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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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