Tag: Unveiled – The Hoover Legacy

Unveiled – The Hoover Legacy, 40 Years After Part 1: The End of an Era

Hoover’s casket in U.S. Capitol
J. Edgar Hoover’s body lies in state in the U.S. Capitol in 1972—an honor afforded to no other civil servant before or since. Hoover died 40 years ago this week. AP Photo

The Hoover Legacy, 40 Years After
Part 1: The End of an Era

05/04/12

He had led the FBI for nearly a half century and worked for eight different presidents, becoming practically an institution in his own right.

So when J. Edgar Hoover’s body was found by his housekeeper on the morning of May 2, 1972—40 years ago this week—the reaction was swift and far-reaching.

Later that day, President Richard Nixon called a press conference to announce the Director’s death, saying, “Every American, in my opinion, owes J. Edgar Hoover a great debt for building the FBI into the finest law enforcement organization in the entire world.” Nixon ordered that all flags at government buildings be flown at half-staff and spoke at Hoover’s funeral two days later.

J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover

Congress responded quickly as well, ordering Hoover’s body to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol—an honor afforded to no other civil servant before or since. The next day, as rain fell on Washington, thousands processed by his casket in the rotunda to pay their respects, and Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger eulogized the departed Director. Allies and admirers took to the floor of Congress to offer often effusive praise, and a new FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the Capitol and the White House, was soon named in his honor.

At the same time, as the inevitable obituaries were written and TV specials aired, there was an undercurrent of reservation and some outright criticism. Hoover’s historic 48-year tenure in such a position of profound influence—and during a stretch of time when America was undergoing great social change—was bound to be marked by some mistakes and controversy. Fairly or unfairly, Hoover was criticized for his aggressive use of surveillance, his perceived reluctance to tackle civil rights crimes, his reputation for collecting and using information about U.S. leaders, and his seeming obsession with the threat of communism.

Both feared and beloved within his own organization, Hoover was clearly a complex and often confounding character. He joined the Department of Justice in 1917 at the tender age of 22 and quickly became a rising star. Hoover was tapped by the attorney general to head the Bureau in 1924, when it was a relatively unknown organization mired in political scandal. Hard-working, smart, and a superb bureaucrat, Hoover took a fledgling organization and molded it into an international leader in law enforcement and national security, one solidly grounded in professionalism and the techniques of modern science. As the Bureau put the trigger-happy gangsters of the 1930s out of business and outsmarted the spies and saboteurs of World War II, the FBI—and its newly christened “G-Men”—became a household name. Hoover rode that wave of fame, earning widespread acclaim as the nation’s top lawman.

The country’s honeymoon with Hoover would ultimately come to end, to some degree in the years before his passing and even more so after his death in the wake of greater scrutiny of the FBI and the growing distrust of government leaders that followed Watergate. Over the next several months, FBI.gov will explore various aspects of the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover through a series of stories and other materials, with the goal of shedding light on less well known or even caricatured areas of his actions and broadening the discussion on his complex and enduring legacy.

Unveiled – The Hoover Legacy, 40 Years After

Hoover shown in the yearbook of his George Washington University law school graduating class in 1916
J. Edgar Hoover is seen in a George Washington University law school yearbook picture from 1916.

The Hoover Legacy, 40 Years After
Part 2: His First Job and the FBI Files

06/28/12

J. Edgar Hoover was just 18 years old when he took his first job in government—an entry-level position as a messenger in the orders department of the Library of Congress.

It was October 13, 1913. No one knew it at the time, but an important foundation in Hoover’s future career as FBI Director (and in the Bureau itself) was being laid.

Hoover work abstract
– View Hoover’s early service record

Young Hoover excelled at his work. He impressed his supervisors and was awarded multiple raises. His position in the orders department—which acquired books, manuscripts, and other items for the Library’s collections—included the opportunity to work in the cataloging department and the loan division. The Library was a half-mile from his house and allowed him to attend law school at night, where he was studying hard and learning quickly.

On July 25, 1917, Hoover left the Library, and he took a job the next day as a clerk in the Department of Justice, where his story becomes better known.

Hoover’s experiences with the Library of Congress and its innovative organization of knowledge have often been credited with influencing the creation of the FBI’s own knowledge management system—the FBI Files. The filing system he helped architect became almost legendary for its efficiency and over the years has been fodder for books, news stories, movies, and even conspiracy theories of all sorts that exaggerate the size and scope of the files.

But were the FBI files modeled on the Library of Congress system? Actually, no. The FBI file system is based on the type of case the file covers. Each file is designated by a classification number—for example, kidnapping cases begin with the number 7, espionage cases with the number 65. This is only vaguely similar to the Library’s system. Also, these classifications were already being used by the Department of Justice; Hoover’s Bureau simply adapted them for its own purposes.

What is true, however, is that Hoover’s Library experience did have a significant impact on how the FBI’s filing system was used and adapted. In a 1951 letter referencing his former position, Hoover wrote, “[T]his job …trained me in the value of collating material. It gave me an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence.”

This ability to synthesize information was key. In 1921, as assistant director, Hoover oversaw the reform of the Bureau’s files, which were in disarray after several organizational restructurings. For the reform, Hoover took something old—the Department of Justice system—and something new—indexing the files as they were created. And then he used something borrowed—from the Library of Congress: the idea of extensive cross-references within the card indices that provided access to the content of the FBI files. Each cross-reference pointed back to the original file and allowed for comparison of information across all files. So an agent or clerk could find a person’s name, an event, a location, or any number of other things, even if it was spread across dozens of different files at Headquarters and in the field offices. In a profession that requires intelligence at its fingertips and the ability to know everything that’s available, this system was crucial to the success of Hoover’s Bureau as it grew and adapted to its expanding mission.

In the end, Hoover’s work at the Library helped the Bureau to create a file system that—in comparison to others of the day—was “unique unto itself,” as one records manager noted in 1941 when surveying the state of records across the nation.