61 pages 2 hours read

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

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2022

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Key Figures

Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received her PhD in history from Columbia University. Her research focuses on 20th-century interactions between governments and social movements. Her first book, The Day Wall Street Exploded, examines the September 1920 bombing in front of the J. P. Morgan office. The explosion killed 40 people, and it would stand as the deadliest terrorist attack in US history until the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. The book covers many of the themes she later explores with G-Man, which is appropriate since Hoover himself was part of the team charged with investigating the bombing, although they never mounted a successful prosecution. Like G-Man, the book examines how government responds to evolving social conditions, often responding to new threats with harsh tactics and blatant violations of constitutional procedure rather than attempting to understand and address the root causes of violent or subversive behavior.

 

In interviews regarding G-Man, Gage has said that she generally agrees with the negative public perception of Hoover as a paranoid and authoritarian bully who abused his office, but that focusing on his most obviously negative qualities is not sufficient for a genuine understanding of the man and, even more importantly, how he both influenced and was influenced by American society as a whole. G-Man won Gage the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

John Edgar Hoover

John Edgar Hoover, generally known as “J. Edgar” was the federal government’s leading law enforcement officer from 1924 until his death in 1972. He was born in Washington, DC, on January 1, 1895, and lived his entire life in the nation’s capital. After receiving a law degree from George Washington University, he entered federal service just as the United States entered the First World War. He joined what was then called the Bureau of Investigation and made a name for himself as the head of its Radical Division, cracking down on antiwar activists, anarchists, and suspected enemy agents. After serving as deputy director of the bureau under the Harding administration, he was named interim director at the age of 29 by President Coolidge. A brilliant administrator with an inexhaustible capacity for work, Hoover championed the bureau as a model of bureaucratic professionalism and innovative techniques, and he made the FBI both a clearinghouse of information for law-enforcement agencies across the country and then a national police force in its own right.

Although never free from critiques that his methods violated constitutional rights, Hoover was largely popular throughout most of his long career. The FBI’s pursuit of famous gangsters like John Dillinger made the G-men a fixture of pop culture, and Hoover’s rabid anticommunism resonated with voters in the early days of the Cold War. He became a much more controversial figure in his later years, especially when his all-consuming fear of communism led him to oppose the civil rights movement and conduct an illegal campaign of surveillance and harassment against Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black activists. Despite his fierce defense of traditional family values, he never married, had children, or had any serious romantic relationships, prompting speculation about his sexuality that persists to this day.

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