A lesson learned from G-MAN: J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY, by Beverly Gage

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."- Two-Face 

One of my teaching mottos is, “never feel like you’ve figured it all out, you can always learn more and do better.” As a (somewhat) successful community college teacher, I felt I knew what I was doing, until a teaching credential program forced me to confront how all of my old teaching philosophies simply did not connect with the current digital generation of students. Since I entered high school, I have tried hard to be open to new ideas and approaches for teaching students in a way that can reach them, and I’m certain there are many ways I can improve on what I do; I personally believe that ineffective teachers are those who cling to philosophies from 25 years ago, in spite of evidence that students simply do not respond to them anymore. That leads us to John Edgar Hoover, and the blog title I have, yes, ripped off from Dark Knight. It truly is one of the best quotes in all of pop culture, and one of the most steadily applicable lessons of humanity—history is full of characters who started out lives and careers meaning to do well and make great changes, who steadily curdled into more villainous figures due to a failure to understand and embrace the larger global changes that enveloped them. J. Edgar Hoover built the American FBI into the competent and professional organization that it still tries to be today, but his failure to understand the larger tides of American social change ultimately made him into both a great obstacle to needed change, and an old, senile man who could not admit when he was finished and needed to let the next generation move in. 

J. Edgar Hoover was born into a well-to-do American WASP family in the late 1800’s, and one of the funnier elements of Gage’s book is how little some things change over all the decades of wrenching social and technological disruptions we have lived through. Hoover grew up in an early 1900’s America when there was a real national panic over the idea that “true American manhood” had been lost, that young boys had become too intellectual and feminine, and they had to learn again that “real men” had big muscles, hearts of stone, and exercised power over others (surely none of this sounds familiar to modern audiences). Hoover took these lessons to heart, and devoted his life to being a stoic, unemotional man who held all of his secrets close to his chest. Ironically, this included his single greatest secret—that he was, in all likelihood, a gay man, a fact we can only glean (he had all his personal letters burned upon his death) from his lifelong avoidance of women, the mildly flirtatious tone he adopted in his correspondence with hotshot FBI agents in his younger years, and the fact that he spent his final decades living with a “friend” Clyde Tolson whom he was absolutely devoted to. 

Such personal repression undoubtedly played a role in Hoover’s generally stoic, anti-social demeanor, but in his early decades of public service he looked like one of the true American heroes of the 20th century. Joining federal law enforcement agencies (still a new concept) in the 1910’s, Hoover got swept up in the national hysteria surrounding World War I, and participated in brutal crackdowns on protestors and labor unions who the government saw as too left-leaning. To his credit, he seemed to learn from the national backlash against these arrests, and when he was asked to take over a new Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1920’s, Hoover ordered his agents to treat criminal suspects humanely and to respect their general civil liberties (the famous “Miranda rights” still used today actually had their foundation in these early FBI procedures). Appalled at the lack of coordination between law enforcement agencies in the 1920’s, Hoover devoted the next 20 years to building the FBI into a competent, professional organization that could make real progress in fighting national crime waves. Giving his agents special weapons and training, they were able to defeat the nation’s most hardened criminals in the 1930’s. Perhaps Hoover’s finest moments came during World War II, when the FBI successfully tracked and arrested Nazi saboteurs operating within the United States. Even more impressive was Hoover’s advocacy of these limited and targeted operations over grand political abuses such as the Japanese Internment, which Hoover argued was a massive abuse of government power at a time when very few people were willing to challenge it. 

Had Hoover retired at the end of World War II, he might have cemented his place in the pantheon of heroic government figures who created pivotal new agencies. Alas, the nation in the decades following World War II saw the rise of massive social movements that challenged its traditions of discriminations and exclusions, and Hoover was deeply unprepared on a personal level to even understand these changing ideas, much less be able to properly respond to them. He was an old-school man who believed in a nation of proper gender and racial hierarchies, and he saw any challenge to them as a Communist plot to weaken the foundations of America. Seeing Communist conspiracies around every corner, Hoover violated his own principles to authorize surveillance and disruption of the growing Civil Rights Movement. He was never an outright villain; he actually had great contempt for violent racist white groups, and he occasionally ordered the FBI to put real effort into infiltrating and disrupting them as well. However, he felt deeply threatened by the nation’s changing social mores, and this lead him down dark paths as he got into the final years of his career. He developed an unhealthy obsession with the popularity of Martin Luther King—a man who both exceeded Hoover’s own charisma and leadership abilities, and a man who (often unfortunately) did not show nearly the restraint in his personal desires compared to Hoover—and constantly pressured different presidents to spy on and threaten him. Hoover also saw Black Power as a national threat that had to be broken no matter what the cost, and that lead him to authorizing the brutal assassination of the popular leader Fred Hampton, who had shown a real potential for national leadership. 

Ultimately, Hoover was a national icon who clung on to power too long, long past the point where he had any understanding or connection to the large changes sweeping through the country. His early decades helped to create our entire understanding of how professional investigations should operate and succeed, but in his later decades his clinging to an idealized past lead him to be on the wrong side of history on such crucial issues as civil rights, women’s rights, and the Vietnam War (upon Hoover dying in office at 77, one of the first moves the FBI made was to finally open up the agency to women and people of color). He served eight presidents (only really clashing with the Kennedys), often with distinction, but ended his career as something of a toady for Richard Nixon. Ultimately, Hoover, for all his achievements, serves as a cautionary tale of the dark places that can be reached once public servants have served past the point when they have any real connection to the feelings and actions of America’s youth.