G-Man, page 3
Hoover’s great-grandfather William, a butcher, became a true Washington patriarch, fathering eleven children. By the middle of the nineteenth century, those children, and their children’s children, occupied a dusty stretch of Sixth Street between M and N Streets, near what was then the outer perimeter of habitation. The Hoovers were a close-knit, well-established Washington family, if just outside the downtown corridors of power.[5]
Some of the early family men were slave owners, though of a distinctly Washington sort. To the north and south, Maryland and Virginia maintained flourishing plantation economies, and thus large concentrations of men and women held in bondage. In Washington, a political and commercial city, even prominent slaveholders claimed at best a handful of enslaved persons. One early Hoover claimed ownership over two human beings: a boy under fourteen and a slightly older woman, who presumably provided household help. Hoover’s paternal great-grandfather, Dickerson Naylor, owned at least one enslaved person, freed only with the abolition of slavery in the district in 1862. Antebellum Washington was a Southern town, committed to the practice of slavery and to the racial order it entailed.[6]
This Southern legacy would become an important part of Hoover’s upbringing and worldview. And yet there was another side to Washington’s racial history and this, too, shaped Hoover’s family inheritance. As a federal city in the midst of the plantation South, antebellum Washington often served as a refuge for Black men and women. Long-standing rumors suggest that at least one of Hoover’s ancestors hailed from this population. For decades after his appointment as FBI director, there were rumors that Hoover came from a “passing” family—that he was, under the one-drop rule governing racial classifications, actually Black. Circumstantial evidence makes the idea plausible: Hoover’s family lived in a multiracial city and engaged in the sorts of work often performed by Black men and women. Still, census and genealogical documents suggest that the Hoovers were mostly what they said they were: a tight-knit clan of small shopkeepers and tradesmen, among the oldest white families in the city.[7]
From the outside, visiting writers often mocked nineteenth-century Washington as a backwater—a “City of Magnificent Intentions” dismally lacking in worthwhile “houses, roads, and inhabitants,” in the words of Charles Dickens. Families like the Hoovers thought differently, and they organized a distinct local culture to prove it. The most committed of them joined the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia, open only to families present long before Washington became a center of national power. But for all the insistence upon the distinction between locals and politicians, between residents and government transients, nobody lived in Washington for long without being drawn into the federal orbit. The Hoovers were no exception. Around 1853, Hoover’s great-grandfather took a job as a messenger for the post office, among the lowest rungs of the federal hierarchy. That same year, his grandfather, John Thomas Hoover, signed on as a clerk with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the first scientific agency to be endorsed and funded by the federal government. Between them, they began a family tradition of government service that would continue almost unbroken for the next 120 years.[8]
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Of all his paternal ancestors, including his own father, Hoover turned out most like his grandfather John Thomas, the man who introduced the family to professional government work. They shared a name: “John Edgar” was, in part, a tribute to John Thomas. But the affinity seems to have gone much deeper, a commonality of ideas, ambition, and temperament that reached across generations. As a young man, John Thomas was relentlessly driven and efficient, determined to secure a foothold in the emerging federal bureaucracy. He was the first family member to show how diligence, organization, and a knack for file keeping could yield a successful government career. Socially, too, he set the template that his grandson would later follow: membership in the Presbyterian Church, along with active participation in the Masonic order and its fraternal Washington networks.
As a boy, John Thomas grew up fast, the oldest of his parents’ eleven children. According to family lore, at age fifteen he turned down offers to attend West Point and the Naval Academy in order to remain in Washington and seek his fortune. Whether or not the story was true, it pointed to something important about Hoover family tradition: staying in Washington was the expected thing. In 1853, at the age of eighteen, John Thomas accepted a clerkship at the Coast Survey, a turning point that brought the Hoover clan into white-collar government employment. Two years later, he married Cecilia Naylor, the daughter of a prosperous grocer and small slaveholder. And two years after that, Cecilia gave birth to Hoover’s father, Dickerson, a thin, gentle boy who would grow up surrounded by boisterous aunts, uncles, and cousins, and who would eventually follow his father into the Coast Survey.[9]
Congress had created the survey to map the coastline of the Louisiana Purchase. By the time John Thomas went to work there in the 1850s, it had acquired a reputation as one of the few well-established professional agencies in Washington, an early progenitor of the modern civil service. Its chief was Alexander Dallas Bache, a dashing West Point graduate (and great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin) who viewed the survey as a means to promote scientific enterprise using the purse strings of the federal government. Bache was both a visionary and a bureaucrat, an early example of the sort of independent administrator Hoover himself would later become.[10]
Hoover’s grandfather was unusually close to Bache, something between a personal assistant and surrogate son. John Thomas originally signed on to work in the survey’s computing division, which calculated map coordinates and double-checked the work of human “computers” in the field. Several years into his work, he was promoted to the post of field secretary. In that role, he began to write Bache’s correspondence, plan his schedule, and accompany his boss on official expeditions. This swift rise suggests that John Thomas shared another of his future grandson’s talents: the ability to please older men in positions of power. Bache praised John Thomas for his “zeal and fidelity.”
Coast Survey men shared a distinctive approach. Though they worked for the government, survey employees considered themselves scientific professionals, set apart from the Sturm und Drang of electoral politics. As such, they were among the first bona fide members of the modern administrative state, men who believed that their value lay in expertise and bureaucratic skill rather than in partisan loyalty. But politics had a way of intruding in Washington. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the survey was put to work building fortifications on League Island near Philadelphia in preparation for a Southern attack that never came. While working on the project, John Thomas contracted tuberculosis, the beginning of a long, slow decline that altered the family’s plans for the future.[11]
He returned home to Washington to find the city transformed, its slave system shattered, its population doubled, its oldest residents bewildered by the change. He, too, had changed, no longer the energetic, forward-looking man he had once been. After a brief convalescence, he returned to survey work as head of its Division of Charts and Instruments. He survived more than a decade in the post and even recruited his oldest son, Dickerson—Hoover’s father—to join him. The son brought little of the “zeal” and vision that had been the father’s trademark. An early photo of Dickerson shows a sallow man with a receding chin and wide-set eyes, gazing distantly off-camera, hardly the heir to his father’s once-robust energies.[12]
Dickerson joined the survey in 1876, at the age of twenty. Over the next few years, his father entered a final decline, slowly giving up on church and charitable activities as his lung infection returned. The end came suddenly on May 25, 1878. “Within the fortnight preceding that date he was at the office as usual, efficiently discharging duties to which he had been long accustomed,” recalled a Coast Survey publication. Then his lungs gave out.[13]
His government obituary mourned the loss of “one of the most useful members of the Coast Survey” at the age of forty-three. It made no mention of his eldest son, Dickerson, just twenty years old and now the head of the family.[14]
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John Thomas’s premature death was one major rupture in Hoover’s family past—a jarring moment of loss that forever altered his father’s prospects and put the family under deep financial constraints. Another came from his mother’s side and was the more dramatic of the two, not a protracted, helpless decline but a concentrated few years of devastation and betrayal.
Hoover’s mother, Annie, descended from the Hitz line—the most prominent family of nineteenth-century Swiss Washington, several rungs up from the Hoovers on the city’s class ladder. Its local patriarch was John, or Hans, Hitz (another inspiration for Hoover’s first name). Raised as a mining engineer in the meticulous Swiss tradition, Hans had arrived in Washington during the 1830s with his wife, parents, and several children. He worked closely with the Coast Survey but made his real money off of private ventures, managing gold and zinc mines while helping to run an odd assortment of local businesses. In recognition of this success, he earned an appointment as the first Swiss consul general to the United States, the highest post available for a Swiss citizen living in America.[15]
By today’s standards, being a Washington diplomat in the 1850s was not glamorous. Nor was there much for a Swiss consul to do in a city where foreign-born residents made up just 20 percent of the population, and only a tiny fraction of those foreign-born residents were Swiss. Switzerland itself was a relatively new nation, its central government cobbled together in the wake of the 1848 revolutions that swept through Europe. As its consul general, Hitz was a largely symbolic figure. In local circles, however, he had real status as a civic leader and man of wealth. By the time Hans died in 1864, he had become a significant enough personage to attract the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who allegedly attended his funeral. Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, also found Hitz a “most estimable and worthy character.”[16]
The Swiss government soon appointed Hans’s oldest son and namesake, John, as its new consul general. Over the next decade, John carried on his father’s good works, presiding over Swiss cultural festivals, spearheading local efforts to assist the “deserving poor,” even helping to coordinate the creation of a Swiss farming colony in Tennessee. In 1872, he also helped to establish the German-American Bank, devoted to serving the financial needs of Washington’s German-speaking population.[17]
Thanks to this family lineage, Hoover’s mother, Annie, grew up in relative splendor. Childhood portraits show a plump, rosy-cheeked princess, adorned in velvet, satin, and ribbons, her auburn hair arranged in tidy ringlets. Annie attended a local Catholic high school, then a convent finishing school in Switzerland, both rare privileges in the late nineteenth century. Annie’s father, a machinist and technical draftsman named Jacob Scheitlin, earned far less than his illustrious in-laws, but he managed to provide for his family and to carve out his own place of respect within Washington’s Swiss society.[18]
In 1878, everything fell apart. The precipitating event was the collapse of John Hitz’s German-American Bank, a family secret so shameful and so well-kept that it has never appeared in any account of Hoover’s past. On October 31, 1878, depositors showed up at the German-American Bank only to find a sign on the front door announcing, “This bank is suspended.” In a time before federal deposit insurance, this news meant that their money was simply gone, squandered on bad debt and poor investments in the midst of a bitter nationwide recession. The bank held the savings of Washington’s German-Swiss community. When it collapsed, so did the networks of kinship, respect, and prosperity that had given the Hitz family its luster.
The months that followed seem to have been a time of soul-searching for the entire family, as they struggled to cope with the practical and personal consequences of the bank collapse. John Hitz came out swinging; his diplomatic status, he argued, ought to prevent him from being prosecuted in American courts. Hoover’s grandfather Jacob proved less resilient, almost certainly among the depositors wiped out that year. In early April 1880, a year and a half after the bank collapse, Jacob went missing. On April 10, a passerby found his body in the Anacostia River, near a spot known as Devil’s Elbow. Jacob had tied himself to a stake so that he would be unable to resist when the tide washed over him—“Suicide by Drowning,” in the words of a local headline.[19]
Before his death, Jacob composed a note lamenting that his most intimate acquaintances had betrayed him, and that his life had become a failure through no fault of his own. “My wish is that I have Christian burial in some spot, and that after my death I do not come in contact with hypocritical and false-swearing people,” he wrote, perhaps a reference to John Hitz and his fellow bank officials. Like John Thomas Hoover two years earlier, Jacob Scheitlin left behind a wife and three children. His daughter, Annie—Hoover’s mother—had just turned nineteen.[20]
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Hoover’s parents met and married each other during this period of turmoil, two wounded young people reeling from the collapse of their families. Acquaintances may have puzzled over what drew them together, noting that Annie came from the illustrious Hitz family while Dickerson came from far less. And yet as individuals, more than the sum of their family backgrounds, they had a surprising amount in common, at least in the hazy early months of romance. Their marriage cannot be separated from the context of family loss—for Dickerson, the death of his father; for Annie, the bank collapse and her father’s mental decline. Like Dickerson, Annie found herself left with a grieving mother and two younger siblings to care for. Surely she hoped that her young husband—gainfully employed at the Coast Survey, still mourning his own father—would be a balm and source of stability. But Dickerson had his own demons and, like her father’s, they would only grow more insistent in the years that followed.
First, though, there were the good times. John Hitz’s legal troubles eventually settled down; he resigned as consul general and served only a brief time in jail. During the interim, Annie and Dickerson began their own family. Dickerson Jr., or “Dick,” was born in September 1880, five months after his grandfather’s suicide. Sister Lillian came along two years later. The young couple moved into a modest house just a few hundred feet from where Annie grew up, perhaps hoping to provide ballast for her widowed mother. In 1890, at the age of twenty-nine, Annie gave birth to a third child, a baby girl named Sadie Marguerite, the adored pet of two much older siblings. When Dickerson lost his job at the Coast Survey a few years later, he managed to recover by taking up work at a family-owned shoe shop. The store was nothing glamorous, but it was enough to keep everyone afloat: Dickerson at the shoe shop, Annie caring for the baby, Dick and Lillian at Brent Elementary School, a few blocks away.[21]
Had events gone differently, Hoover might have been born into this world—a family successfully knit together, its difficult past managed if not forgotten. But the Hoovers were not yet free from family tragedy. During a vacation in Atlantic City in the summer of 1893, three-year-old Sadie Marguerite fell ill with a sore throat and fever. Within a few days, she was dead of diphtheria, one of the most feared childhood diseases of the nineteenth century. The family brought her little body back to Washington. “She is buried,” Hoover noted in an adolescent journal, “in Congressional Graveyard, Wash. D.C.” His own birth came seventeen months later, carrying the promise of a new beginning but also the weight of his family’s history.[22]
Chapter 2
Little Edgar
(1895–1905)
Hoover as a little boy in Washington, D.C. He was the pampered baby of the family. His sister Sadie died as a toddler less than two years before he was born.
National Archives and Records Administration
On the same page of the teenage journal where he noted his sister Sadie’s death, Hoover composed an account of his own birth. “On Sunday Jan 1, 1895 at 7:30 A.M. I, Edgar Hoover was born to my father + mother,” he wrote. “The day was cold + snowy but clear. The Doctor was Mallan. I was born at 413 Seward Sq S.E. , Wash. DC.” He recorded these details in a brown rectangular notebook, small enough to be tucked away in a front coat pocket. On the cover of the notebook, in careful cursive script, he wrote his name as he then conceived of it: “Mr. Edgar Hoover.” He also marked the cover with one of the words that would later become a hallmark of his career. “PRIVATE,” he wrote in large capital letters, warning off anyone inclined to pry into his teenage affairs.
Inside, there were no great secrets—no confessions of youthful passion, no quiet hopes about what the future might hold for “Mr. Edgar Hoover.” The notebook’s pages mainly contain spare accounts of his family history. This style suggests that certain aspects of the man were already present in the child. Even as a boy, Hoover ordered his world through dates, facts, and figures. But it is worth being cautious about imposing too much of the stern, guarded Bureau director back onto the little boy. Hoover grew up in a home far more loving and less sterile than the one he later created for himself. And he liked to do little boy things, floating along the Tidal Basin in summer, sleighing across the city when there was snow on the ground.[1]
Despite his parents’ early difficulties, Hoover grew up in a caring household, where he was taught—and came to believe—that great things could happen through hard work and self-discipline. As early as elementary school, he proved to be an ambitious, hardworking child, eager to please his teachers and parents alike. There was some pressure, especially from Annie, but much of it seems to have come from within. Born in the wake of his sister’s death, Hoover tried hard to be the redemptive child, to do things right and replace the child his parents had lost. Though as an adult he insisted that others conform to his ideals, as a boy he sought to be what everyone wanted him to be.
