In March 1913, Captain J. E. Hoover led his company down Pennsylvania Avenue in President Wilson’s inaugural parade. Sixteen years of Republican government were coming to an end, and America was entering a period of upheaval. While revolution and war overwhelmed Russia and Europe, labor unrest had become a major issue in the United States. Nearly half the working population was toiling excessive hours in appalling conditions, going home to filthy slums at night. The United States was about to experience a wave of strikes, and a million American socialists would demand the overthrow of capitalism.
Soon company guards would be gunning down workers in Ohio. Members of one union, the Industrial Workers of the World, would be lynched. Others would be jailed. Their right to protest at all was questioned by those who asserted that they, and they alone, were ‘100 per cent American.’
At Central High, meanwhile, things went on as usual. Eighteen-year-old Edgar and his peers immersed themselves in the rites and celebrations of graduation year. Edgar Hoover, Francis Gray and their fellow cadets, splendid in blue-and-white uniforms, made their way to the Cairo Hotel for the regimental ball.
‘We weren’t expert dancers,’ Gray recalled. ‘We all wore our sabers, and they got in the way.’ A dance in those days was a rigidly formal affair, and each young man came armed with a dance engagement book. There were spaces to fill out the names of female partners ‘engaged’ to dance the alternating waltzes and foxtrots, and spaces for the names of chaperones.
Edgar’s dance book, which he kept all his life, shows that his parents came along as chaperones. The spaces for female partners, however, remain blank. If Edgar’s record is to be believed – and he usually recorded everything meticulously – he did not dance with a single girl.
Francis Gray said Edgar ‘wasn’t a dater, didn’t go with girls.’ His relatives noticed it, too. ‘Edgar never had any girlfriends,’ said his niece Dorothy. ‘Never.’ Edgar’s male friends teased him, claiming he was in love only with the Cadet Corps. ‘He was,’ said Francis Gray, ‘just a fraternity man.’
In his yearbook picture, Edgar looks more fragile than his broad-shouldered friends, his mouth pinched and humorless. The caption beneath his name praises him as ‘a gentleman of dauntless courage and stainless honor.’ Edgar was class valedictorian.
‘There is nothing more pleasing,’ Edgar wrote in a final Cadet Corps report, ‘than to be associated with a company composed of officers and men who you feel are behind you heart and soul. The saddest moment of the year was when I realized that I must part with a group of fellows who had become part of my life.’
Edgar the debater signed off with thoughts on the virtues of competition. Debate, he reckoned, was like life – ‘nothing more or less than the matching of one man’s wits against another.’ And so, armed with a curiously fixed set of certainties for a youth of eighteen, Edgar set forth into the adult world.
As he did so, a family crisis was developing – a tragedy that must have been devastating to a young man coming of age. Edgar’s father began losing his mind.
Edgar never discussed his father at all, not even with his closest friends. Surviving relatives, the generation that grew up during World War I, have only a blurred memory of Dickerson Hoover. To them he was ‘Daddy,’ a kindly man with a small moustache who liked to take children to the basement to sample his homemade ginger ale. Often, though, Daddy was not home at all.
Dickerson, Sr., was away a lot because, sometime during the war, doctors sent him to an asylum at Laurel, some eighteen miles from Washington. Quite what was wrong with him was not discussed in front of the grandchildren. One of them, Margaret Fennell, remembered only that he ‘had a nervous breakdown.’
Dickerson was fifty-six when Edgar left school. He still worked, as he always had, as a printmaker at the government mapmakers. He earned a living wage, but never enough to dispel the notion that his wife, Annie, had married below her station. He had always played second fiddle to Annie at home. Now, in middle age, Dickerson began to be troubled by depression and irrational fears. Repeated trips to the asylum failed to help, and he went steadily downhill.
In the eight years that remained to him, Edgar’s father would become a pitiful figure. His death certificate, in 1921, would say he died of ‘melancholia,’ with ‘inanition’ as a contributory cause. Melancholia was the contemporary word for what doctors today call clinical depression. Inanition can be the outcome of extreme depression treated inadequately. The patient loses the will to live, stops eating and dies.
This drawn-out tragedy had a traumatic effect on life at Seward Square. Edgar’s elder brother and sister were long gone, in their thirties and married with children. Only Annie and young Edgar remained at home, and they reportedly had little patience with Dickerson, Sr.
‘My mother,’ said Edgar’s niece Dorothy, ‘used to say Uncle Edgar wasn’t very nice to his father when he was ill. He was ashamed of him. He couldn’t tolerate the fact that Granddaddy had mental illness. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect.’
Dorothy, a retired teacher with wide experience of life’s trials, said she thought perhaps ‘the whole Hoover clan were a little off in the head.’ Her memories suggest the Hoover family’s emotional life was seriously fractured. Dickerson, Jr., was distant, and his sister Lillian was ‘cold, very cold.’ The young Edgar, who used to come to Dorothy’s home to play croquet, at first seemed ‘quite fun to be around.’ Then he changed, becoming a remote figure ‘inclined to push us all away.’
‘I sometimes have thought,’ said Edgar’s niece Margaret, ‘that he really – I don’t know how to put it – had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people.’
Half a century later, FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan would voice the same opinion. Edgar, he thought, ‘didn’t have affection for one single solitary human being around him …’
‘I didn’t have any honor or love for him as an uncle,’ said Dorothy Davy. ‘Whatever he did for the country, he was no use as a relative.’ Other family members confirmed – often nervously, as though Edgar were still alive to rebuke them – that he bothered little with family ties. When his widowed sister was struck down by Parkinson’s disease, Edgar did little to help. When she died, his appearance at the funeral was so brief as to be insulting.
The only constant family connection for Edgar, far into the prime of his life, would be his mother, Annie. Once they were free of Edgar’s father, the burden they had both resented, they became inseparable. Edgar lived at home with his mother until he was a middle-aged man. Only when she died, in 1938, would he leave the house on Seward Square. And when he did find a home of his own, he would live there alone.
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‘If you work for a man, in heaven’s name work for him! If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him – speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents.’
Elbert Hubbard quotation, displayed on Edgar’s orders in FBI field offices
As Edgar grew to manhood, he closed the dossier on himself that he had kept since childhood. There are no more diaries, and few intimate letters, to help chart his six decades of adult life. In accordance with his wishes, his secretary destroyed his private correspondence – and almost certainly much else besides – after his death.
Enough evidence survives, however, to expose the hidden Edgar. The man who projected himself to the public as a stern moral figure, full of integrity, was a walking myth. It was so carefully crafted that he perhaps came to believe much of it himself, but it was a myth nonetheless.
What Edgar said of his past, especially of events long ago, must always be treated with caution. ‘He was a master con man,’ his aide William Sullivan was to say, ‘one of the greatest con men the country has ever produced, and that takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astuteness, a shrewdness.’
In 1913, the year he turned eighteen, Edgar graduated from high school, and decided to study law.
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bsp; ‘I don’t really know why I chose law,’ Edgar would say for public consumption. ‘You come to a crossroads, and you’ve got to go one way or the other.’ The other road beckoning, he claimed, was the Church. In the months before he left school, he said, he was preoccupied with the idea of becoming a minister.
FBI propaganda solemnly repeated this story, portraying a youth who had struggled to choose between one path of good, the Church, and another, the Law. According to this version, Edgar the FBI Director remained a regular churchgoer, a boss who kept a well-thumbed Bible on his desk, who took his religion very seriously indeed.
Some of this was simply untrue, some of it the truth stretched beyond recognition. Relatives recalled no family talk at all about Edgar being ‘torn’ between religion and law. It was the elder brother, Dickerson, not Edgar, who faced such a dilemma.
Edgar did not fully exploit the ‘call of the Church’ gambit until after the death, in 1944, of the brother who might have contradicted him. In 1990, however, a member of Dickerson Jr.’s family emerged to set the record straight. ‘That thing that keeps coming up about Edgar wanting to be a minister,’ said Dickerson’s daughter-in-law Virginia Hoover, ‘it just isn’t true. In our family, we’ve always known that.’
Was Edgar at all religious? As a child, certainly, he was a zealous leader of Sunday school class. He went on teaching, quirkily dressed up in his high school cadet uniform, well into his teens.
According to the propaganda, this was the start of a lifetime of regular worship. A Bureau-approved article in 1960 would report that he ‘walks down the aisle of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church each Sunday morning at precisely 9 o’clock.’ It was not true. ‘Mr Hoover,’ the church’s former pastor Dr Edward Elson admitted in an interview, ‘was not regular in his attendance … was present at mainly seasonal affairs.’
Leo McClairen, a former FBI agent who acted as Edgar’s chauffeur whenever he traveled south, did not remember his boss having gone to church once – in twenty years of Christmas visits to Florida.
Edgar’s public piety was a sham – as was his version of his decision to go to law school. ‘We have no lawyers in our family,’ Edgar said, ‘and I don’t recall that I knew any. But suddenly I took the turn, and knew that’s what I wanted to be – an attorney.’
In fact, Edgar had a cousin, another John E. Hoover, who was a lawyer, a clerk to five Supreme Court justices and a longtime Justice Department attorney. The family also boasted another very successful lawyer: Annie Hoover’s cousin William Hitz was a senior Justice Department attorney. He was quite close to Edgar, according to yet another lawyer relative, Harold Burton, who was to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
George Washington University Law School, where Edgar enrolled in 1913, did not have the prestige of other local universities. It offered, however, a respectable conservative law program, a solid grounding in the nuts and bolts of the legal system. For Edgar, a key advantage was that the course consisted of evening classes, leaving time for wage-earning during the day.
The purse strings at home were tight now, with the two elder children burdened with family commitments. Soon, as their father’s health declined, they would be even tighter. Edgar was the man of the house at the age of eighteen, and he needed a job. Annie’s cousin William Hitz found him one – as a thirty-dollar-a-week junior messenger in the order department of the Library of Congress.
Every day for the next four years, Edgar would walk the few blocks from Seward Square to his day job at the Library. He studied at the law school from five until seven, then went home to study some more. He kept his twenty-six law notebooks, filled with neat script, all his life.
He became a member of Kappa Alpha, a southern fraternity with origins at William and Mary College in Virginia – a link he would maintain long after his student days were over. GWU graduates, and especially Kappa Alpha men, were to be among his closest associates at the FBI.
A photograph from those days shows Edgar at the center of a group of students, hands thrust deep in pockets, a flower in his buttonhole, a grave expression on his face. ‘He was slim, dark and intense,’ a classmate recalled. ‘He sat off by himself against the wall, and always had the answers. None of us got to know him very well.’
As manager of his fraternity house, Edgar proved to be a budding despot. He reportedly ‘took a dim and moral view of such chapter-house capers as crap games, poker and drinking bouts.’ He ‘located our contraband,’ recalled Dave Stephens, who had also been at Central with Edgar, ‘and destroyed it by sending it crashing to the concrete areaway.’ ‘Speed chastised us with his morality,’ recalled actor William Gaxton.
While the nickname Speed stuck, some students hit on a crueler one. ‘We men who received C’s,’ said GWU alumnus C. W. Collier, ‘called Hoover, who received A’s, “Fatty-pants.”’
Edgar had no time for the slew of writers and thinkers then changing social and political attitudes around the world. Not for him the ideas of Freud and George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx and John Reed, Pankhurst or Bertrand Russell. His favorite poets, he let it be known, were Edgar Guest and Vash Young and Robert Service, the he-man poet who told America that:
… only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the weak shall perish, and only
the fit survive.
Edgar received his Bachelor of Law degree, without honors, in the summer of 1916. America, meanwhile, was moving closer to entering the war in Europe. There were problems at home – anarchist bombs, strikes, workers’ demands for shorter working hours. Henry Ford was forced to agree to equal pay for women – $5 a day – and a woman was elected to Congress for the first time. President Wilson promised that all women would soon get the vote. Then, on April 6, 1917, after he had told Congress ‘the world must be made safe for democracy,’ the United States declared war on Germany.
That same day, his mental health now seriously impaired, Edgar’s father gave up work for good. Though Edgar was now the highest-paid youth in his grade at the Library of Congress, the family faced penury. On July 25, when he learned he had passed his bar exams, Edgar quit the job at the Library. The next day, for a few dollars more, he began work at the Department of Justice.
Edgar would in future imply that he got the government job on his own initiative. In fact he almost certainly got it thanks, once again, to Bill Hitz. Hitz, by then a judge, had clout. He counted the President and Supreme Court Justice Brandeis among his friends, and himself held a senior post at the Justice Department. With connections like that, it was easy to find a place at Justice for a needy young relative.
Edgar would say his first post had been a ‘clerkship.’ His personnel file describes him as having been a ‘Special Employee.’ In fact he worked in the mail room. Bruce Bielaski, a senior official, recalled how – on the trolley to work one day in 1917 – he found himself talking shop with his neighbor, mail room chief George Michaelson.
Michaelson dropped the name of a young lawyer he had sorting mail, ‘one of the brightest boys around.’ ‘You don’t need anybody with brains doing that,’ said Bielaski. ‘If you want him,’ Michaelson replied, ‘you can have him.’
That conversation on the trolley was a fateful one for America. Bruce Bielaski was Director of the Bureau of Investigation, direct forerunner of what we know as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.
The Bureau had been created in 1908, in the face of congressional fears that its powers might be used for oppressive political ends, and that it might end up under the control of one man. It was used to probe crimes that involved the crossing of state boundaries, antitrust and banking violations, and – notoriously – offenses against the Mann Act, which made it a crime to carry a woman across state lines for ‘immoral purposes.’
Bureau Chief Bruce Bielaski did not forget the young man his neighbor had recommended – though he did not bring Edgar into the Bureau. Instead he told John Lord O’Brian, head of the War Emergency Division, about Edgar. On December 14,
1917, the name of ‘Mr Hoover, special agent,’ appeared for the first time in an O’Brian memorandum.
So, a month short of his twenty-third birthday, Edgar shot from sorting mail to deciding what to do with suspect foreigners. Three years of propaganda had brought the nation to a fever-pitch of hysteria about German spying and sabotage – although Bureau operations never caught a single spy or saboteur. It fell to the Justice Department to decide the fate of many German aliens.
The first faded memos of Edgar’s prodigious career tell their own story. A German alien aged eighteen arrested on the Texas border for mouthing support for the Kaiser – Edgar recommended detention until the end of the war. Another German called President Wilson ‘a cocksucker and a thief.’ Edgar recommended internment again. He was overruled, on the ground that angry talk hardly justified such drastic punishment.
In 1918 Edgar worked on a drive to register all German women in the United States. That June, when The Washington Post reported that the work was going slowly, he rushed off a memo denying it. He would detest the Post and The New York Times all his life, would specifically exclude them from his daily reading, claiming that they ‘distort and slant the news.’ ‘When they throw brickbats at the FBI,’ he was to say, ‘I’m happy – brickbats from some people are like bouquets.’
Edgar worked seven days a week in 1918, often into the night, and his boss took note. ‘Hoover,’ O’Brian observed then, ‘is a conscientious and honest fellow.’ Edgar received three pay increases in his first year at Justice, doubling his starting salary. Yet there was something odd about all this. Why had this twenty-three-year-old not gone to war?
All American males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty were required to register for military service within weeks of the declaration of war. As the government raised an army for the war in Europe, the first officers’ training camp opened in Washington. Three million men would be drafted before it was over. One hundred and fifty thousand of them would die. There was a surge of righteous anger against young men who avoided the draft. In one roundup alone, 60,000 men were picked up in New York City, 27,000 in Chicago.
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