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WWI and The "Rise" of J. Edgar Hoover by Norman Markowitz
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by: Saturday 18 October 2014
I had the privilege of participating in a panel and presenting a paper yesterday at a conference co-sponsored by the Peace HistorySociety and Georgian Court University, a university in Lakewood New Jersey which has a fascinating history in itself. The Conference dealt with "WWI: Dissent, Activism, and Transformation" and had a wide variety of scholars from the U.S. and the UK primarily dealing with resistance to the war, peace movements during and after the war, and the effects of the war onwomen, African Americans, colonial peoples. I will deal with theconference in a subequent post, but I thought that I would post my paper, which dealt with the Red Scare and the rise of J. Edgar
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Hoover. I am proud to say that I was introduced not only as a Professor of History at Rutgers but a contributing editor to Political Affairs and when I mentioned that PA's relationship with the CPUSA, the response of both the participants and the audience was very positive
Norman Markowitz
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover FBI subordinate Clyde Tolson,,
Hoover’s constant companion from the late 1920s to his death in
1972
J. Edgar Hoover(1895-1972)
J. Edgar Hoover and World War I
Born in Washington, D.C, in 1895, John Edgar Hoover joined
the Justice Department in 1917 and became director of the scandal
ridden Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1924. Brought in as a
reformer, Hoover was to lead the agency until his death in 1972,
making him the longest serving head of a national police agency
in history. During his tenure as FBI director, Hoover ruled the
bureau with an iron hand and helped to establish both it and
himself in the American mind as the embodiment of masculine
virtue and the guardian of law, order, and national security.
Following Hoover ‘s death in 1972, accounts of his crude
violations of civil liberties and far-reaching personal
corruption, along with prurient accounts of his hidden sex life,
which he had sought to suppress over decades, surfaced, making
him an object of ridicule to large sections of the general public
even as the FBI named their new national headquarters after him.
But, one might say, so what? The FBI Building in Washington
is still named after J. Edgar. Small numbers of victims of Purges
and Blacklists that the Bureau either created or helped to bring
about have received apologies and, in small numbers even some
financial compensation. Hoover lives on in the Patriot Act,
warrantless searches and seizures And there is little chance
today of a national truth and reconciliation commission
investigating the half century crimes of Hoover’s FBI as there is
the Republican Party endorsing a National Health Service as a
substitute to what they call “Obamacare.
Hoover’s skills were first that of the modern bureaucrat,
either private or public. He realized that controlling and or
fixing the data, the files, would determine whether or not he
would implement his political agendas. He also understood the use
of mass media, first the press in the period that we are
analyzing, later motion pictures, radio, and finally television.
Today he would be planting stories through the Internet on
blogs and websites while his agents were combing webistes for
information(I am not saying that isn’t happening) and he would be
vacationing in the Carribean with a stop at Guantanamo, the way
he and Clyde Tolson, the FBI agent with whom he developed a close
personal relationship with in the late 1920s that lasted the rest
of his life, did for many years on taxpayers expense, showing up
at FBI raids usually on illegal gambling facilities in the
tourist areas for the photo ops.
Hoover did not create in any way the fear of radicalism
of revolution, which earlier produced the Salem Witch Trials,
the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the terroristic suppression of
abolitionists before the idea of a “Red Scare” or the association
of the color r ed with revolution existed
The “Red Scare”(not the first one should note) which really
began during World War I and accelerated in the immediate postwar
period was to be the foundation for J. Edgar Hoover’s long
career. Graduating from George Washington Law School and passing
the bar, Hoover, the son of a minor Interior Department Official
who had retired do to severe depression, got a position as
clerk in the Justice Department, which also gave him an exemption
from the draft
Family influence, many believe, was essential in his gaining
the position and draft deferment, which enabled him to support
his parents, particularly his mother, with whom he would live for
the rest of her life.
Hoover displayed his skills as an organization
man/bureaucrat rose rapidly in the Justice Department . Always
adept at flattering those above him, he was chosen in 1918 by his
supervisor , John Lord O’Brien, to direct a new Enemy Alien
Registration section. In the department Hoover’s conservative
religious outlook and emphasis on efficiency(or at least his
ability to make those above him think that he was t he model of
efficiency made him a zealous prosecutor of aliens of all kinds
and an advocate inside the Justice Department of the position
that aliens from hostile foreign powers were not entitled to the
constitutional protections of U.S. citizens. From the outset, it
is important to note that many of the “aliens” he went after were
socialists and anarchists who in no way supported Germany and its
allies, even though many were anti-war.
The end of the war saw the end of the Enemy Alien
Registration section, but Hoover saved himself bylobbied with
O’Brien, who had returned to private practice, to intercede on
his behalf with the new Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, to
keep him in the department Now, if the aftermath of the
Bolshevik Revolution, he began to convince his superiors t hat we
was an expert on the menace of Bolshevism and its domestic
dangers, based his experience and achievements with the Alien
Registration section
As strikes swept the country, and the press generally
denounced trade unionists and immigrants as agents of a
Bolshevik inspired “world revolution” in 1919, Attorney General
Palmer’s Washington home was bombed by an anarchist, who was
killed in the attack. Now Hoover had his great opportunity.
Palmer responded by promoting Hoover, whom he supervisors saw as
the Departments “Bolshevism expert” to organize an attack on
radicals and aliens.
Hoover then devised a scheme to launch national raids
against radical organizations and arrest and deport as many of
the radicals as possible. Under Palmer’s auspices, Hoover became
director of a new section, the General Intelligence Division of
the Justice Department, to carry forward this campaign. The GID
was to the Hoover who would emerge from it for the next half
century what Dr. Frankenstein’s Laboratory was to the Monster
Through the division, Hoover began to amass files on a huge
number of people, many of them U.S. citizens., who were part of
the Bolshevik menace Hoover focused primarily on the Communist
movement, then developing rapidly. Hoover still hoped for mass
deportations, a goal he had had in the Alien Registration Section
during the war, which the rapidly developing Red Scare made
possibel
Having acquired files on over two hundred thousand people
by the end of 1919, Hoover gained Palmer’s approval to launch a
series of raids against radical groups.Hoover also began to plant
stories of revolutionary plots in the press, through pliant
reporters and editors, a policy that he would continue for the
rest of his life(for example, the FBI planted false stories over
fifty years later in the press of Jane Fonda partying with Black
Panthers and making threats against Richard Nixon)
The raids, which occurred in thirty-three cities on January
2, 1920, were carried forward without arrest warrants, which were
issued after the arrests. Over ten thousand people were
arrested, although nearly half were shortly released, primarily
because they were not aliens.
Hoover sought to use the raids to mobilize public opinion
for mass deportations and to associate socialist and Communist
ideas with Soviet directed conspiracies. Hoover also sought
gather information on anyone connected to radical movements, to
expand the files that he had opened in the General Intelligence
Division and which, by the time Warren Harding would take office
in 1921, would number 450,000.
Under Hoover’s influence, over 1,600 deportation warrants
for those arrested in the raids were issued. When Assistant
Secretary of Labor Louis Post, a progressive, used his influence
to veto over 1,000 of the warrants, Hoover opened a file on him.
Hoover use ofthe press escalated as he authored and
disseminated material which warned daily of coming armed
Communist uprisings, with May 1, 1920,(May Day) being the day for
apocalyptic revolution. When May 1 passed uneventfully, in spite
of a massive military and police buildup, in Washington(the White
House did not fall as the Winter Palace had in 1917) the Red
Scare began to decline.
Attacks on the Red Scare from prominent figures, including
the former Republican presidential candidate Charles Evens
Hughes, and Palmer’s disastrous attempt to gain the Democratic
presidential nomination, effectively ended Hoover’s campaign for
mass deportations, although Hoover himself was present for the
publicity of course in New York when over 500 Palmer Raid
political prisoners, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman, were deported on the U.S.S. Buford, which the
press dubbed the Soviet Ark.”
The new conservative Republican Harding administration was
to be a boon to J. Edgar Hoover even though his fate in that
administration was initially uncertain. O
First the new Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, found that
Hoover’s files contained materials on Harding’s enemies among the
Democrats, which Hoover , the good bureaucrat for whom self-
interest and national interest were one of the same, dutifully
supplied. Daugherty rewarded Hoover by appointing him Assistant
Director of the Bureau of Investigation, under the leadership of
William Burns, a former Secret Service official and director of a
Private Detective Agency popular with businessmen (the main rival
of the Pinkerton Agency)because of its anti-labor activities.
As the Harding administration was overwhelmed by scandals,
some concerning the Bureau of Investigation, Calvin Coolidge ,
who became president with Harding’s death in 1923, appointed a
leading Progressive Republican, Harlan Fiske Stone, Attorney
General. Although Stone had been a fierce opponent of the Palmer
Raids, and would later distinguish himself as a progressive
Supreme Court Justice, he listened to friends in the
administration who suggested J. Edgar Hoover as a man of
unimpeachable integrity. Meeting with Stone on May 10, 1924,
Hoover accepted the position of Acting Director, appealing to
Stone’s progressive views with promises to take the bureau out
of politics, make all appointments dependant on merit, and assure
that the Bureau would be completely under the control of the
Attorney General. His role as “Acting Director” would last forty
eight years and none of his promises would ever be fulfilled.
Norman Markowitz
Bibliography
Athan Theoharis, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the American
Inquisition(Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1988) is the
best overall treatment of Hoover. Athan Theoharis,. J. Edgar
Hoover, Sex, and Crime, an Historical Antidote(Chicago, Ivan Dee,
1995) is also useful. Curt Gentry, J Edgar Hoover, the Man and
the Secrets(New York, Norton, 1991) contains rich material. For a
more sympathetic portrayal of Hoover’s ends, if not his means,
Richard Gid Powers, G-Men, Hoover’s FBI in American Popular
Culture(Carbondale, Ill., Southern Illinois University Press,
1983) and Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J.
Edgar Hoover(New York, The Free Press, 1988) are well-written and
well-researched treatments. Although it has been the subject of
many attacks because of its focus on Hoover’s secret sex life,
personal use of public funds, and indirect involvements with
organized crime, investigative journalist Anthony Summers
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover(New
York, G.P Putnam and Sons, 1993) is a carefully researched
popular biography.
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