G-Man, page 34
His employees’ basic complaints were nothing new, echoes of what the dissident agent Joseph Bayliss had alleged during Hoover’s first years as director. Workers in the fingerprint division complained that they were required to stand nearly all day, for fear that stools might make them appear lazy or sloppy when tours came by. All window shades had to be kept at precisely the same level, no matter the angle of the sun, to provide a tidy, uniform impression for outside visitors. Employees who showed up to work without a belt were required to wear their coats for the entire day, regardless of temperature, to hide their slovenly appearance. And the list went on, one bewildering rule after another, all designed to display a perfect picture of institutional order. According to the union complaint, Hoover’s rigidity had created an attrition crisis at the fingerprint division, where some thirty-five of 150 identification experts quit their jobs in the first six months of 1936 alone. Those who remained met with swift retaliatory action when they expressed discontent or tried to form a union.[18]
Under federal labor law, retaliatory firing for labor organizing was now supposed to be illegal; employers could not get rid of workers who wanted to unionize any more than politicians could ban voters who liked the other candidate—a principle of workplace democracy. Hoover either did not understand the new law or did not care. He interpreted his employees’ actions as an attempt by subversives to undermine confidence in American institutions and to bring the functioning of the nation’s government to a halt. Rather than negotiate further, he fired the main organizers.[19]
Cummings backed Hoover in his resistance to the union, refusing to entertain the employees’ complaints. In response, the fired men took to the streets, picketing and chanting outside Justice headquarters while handing out pamphlets describing the many small cruelties of FBI life. Their demands were hardly revolutionary but their language was vicious, charging Hoover with “spying on the men, overtime, inadequate pay, harsh enforcement of petty regulations and the speed-up resulting from an undermanned force.” For a boss accustomed to praise and fawning obedience from his employees, the protests came as a shock. “Mr. Hoover’s life has been made a little more uncomfortable in the last few days by public charges that his highly-publicized fingerprint section is, in reality, a sweatshop,” the left-wing Nation magazine declared with satisfaction.[20]
And it might have gotten more uncomfortable still, if not for the fact that the AFGE’s leadership actually sided with Hoover. Though often presented as a monolithic front, the labor movement of the late 1930s was deeply divided between liberals and radicals, and between those who preferred negotiation and those who sought direct action or even revolution in the streets. As one article pointed out, the union struggle at the FBI not only pitted clerks against bosses; it also marked “a battle between conservative, old-line majority factions of the [labor] organization and the idealistic members, ranging from pale pink liberals to vivid red radicals.”[21]
Hoover’s own role in the showdown came to a climax in August, when the AFGE called an emergency meeting at a Washington labor temple. As proceedings began, a black-hooded figure arose and identified himself as “the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover.” When the presiding chairman expressed tongue-in-cheek surprise at Hoover’s death, the “spirit” clarified the situation. “I am the spirit of John Edgar Hoover’s better self, which has died long since from the subtle poison of excessive authority. I can return to his body only once that better self is resurrected.” Behind him, union members lined up to denounce Hoover as a “social criminal,” in violation of the nation’s labor laws. “If Hoover is not checked now,” they insisted, “he will be encouraged to launch an open campaign against the entire labor movement.” It was a prescient warning, but the AFGE leadership saw things differently. Citing unauthorized picketing, they voted to expel the offending lodge from the national union.[22]
That brought an end to Hoover’s battle with the fingerprint division—indeed, to the only labor struggle ever waged within the confines of his Bureau. Happy to dismiss the whole affair as a subversive rebellion, he did little to address the substance of his employees’ claims. He did, however, institute two minor changes to ensure that such a situation never occurred again. In the fall of 1936, he accepted the resignation of Identification Division chief John Edwards, once a trusted member of the Bureau’s GW-and-Kappa-Alpha-bred inner circle, informing Edwards that “if he had maintained harmony in his division among the employees . . . they would have had no desire to join a union.” His second change was less punitive, an extension of the public relations techniques that had proved so successful in recent years. Rather than blackball the entire union, Hoover invited its sympathetic leaders to visit the Bureau, promising an exclusive tour.[23]
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If the challenge from his own employees was easily dispatched, the same could not be said of a more serious problem that arose in the late 1930s, and that would ultimately test the limits of the Bureau’s renewed intelligence initiatives. In mid-February 1938, amid fears about a coming German invasion of Austria, the FBI took custody of a German immigrant and former U.S. Army enlistee named Guenther Rumrich, arrested by New York police in a bumbling passport theft scheme. Hoover did not want the case, especially because his agents had not made the initial arrest. But Rumrich had done something that made Hoover’s wishes all but impossible to fulfill. Under questioning by the New York police, he confessed to being a German spy and ardent Nazi, stealing passports in order to facilitate the movement of Hitler’s spies around the world. At the time there was no federal agency specifically tasked with handling foreign espionage on American soil. So the case fell to the FBI, under the logic that its recent involvement in the Bund investigations made it best equipped to handle such a situation.
Hoover was not at all ready, however—just as he had not been ready when the War on Crime fell in his lap. Things started reasonably well, with Rumrich naming names, identifying locations, and describing the elaborate espionage ring he had helped to run. FBI agents then rounded up the suspects and proceeded to gather further evidence. Hoover approached it all as he had approached big cases like Dillinger and the Barker gang: suspects would be identified, evidence scientifically gathered, and a grand jury convened. He failed to recognize that these were spies, not ordinary criminals. The German government had a powerful interest in making sure that they did not testify or rot in American prisons. After being released in advance of grand jury proceedings, most of the key plotters slipped out of the country one by one. To Hoover’s horror, when agents went back to find them, only four of the eighteen original suspects were still in the United States.[24]
Unlike most of the FBI’s political intelligence work, this colossal error did not remain a secret. Hoover blamed the lead agent in the case, Leon Turrou, and promptly fired him, just as he had fired the responsible parties at the fingerprint division. According to Hoover, Turrou had erred by leaking news of the arrests, then doubled down on the mistake by trying to sell his own story—based on proprietary government information—to the highest press bidder. The real problems ran deeper. As Turrou admitted, the FBI simply did not know how to conduct espionage investigations. Indeed, nobody else in the government knew how to do it either. Questioned about the spy case during an October 1938 press conference, Roosevelt emphasized a “very definite responsibility” on the part of the federal government to get a handle on the situation, and even suggested he might consider the creation of a new espionage agency.[25]
Initial reports assured the public that any “central spy-control bureau” would not fall under FBI auspices. “There is no intention to enhance the power—and publicity—of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover,” wrote one columnist. But Roosevelt had a long history of turning to Hoover in such situations, and despite the FBI’s missteps, he did so once again. During a cabinet meeting in mid-October, Roosevelt raised the idea of assembling a committee to survey the state of intelligence operations and “make definite recommendations as to how to proceed.” Cummings brought the information back to Hoover, and asked him to propose something that might ease the president’s concerns.[26]
In response, Hoover did something brash: despite the FBI’s obvious failures in the Rumrich case, he made a bid for the Bureau to become the nation’s chief counterespionage agency—in essence, for Roosevelt to expand its power yet again. To make his case, Hoover cited all that the Bureau had done, quietly and without controversy, since Roosevelt’s secret 1936 directive. According to Hoover, by late 1938 the FBI had amassed some twenty-five hundred names of individuals “engaged in activities of Communism, Nazism, and various types of foreign espionage,” including maritime and industrial workers, labor organizers, “youth,” and “Negroes.” It was also actively collecting sixty-five “daily, weekly and monthly publications,” and gathering further information from contacts in “professional, business and law enforcement fields.” Hoover’s numbers no doubt sounded better than they were, a mishmash of CIO organizers, Black activists, and perhaps the occasional Nazi spy. But he believed that they were enough to legitimize another quiet “expansion.” He gave a rough estimate of what it would cost: $39,000 for naval intelligence, $35,000 for the army, and $300,000 for the FBI. Lest the White House encounter criticism over the plan, he urged that it all take place “with the utmost degree of secrecy” and without attempting to pass new legislation or form any new committee.[27]
In early November, Hoover received a request to join Roosevelt aboard a secure presidential train when it stopped in New York en route to the family estate in Hyde Park. The two men sat inside the train car for several minutes, as the president’s advisers and security detail milled about. When he emerged, Hoover had most of what he wanted. Though Roosevelt did not approve the full $300,000, he gave the FBI $150,000, apportioned from a discretionary fund, to build up its counterespionage ranks. Another $100,000 went to naval and military intelligence, to be divided between them. According to Hoover’s memo of the meeting, the president “approved the plan which I had prepared,” authorizing the FBI to take the federal lead in efforts to combat espionage, sabotage, and subversion on American soil.[28]
Other than that memo, there was no record of the meeting: no request to Congress or the State Department, no official signature for the records. It was just another handshake deal between Hoover and the president who had already given him so much. With a global war looming on the horizon, Roosevelt’s decision would license a level of domestic spying and surveillance as yet unimagined in 1938. For the moment, though, Hoover had other problems to address, and on these the president could be of little help.
Chapter 20
Mothers and Sons
(1938–1939)
Hoover (left) and Tolson (right) with Tolson’s mother at the Stork Club in New York, October 1939. Tolson’s father died in August; his mother is in mourning dress. Jack Entratter, daytime manager of the Stork Club, is standing.
National Archives and Records Administration
Hoover referred to cancer as the “gangster disease”: it preyed upon innocent victims, draining them of life and joy before delivering its final blow. His mother, Annie, received her diagnosis sometime around 1935, just as Hoover’s fame began to hit its Dillinger peak. She was seventy-five years old, a widow for a decade and a half, still living in the same house her husband had bought for her in 1892. Both of her sons were making headlines. Her daughter had three healthy children, now almost grown. So perhaps the diagnosis was something that Annie simply accepted, a good life’s work done. She took to her bed, too exhausted to maintain her usual hard-scrubbing rigor.[1]
Hoover did his best to care for her, hiring a round-the-clock nurse. Her decline accompanied her son’s rise, and some of Hoover’s grief and worry made its way into his public commentary. “When we look upon the gnarled, tired hands of an old woman they remind us of the tired hands of some one we worship above all other early things”; he mourned “the hands which labored so faithfully for us; the hands which grew so tired and weary in our service during the years of our childhood.” The death of their much-adored dog, Spee Dee Bozo, only enhanced the sense of homebound gloom. Hoover said that the Airedale’s final hours marked “one of the saddest days of my life.” He buried Spee Dee in a white shroud at the pricey Aspin Hill Pet Cemetery, where Washington’s elite marked the passing of their beloved pets. A few months later, he gave Annie a little black terrier named Scottie in an attempt to fill the void.[2]
Hoover complained that his brother and sister abandoned him during these years, too wrapped up in their own families to step forward and help ease their mother’s way. And he resented their absence, the final indignity in a lifetime of being cast as a mama’s boy. Years later, he would point out bitterly that Annie had failed to change her will, distributing her possessions among all three children despite the fact that he alone took charge of caring for her.[3]
For daily support, Hoover looked not to his family, but to Tolson, the one person who remained by his side even as Annie slipped into the final stages of decline. On Valentine’s Day 1938, Tolson sent Annie a floral bouquet. “Mother was quite pleased with the beautiful Valentine flowers which you sent her,” Hoover wrote in a formal thank-you note, “and asked me to tell you how much she appreciates your remembrance of her on this occasion.” Over the next few weeks, Hoover prepared to say goodbye to the mother to whom he had dedicated so much of his adult life. Annie died at home on the night of February 22. Hoover buried her two days later in the family plot at Congressional Cemetery, next to his father, Dickerson, and tiny Sadie Marguerite.[4]
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Annie’s death left Hoover reeling. “I have been resting . . . trying to readjust to what at present seems like a completely shattered life,” he wrote to a friend after the funeral. “Mother was such a part of my life that I feel so utterly alone.” He found normal activities rendered strange and “overwhelming.” Still, he saw little choice other than to forge ahead. “One must carry on somehow and the support which I have from a few real friends has been most sustaining,” he wrote. Hottel recalled that Hoover seemed to accept Annie’s death but rarely spoke of it. Like mental illness, cancer was often kept secret in the 1930s, a source of shame, confusion, and regret. Her death came and went without public discussion, another chapter of Hoover’s family life consigned to shadows and silence.[5]
In response, Hoover did what he had done more and more since the start of Annie’s illness: he fled Washington. It was likely no coincidence that his first Florida vacation with Hottel and Tolson seems to have occurred as Annie fell ill. While Florida had the pull of sunshine, there was also the push of Annie’s sickness, the desire to escape a bleak winter house smelling of illness and decay. In mid-March 1938, after a hard winter of witnessing his mother’s decline and death, he and Tolson left once again to Miami, where a young photographer snapped a picture of Hoover “snoozing in the sunshine” outside their private hotel cabana.[6]
New York remained another refuge. On weekends, according to the gossip sheets, Hoover and Tolson frequently returned to the Stork Club, the Paradise, or 21, often to meet with Winchell. It was a peak year for café society, with the harshest conditions of the Depression lifted and the trials of war still to come. In the months after Annie’s death, Hoover and Tolson dined alongside literary legend Dorothy Parker at the Stork Club and watched champion boxer Joe Louis pummel his German-born rival Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. Beyond the tabloid excitement, they continued to live the lives they had built for themselves in New York, an accepted duo within the world of “Broadwayites” and nightclub devotees.[7]
Hoover’s travel schedule throughout 1938 and 1939 suggests a kind of restlessness, as if simply being on the road allowed him to avoid the questions and silences that awaited him at Seward Square. He and Tolson often attempted to travel in secret, for professional reasons but also perhaps for personal ones. During a trip to Kansas City in May, they registered incognito at their hotel and swore the front-desk staff to secrecy—all to no avail. Reporters sniffed them out in the penthouse suite, a three-bedroom extravaganza featuring a grand piano, a walnut-lined dining room, a butler’s pantry, and “ankle-deep carpets.” An enterprising newsman went so far as to knock on the door, which was reportedly opened by a tall, handsome man in “a Hollywood cafe au lait lounging robe.” This was presumably Tolson (officially registered in the room next door) playing his usual role as both intimate companion and press liaison for his overextended boss. Upon returning east, Hoover spent the weekend not in Washington but in New York, where Winchell spotted him at Yankee Stadium surrounded by “a trio of G-lamour Men,” the closest thing Hoover now had to a family.[8]
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Despite Hoover’s attempts to carry on as usual, Annie’s death raised a vexing social dilemma: Since he no longer lived with his mother, how would he explain his “bachelor” status? The press wasted little time in calling the question. Less than two months after Annie’s death, Washington columnist Evelyn Peyton Gordon declared Hoover the new “pet” of “capital society.” “Until his mother’s death a few weeks ago,” Gordon wrote, “the famous G-Man lived with her, and was known as something of a ‘woman hater.’ Now that he is alone tongues are beginning to wag and surmises to be made as to just how long J. Edgar will remain in unwedded bliss.” If it was really his mother who had been holding him back, he was now free to pursue his own agenda.
