G-Man, page 10
Hoover was no doubt relieved to avoid the war. But his decision not to enlist probably had less to do with his temperament or preferences than with the same problem that had constrained his choices after high school: the situation at home. Dickerson experienced no miraculous recovery during Hoover’s law school years. If anything, he appears to have grown worse, unable to maintain even the rudiments of a daily routine. With his resignation from the Coast Survey, Annie and Dickerson lost their income and became dependent on their youngest son. And so Hoover, once again, stayed at home with them.
After high school, there had been something disappointing about remaining in Washington while other men set out to explore the world. This time, the world came to Washington. During the spring and summer of 1917, while Hoover was wrapping up his classes at GW and poking around for employment, some forty thousand war workers poured into the district, each of them hoping to secure a government job. A few were famous and accomplished, “dollar-a-year men” who volunteered their services running the new war agencies. Many more were young and anonymous and spent their days toiling away in “tempos,” the drab temporary office buildings that sprang up along the mall. Later generations would mythologize other moments of intensified federal activity—the imaginative fervor of the New Deal, the vast organizational triumphs of World War II—as among the most vital periods of their lives. For Hoover’s generation, it was the Great War that mattered and that brought the federal government to life on a grand scale.[7]
Countless “firsts” were rushed into being during those early months of war: the first mass draft, the first widespread use of the income tax, the first significant experiments in federal propaganda and surveillance. The swiftness and scale of these changes have led historians to identify 1917 as the moment the American state began to acquire its truly modern form, the one in which men like Hoover would make their careers. In Washington, the lived experience of the wartime bureaucracy was not quite so tidy. What stood out to many federal employees was not how powerful the government was but how weak it seemed, and how little anyone appeared to know what they were doing.
The anxieties bubbled up everywhere: Who would pay for the war? Who would fight in it? Would the American people support it? Could the war indeed be won? Wilson had a simple answer to most of these questions: a democratic people would fight a war for democracy through democratic means. What he meant in theory was that all forms of mobilization, from the draft to war finance, would be voluntary rather than coercive. In practice, this approach had a darker side, an insistence on conformity that tended to fuel both vigilante violence and a new regime of speech codes and legal restrictions. Going to war had never been popular: German Americans did not want to fight against Germany; Irish Americans did not want to fight on behalf of England; workers, socialists, and Westerners showed little interest in fighting to make good on New York bankers’ overseas loans. The war effort thus began amid cries to squelch “disloyalty,” root out spies, and silence internal critics. Like many war workers, Hoover found himself pushed and pulled between competing imperatives—to build new structures while maintaining traditional limits, to suppress dissent while fighting a democratic war.[8]
This combination of ambition and anxiety, of liberation and repression, could be found nearly everywhere in Washington. With the influx of war workers, housing suddenly became a precious commodity. Boarders began to crowd into homes that had once housed single families. Annie and Dickerson took in a man named Roy Plympton, a twenty-nine-year-old postal worker who, like Hoover, seems to have avoided the draft. There were soldiers around the city, too: a total of 130,000 men in uniform within a twenty-five-mile radius. Perhaps most visible of all were the single young women, arriving from small towns across the country to take up secretarial work. Late in life, one of Hoover’s confidants would spread the story that Hoover had fallen in love with one of these war workers in 1917, a woman named Alice who broke his heart by taking up with a soldier fighting in France. If true (and the evidence is meager), it would mark an important moment in Hoover’s coming-of-age, his first serious flirtation with a member of the opposite sex.[9]
More likely, Hoover was simply part of the wartime social whirl, with its tendency to push back against the strictures he had absorbed as a church boy and perfect student. The presence of so many young, transient people gave Washington a new energy but also a sense of social chaos and disorder. The city went dry in the fall of 1917, a morals measure promoted by Texas senator (and loyal Kappa Alpha brother) Morris Sheppard. But such restrictions did not prevent the development of an energetic underground social scene. Despite its martial atmosphere, Washington was an exciting, even wild place to be as the war began. “The one invariable rule seemed to be that every individual was found doing something he or she had never dreamed of doing before,” a local writer observed. That insight turned out to be one of the open secrets of the war: If you were headed to the battlefields of France, you were in serious trouble. If you were in Washington, you were indeed embarking upon a “Great Adventure.”[10]
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Hoover began his job at the Justice Department on July 26, 1917, six days after the national draft lottery. In later years, July 26 would emerge as a storied date in FBI lore, celebrated with flowers, parties, and letters of congratulation. In 1917, though, very little about the Justice Department seemed especially promising. Created by Congress during Reconstruction, the department had spent the past half century dealing mostly with issues of trade and taxation and cleaning up after botched elections. Until 1917, the department was insignificant enough to fit into a limestone mansion that had once been a stand-alone private residence. Hoover’s arrival coincided with the move to an eight-story office building, a sign not only of the department’s growing size and status but also of the mounting wartime chaos.[11]
The man in charge at Justice was an antitrust lawyer named Thomas Gregory, the first of many attorneys general who would come and go over the course of Hoover’s career. To a Kappa Alpha like Hoover, Gregory was a familiar type. Born in Mississippi, the son of a Confederate doctor, he had come of age in the turmoil of Reconstruction and emerged as a passionate Texas Democrat. Once in Washington, he stayed loyal to the Southern Society, home to many influential Kappa Alphas. He had accepted the post of attorney general on the assumption that he would continue his antitrust work while helping Wilson solidify Democratic power. When war broke out, he found himself grappling with “activities wholly different in character.”
Among those activities, three stood out as major sources of controversy and challenge. The first was draft enforcement, a duty that required the Justice Department to police the compliance of millions of American men. The second came under the auspices of the Espionage Act of 1917, passed in June as a tool for suppressing not only bona fide foreign espionage but also any act that might “willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States.” Finally, there was the “alien enemy” problem—the issue of what to do about noncitizens born in belligerent countries but currently living in the United States, where they were now suspected of danger or disloyalty. As Gregory noted, all three of these duties fundamentally altered the Justice Department’s “relationship to the daily life and habits of our citizens.” From his first day on the job, Hoover was thrown into negotiating this new relationship between the government and its citizens and finding his own place within it.[12]
Out of the war came his first experiences in surveillance, detection, and law enforcement. And there were other lessons as well, in governance and bureaucracy, in managing an organization that suddenly found itself under tremendous pressure to deliver. Like Herbert Putnam at the Library of Congress, Gregory provided Hoover with a model of institutional leadership, and one much closer to Hoover’s future profession. The attorney general could be venomous toward “disloyal” Americans. “May God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging Government,” he declared in one oft-cited speech. At the same time, Gregory cautioned against mob violence and prejudging German-born residents. He showed a similarly mixed approach when it came to federal power, expanding the Justice Department bureaucracy while also warning against creating bureaucracies that might be impossible to dismantle when the war ended. Gregory worked to build the wartime government, but he did so with one eye on conservative states’ rights principles and another on the dangerous passions that could be unleashed by “100 percent Americanism.”[13]
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In the first document he signed as a Justice Department employee, Hoover promised to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” In 1917, that meant dealing with one of the new facets of the department’s war work: the internment and registration of German “alien enemies.” Most of this work took place within the War Emergency Division, created to serve as a clearinghouse for home-front intelligence. Hoover also came into contact during these first few months with the organization to which he would dedicate his life: the Justice Department’s little-known Bureau of Investigation. Just nine years old in 1917, the Bureau functioned as the department’s detective wing, investigating violations of federal law. Hoover’s first encounters with Bureau agents came through his German internment work: they performed the on-the-ground field inquiries while he processed the cases from Washington. He must have liked what he saw. For the rest of his life, he would champion the investigative process as one of the government’s highest callings.[14]
During his war address in April, Wilson had delivered a warning to foreign-born residents who had neglected to become American citizens, vowing to use the “firm hand of stern repression” in all cases of “disloyalty.” Millions of Americans had responded to his call by purging their communities of all things German: no more Beethoven or Wagner, no more German-language instruction, no more “sauerkraut” or “hamburgers” (instead, Americans ate “liberty cabbage” and “liberty sandwiches”). Some citizens went even further, engaging in acts of group violence to police patriotism by force. On the same day as Wilson’s speech, a mob in Wyoming seized a pro-German loyalist and hung him from a tree; they cut him down before he could choke to death and forced him to kiss the American flag in gratitude. On August 1, just days after Hoover started his job, another vigilante group abducted anti-war labor radical Frank Little in Butte, Montana, tied him to the back of a car, and hauled him through the town before hanging him from a railroad trestle.[15]
Americans justified such actions by pointing not only to wartime atrocities, but to the menace of home-front sabotage. As early as 1915, military authorities had begun to warn that German agents were behind mysterious explosions of ships and defense facilities along the East Coast. The worst episode occurred at Black Tom Island, just off the tip of Manhattan. There, saboteurs blew up a federal munitions depot and produced a massive explosion that killed several people and rattled the entire city. It would take two decades for the government to prove definitively that Black Tom was, indeed, an act of German sabotage. But many Americans needed no convincing about the potential for Germany teachery. According to one study, more than seventy people in the United States died at the hands of home-front mobs during 1917 and 1918.[16]
The Department of Justice responded to anti-German sentiment with both alarm and encouragement. Attorney General Gregory urged Americans to exercise restraint despite the passions of war, and to respect the rights of both German citizens and anti-war dissenters. At the same time, he licensed the creation of a volunteer brigade known as the American Protective League, soliciting some 250,000 men to sign up as deputies of the Justice Department to provide extra manpower in enforcing wartime laws. Though Gregory had hoped that the organization might constrain certain mob tendencies, APL members soon became vigilantes in their own right, zealously seeking out immigrants and flashing badges that identified them as “secret service” operatives despite a near-total lack of screening or training.[17]
Wartime restrictions reinforced their sense of righteousness. By executive order, all German-born men over the age of fourteen who had not become U.S. citizens were automatically considered “alien enemies,” a category that meant they had to register with the federal government and could be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed” at any moment. Those who remained at large were forbidden to live within half a mile of any military facility and could not own guns or other “implements of war.” They were also not permitted to live anywhere within Washington, D.C., making the national capital the only American city to purge itself entirely of noncitizen Germans. Those who resisted were subject to arrest and imprisonment in an army-run internment camp, surrounded by barbed wire.[18]
Hoover’s earliest duties at the Justice Department seem to have focused on “questions relating to the parole of men in detention,” especially German seamen who had been captured in American waters. By December, he moved on to offering preliminary assessments of internment cases themselves. Most of the alleged violations were procedural rather than overtly dangerous: living too close to the waterfront, failing to register as an alien enemy. It was up to Hoover not to gather evidence but to render judgment. There were no hearings or trials, just a few sheets of paper outlining the known facts. If the department so decided, the accused could be sent without further question to a military internment facility and forced to stay there, potentially for the duration of the war.
These were subjective decisions, often made in haste. “I have a feeling of suspicion about this fellow and recommend permanent detention as the safest course,” wrote one Justice Department lawyer, reviewing the case of a Southern Pacific railroad employee whose route took him near wartime facilities. Hoover relied on similarly vague instincts to render his decisions. In one case, he recommended internment for a man who had denounced President Wilson as a “cock-sucker and a thief”; the man, Hoover concluded, used “various vulgar and obscene remarks” in the service of “the most pronounced pro-German expressions.” Hoover felt similarly alarmed about the case of a German teenager who had fought beside Pancho Villa in Mexico, then snuck back across the U.S. border. In yet another case, he identified a man’s “lying about his social standing and connections” as a reason for internment, despite the fact that allegations of spying and direct contact with German agents “have not been able to be substantiated by evidence.”[19]
But Hoover could also show compassion and a willingness to give accused men a second chance. In one case, he reviewed the arrest of German citizen Max Schachman, accused of selling whiskey to men in uniform and “soliciting men for immoral women.” These were clear violations of wartime statutes. Hoover recommended that Schachman nonetheless be paroled, perhaps since the man was the sole support for a wife and three children. In a similar case, Hoover argued for mercy toward a German-born sailor who had snuck back into maritime employment (forbidden by wartime regulations) after failing to find a job on dry land. Hoover even suggested parole for the Southern Pacific employee who engendered the “feeling of suspicion” in his Justice Department colleague. In all three instances, Hoover acknowledged that the men had broken the law but declined to see them as dangers to the war effort. But in all three cases he was overruled by superiors.[20]
He may have concluded from this experience that compassion and restraint were unlikely to be rewarded, especially in moments of national emergency. By the attorney general’s estimate, more than six thousand “suspected enemy aliens” were interned or detained under presidential warrants for the duration of the war, along with “several thousand” more held for shorter periods. The salutary effects of the program, he boasted, were even more widespread. “The summary character and severe penalty of internment has acted throughout the country as a powerful deterrent against alien-enemy activity,” Gregory wrote in 1918. What mattered, in this view, was not that the program doled out perfect justice, but that it taught a lesson about the power and reach of the wartime government.[21]
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Though Hoover was assigned to German cases, he also witnessed a second—and ultimately more influential—campaign of surveillance and prosecution during those first months of war. This one targeted men and women of the American left, self-admitted revolutionaries who held the war in open contempt as a needless bloodbath and an act of imperial folly. They came in a variety of affiliations: disciples of the Midwestern socialist Eugene Debs; militant unionists from the Industrial Workers of the World; anarchists who appealed for an end to both capitalism and organized government; Black activists who opposed the war as an exercise in democratic hypocrisy. During Wilson’s first term, they had all spoken out vociferously against the “hell of slaughter” propagated “by the ruling class to rob and kill and enslave the working class,” in Debs’s words. Until the spring of 1917, those sentiments had been reasonably popular, attracting thousands of followers to rallies and protests. Once Congress entered the war and approved the Espionage Act, however, popular sentiment shifted, and the few remaining dissenters found themselves isolated and vulnerable. The Bolshevik Revolution, which erupted in November 1917, added to the sense that revolutionary socialism could be a dangerous force, especially during the instability of wartime.[22]
There is no evidence that Hoover had thought systematically about socialism, anarchism, or other forms of left-wing politics before his arrival at the Justice Department in 1917. During high school, the debate team had taken on questions of free speech and labor activism, but it gave equal time to both sides. At the Library of Congress, he had processed books on European socialists and revolutionaries, but had little time to read them or think about how they applied to American life. From Kappa Alpha and the Presbyterian Church he picked up general suspicions about immigrants and radicals and racial minorities, but those views were hardly exceptional, even in progressive circles. Though Hoover had been taught to be wary of such groups, he appeared to have no fixed ideas about what lay behind left-wing sentiment or what the nation might do about it.
