by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
At a glance, this is yet another bland publicity shot with visitors. But look at Hoover’s hands clutching the tabletop, perhaps a sign of strain. The sapphire ring was a present from his mother that he wore throughout his life.
PHOTO DOSSIER:
Those who think they know what Hoover looked like are most often recalling images of him from the very end of his life, when he was ill and almost pasty white. These images of a younger Hoover allow for questions about his family’s racial history.
Greeting an African-American father and son and standing in profile, which highlights his wavy hair, Hoover looks distinctly African American. Compare this image to photos of prominent African Americans of the time such as Walter White, who led the NAACP from the 1930s until the mid-1950s, or Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and it would be easy to think of Hoover as the product of a racially mixed heritage.
Out in the sunshine, a very dark Hoover
Hoover ten years later, looking lighter but what might now be called Hispanic
A black male could not be in worse trouble than to be accused of raping a white woman in Alabama. Accusation almost always led to conviction, and 100 percent of blacks found guilty of that crime, no matter the circumstances, were executed. So when two white Alabama women accused nine young black males — the youngest was twelve, the oldest twenty-one — of brutal and repeated gang rape, their fates seemed to be sealed. The judge’s biggest challenge was keeping the accused away from a lynch mob in Scottsboro, where they were being held, so that they would live long enough to be tried. The local defense lawyers the judge managed to scrounge up were totally ineffective; one of them appeared to be so drunk on the first day of the trial that he stumbled around the courthouse. The nine were instantly convicted and sentenced to be executed. And that is where the Communists stepped in.
Anyone who reads about the case today will immediately see that the two women (one of whom was married and the other a teenager) invented the whole story to cover up their own affairs with other men. One actually admitted that soon enough. But getting a court to agree required challenging the entire Alabama system of justice. The Communist Party hired Samuel Leibowitz, one of the very best lawyers in the country, to take on the apparently hopeless case. In trial after retrial, appeal after appeal, the case against the nine fell apart, yet they remained in jail, often in solitary confinement or on death row. It was not until 1950 that all the accused were safe: released, paroled, or — in one case — escaped from prison and protected by the order of the governor of another state.
As the years went by, the Scottsboro trials split the black community. Moderate leaders tried desperately to wrest the case from the Communist Party. But many people, black and white, saw the Party as strong, determined, and helpful. Every Party rally or demonstration aimed to bring together everyone who cared about racism, poverty, and social justice.
Rallies such as the one promoted in this poster showed the Communist Party in the best light — leading the way to protect innocent lives from racist injustice.
The great novelist Richard Wright had grown up poor and black in the South, and left high school to work. But he had such a hunger to learn that he educated himself and sensed that he wanted to write. In Chicago he met a group of Communists — the first white people who ever seemed to take him seriously. The Communists convinced him that only they understood the “overwhelming drama of moral struggle” that was taking place around the world. Wright joined the Party.
Scottsboro, it might seem, proved that the Party was right and Hoover was wrong. He was blinded by his prejudices, while the radical revolutionaries saw through the lies of American history. But that is not the end of the story. The Communists were as inhuman and calculating as Hoover claimed — and the proof of that lay in the arts.
The Communist Party insisted that the Depression proved that its understanding of world events was correct. Marx, and thus Marxists, knew the truth of the past, present, and future. But since that was so, the Party claimed it had the right to dictate exactly what every writer and actor, poet and painter, should create. Mike Gold, a good American Communist, explained that all older forms of fiction, poetry, drama, and music were a product of the diseased, dying capitalist world that “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad.” Now that capitalism was collapsing, artists had a new mission: to portray “the revolution . . . the strike, boycott, mass-meeting.” The truth of the world was the clash of classes, and everyone needed to line up with the workers or be swept aside.
Artists who listened to Gold stopped writing about their personal feelings or their imaginative fantasies. Instead, they dutifully crafted stories and plays designed to spur the audience to strike, to act, to join the Party. Anyone who resisted, who felt that artists needed to follow their own inner light, was condemned as a traitor. The New Masses, the American Communists’ monthly magazine, screamed out the only two possible futures for artists: “You are either pioneers and builders of civilization, or you are nothing. You will either aid in moulding history, or history will mould you.” Those who failed to see the light and join in the Communist revolution faced a terrible fate: “You will be indescribably crushed and maimed in the process. And the end will be total destruction.”
Art was no longer a personal expression; it was a weapon in the revolutionary cause. That meant artists needed to bend to the will of the Party.
This 1933 issue of the New Masses is a cross section of the American Communist Party at the time: it defended the Scottsboro boys and raised the alarm over the Nazis when too many others did not notice or did not care, but it also insisted that writers devote their art to the cause of class revolution.
While the Communists were eager to make Richard Wright a member of the Party, they were suspicious of him. They didn’t like his clean shirts and tasteful tie, his well-shined shoes. He seemed too much of a bookish intellectual, not the hearty black laborer the Party wanted. And when he refused to obey Party commands about where and how to teach, he was kicked out.
One day in May, Wright went to a Party rally in Chicago, and an old friend invited him to march with the Communists. As he began to walk, a voice barked, “Get out of our ranks!” “I-It’s May Day and I want to march,” he protested. “Get out.” Soon, as Wright wrote, “hands lifted me bodily from the sidewalk. I felt myself being pitched headlong through the air. . . . The rows of white and black Communists were looking at me with cold eyes of nonrecognition. . . . Suddenly, the vast ranks of the Communist Party began to move. Scarlet banners with the hammer and sickle emblem of world revolution were lifted, and they fluttered in the May breeze. . . . A long line of set-faced men and women, white and black, flowed past me.”
Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when Communists and other advocates for workers gathered to demand that the work day be limited to eight hours — rather than ten or twelve — May 1, or May Day, has been the occasion for rallies. In New York City, where this photo was taken, the rallies were often held in Union Square — which took its name from the nearby union offices.
Wright saw what the marching masses could not: “they’re blind.” The ranks of Party members moved in lockstep like a grim, sightless machine. He left the Party and went on to write such pathbreaking novels as Native Son and Black Boy.
In the drama of the global depression, people were constantly pushed to choose a side — to see one nation, one party, as all good (and thus to ignore its failings) and another as entirely evil (and thus to dismiss any cause it supported). For the moment many believed that the Communists and their supporters had the upper hand. They waved the flag of their concern for the masses, their defense of the Scottsboro Nine, their beautiful Soviet Union. Hoover continued to gather evidence of Communist influences on liberal causes. But — ever the smart politician — he made sure no one knew exactly how his agents got their information. He was collecting names to use when the time was ripe. For now, he focused on becomi
ng indispensable to the incoming president, Franklin Roosevelt. He succeeded all too well.
THE STORY: In 1933, the United States recognized the Communist government of the Soviet Union, a move that allowed the Soviets to establish embassies in America. In exchange, the Soviets promised to pay debts that had been on the books since before the Russian Revolution, to guarantee freedom of religion for Americans visiting Russia, and not to attempt to spread Communism in America. All the promises were lies.
THE FACTS: The Soviets immediately used their diplomatic passports and embassies to spy, infiltrate, and attempt to subvert the United States. It took a man with his ear to the ground, listening for whispers, watching for shadows, to sense the growing network of spies.
Hoover standing directly behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on July 26, 1933. The kidnapping of an Oklahoma City businessman was in the headlines, but by September, Hoover’s men had captured the criminals, one of whom was said to have yelled, “Don’t shoot G-Men”—giving the lawmen their nickname.
Summer 1936: J. Edgar Hoover was wanted on the phone: Major General Smedley Butler was on the line. Butler was a true hero who had twice earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, then retired after being the head of the marines. If he was calling, it must be important. He was contacting Hoover to report that extreme right-wing Americans had approached him to head up a private army and invade Mexico. This was the second time recruiters had come to the much-honored soldier. Two years earlier, some of the richest men in the country — key stockholders in such companies as General Motors, DuPont, and U.S. Steel — had put together a fund to orchestrate a coup to overthrow President Roosevelt. Butler was beloved by his men, so the wealthy cabal was certain he was the one leader who could march into Washington and change the government. Butler turned down the first overture in 1934 and had just said no again. He was calling to pass along the story of the plot to Hoover.
After taking down the information, Hoover made sure the president was informed. The more danger and unrest there was in the country, the bigger the job for the FBI.
In the early 1930s, it really did seem possible that a coup could take place in the United States. Some 25 percent of Americans who wanted to work could not find jobs, leaving millions of angry, unemployed people. Americans were losing faith in their government, and when you no longer trust elected officials, you begin to take alternatives — even violent ones — seriously. In 1934 alone, nearly one and a half million workers participated in some 1,800 strikes. What if men in steel mills, ports, and power stations walked off the job? Couldn’t they cripple the nation and open the way to a rebellion led by a strong leader? After all, exactly those kinds of uprisings were already taking place in Europe.
Groups with names like the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund marched to show that they supported the Nazis in Germany and wanted a similar government in America. A Texas oil baron bankrolled another fringe organization that railed against taxes, rights for blacks, and Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal,” which it claimed was part of an international plot hatched by wealthy bankers. And then there were the Communists. In 1933, when the Russians were allowed to open embassies in America, it became all too easy for them to look for allies and to begin spying for the homeland. As one agent later recalled, “If you wore a sign saying ‘I Am a Spy,’ you might still not get arrested.”
Standing in front of a monumental portrait of George Washington, American Nazis show their colors, claiming that they are true Americans. This photo was taken at a large American Nazi party rally in New York City in 1939.
During the 1939 Nazi rally in New York, a Jewish man who rushed the stage was severely beaten. The attack was captured by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, and his photos of it were published in Life magazine. Nazism was alive and dangerous in America.
By the end of the summer of 1936, FDR had heard enough. Between Hoover’s memo about the Butler plot and other tips about Soviet spying, he knew there was real danger brewing. On August 24, he called Hoover in to figure out how to guard against what Hoover would later term “subversive activities in the United States.” Whose job was that? The Secret Service kept its ear to the ground for plots, but its only responsibility was to protect the president himself, not the nation. What about the FBI? The Bureau had absolutely no authority to deal with the kind of threat that concerned the president. But Hoover had an idea.
Hoover knew how to find loopholes in rules and regulations the way a dog sniffs out a hidden bone. Way back in 1916, a budget bill had instructed the Bureau to investigate “any matters referred to it by the Department of State.” Any matters. So if the secretary of state were to tell the FBI to go after “subversives”— whatever that meant and whoever they were — the Bureau would simply be doing what Congress had long ago told it to do. FDR liked the idea but took a night to think it over. The next day, Roosevelt called a secret meeting. As Hoover recalled, there, in private, FDR said that he wanted this to “be handled quite confidentially and that the President, Secretary of State, and I should be the ones aware of this request.”
That secret conversation was the moment when Hoover’s life story changed American history. He was given real authority to protect the nation, which he slowly but surely transformed into the right to play by his own rules, even if that totally undermined the laws and principles of the democracy he was protecting.
On May 18, 1934, President Roosevelt signed a package of anti-crime legislation that extended the powers and responsibilities of Hoover’s bureau. The more significant and dangerous extension of the FBI took place in a private meeting two years later. Hoover was the only one to ever describe that discussion, so we have only his word for the mandate given to him by the president.
FDR’s request was the opening Hoover had been waiting for since the last Palmer raid sixteen years earlier. And it came exactly in the way he wanted it: a secret deal, never to be revealed to Congress, not subject to any review except by the three men in the room and Hoover’s direct boss, the attorney general. This was Hoover, the brilliant bureaucrat, making absolutely sure that a powerful person above him in the Washington hierarchy gave him orders, a mandate that he would then use to vastly expand his own power. In fact, by 1938, he confidently stated to the president that the FBI’s mission was “broad enough to cover any expansion” of secret “intelligence and counter-espionage work.” “Any expansion.” In the cold light of history, those two words are terrifying. Indeed, the agreement the president and the director were determined to keep secret was the foundation of the FBI’s intricately defended empire of surveillance and subversion for the next forty years.
Every nation has its secrets and its guardians; after all, countries do face real enemies. But when the person charged with exposing and capturing those spies and traitors is allowed to operate in the dark, out of sight, the country begins to rot from within. That is Hoover’s tragedy: he was able to live out his lifetime dream, the job of safeguarding America his own way, by his own rules. But, as we now know, step by step, year by year, the dream became ever more of a nightmare for free-thinking Americans.
To be fair, Hoover never acted entirely alone. He always made sure he had some sort of clearance from his immediate superior, the attorney general, and his ultimate boss, the president. In fact, it was in working to curry favor with FDR and to undermine the president’s political enemies that Hoover really began to use his toolbox of controversial activities. Hoover insisted that his agents follow the letter of the law — or at least not explicitly break the law. However, as an astute lawyer and lifetime Washington insider, he knew exactly how to get around these regulations.
By 1939, Europe was at war. Would America join in? Polls showed that the voting public was strongly against doing so. But FDR recognized the danger posed by Nazi Germany and Japan, as well as the dire threats to England, America’s closest ally. He needed to walk a careful political tightrope to lend support to the heroes fighting against the Nazis without alarming voters. Hi
s job was all the more difficult because those determined to keep America out of the growing conflict found a popular spokesman in Charles Lindbergh and a voice in the growing America First Committee (AFC). FDR was certain that Lindbergh was a Nazi, which was a perfect opening for Hoover. The more dirt Hoover could gather about Lindbergh and America First — legally or illegally — the happier FDR would be.
Charles Lindbergh (middle figure, in dark jacket) addresses an America First rally in Madison Square Garden in 1941. (The man with his hand raised is Senator Burton K. Wheeler.)
Wiretapping — listening in on private phone conversations — was illegal. Congress had said so in 1934, and the Supreme Court agreed. But neither FDR nor Hoover accepted that. In 1940, the president secretly ruled that wiretaps could be used in special cases involving national defense, so long as the attorney general personally approved each one. Hoover was to keep a log of authorized taps, which the attorney general could review at any time. But this system of checks did not reckon with Hoover’s gift for evading rules and hiding in plain sight. When he wanted to tap a line but did not have approval, he omitted it from the logbook. Instead, the record was kept in the secret card files of his top assistants, then destroyed after six months. FDR may or may not have guessed that Hoover was making up his own rules. But so long as the result was information that could embarrass or undermine those who opposed his policies in Europe, he did not mind. On June 14, 1940, he sent Hoover a note expressing his deep “appreciation” “for the many interesting and valuable reports that you have made to me.”