Read J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Online
Authors: Curt Gentry
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #United States, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #History, #Fiction, #Historical, #20th Century, #American Government
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (20 page)
Hoover also assured Baldwin that the American Civil Liberties Union was not, and had never been, a subject of investigation by the Bureau.
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The truth was otherwise. The American Civil Liberties Union had been a subject of
intensive
investigation from almost the day it was founded, and it remained so for at least another fifty-two years.
In this matter, Hoover could neither deny knowledge nor shift blame. The first report on the new organization, a confidential memorandum dated March 1, 1920, was addressed to and prepared for the benefit of “Mr. Hoover,” head of the GID. Nor could Hoover profess ignorance about the identity of the memo’s author. He was one of Hoover’s closest friends, George F. Ruch, who “helped research” Hoover’s famous briefs against communism.
Ruch, summarizing an even longer report by a secret agent identified only as “836,” reported that the ACLU would soon launch a nationwide campaign protesting the recent raids and advocating free speech and free press. By “free speech,” Ruch noted disbelievingly, these people meant that “anyone, no matter whether anarchists, IWWs, Communists, or whatever else, should be allowed to speak and write all they wished against this government or any other government!” Apparently Ruch had never heard of those revolutionary documents the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Ruch felt the free-speech campaign was of such “grave importance” that he recommended that Hoover assign agent 836 to watch “nothing else.”
29
By January 1921 the file on the ACLU was already voluminous. Summaries of ACLU meetings noted who attended, what they said, and how much money was collected. There were lists of the organization’s pitifully small bank accounts, with all deposits duly recorded. At least one agent sat through each of Roger Baldwin’s speeches, taking copious if often misleading notes.
*
Other reports contained detailed summaries of ACLU executive committee meetings. Since the minutes of these meetings were never published, their “confidential source” had to be a bugging device, an informer high in the organization, or a burglary. By probably the last means, the BI “obtained” the ACLU’s mailing list, which it copied and sent to each local BI office, labeling it a basic list of American radicals.
On June 2, 1921, the agent E. J. Connelley sent Hoover a garbled recounting of Baldwin’s latest speech, recommending that “a very prompt decision” be made concerning this organization. One was, but it pleased neither Connelley nor Hoover, Attorney General Daugherty deciding that “so far” the ACLU had committed “no act which could be construed as being in violation of any federal statutes now in existence and for that reason action by the government is precluded at the present time.” Despite this ruling, the investigation never stopped.
By January 1924 this group of “Pinks and Reds” and “all tints between,” as the agent H. J. Lenon put it, had become the preeminent organization in the civil liberties field; or, as Lenon phrased it, the ACLU was now playing “big brother to them all, from the bomb-throwing Anarchist to the wrist-slapping pacifist, and the preferred occupation, slacker.”
31
Nor was the organization itself the only subject of investigation. Each member of the ACLU’s national board rated a file. Several, such as those on Baldwin and Frankfurter, were already sizable. The Harvard professor, according to his dossier, was “considered a dangerous man.” Helen Keller, whom history would remember as the famed blind, deaf, and mute author-lecturer, was, to the Bureau, “a writer of radical subjects.” The Nobel laureate Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, was a “zealous and consistent supporter of radical and revolutionary movements.” Attorney Clarence Darrow, who had recently defended teacher John Scopes in the celebrated Tennessee Monkey Trial, was accused of helping other radicals capitalize on evolution, thereby “gaining entree…to certain coveted circles…hitherto closed to their propaganda.”
As for Baldwin himself, he was no longer an “IWW agitator” but an “intellectual anarchist,” which would have made him a fit subject for deportation, had not his ancestors arrived on the
Mayflower.
32
Nor could Hoover argue that this interest predated the Justice Department’s “new era.” On August 28, 1924—just three weeks after his first meeting with Baldwin—Hoover received an updated report on an ACLU function so detailed that it included the exact amount of pamphlet sales: $36.54. On November 19 the Bureau “obtained” the names and addresses of 130 persons who had contributed to “the new radical newspaper”
Civil Liberties.
As late as 1940 Hoover was still giving his personal attention to such matters as approving a $5 membership fee for an undercover agent.
33
Contrary to Hoover’s assurances to Baldwin, the Bureau never ceased to be interested in personal opinions or beliefs.
Also contrary to his pledge to both Baldwin and Stone, the Bureau never stopped collecting and filing away information on alleged radicals. For the next fifteen years, from 1924 to 1939, agents in the field continued sending such information to their special agents in charge, who would in turn forward them to SOG.
The GID
was
dismantled (until 1939), and the Bureau did halt
new
investigations into these particularly sensitive areas. But none were necessary for—unknown to Attorney General Stone and most of his successors—Hoover had secretly made other arrangements which provided him with the information he desired, without any of the risks.
Baldwin was
greatly
impressed by Hoover. “I think we were wrong in our estimate of his attitude,” Baldwin happily admitted in a letter to Stone. Days after the letter, the ACLU issued a press release, praising Attorney General Stone’s new guidelines and his choice of John Hoover as acting director. And
this was followed by numerous speeches in which Baldwin assured his audiences that the ACLU now believed that the Justice Department’s Red-hunting days were over.
34
Perhaps more than a little surprised at how well his confrontation with the “intellectual anarchist” had gone, Hoover wrote Baldwin an effusive thankyou letter, in which he said, “If I can leave my desk each day with the knowledge that I have in no way violated any of the rights of the citizens of this country…then I shall feel satisfied.”
35
Thus began the curious partnership of what soon became the leading law enforcement agency in the United States, and that nation’s foremost—and at times only—organization dedicated to the safeguarding of individual liberties.
In the decades ahead that partnership grew much curiouser.
Whether aware of it or not, Hoover had passed his last test. The probationary period was over. During the past seven months Attorney General Stone had not only observed Hoover’s performance but also quietly considered others for the post. Hoover, he later recalled, gave “far greater promise than any other man I had heard of.” He was, Stone felt strongly, “a man of exceptional intelligence, alertness and executive ability.”
36
On December 10, 1924, Attorney General Stone called Hoover into his office and, with even a trace of a smile, informed him that he could drop the “acting” from his title.
He was making a number of other changes, Stone added. For example, William J. Donovan would no longer head the Criminal Division. He was promoting him to assistant to the attorney general, the second-highest position in the Justice Department, over all the divisions.
It’s quite likely, though unrecorded, that during this same meeting Stone shared a personal secret with Hoover. Six days earlier, on December 4, Stone had written his son a letter which began, “
Confidentially
there is much prospect that I may go on to the Supreme Court by the first of the year.”
37
Stone’s appointment was announced on January 5, 1925; the Senate voted its confirmation on February 2; and on the twenty-fourth of that month Stone submitted his resignation as attorney general.
Before Stone left office, Hoover took care of the Donovan problem. He did it very adroitly. He was fearful, he confided to Stone, that in the years to come the politicians might again attempt to take over the Bureau; if they succeeded, all of Stone’s ideas and concepts, and their efforts to achieve them, would be for naught.
On January 12, 1925, Attorney General Stone issued a policy statement, in the form of a letter to all Department of Justice officials and employees. It stated that the attorney general would be responsible for overall supervision of the Bureau of Investigation and that the director of said Bureau would report directly to, and take his instructions solely from, said official.
J. Edgar Hoover had won his first battle with William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
Helen Gandy took the letter and put it in a folder, to which she gave the
uninformative heading ATTORNEY GENERAL (SUBMISSION OF MEMORANDA BY). It was one of the first items in what would become known as the Official/Confidential file.
38
Periodically, over the years, Mr. Justice Stone dropped in on Director Hoover and asked for an accounting of his stewardship. Stone remained immensely proud of the man he had chosen, and quietly, behind the scenes, defended him in many a battle. Only in his later years did he voice reservations about certain practices of the Bureau, and even then the criticisms was muted and private, confidences shared with old and trusted friends. He complained, for example, that the FBI was getting much too much publicity; its effect on the organization could only be harmful.
For his part, Hoover deified Harlan Fiske Stone. His would be the only formal portrait of an attorney general ever to hang in Hoover’s inner office. Over the years attorneys general came and went—a few Hoover even liked—but all at some point were made aware that no matter what they did, in Hoover’s eyes they’d never measure up to the man with the scowling face.
The announcement of Hoover’s permanent appointment was largely ignored by the press.
Time
did mention it, but said of Hoover simply that he was known to have a retentive memory. Only the
Washington Evening Star
saw fit to devote a whole article to it. But since it ran on the obituary page, under the headline DAYS OF “OLD SLEUTH” ARE ENDED, most readers probably thought it just another death notice.
And in a sense it was, for it concerned the end of an era. But even more significant, it announced a birth: the beginning of the Hoover myth.
“The days of the ‘Old Sleuth’ are over,” proclaimed the
Star.
“The old-time detective, the man of ‘shadows’ and ‘frame-ups’ and ‘get the goods in any way you can,’ is a thing of the past.”
There was a “new order” in the Department of Justice, the
Star
said, and heading it, representing “the new school of crime detection,” was “John Edgar Hoover, disciple of Blackstone.”
“As an assistant to Burns, young Hoover got some education in the arts of the old school. But most of these he is casting aside. He is striking out along new and clean lines. He is not going to have men snooping around the offices of Senators and Representatives. He is going to try and do his work in a big and legitimate way.”
The new director was a “homebred,” the paper proudly noted, a former Central High cadet who’d graduated from marching to Sousa tunes to his present membership in “the military intelligence division of the Officers’ Reserve Corps.”
“Young Mr. Hoover…has no entangling alliances,” the
Star
reported. “Among his friends he is known to be as clean as a hound’s tooth…
“It is an interesting experiment that Attorney General Stone is making…Detectives of the old school the whole world over, from Scotland Yard to
Tokio, will be watching this new idea in Washington.”
39
Robert T. Small, who wrote the
Star
piece, was not just a local reporter. He was also Washington correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association. His article on Hoover appeared in scores of newspapers all over the United States.
Long before Mother Hoover had finished pasting the clippings in her scrapbook, the first magazine article on her son appeared, in the very popular
Literary Digest.
Small also wrote for the
Digest.
Picking up on Small’s old-and-new sleuth theme, the
Digest
editors took a bit of literary license, observing that in contrast to “the prominent and much-discust” Burns, “the new chief detective, John Edgar Hoover, is a scholar, a gentleman and a scientist.”
Heady stuff for one of any age. And, in the new director’s case, addictive.
*
That J. Edgar Hoover never publicly acknowledged Mrs. Willebrandt’s role in his appointment was probably due less to sexism than to that remarkable woman’s affinity for generating controversy.
Forgetting her many accomplishments, people tended to remember Mabel Walker Willebrandt for such things as introducing the issue of Al Smith’s Catholicism in the 1928 campaign (although she later converted to Catholicism); telling a reporter who questioned her regarding the Ku Klux Klan, “I have no objections to people dressing up in sheets if they enjoy that sort of thing”; abandoning her husband (or so he charged in a well-publicized suit); and—after retiring from her job as the Justice Department’s chief prohibition officer—obtaining government subsidies so that the California grape industry could market a pulp product which, if one added water and sugar and waited sixty days, produced a 12 percent wine.
*
A travel-weary visitor from Washington was offered a drink by the Denver SAC. Within a week Denver had a new special agent in charge.
*
Nor were most of the ideas either Stone’s or Hoover’s. Stone’s admitted model was Scotland Yard. He knew little about its actual operating procedures, but it had what he considered the three main qualifications for a successful police organization: (1) that it be law-abiding itself; (2) that all appointees be men of intelligence and some education; and (3) that they be subjected to a thorough course of training for their work.
†
A special was a case so important that a number of agents were assigned to it alone. JODIL (the Bureau’s telegraphic shorthand for the search for John Dillinger) was one such case. Each special was run by one experienced agent. Operating from the scene, not Washington, and with the authority to make instant decisions, he personally picked each member of the elite squads and, ignoring field office boundaries, sent them wherever the leads pointed. This highly concentrated assault, the forerunner of the modern strike force, broke many of the Bureau’s biggest cases.
*
As Roger Baldwin put it many years later, “Harlan Stone was a very good friend of ours. He had our ideas and we had his ideas.”
25
†
The National Civil Liberties Bureau, one of the forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union, had been formed expressly to protect the rights of conscientious objectors. The Propaganda League was composed of members of the prestigious Union League Club. As dollar-a-year employees of the Justice Department, they were exempt from military service.
*
Many years later, on the eve of his ninety-second birthday, Roger Baldwin—who had lived to read his own FBI file—recalled these and subsequent meetings with a rueful smile: “Mr. Hoover professed to be a great believer in civil liberties. He often lectured me about them.”
Baldwin died August 26, 1981, at the age of ninety-seven.
*
Neither the agents nor their director seemed to understand what Baldwin and the ACLU were up to. For example, in 1934, Hoover himself reported to FDR’s press secretary Steve Early that the ACLU had “participated actively in connection with lynching, radical activities, etc.”
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