G-Man, page 32
In purely monetary terms, this was hardly worth worrying about—a trim of less than 4 percent in a Depression year when efficiency in government was already a bipartisan battle cry. But Hoover saw something critical at stake—not just money but pride and autonomy, the right to speak out on matters of national import. McKellar’s attack called into question Hoover’s crime-fighting prowess as well as his rising status as a law-and-order spokesman. “The Senate did its worst in connection with our appropriation,” Hoover wrote a few days after his testimony. “I have not, however, given up the fight.”[23]
Hoover’s fight to prove McKellar wrong showed his increasing sophistication in organizing his supporters to put pressure on Congress. After the vote, a Mississippi-born FBI agent called on his state’s senator, Theodore Bilbo, who promised to talk to “the Old Boy, meaning Senator McKellar” in return for a Bureau tour. That same day, one of Hoover’s FBI speakers happened to be lecturing at the Contemporary Club, an organization composed of wealthy and influential New Yorkers. “All of them stated voluntarily that they would immediately ‘get busy’,” the agent assured Hoover, “and contact various Senators and Representatives in Washington who, they felt, would give every assistance possible.” Since the Senate would have to approve the committee’s decision, that gave Hoover just under a week to drum up votes from senators inclined to support the Bureau, and to change the minds of those who didn’t. In the meantime, he ordered agents in Tennessee to round up support for the Bureau, and to let McKellar know that he was being watched.[24]
Hoover’s public relations apparatus played a critical role in the campaign. Some newsmen attempted to contact him directly, promising to rustle up positive stories to counteract the “rather nasty” coverage of McKellar’s interrogation. In other cases, Hoover’s men took it upon themselves to contact local editors and radio stations. From Philadelphia, a veteran of the Kansas City investigation wrote to say that he had spoken with three area papers, each of which agreed to publish editorials in support of restoring the $225,000. Similar sentiments poured in from papers enthusiastic about Hoover’s law-and-order message. All made roughly the same point, championing Hoover as a uniquely effective public servant in a Washington establishment riddled with corruption and inefficiency.[25]
When the day of the vote arrived, the task of defending Hoover fell to Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a dedicated Bureau ally. Like many Republicans, Vandenberg viewed Hoover as the great exception to New Deal profligacy—a Republican holdover who still knew what to do with government appropriations. Now Vandenberg declared his support of the Bureau’s extra $225,000. “It does not make the slightest difference what the Senator from Tennessee has to say about relative arithmetic,” Vandenberg said. “This happens to be a problem in the realm of grim reality. It is a problem which involves the basic protection of life and property in the United States against major crime; and upon that subject the most expert witness in America is J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Bureau of Investigation. I stand with him to the last necessity which he may require. So do the American people.”[26]
So, to Hoover’s relief, did a majority of the Senate. Just after three p.m., senators began calling with the good news: the Senate had agreed to restore the $225,000. “I am told,” Hoover wrote a few days later, “it was actually the first time a Committee Chairman was so completely repudiated as McKellar was.” Bureau staff noted each caller, as well as each senator who voted in favor of the Bureau, so that Hoover could send notes of thanks.[27]
Hoover had a message for McKellar as well. While in New York on the afternoon of April 30, Hoover received word that his agents had finally located Alvin Karpis, the last great figure of the Barker gang, at a hideout in New Orleans. Hoover and Tolson flew out the next morning, chartering a transport plane for a grueling journey south. The purpose of this mad dash was to refute McKellar’s accusation that Hoover could not make an arrest. Karpis later said that low-level agents did all the dangerous work, capturing him and confiscating his rifle, then calling out to Hoover once the coast was clear. Hoover told a different story. Karpis “was scared to death when we closed in on him,” he claimed. “He shook all over—his voice, his hands, and his knees.” Both parties agreed that Hoover made the final arrest, grabbing Karpis inside a getaway vehicle, then instructing an agent to tie a necktie around the prisoner’s wrists. In all the excitement, nobody remembered to bring a set of handcuffs, a picturesque touch that would become a staple of the Hoover legend.[28]
News accounts recognized the significance of what had taken place. “Karpis Arrest Hoover’s First,” cheered the Milwaukee Sentinel. So, apparently, did Senator McKellar. With no advance warning, he showed up at the FBI Academy graduation, sliding quietly into a chair proffered by Hoover’s deputy Hugh Clegg. Toward the end of the ceremony, Clegg recalled, McKellar stood up to say something—a moment of trepidation for everyone in the room. “I surrender!” McKellar declared, in Clegg’s recollection. “J. Edgar Hoover is the greatest American we have today. I was mistaken.”[29]
“From that time on,” Clegg explained, “he was a close friend and would argue strongly for the appropriation.”[30]
* * *
—
Hoover was not the only law enforcement official engaged in this sort of politics, in which apocalyptic warnings of youth crime and moral laxity could produce both headlines and funds. In New York, District Attorney Thomas Dewey showed some of Hoover’s talent for grabbing the spotlight. In Washington, Harry Anslinger, the young chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, warned of a violence-ridden marijuana epidemic about to seize the country and began to conduct arrests accordingly. Hoover, too, soon went beyond words and stagy arrests to order his Bureau into action. In 1936, he “dusted off” the Mann Act, in one agent’s words, launching a nationwide anti-vice and anti-prostitution campaign that served to reinforce his moral bromides with concerted federal action. Unlike the War on Crime, instigated by the attorney general and the White House, the vice raids were a campaign of choice for Hoover. They put the Bureau in the position of protecting not only life and property but also national virtue. By focusing on prostitution, Hoover could act as both a conservative moral arbiter and an efficient law enforcement administrator.[31]
He defined the Mann Act broadly, insisting that any contact across state lines—including by phone or telegraph—provided justification for Bureau action. Under this interpretation, each local brothel owner and sex worker was potentially committing a federal crime. In February 1936, Hoover justified the arrest of New York madam Mae Scheible, identified in the press as the “millionaire queen of the prostitution industry,” on charges of trafficking women across state lines to supply her high-end brothels. Several months later, in the wake of the McKellar showdown, he extended the raids to Connecticut, where a network of brothel owners allegedly traded women up and down the Eastern Seaboard. As one agent later recalled, the Connecticut raids put Hoover in touch with all manner of “sexual abnormality,” from “homosexuals” and “lesbians” to “sadists, masochists, and fetishists” and “mass orgies.” But what Hoover emphasized publicly was the trafficking and victimization of young women, the area where the Bureau’s jurisdiction was strongest. He used the Connecticut raids to introduce a campaign “against white slave rings everywhere in the country,” approving raids on houses of prostitution in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, Corpus Christi, even Hawaii.[32]
As the campaign intensified, Hoover continued to approve techniques he had once banned as cheap police work, to be used only for the most heinous of crimes. In preparation for the raids, he authorized multiple wiretaps. He also pressured his men to recruit confidential informants, including working prostitutes, who agreed to spy on illegal activities and provide client lists. When the moment of arrest finally came, Hoover made a point of being on the ground with his men—again refuting McKellar’s accusation that he was no more than a desk man. In Atlantic City, he snuck into town with Tolson, hiding out in his hotel room until the final moment. Then, in a single coordinated burst of action, his agents descended on local brothels, resulting in the arraignment of 137 people. The New York Herald Tribune identified the raiding spree as “the biggest vice haul of recent years,” the culmination of Hoover’s yearlong effort to set the nation on a virtuous track.[33]
Like his earlier showboating, the prostitution raids produced their fair share of critics. The famed writer H. L. Mencken, for one, informed a grand jury that only “morons and idiots” believed in Hoover’s approach to enforcing morality. But the raids’ overall effect was to secure Hoover’s place in the pantheon of moral crusaders—a major figure able not only to articulate his ideas, but to conduct his own anti-crime campaigns and make the mechanisms of government work according to his agenda. In September 1937, a month after the Atlantic City raids, he expanded that agenda again, calling for a “War on the Sex Criminal!” in the words of one headline. Like “white slavery,” “sex criminal” could encompass a vast range of behavior, from rape, murder, and child molestation to acts of consensual “perversion” like the ones they had found in Connecticut. Hoover promised to eliminate them all, arguing that “the ‘harmless’ pervert of today can be and often is the loathsome mutilator and murderer of tomorrow.” He viewed his role as one of public exhortation, a national Cassandra warning of the perils ahead.[34]
* * *
—
All this left Hoover with a paradoxical public image. From one vantage point, he was the same firm apolitical administrator he had always been, moving soberly between partisan factions. From another, he was a cosmopolitan socialite and celebrity, at home in the latest of late-night New York gatherings. From still a third, he was a national scold and moralist, unflinching in his demands that all Americans—including politicians—live up to a strict code of personal virtue. In the fall of 1937, The New Yorker assigned writer Jack Alexander to make sense of it all in a multipart feature profile. The first sentence captured Hoover’s role as the country’s self-serious moral champion, “a dynamic, high-strung, fidgety man, to whom a mere suggestion of crime is a call to arms.” The article also described Hoover’s personal life, in which “night clubs are his favorite form of relaxation” and “the hilarity of an early-morning table group” at the Stork Club or 21 served as a relief from his self-imposed discipline. It likened Hoover to Benito Mussolini, with his fondness for brass eagles, national flags, and masculine posturing, while noting Hoover’s “wry amusement” at the comparison, his insistence that he was simply a modest, middle-class American boy. Alexander made no attempt to resolve these contradictions. Rather, he portrayed Hoover as a man struggling to figure it all out himself.[35]
Chapter 19
The Gathering Storm
(1936–1938)
Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German-American Bund, reviews a pro-Nazi parade at a Bund camp in New Jersey. May 1, 1938. With Roosevelt’s approval, Hoover and the FBI began investigating Nazi, communist, and other “subversive” organizations in the mid-1930s.
Library of Congress
Even as he wrestled with his few critics in Congress and the press, Hoover retained the loyalty of the one man who really mattered in Washington: Franklin Roosevelt. It had been Roosevelt who made it possible for Hoover to become a crime fighter, to take on bank robbers and gangsters, to have his men carry guns and make arrests. And it had been Roosevelt who lent Hoover crucial support during the promotional burst of 1935, when Hoover became a national celebrity and a practitioner of public relations. In August 1936, even as Hoover barnstormed the country denouncing New Deal social workers and softhearted liberals, Roosevelt secretly handed over a third significant gift, one that would allow Hoover’s power to expand and flourish long after the president left office. In a confidential meeting, he asked Hoover to begin investigating “Fascism and Communism,” the two great ideological forces threatening to upend the global order of the 1930s and to challenge the status quo at home. And he wanted it all done quietly, without the speeches, editorials, and public relations he had encouraged in the crime arena.[1]
The inspiration for Roosevelt’s request came from a wave of social turbulence unlike anything since 1919, when Hoover had launched the Radical Division. Little more than a year into Roosevelt’s presidency, San Francisco dockworkers pulled off the first general strike since the 1919 strike in Seattle—but unlike the Seattle workers, they won, securing union members and improved working conditions at ports up and down the West Coast. The following year, Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, establishing federal protection for union organizing and bargaining in another landmark victory for labor. Rather than calming domestic affairs, the law had helped to inspire a revolt within the American Federation of Labor, as the bushy-browed firebrand John L. Lewis led a walkout of the country’s most militant industrial unions. As president of the United Mine Workers of America, Lewis had helped to lead the great coal strike of 1919. Now he was not only winning strikes but also forging a new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to bring the miners’ organizing tactics and social-democratic vision into steel, auto, and other major industries.[2]
The growing conflict gave the 1936 election season a charge of uncertainty: Roosevelt seemed likely to win, but under what conditions? His Republican opponent, the millionaire Kansas governor Alf Landon, was a weak candidate. But there were other influential men, many of them with movements behind them, who ripped into Roosevelt’s record. From Detroit, the “radio priest” Charles Coughlin complained that the president was too close to Jews and communists. Senator Huey Long, the “Kingfish” of Louisiana, had offered his own variation on Coughlin’s populist economics and hinted that he might seize the Democratic nomination from Roosevelt, until an assassin’s bullet kept him from making good on his promise. From Europe came news of a rising fascist threat: Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, the outbreak of civil war in Spain. And each of these developments seemed to be producing its own strange offspring in the United States, with a revived Communist Party gearing up to fight fascism while a homegrown Nazi movement sought to implant fascism on American soil.[3]
Even for a president as confident and broad-minded as Roosevelt, it was impossible to keep track of everything: the strikes and plots, the shifting sands of a hundred impassioned ideological and political debates. Roosevelt also believed that staying on top of the domestic situation would be crucial to his reelection campaign. So he reached out to Hoover for help. On the morning of August 24, Hoover arrived at the White House, where he found the president “desirous of discussing the question of the subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” as he noted in a “confidential memorandum” about the meeting. Roosevelt confessed that “he had been considerably concerned” about both phenomena, and about what they might mean for the stability of American society. He wanted Hoover’s help not in investigating particular crimes, but in “obtaining a broad picture of the general movement and its activities as may affect the economic and political life of the country as a whole.” In other words, he wanted Hoover to start spying on political dissidents again.
Hoover did not try to assuage the president’s concerns. Instead, he confessed his own worries that the nation was beset by “subversive” political forces, many of them locked in a secret conspiracy to undermine both the presidency and the social order. He singled out a few key leaders: the miners’ John Lewis; the Australian-born Harry Bridges, head of the San Francisco dockworkers; even Heywood Broun, a New York newsman and founder of the American Newspaper Guild. Together, Hoover warned, “they would be able at any time to paralyze the country in that they could stop all shipping in and out through the Bridges organization; stop the operation of industry through the Mining Union of Lewis; and stop publication of any newspapers of the country through the Newspaper Guild.” Understandably concerned, Roosevelt asked Hoover what to do.
Hoover suggested something that would transform the work of the FBI yet again, just two years after his men began carrying weapons and hunting down gangsters. In response to Roosevelt’s query, Hoover raised the possibility of reviving the “general intelligence” function that Harlan Stone had banned in 1924—in essence, moving the FBI back into political surveillance work. The proposal implied a historical analogy: With the return of the social conflicts that had plagued the country in 1919, the FBI would reengage in the political work it had performed in that earlier era. And yet there was no forgetting what had happened in between: the outcry against the Palmer Raids, the rise of a new civil liberties consciousness, the establishment of Stone’s directive.
To get around those obstacles, Hoover offered Roosevelt a strategy for getting started in secret, without going to Congress. As Hoover acknowledged, the FBI appropriation contained no money for “general intelligence” activities. However, it did allow for investigations undertaken at the behest of the State Department—and “if the State Department should ask for us to conduct such an investigation we could do so under our present authority,” Hoover explained to the president. In that way, nobody outside of the executive branch would need to know what the FBI was doing: not Congress, not the ACLU, and certainly not the press and public.
