G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Throughout the book, Gage draws a close parallel between the events of Hoover’s life and the federal government he served for so many years. He was born and raised in Washington, DC, and his childhood coincided with its transformation from a small city, with most of its population rotating in and out with each election, into a major metropolis supporting the staff of a fast-growing federal bureaucracy. President Woodrow Wilson, who served from 1913 to 1921, had long championed a more expansive role for the federal government in advancing social progress, with brilliant rhetoricians securing popular support while competent bureaucrats tended to quotidian details. As a law student and clerk at the Library of Congress, Hoover was a small part of an early effort to create a highly professional and efficient civil service that served the public interest and not the ruling party. Hoover graduated from law school just as the United States was entering the First World War, which prompted a massive expansion in government power to sustain the fight abroad and monitor subversive elements at home. The early results of this effort were middling. Hoover first gained attention in the context of the so-called Palmer Raids, an unprecedented effort to round up foreigners suspected of radical leanings. Hundreds were arrested and deported, but shortly afterward, a bomb exploded in Wall Street, killing 38 and proving the insufficiency of the bureau’s methods.

Early on in his administration, Hoover dedicated the FBI to the elimination of “public enemies,” high-profile gangsters evading local police. The FBI’s success turned the bureau into a pop-culture phenomenon, creating the myth of “super cops” equipped with superior courage and information. During World War II, Hoover was able to improve on the murky record of the last war, quietly interning thousands of Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Subsequently, the early years of the Cold War marked the height of both American trust in government and Hoover’s fortunes, as he become a public face of a popular effort to stamp out the communist menace. By the mid-1960s, however, Hoover was embodying the very qualities that would trigger a major decline in trust of the federal government. While he was alive, Hoover’s strident opposition to civil rights and harassment of protestors against the Vietnam War was generally popular, but at the time of his death in 1972, he had become the representative of an old order that had blocked social progress and wasted tens of thousands of lives rather than accept a changing world. Hoover’s death came only five months before the events that would precipitate the Watergate scandal, and American perceptions of federal integrity and competence have still not recovered.