[As I’ve done for each of the last few years, this week I’ll start 2024 by AmericanStudying a few anniversaries for the new year. Leading up to a special post on the 200th anniversary of a frustratingly familiar election.]
On what J.
Edgar Hoover brought to his new role as
Director of the Bureau of Investigation, and two early examples of his
leadership style.
John
Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) became a clerk with the Justice Department’s new War
Emergency Division in 1917, when he was just 22 years old, and within a few
months had taken on a leadership role with another new organization, the Alien Enemy Bureau.
In that role, authorized by President Woodrow Wilson and the 1917
Espionage Act, Hoover had the power to arrest and jail foreign nationals
without trial. When the war ended those extreme powers most definitely did not,
and two years later Hoover was able to expand them as head of the Bureau of Investigation’s
new General
Intelligence Division, known as the Radical Division as it focused on
rooting out supposed domestic radicals through actions like the Palmer
Raids. All of that constituted Hoover’s resume was he was appointed the
Bureau of Investigation’s fifth Director in May 1924.
As he
quickly demonstrated in that new role, Hoover’s extreme attitudes weren’t
limited to those he perceived to be direct threats (whether foreign or
domestic) to the United States. In 1924 the Bureau of Investigation had three
female special agents; upon taking over the Director’s role Hoover
fired two of them and transferred the third against her wishes from the Washington
field office to Philadelphia, after which she resigned. Hoover argued that
women’s “unpredictable nature” made them unfit for the role, even though he
acknowledged that they “probably could learn to fire a gun.” He also believed
that they were far more suited for the role of secretary, since “a man’s secretary
makes or breaks him”—and his own executive
secretary, Helen Gandy, was indeed with him for his whole 50-year run as
director. Hoover’s personal issues
with sex and gender have been well documented, but he was pretty awful with
them on a professional level as well.
Much of
Hoover’s leadership of the FBI (as it came to be known) throughout his tenure
as Director was very much in that discriminatory and exclusionary vein. But obviously
he did other things too across those five decades, and one of his more positive
influences was in connecting the agency to other layers of the federal
government, especially more symbolic ones. Hoover had an opportunity to
showcase that side of the Bureau in 1929, when members of the Japanese
Naval Delegation visited Washington on their way to take part in the 1930
London Naval Treaty. Hoover volunteered the Bureau to serve as the
delegates’ protection detail, and the international recognition was an
important step in the FBI’s development from a facet of the Justice Department
to its own, significant part of the U.S. federal government. The reality that
that part has been pretty consistently awful is vital to acknowledge, but not
the only part of the Bureau’s story, nor of Hoover’s.
Last
anniversary tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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