certificate proving him too young or too old for the draft. Those who didn’t happen to be carrying such documentation, the majority, were herded into hastily constructed “corrals” and held until their status was determined. Overly enthusiastic—the New York catch included a seventy-five-year-old cripple on crutches—the raiders arrested far more than had been provided for, and many were confined in standing-room-only quarters without food, water, or sanitary facilities for up to two days.

  Unlike the IWW raids, these roundups were denounced by both Congress and the press. Defending the role of the Bureau of Investigation, the New York division superintendent Charles De Woody stated that the dragnet would have been justified “if only two or three slackers” had been found.* Attorney General Gregory was denied such a simplistic answer. Asked for an explanation by President Wilson, Gregory stated that even though the Bureau had acted “contrary to law” and contrary to his “express instructions,” as attorney general he took “full and entire responsibility” for the affair. While defending the dragnet as the only feasible approach, he deplored the use of extralegal methods (among them, the absence of warrants and probable cause) but added that he was sure the agents acted as they did out of an “excess of zeal for the public good.”4