G-Man, page 44
One of those duties threatened his relationship with Tolson, however, if not in ways that Hoover openly acknowledged. In 1941, as part of its draft policy, the army announced its intent to eliminate men with “homosexual proclivities” from serving in military ranks. Though the new policy applied only to military service, its effects rippled out into other areas of federal employment and into Washington society itself. After more than two decades in government, Hoover faced a world in which remaining unmarried or socializing primarily with other men—both distinctive features of his public persona—could be grounds for official scrutiny. The new policy also meant that accused homosexuals, summarily dismissed from the army, often ended up in other government jobs, nonmilitary work that came to be stigmatized as bookish, unmanly, and vaguely suspect.[10]
It did not take long for Hoover to witness how the emerging culture of suspicion could damage—or even end—a previously untroubled government career. In early 1941, he was summoned to the White House for a private meeting about Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, one of the most respected men in the diplomatic service. According to rumor, Welles had recently made drunken sexual proposals to several Pullman porters and waiters—all of them Black men—while en route between Washington and Alabama. It was not thought to be an isolated incident. The president wanted Hoover to conduct a discreet inquiry, in hopes of finding a way to contain any political damage. A few weeks later, Hoover reported to Roosevelt that Welles had indeed propositioned several men while under the influence of alcohol, and that all too many people in Washington knew about it. “It is a common thing, unfortunately, for persons to charge men in public life with indulging in immoral acts and acts of degeneracy,” Hoover lamented. In Welles’s case, Hoover acknowledged the truth of the rumors, but attributed the troubling behavior to “more of a mental condition than anything else,” an impulse over which the under secretary had limited control. To avoid a reoccurrence, Hoover recommended that the president appoint a “mature” companion to travel with Welles and prevent “the circulation of any story that would reflect upon his character.”[11]
Hoover’s suggestion failed to contain the Welles scandal. In the fall of 1942, Secretary of State Cordell Hull caught wind of the rumors and demanded a meeting with Hoover to discuss what the FBI knew. A few months later, the Republicans figured out what was happening and demanded a meeting with Hoover as well. By August 1943, Roosevelt no longer believed he could keep his enemies quiet—and so he fired Welles, despite high regard for his diplomatic abilities.[12]
In the weeks that followed, Hoover tried to keep the true reasons for the dismissal (and the FBI’s role in it) out of the newspapers. But he could not entirely control Washington gossip. One Washington resident, being interviewed by FBI agents for an unrelated case, made the mistake of mentioning a rumor that the director, too, was a “queer” who liked to hang out at New York clubs. The agents reported the remarks to Hoover, who commented, “I never heard of this obvious degenerate. Only one with a depraved mind could have such thoughts.” Increasingly, though, it did not take a “depraved mind” to see that certain parts of Hoover’s life did not mesh well with the war’s changing cultural reality.[13]
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Even as he felt his way through the challenges of wartime sexual policing, Hoover was forced to engage another issue that he might well have preferred to avoid. This was the so-called race problem, an area in which he had long held firm views, even if he rarely had expressed those views in public. Hoover still believed what Kappa Alpha had taught him long ago: that a stable social order required racial hierarchy, that Black protest threatened to disrupt that order, and that the white Southern “gentleman” offered the highest form of American citizenship. And he had built the Bureau in that vision, hiring and promoting Kappa Alpha men who already shared his ideas. Their work together often reflected what they believed. When Roosevelt ordered the Bureau to begin investigating fascism and communism in 1936, Hoover included “Negroes” and their activism—from sharecropper organizing to voter registration—under the label of subversive activity.
And yet, even here, on a subject about which he had such deep prejudices, Hoover found himself pushed to adapt to changing sensibilities during the war—and to experiment with new areas of investigation. As the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal observed in his wartime bestseller, An American Dilemma, military conflict highlighted the essential paradox of American life: How could a nation that prided itself on freedom also deny that freedom to its Black citizens? Though Hoover stopped short of fundamental changes to Bureau policy, he began to echo Roosevelt’s warning that racial discrimination could undermine the war effort and disrupt home-front peace, providing the country’s enemies with a powerful tool of propaganda. In one of the stranger twists of his wartime experience, he also began working with some of the very groups the Bureau was watching as potential subversives, including the NAACP.
As early as June 1941, Hoover had warned the White House “that approximately twenty-five thousand Negro delegates will participate in a ‘March’ on Washington” to protest discrimination within the booming defense industry. For months, A. Philip Randolph, the legendary head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had been telling the White House about plans for civil rights march straight down Pennsylvania Avenue to the gates of the White House, the first of its kind. Hoover’s warning reinforced Roosevelt’s worry that the march would humiliate his administration, alienating the Democrats’ crucial Southern wing at just the moment national unity was needed. At the last minute, Roosevelt cut a deal to save face, issuing an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry in return for a promise to call off the march.[14]
Despite this temporary truce, rumblings of mass protest did not go away. With the United States striding forth as the last best hope for global democracy, Black men and women began to demand that democracy be realized on the home front as well. The Pittsburgh Courier labeled this the Double V campaign: justice and equality both at home and abroad. The U.S. military remained segregated, a redoubt of Jim Crow. Elsewhere, though, the forms of segregation erected during Hoover’s childhood and early adult years were starting to crumble. In Washington, Howard University students devised the idea of holding sit-ins at local restaurants, demanding to know “Are you for ‘HITLER’S way’ (Race Supremacy) or the ‘AMERICAN way’ (Equality)?” Though they failed to desegregate the capital’s lunch counters, their methods—like the canceled march on Washington—hinted at an emboldened civil rights energy.[15]
Hoover watched it all unfold, delivering reports to the White House about matters ranging from anti-poll-tax protests to plans for a “racial pilgrimage” at the Lincoln Memorial. The General Intelligence Survey, a revival of Hoover’s 1919 General Intelligence Bulletin, devoted entire sections to “The Negro Situation,” emphasizing the communists’ “exceedingly widespread” efforts against lynching, voting restrictions, and “white supremacy” more generally. But Hoover also took an interest in groups with no communist connections at all. A 1941 report from the Oklahoma City field office noted that “there is a strong tendency for the NAACP to steer clear of Communistic activities.” Hoover nonetheless conducted surveillance of the organization and amassed substantial evidence from informants within NAACP ranks.[16]
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, was among the men who appeared in FBI files during these years, though his relationship with Hoover proved to be more fluid and complicated than this fact alone might suggest. Many people were surprised when they met White: Though he identified himself as a “Negro,” his mixed-race heritage gave him blond hair and blue eyes, living testament to the fact that racial separation had always been an American fiction. White knew the violence of Jim Crow; he had spent years investigating race riots that killed hundreds of Americans, most of them Black men and women. He also knew the Roosevelt White House reasonably well, having positioned himself as a broker between the Democratic Party and its small but growing Black constituency. During the showdown over the March on Washington, White had sided with Randolph, helping to prod the Roosevelt administration into action.[17]
His connection with Roosevelt soon brought him to Hoover. In June 1941, as the president wrestled with the idea of an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries, White noted in a letter to Hoover that the FBI did not seem to be setting much of an example: “The general impression seems to be that the F.B.I. does not employ Negroes whatever their ability.” Hoover responded with obfuscation and denial. “Please be advised that this bureau has no ban on the employment of Negroes, and, as a matter of fact, there are a number of Negroes in the employ of this Bureau at the present time,” he insisted. While it was technically true that the Bureau employed a few Black men and women, Hoover’s response hardly addressed the NAACP’s main point. Black workers mostly occupied low-level service positions, more like servants than professional federal employees. The most visible Black employee, Sam Noisette, served as Hoover’s official greeter and visitor escort—essentially, the director’s personal butler. James Crawford, perhaps the second most visible Black man at the Bureau, worked as Hoover’s chauffeur.[18]
The Black press found Hoover’s explanations unpersuasive. “This policy of Mr. Hoover’s is so analogous to the one employed by Mr. Hitler in denying membership to Jews in his notorious Gestapo and Storm Troop organization,” wrote one columnist, “it is almost frightening.” Over the next several years, Hoover felt compelled to take at least some sort of action. He settled on a strategy intended to produce results on paper while doing as little as possible to alter Bureau culture or practice. James Crawford had just finished driving Hoover to the Mayflower one day when he opened a surprise letter from the director’s office: go directly to Quantico, the missive instructed, to be trained as a Bureau agent. Once there, Crawford turned out to be the only Black trainee in his cohort, forced to sleep alone and segregated from the other recruits. When he returned to the Bureau several weeks later, he went back to being Hoover’s chauffeur, now classified as a “special agent,” but under no illusions about what had inspired his on-paper promotion. “I think it was during the time when the NAACP was pressuring the Bureau because they didn’t have any Negro agents,” he recalled years later.[19]
This policy showcased the most cynical and entrenched aspects of Hoover’s racism, his determination to preserve the Bureau’s agent corps as the insular white men’s club it had long been. In other areas of civil rights work, though, he showed more willingness to engage with his critics, and sometimes even to find common ground. Toward the end of 1941, White arranged a meeting with Hoover, hoping to discuss “the violation of civil liberties of Negroes” on the home front. To White’s surprise, he came away intrigued by what Hoover had to say. “Mr. Hoover expressed himself as being unequivocally in favor of vigorous and prompt action by the FBI and pledged me that this would be done in every case,” White reported back to the Washington branch of the NAACP, convinced that Hoover seemed to “be open to suggestions right now to a greater extent than would normally be the case.” What followed was not a friendship but for a time it was a working relationship, in which the FBI learned to cooperate with the NAACP and vice versa.[20]
Hoover’s willingness to engage the NAACP does not suggest that he fundamentally reexamined his own racial views, or accepted responsibility for delivering racial justice at the federal level. But it does show his ability to adapt and make pragmatic, politically astute judgments, especially in times of crisis. Another such moment arrived in the summer of 1943, when more than two hundred violent racial conflicts erupted around the country, most of them in cities overwhelmed by an influx of soldiers and defense workers, both Black and white. The worst occurred in Detroit, where scuffles between Black and white teenagers set off a three-day conflagration, ending only after the deaths of nearly three dozen people (most of them Black) and the arrival of federal troops. Hoover’s response showed the ways that the war altered his official position on racial issues, even as he remained a Kappa Alpha man. On August 3, he warned the president that a riot might be stirring in Washington, laying blame on the “less desirable colored element.” At the same time, he acknowledged that in order to win the war, all Americans bore responsibility for fighting racism. “Every victory for intolerance in America is a menace to democracy for all of us,” he told the International Association of Chiefs of Police in a mid-August speech, calling for “vigorous, prompt and firm measures” to suppress racial violence.[21]
Hoover’s speech was not merely a gesture of public liberalism intended to divert his critics. Even confidential documents, produced for internal consumption, show him grappling in new ways with the security implications of home-front racial violence. In the wake of the summer’s race riots, he compiled a “Survey of Racial Conditions in the U.S.,” a project not entirely unlike the one Myrdal himself had started years earlier. The FBI’s version, completed in the fall of 1943, yielded a 714-page, multivolume discussion of Black life in America. Like Hoover’s IACP speech, the survey did not fit easily into established political categories. It expressed grave fears about communist and Japanese manipulation of Black citizens. At the same time, it noted the “myriad factors” behind home-front conflicts, including “increased housing shortages, crowded transportation facilities and an overcrowding of amusement and recreational facilities.” The report concluded that the war had changed not only the material conditions but also the attitudes of “the Negro race,” now engaged in new forms of resistance to Jim Crow. “A new militancy or aggressiveness has been reported to be existent among the Negro population,” the survey observed, that could soon sweep across the country and permanently alter its landscape. Though Hoover kept close watch on these developments, he had not yet decided what to do about them.[22]
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At least as surprising as Hoover’s cooperation with the NAACP was his wartime outreach to another group of FBI skeptics: the American Civil Liberties Union. Hoover had attempted to make peace with the ACLU during his uncertain first days as director, when Harlan Stone insisted that ACLU founder Roger Baldwin should vet Hoover’s bona fides as a civil libertarian. Since then, the FBI and the ACLU had slipped back into a relationship of mutual suspicion. During the union showdown of 1936, the ACLU’s Washington branch had supported the fired FBI employees, organizing pickets and letter-writing campaigns. Two years later, the group issued a pamphlet titled “Thumbs Down!” in opposition to the call for “voluntary” fingerprinting of all U.S. citizens. As the war began to spread across Europe, however, the ACLU and Hoover increasingly found common ground. In 1940, with the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact still in effect, the ACLU voted to expel any board member deemed overly sympathetic to “totalitarian” ideas, beginning with Communist Party leader (and longtime Hoover foe) Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.[23]
Hoping to build upon this momentum, in October 1941 Hoover agreed to meet with Baldwin in Washington—their first face-to-face encounter in almost two decades. Baldwin was planning to leave on a tour to examine home-front conditions along the West Coast, with an eye toward figuring out how local police might prevent the hysteria that had characterized the last war. Hoover knew what Baldwin wanted to hear. “I saw J Edgar Hoover himself, spending a most pleasant hour, in which he professed his liberalism and devotion to civil rights,” Baldwin reported. After visiting several FBI field offices during his West Coast tour, Baldwin concluded that Hoover meant what he said, and that FBI agents were far more attentive to civil liberties questions than their local police counterparts. When Baldwin did raise questions, Hoover was quick to affirm a shared hope to avoid the “flagrant” civil liberties abuses and “spirit of the vigilante” that characterized the previous war. “It is my earnest desire to have the FBI stand for those principles that are so close to the hearts of all interested in maintaining our liberal form of Democracy, particularly in these very trying times,” he wrote to Baldwin.[24]
Hoover’s investment in Baldwin during those final months of 1941 paid off handsomely once the U.S. entered the war. In early 1942, Baldwin withdrew a critical article commissioned by The New Republic, tentatively titled “Civil Rights and the F.B.I.” The unpublished manuscript had noted the “widespread uneasiness which has long existed among liberals and in the trade unions over the F.B.I.’s relation to civil liberties.” It had attributed much of this to Hoover’s red-hunting “mentality.” In the end, though, Baldwin concluded that the FBI director was now a man to be given the benefit of the doubt. “An interview with Mr. Hoover convinced me that he has largely changed his views on the dangers from labor and the left,” Baldwin noted in a memo for his files, the first time since the 1920s that the FBI and the ACLU saw eye to eye on critical matters.[25]
Baldwin’s colleague Morris Ernst took things even further, proclaiming before all the world that Hoover was indeed a changed man. Ernst had gotten to know Hoover during the late 1930s in and around the Stork Club. Once the war began, what started as a social acquaintance evolved into a useful political alliance. Ernst saw no contradiction between serving as general counsel for the ACLU and speaking out on Hoover’s behalf. To the contrary, he viewed himself as an emissary between worlds, someone who had “started with suspicions” about Hoover but who had arrived at “an increasing admiration for him” and the Bureau staff. “I listened to the blank, indiscriminate attacks on him by my Civil Liberties friends,” Ernst wrote in a 1945 memoir, which included a chapter on his friendship with Hoover. “But after listening to repeated assaults on the FBI at meetings of liberals, I took the time to look into the facts.” Those “facts,” according to Ernst, included Hoover’s deep engagement with the “philosophic interpretations” of Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, heroes in the civil liberties pantheon. They also included the discovery that “liberals” often attacked the FBI unjustly, and that “the assaults on Hoover . . . do not stand up in the eyes of anyone desirous of looking at the complete record.” If these sounded suspiciously like Hoover’s own narratives, it was for good reason. Before publishing his memoir, Ernst sent the chapter to Hoover for suggestions and edits, a willing aide in the director’s wartime rehabilitation.[26]
