G-Man, page 22
Hoover lavished attention on personnel policies during his first decade as director. In December 1929, during his annual appropriations testimony, he described in detail an agent’s hiring and training, implying that his own high standards outdid anything dreamed of by the civil service. He did not mention his unofficial favoritism: the GW degree, the fraternity background he liked his agents to have. Instead, he emphasized the Bureau’s superiority to other government agencies in nearly every aspect of its professional screening. Bureau employees “are not appointed under civil service,” he noted. Rather, they were chosen for their educational qualifications and then subjected to a battery of social and technical tests, including a written exam, screenings for “proper personality” and “proper personal appearance,” and a full physical workup. If approved, the agent hired on for a six-week training school, another exam, and finally a two-month probationary period. “If his services are satisfactory,” Hoover concluded, “he receives a permanent assignment in the field service.”
Hoover’s testimony was partly defensive. In the late 1920s, Congress passed the Welch Bill, which attempted to restructure the pay system of federal agencies. Rumors suggested that a more uniform imposition of civil service rules might be next, folding Hoover’s men into the system. Seeking to head off this possibility, Hoover pointed out that his agents already adhered to prohibitions on political advocacy, and that he rejected all pressure by politicians to hire hacks and favored sons. If anything, he insisted that civil service standards were too lenient for his taste. Bureau men were professionals, as one Justice employee noted in a 1928 memo, engaged in “highly specialized” and “unique” work that “defies classification.” They could not possibly be drawn from a pool that also fed the Labor, Commerce, and Agriculture Departments.[19]
There were two problems with this claim. First, other agencies operated under civil service regulation and did just fine. Second, an entire section of the Bureau, Hoover’s prized Identification Division, already worked under civil service rules as well. Hoover often lauded the division as a paragon of efficiency—“the most vitally necessary organization for law enforcement in this country to-day,” as he informed the Appropriations Committee in February 1931. When it came to the civil service question, though, he regularly bemoaned identification employees’ incompetence and lack of professional demeanor. A month after praising the division before Congress, he ordered Bureau officials to draw up a list of problems they had encountered at the hands of their own civil service employees.[20]
As he had with crime statistics, Hoover ultimately prevailed. Despite the rumors, he kept his agents under his control, while the identification clerks continued to operate under the civil service. Some agents cited Hoover’s direct authority as a source of loyalty and esprit de corps. He “handled, or approved, all appointments originally and they knew that,” Clegg recalled. “He, consequently, was rewarded by a very faithful service, and hard work and successful work.” Others saw something less benevolent in Hoover’s exercise of internal discretion. “If you have any backbone or independence and do not fit into the so-called ‘Super Efficiency’ machine . . . you are given the boot,” one critic complained in 1933. “The director could not be the petty tsar and get away with these injustices if there was a court of appeals or if his men were under the Civil Service.”[21]
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Hoover’s homage to science and professionalism was not all talk. As he gained confidence, he began to accelerate the development of programs based on these principles, hoping to give the Bureau a clear role to play within the president’s anti-crime agenda. The Identification Division and the crime statistics program had set the template: both required technical expertise and enabled the Bureau to coordinate the work of local police departments. In 1932, Hoover introduced two other projects that fit this model.
The first was a publication known as “Fugitives Wanted by Police,” launched in the fall of 1932. As the title suggested, the earliest issues focused narrowly on escaped prisoners and other fugitives from justice, providing police across the country with profiles and fingerprints through which they might assist each other in apprehension. With the increasing number of automobiles, fugitives could more easily cross from one municipality into another to avoid detection. Hoover’s proposed solution was to make information about their crimes and identities more widely available. In its earliest incarnations, the top-secret publication went out only to chiefs of police. Over time, though, Hoover began to use the magazine to convey other forms of technical information: how to dust for the most detailed fingerprints, how to handle explosives. In 1935, the publication acquired a new name—a general Law Enforcement Bulletin, no longer restricted to fugitives, now Hoover’s house organ for communicating with local police.[22]
The second initiative was more ambitious. In 1932, during the worst months of the Great Depression, Hoover set out to create the world’s most spectacular forensic laboratory, and despite his limited budget he invested heavily. The equipment alone necessitated a major appropriation. The lab needed ultraviolet lamps, specialized cameras, and at least three different kinds of microscope. It also required moulage facilities, where agents could reconstruct “parts of the human body,” especially wounds and missing limbs, in cast form. Hoover aspired to build the nation’s most extensive collection of bullets, guns, cartridges, typewriters, tire treads, and paper watermarks, to assist local police in identifying scattered bits of evidence. He approved equipment for hair and fiber analysis, as well as a “chemical apparatus for the examination of blood stains.” He provided these high-skill services free of charge to local police departments, who sent in evidence for testing just as they submitted criminal statistics and fingerprints. To run the facility, he appointed Charles Appel, a thirty-seven-year-old college graduate and Washington, D.C., native.[23]
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While Hoover embraced certain new duties in the early 1930s, he avoided many more, and these choices, too, mattered for the Bureau’s future. Asked before a congressional committee about the ethics of wiretapping, Hoover swore that the Bureau had never engaged such “unethical” methods. Asked by the president to investigate the Bonus Army debacle, he did his best to limit the Bureau’s role to checking fingerprints and passing along left-leaning pamphlets. Asked by another congressional committee about the activities of the Communist Party, he spoke at length about the party’s “dangerous” revolutionary outlook but insisted that “since 1924 to date there has been no investigation conducted by the Department of Justice of communistic activities.”[24]
He also played little initial role in 1932’s most sensational and heavily publicized crime: the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old baby boy. In the case’s early weeks, as the frantic family assembled the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom and begged for their son’s return, the Bureau tested fingerprints and circulated state police circulars but remained far from the center of action. As in many high-profile crimes, Hoover pointed to a lack of jurisdiction. He could provide advice and coordination and technical support but he was not in charge.[25]
Only after New Jersey authorities located the baby’s body—mostly decomposed, left to rot in a shallow grave a few miles from the Lindbergh estate—did he begin to develop a more active role. The New Jersey and New York police would always be the lead agencies, the ones who hunted down clues, conducted most of the interviews, and performed the grunt work. But by late spring of 1932 the public demand to find the kidnapper was too great for the federal authorities to ignore. On May 13, the day after the baby’s body was found, President Hoover instructed the Bureau to serve as a clearinghouse for federal efforts concerning the case—“the first time such a drastic move has been made except in time of war,” in The Evening Star’s overblown description. The following month, Congress went still further, voting to make interstate kidnapping a federal crime. The law was a logical outcome of the president’s commitment to bringing the federal government into the battle against crime. It also marked the start of a disturbing new era at the Bureau, and the end of Hoover’s Depression idyll.[26]
Chapter 13
Chairman of the Moral Uplift Squad
(1927–1932)
Hoover (right) with agent Melvin Purvis around 1934. Their surviving correspondence allows unique glimpses of Hoover’s inner life and sexual attitudes.
National Archives and Records Administration
One other feature of Hoover’s life became more noticeable as he settled into the comfortable patterns of adulthood. Now well into his thirties, he still showed no interest in women and no signs of getting married. In his younger years, his single status had been unremarkable, easily explained by the need to buckle down and make a living. Then, too, it was perfectly ordinary for young men to spend their time with each other, passing seamlessly from the cadet corps to the fraternity to the University Club and the Masons. The structure of American manhood often separated men from women, providing clubs, fraternities, offices, saloons—even entire professions—where they could hold themselves apart from female influence. Still, at a certain point men were supposed to step forward, propose marriage, and begin a family. By the early 1930s, Hoover was the proper age, earning a decent salary, with no serious obligations or debts beyond the care of his aging mother. Getting married was the next obvious thing.
Other Bureau men understood this imperative, peeling off one by one from Hoover’s social circle to assume the trappings of married life. Frank Baughman—the Kappa Alpha brother who had seen Hoover through so much of college and the early Justice years—married in 1932, with Hoover by his side as best man. Hoover, by contrast, grew increasingly removed from the entire prospect of marriage. He expressed little interest in women either inside or outside of the Bureau, where he spent the vast majority of his time. Though only men could be appointed as agents, the Bureau employed its fair share of young women: clerks and secretaries hired to file reports, take dictation, and identify fingerprints. The most important of these was Helen Gandy, who had stayed with Hoover after his promotion to director, and who continued to take his calls, greet his visitors, and keep track of his confidential files. Gandy remained single, even as other women at the Bureau married and moved on from paying work. Hoover did not prohibit dating between male and female employees. His own social outings and expressions of intimacy nonetheless occurred almost exclusively with other men.[1]
Americans had a name for this sort of figure: he was a “bachelor,” a label that would be applied to Hoover repeatedly as he aged into definitive single status. The bachelor was an established type in the early twentieth century, when the rise of office jobs and city living meant that more men could entertain the possibility of a single life. Hoover’s domestic arrangements fit one of the best-known stereotypes: that of the bachelor who lived at home in order to care for his widowed mother. But there were other, less virtuous forms of life associated with bachelorhood as well. According to conventional wisdom, bachelors came in a variety of suspect variations: playboys and bon vivants; weak-willed or degenerate “sissies”; career men too serious to tolerate feminine flightiness; nebbishes too awkward to relax in female company.[2]
Hoover was certainly a career man. “He married the Bureau of Investigation,” admirers would later explain. The women around him saw something else, an inability to forge deep emotional relationships of any sort at all. His niece Margaret acknowledged that his devotion to work left little time or patience for dating. “I think he regarded women as a kind of hindrance,” she said. “You know, they sort of got in your way when you were going places.” At the same time, she argued, he was trapped by a larger failing, an abiding “fear of becoming too personally involved with people.” Doris Rogers, who joined the Bureau’s Chicago office as a secretary in the early 1930s, saw a similar insecurity. “The perception of Hoover at the Bureau was that he was not a whole person. He needed someone else to buoy him. That was why he always had to have a man follow him around.”[3]
These ideas fit with the reigning stereotypes of bachelorhood, alternately seen as a benign social phenomenon and a deep cultural threat. Today, another explanation seems far more obvious: Hoover had settled into adulthood as a gay man—perfectly capable of intimacy and sex, just not with women. As during his college years, the contours of Hoover’s social life in the early 1930s fit with this proposition. If anything, it is the most straightforward explanation for the life he chose. Few people reach their midthirties without having some sort of sexual experience. While we have no detailed record of what transpired behind closed doors, it seems safe to say that Hoover was not having sex with women.
But merely applying a label does not get us very far toward understanding his interior life—how he himself thought about his most intimate relationships. The fact is that we know very little about Hoover’s innermost thoughts and feelings on the subjects of sexuality and desire. There is one great exception, however—an extraordinary cache of letters between Hoover and Bureau agent Melvin Purvis, one of Hoover’s closest friends and ultimately one of the most famous Bureau employees of the 1930s. It was Purvis who saved the letters, providing a rare glimpse into his boss’s personal longings and foibles. Hoover was by turns funny, tender, solicitous, and flirtatious in his correspondence with Purvis. He could also be stern and sometimes punitive. He lavished attention on Purvis’s physical attributes: the agent’s fine features, his swooning effect on women, a certain insouciance that made Purvis, in Hoover’s view, one of “the Clark Gables of the service.” At the same time, he insisted that Purvis reply promptly to all his letters, address him by his nickname, even acquire films and antiques on his behalf.[4]
His banter with Purvis presented one of the few documented instances in which Hoover was willing to laugh at himself. “Of course my interest is solely as a censor or as Chairman of the Moral Uplift Squad,” he joked upon receiving a set of films he had requested, apparently some sort of erotic footage distributed by the Tru-Vue company. He also used humor to mask more overt admiration. “It was some night + I am still looking forward to you producing a set,” he wrote after viewing the films, thanking Purvis for his “sassy note” and suggesting that the agent create his own erotic oeuvre. The correspondence contains nothing that would reveal a sexual relationship between the two men. But their emotions and flirtations went beyond the ordinary run of club-and-work friendship. The Purvis letters show that Hoover actively sought out the affections of other Bureau men, and used his position as director to push the boundaries of his relationships.[5]
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Before he was a Bureau agent, Purvis was a model Southern boy, a son of middling privilege in low-country South Carolina. Born in 1903 in Timmonsville, a segregated tobacco town, he followed a Hooveresque path, serving as captain of his high school cadet corps and later joining Kappa Alpha. After studying law, he accepted a position with the only decent firm in the region, but earned no salary and racked up only limited fees. His employers “doubted that Applicant would make any great success in the practice of law as he was not aggressive enough in going after the dollars,” one Bureau report noted of Purvis’s lackluster law career. After twenty months of frustration, Purvis applied for a job at the State Department but received a prompt rejection. His congressman suggested that Purvis apply to the Bureau, where young, legally trained Kappa Alphas were in short supply but great demand.[6]
Purvis was just twenty-three years old when he applied, two years shy of Hoover’s minimum for agents. And it showed. Slight and boyish, with a teenager’s cautious gait and self-conscious smile, Purvis could easily be mistaken for a college student. During their first interview, Nathan found him absurdly young and naive, “pretty much like a kid.” He doubted Purvis’s tales of global travel and sophistication (“probably all over the state of South Carolina”). But Nathan thought him pleasant and healthy enough, if not, according to his legal colleagues, “exceptionally brilliant,” and decided to hire him.[7]
Like all new agents, Purvis was required to move anywhere in the country without complaint. A week after signing on, he found himself in Dallas, where he set to work studying the Bureau manual and running down auto thefts. From there, he moved on to various other field offices, including New York, Cincinnati, Butte, and Chicago. He traveled between postings with an entourage: not only his Black “valet,” who worked as maid, chauffeur, and butler, but also his palomino mare. Even his means of transportation was fabulous, an eight-cylinder Pierce-Arrow automobile that could outrun all but the most fortified government vehicles. He presented himself as a man of style, even if neither his salary nor his age had yet grown to meet his aristocratic tastes.[8]
Perhaps it was this personal flair that caught Hoover’s eye. By late 1927, less than a year into Purvis’s career, Hoover ordered the twenty-four-year-old back to Washington to be groomed for executive assignment. Bureau supervisors recognized Purvis’s personal charm and rock-solid loyalty, but they noted several troubling qualities that seemed to mesh uneasily with Hoover’s hierarchical culture. Purvis often showed up late—just a minute or two, but enough to earn official censure. According to one supervisor, he also suffered from “being over-confident,” a Napoleonic trait perhaps intended to make up for his slight stature, reedy voice, and relative youth. Purvis was not the sort of boy who had been held up to Hoover during childhood as the masculine ideal. Nor did he live up to Hoover’s recent vision of the model Bureau agent. “He is not the rugged type who impressed one as being a forceful character,” one report noted.[9]
