by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
If you took everything about John Reed and reversed it, you would just about have J. Edgar Hoover. Reed was a charismatic star of Greenwich Village at its wildest, and he was free to be radical because he was rich. From an early age, he was eager to taste life — having affairs with women, seeking adventures overseas, marching alongside striking workers. People noticed Reed, who was so willing to upset conventional Americans that many saw him as “‘wild’ and ‘crazy’ and ‘irresponsible.’” When he wasn’t ablaze with some new radical activity, he was writing poems and plays to preach revolution. Hoover, on the other hand, was born in 1895 in a modest home in a modest section of Washington, DC. He lived in his family home until he was in his forties and his mother passed away. As a teenager, he was an ace student in Sunday school, and he attended church throughout his life. In school, Hoover won contests for his debate team by citing the Bible and the example of “Christian nations” to defend capital punishment. He never left the United States, never married, did not date, and, in all likelihood, never had a sexual relationship with anyone (more on this later).
Reed was most at home in mixture; he needed to be where men and women, rich and poor, black and white, American and Russian flirted, argued, and plotted to change the world. Hoover loved marching in the school cadet corps and was such an upstanding young man that he would teach Sunday school wearing his cadet uniform — the very picture of knife-edged creases, firm rules, and accepted moral values. Being a cadet was more than wearing a uniform; it fit his preference for separation and conformity. Hoover loved being around guys, being in an all-male club with his very special friends. As he was about to graduate from high school, he wrote that “the saddest moment of the year was when I realized that I must part with a group of fellows who had become a part of my life.” He needed a “group of fellows” around him all the time. And, having grown up in a totally segregated Washington, attending all-white schools and churches, he was deeply alarmed at the idea of racial mixture. If we look back to the two versions of American history, Hoover never wavered in believing the first, while Reed devoted his life to the second.
Hoover as a cadet, displaying his knife-edged precision and unwavering moral severity. Though the date of the photo is unknown, he is somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old.
And yet it is not hard to see that the crisp, firm face Hoover presented to the world was the product of steely determination and unceasing vigilance. As a child, Hoover was short, somewhat overweight, and he stuttered. He overcame these challenges by pure will. He discovered that if he spoke quickly, he could outrace his stutter, so night after night he practiced speaking until he was good enough to become captain of the debating team. From then on he always spat out his words rapidly with a machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of hard facts and firm judgments. Later in life, when people began to write his official biographies, he made up stories highlighting his supposed childhood athletic skills. Whether by training himself or shaping how he was described, Hoover controlled the story: you learned only what he wanted you to know.
Does Hoover’s stutter tell us something? While the problem itself may have been a genetic accident, the way he dealt with it opens a crack into the hidden chambers of his family life. Throughout his life, he was determined to hide all signs of weakness, and he became a gifted performer — always onstage, always selling the story he wanted you to believe. Most probably Hoover’s need to seem perfect was related to the first secret: the tension between his stern mother and withdrawn father that he experienced every night.
Seated holding flowers and smiling to himself, Hoover at twelve gives a hint of his taste for performing.
Annie Scheitlin, Hoover’s mother, grew up in a nineteenth-century Washington family that was wealthy enough to educate her in Switzerland and was proud of ancestors who had been diplomats and colonial soldiers. She carried on those military traditions, for she was known to be “a very forceful kind of person” who “made herself felt.” Her marriage to Dickerson Hoover, though, disappointed her. Dickerson earned a limited income as a government mapmaker. Born in an era when intelligent, determined women had very few opportunities, Annie focused all of her frustrated ambition on her third child, whom she always called Edgar.
Anne Scheitlin Hoover, the stern, ambitious backbone of the Hoover household
Annie and Dickerson’s first two children were teenagers when J. Edgar was born, and she could see that neither of them was going to be her shining star. That left the newborn. The house was divided in two. On one side were the quiet father and the first two children: Dickerson Jr., an easygoing athlete, and Lillian, a rebellious teenager. On the other side were Annie and Edgar. Annie’s rule was absolute: obey her laws, live an orderly life, and if you slip, expect punishment. Annie demanded order and excellence; Edgar eagerly accepted the challenge. As one niece recalled, Annie “always expected that J.E. was going to be successful.” She “pushed” him “as much as she could.”
The team Annie and Edgar formed during his childhood lasted the rest of her life. Like an attentive wife, Annie “ran a beautiful home for him.” That did not mean they always got along. Known as two “very strong personalities,” they clashed nightly over decisions as seemingly silly as how high to open the window shades. But that was the friction of two totally committed partners. Cartha DeLoach, one of Hoover’s longest-serving and most loyal FBI colleagues, believed that Annie was “the only person for whom he held a deep and abiding affection.”
J. Edgar and his parents, Dickerson and Anne
One way to see young Edgar is as the favorite — molded and doted on but also smothered by his fiercely determined mom. But there was another side to him and to the Hoover family. They loved to go to shows, to see vaudeville acts. In the thousands of photos preserved in Hoover’s personal FBI files, the shots taken at sporting events stand out: he looks relaxed, happy, and at ease — totally unlike the endless dour images of him taken in the office. As a spectator, Hoover came alive. But he was also a gifted performer himself. Young Hoover was always displaying something to the world, whether in the two-page local newspaper he created as a boy, the debates he won, the Sunday-school classes he taught, or the marching-band contests in which he excelled. Whether to please his stern mom or to enjoy his own power of persuasion, Hoover was always acting, always broadcasting his story, always on display.
Hoover as a guy among guys watching a ball game; the four men seated around him are FBI colleagues. Hoover seems relaxed and happy.
While Annie was a partner to Edgar, his father was a warning to him. Dickerson’s fragile state was one reason Edgar was so secretive, calculating, and ever vigilant.
When Edgar was eighteen, Dickerson began to withdraw into himself. He would be silent for long periods, then suddenly fearful. The Hoovers did not want anyone, even their relatives, to know. A visiting doctor sent Dickerson to a mental hospital, and he came out a ghost of a man. From that point on, Edgar shared a home with his haunted father and a fierce, frustrated woman.
Even in his weakened state, Dickerson managed to keep going to the office. But in 1917, four years into his illness, he was sent home with a note telling him to leave his desk by the end of the week and not come back. After forty years of loyal work, he received not a single penny of retirement pay or pension. Edgar kept that letter throughout his life. He had seen how power worked: if you showed weakness, you could be cut off instantly.
When Dickerson lost his job and retreated into himself, Edgar needed to step forward. He had been working his way up at the Library of Congress —throughout his life, he showed genius at creating, mining, and manipulating files. At night, he attended George Washington University, where he was studying law. He graduated from GWU in 1916 and earned his master’s in law the following year. So in 1917 he was ready to help his family by starting a career in the Justice Department. That is where Hoover was working two years later when bombs exploded in Washington. Someone was trying to start a revolution in America.
Hoover at twenty-four — a handsome young man working his way up in government
At eleven p.m. on June 2, 1919, terrorists unleashed their fury at America. In key cities across the eastern United States, nine large bombs, each made up of at least twenty pounds of explosives, shattered glass and smashed wood. The Washington bomb blasted a quiet street that was home to one former and three future presidents (William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower). It was placed directly at the door of the chief law officer in the land, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Amid the splinters and shards — designed to maim or kill Mitchell, his wife, and their teenage daughter — Mitchell found a note carrying the credo of the bombers: “We have been dreaming of freedom, we have aspired to a better world, and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could. . . . There will have to be bloodshed. We will not dodge; there will have to be murder; we will kill because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.”
Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s home just after it was bombed. This photograph appears to have been altered — note the shadows around several men in the foreground. Who did this, or why, remains a mystery.
While America was fighting World War I, it had been illegal to go on strike. Now that the war was over, some four million Americans from coast to coast were stopping work to demand — what? Better wages or a different system of government? The strikes and the bombing suggested to some — radicals and conservatives alike — that America was about to go the way of Russia and plunge into the fires of revolution. Indeed, two months earlier, in April, violent revolutionaries had put together thirty-six packages and carefully taken them to the post office. Each box was a booby-trapped bomb loaded with both explosives and acid. The seeming gifts were addressed to a mayor, a judge, a senator, a businessman, and others considered class enemies. That plot largely failed: the bombers did not put enough postage on all the packages, and after one box was opened accidentally, many of the others were intercepted.
Just over a year after the June attacks, on September 16, 1920, the bombers achieved their greatest success. A horse-drawn cart pulled to a stop on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York, in the heart of the heart of capitalism: Wall Street. The cart erupted. It was filled with so much explosive material and so many heavy weights — designed to spread the carnage — that all that was ever recovered of the horses were two hooves and horseshoes. Forty people died in that blast, and hundreds were injured.
The shattered cart and scattered wreckage give a sense of the power of the terrorist bomb that exploded on Wall Street in 1920.
Someone speaking in the name of the people, the workers, the oppressed, was trying to start a revolution in America by murdering, or terrorizing, the power elite. From the radicals’ point of view, the tree of liberty was getting a needed rain shower. Indeed, the January 1919 issue of the Liberator, a magazine published in New York by American radicals, featured a letter to “American Workingmen” directly from Lenin himself. “A successful revolution,” he preached, “is inconceivable unless it breaks the resistance of the exploiting class. . . . We are certain that we are invincible.” If you were a worker angry about your poverty and the conditions in your factory, if you were an intellectual drawn to Marx’s ideas and inspired by John Reed’s writings, Lenin was telling you that you would have to fight, bleed, and die. But soon enough your cause would triumph.
Attorney General Palmer knew what to do. Even on that June night as he held his sobbing daughter in his arms and stared at the wreckage caused by the bomb designed to maim or kill her, he forged a plan. He must locate and smother every radical threat — letting lawyers and judges worry about legality later. Fear and rage guided him, as well as a canny political sense that being strong in a crisis, defeating a terrorist enemy, could get him elected as the next president. “Palmer,” a legislator assured him, “ask for what you want and you will get it. The government is behind you in whatever you do to root out this kind of revolutionary organization in this country.”
Capturing the criminals who had sent a man with dynamite to his own doorway was only the first step. Palmer needed to calm the nation by eliminating the larger threat to every sleeping child. He was not sure exactly who had planted the bombs, but he had a very good general sense. Communists who agreed with Lenin, anarchists who wanted to destroy all governments, immigrants from Russia who did not cherish America’s laws and traditions — he knew how to find them. The endless waves of new arrivals to America had stopped during the war. But now every ship brought more people Palmer did not like and did not trust. Could it be coincidence that the strikes and bombs came just as immigration heated up again? Somewhere in that un-American mob, he was sure, lurked the terrorists.
Finding people whose views matched the piece of paper that came with the bomb was easy. But Palmer faced a legal problem: free speech is protected under the Constitution. The editors of the Liberator were free to read, write, publish, and sell books filled with Communist ideas. So while Palmer could quickly find American Communists, there was not much he could do about them. But immigrants without American citizenship did not enjoy the same rights. So even while he sent policemen to sift for clues to the bombings, Palmer planned a much bigger roundup. First he would nab every immigrant in the country who was not a citizen and supported anarchism or Communism. Then he would deport these un-American threats somewhere, anywhere — across an ocean. In order to locate, detain, and ship off all those aliens, Palmer needed the help of a hardworking, dedicated patriot who would put security first. Fortunately, just the right person had made a name for himself in the Alien Enemy Bureau of the Justice Department and was aching to get that job: an ambitious young man who saw a sharp line between good and evil, American and alien, and whose only indulgence was a taste for dapper clothes: John Edgar Hoover.
On July 1, 1919, Hoover was promoted; he was now a special assistant to the attorney general. His job was to “make a study of subversive activities” in the country, and to suggest “what action can be taken in the field of prosecution.” This was a perfect match of man and moment.
By 1920, 579 agents working for what was then called the Bureau of Investigations were combing the country for dangerous radicals. Each week the agents sent between six hundred and nine hundred reports back to the home office. To some, this storm of paper might have seemed like a chaotic blizzard, especially since many of the agents were untrained or incompetent. To Hoover it was an opportunity. He loved to compile lists and organize them into categories. Every person named in a report became the heading on a file card. Soon that card filled up with more bits of information: where that person lived, what groups he or she belonged to, whether he or she wrote for a newspaper or magazine. Then new files were started for those same groups, papers, and magazines. Within a year, Hoover’s team had some one hundred thousand of these files lined up, sorted, and ready for use. Though he was born long before the age of the computer, he created a kind of national database.
Hoover’s assistants checked the cards for cross-references the way a search engine now surfs the Internet for websites. Hoover mapped the network of people who might be radicals, looking carefully for the nodes — the neighborhoods, clubs, and publications — where they gathered. Through the slow, steady, relentless gathering of details, his interconnected files became a kind of information machine that could detect who might be a threat. This was a magnificent creation for an ambitious young man still in his twenties. But it was as dangerous as it was brilliant.
Hoover did not think that cleaning out the infection of dangerous immigrants was enough. He also had his eye on citizens; indeed, he believed that anyone who agreed with Lenin was a threat to the American government and the American people. Hoover saw what had happened in Russia — a tiny, very well organized group managed to topple an empire. He was determined that would not happen in America
. For the rest of his life, he kept the Russian story in mind: no matter how few Communists there were, history showed they could have immense power — unless a ferocious defender defeated them at every turn. It was as simple as organizing a file: those who believed in revolution were, by definition, at least dangerous and very likely traitors.
According to the Russian calendar, the Communist triumph there took place in October (throughout the twentieth century, the phrase “October Days” meant the moment of revolution). But in the United States, the first anniversary of the Russian Revolution fell on November 7. Palmer and Hoover picked that as the perfect day to strike back against the revolutionary threat.
Around eight p.m. on November 7, 1919, Bureau of Investigations agents swarmed the Union of Russian Workers (URW) Building on East Fifteenth Street in Manhattan, where Mitchel Lavrowsky was in the middle of teaching a class. Born in Russia, where he was trained as a high-school teacher, Lavrowsky had later moved to New York, where he taught algebra and Russian at the URW. As Lavrowsky recalled, one man entered his class, pulled out a gun, ordered him to take off his glasses, hit him on the head, and pushed him down the stairs — where he was pummeled by other agents. Nicaoli Melikoff, who was a student at the Union, was searched by the Bureau men and robbed of a twenty-dollar bill. As he and other students filed out of their classroom, they were made to run between two officers who beat them, one by one. Nicaoli was the last one out, so he received special treatment: he was smashed to the floor and began to bleed. Then he was pushed down the stairs while being clubbed. Semeon Kravchuck, another student, was not even in the union building when the squad arrived, but he was heading that way. Seeing that, the officers ordered him inside, where they assaulted him and broke one of his teeth. Bloody, dazed, confused, everyone in the union building was then herded off to detention.