G-Man, page 5
At home, he appears to have been no less cooperative and eager to please. He referred to his parents as “Mamma” and “Papa,” childish names that he preserved until his high school years. For fun, he took shopping trips downtown or to the navy yard, sometimes in Annie’s company. In the backyard garden, he helped to tend the rose beds and to gather late-summer tomatoes. On vacations, he threw himself into family activities. On one memorable trip to the shore, Hoover recalled a grand time battling the Atlantic undertow, attending concerts, and watching “the moon rise out of the water,” content to be in his parents’ company. When big events came to Washington, his parents made a point of taking him to see them. In 1909, Orville and Wilbur Wright staged a series of flight demonstrations in northern Virginia, and Hoover visited three days in a row. “Wright flew to Alexander [sic] and back in 14.20 min,” he noted on the third day. “I first outsider to shake Orville’s hand.”[21]
All of this was testament to Annie’s and Dickerson’s resilience, their ability to put the difficulties of their early experiences to rest. But history was not done with them, and there were other tragedies in their future.
Chapter 3
The Boy Problem
(1905–1909)
Hoover and bicycle, around age ten. He worked as a grocery delivery boy, among other odd jobs. For fun, he preferred indoor pursuits.
COLLECTION OF THE National Law Enforcement Museum
On October 23, 1905, Hoover’s aunt Mary was shot and killed in a “modest little house” on Ninth Street SE, less than a mile from his childhood home. Mary was the second wife of Rudolph Scheitlin, Annie’s younger brother (and Hoover’s uncle), a man for whom adulthood had proved to be one long string of difficulties. Just a teenager when his father committed suicide, Rudy had spent his adult life wandering and searching—running off to the navy and then returning to get married, only to see his first wife die, another major loss before the age of thirty. On the day Mary was killed, he had been working the day shift at the navy yard in Anacostia. He returned home to find her slumped in the parlor, shot twice in the head by her drunken lover, who then turned the gun on himself. According to news reports, a few days before the murder Rudy had warned the other man “that he would have to cease his visits, and that if he did not I would seek the law to prevent him from coming to my home.” At that point Mary had run off. “That was the last I saw of either of them until I entered the house this afternoon and found both of them dead on the floor,” he told The Washington Post.[1]
The crime made headlines across the city. “Slayer a Suicide,” the Post announced. “Bodies Found by Husband Who Had Resented Attentions to Wife.” The articles that followed revealed a sordid tale at odds with the Hoover family’s settled life. Mary was an alcoholic—“a good woman, save at those times when she would indulge in liquor,” Rudy insisted. About two years earlier, she had taken up with a “trifling fellow,” an alcoholic barroom singer who worked only occasionally (and then as a bartender). The two “had been intimate for some time,” one article noted, “and this intimacy . . . caused many quarrels between her and Mr. Scheitlin.” The murder was a vicious surprise but there was a long history of violence, addiction, and adultery behind it.[2]
For a future lawman like Hoover, this might have made for a convenient origin story, the moment when crime and sin first barreled into his childhood world. He never mentioned it, though, filing it away as a family secret alongside his grandfather’s suicide and, later, his own father’s mental collapse. There are signs that his aunt’s murder affected him nonetheless, the beginning of a reckoning with issues of manhood, crime, and personal virtue that would continue for the rest of his life. In the weeks after the murder, Hoover’s grades dropped. Not long after that, he created his little childhood newspaper, a boy’s imitation of the sensational headlines around him.[3]
Over the next four years, as he transitioned from childhood into adolescence, Hoover began to think more seriously about matters of life and death, about what might make for a virtuous identity and a secure existence. He also began to struggle for the first time with the pressures of manhood and the social expectations that accompanied it. The early twentieth century was in the throes of what historians have described as a masculinity crisis, a set of deep and pressing cultural anxieties about whether American men would be able to meet the challenges of the modern world. The crisis trickled down to the nation’s boys and adolescents, who found themselves barraged with prescriptions about how to be the right sort of man. At the age of ten, Hoover may have understood his aunt’s murder as a dramatic example of what could happen if he strayed off that righteous path. For decades to come, he would warn about the dangers of women who drank and violated the sanctity of the home, and about the weak men who allowed such activities to occur. It was in early adolescence—in those years after his aunt’s murder—that he began to consider such matters, and to sort out some of his own answers.
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Americans in 1905 had little but contempt for a man like Rudy Scheitlin. According to the era’s conventional wisdom, American men were fast abandoning the Victorian attributes of discipline, duty, and self-restraint in favor of debauchery and self-indulgence. As a result, the nation was awash in lost souls like Rudy, who disappointed their families and generated chaos wherever they went. Reformers agonized over the rise of sedentary desk jobs, the temptations of city life, the decline of frontier conquest—all alleged sources of enervation among American men. They prescribed a variety of solutions, from vigorous daily exercise to spiritual awakening to masculine “rebirth” through military conflict. In particular, they sought to intervene in the lives of adolescent boys like Hoover, to teach them how to be proper men.[4]
This pressure was acute in Washington, where Theodore Roosevelt set a high bar for what he described as “the strenuous life.” As a child, Roosevelt had been weak and asthmatic, more than once at death’s door. By his own account, he willed himself out of this sickly state into a robust existence filled with hunting, boxing, and “manly vigor.” He urged all boys to do the same, and not just for their own sakes. According to Roosevelt, the nation’s ability to rule its new imperial possessions depended upon cultivating young men who would “not shrink from danger.” So did the future of the white race, allegedly in peril both at home and abroad.[5]
A raft of books sprang up to explain how boys might live up to the president’s charge. One was The Boy Problem, a psychological exegesis of the need for discipline, self-control, and physical activity among the boys of Hoover’s generation. Published in 1902, The Boy Problem described children as small creatures who needed to be taught how to eat and behave properly, and how to control their wilder selves. Failure to do so could be catastrophic, the book declared, and many new organizations sprang up to ward off this danger. The Boy Scouts, founded in 1910, promised to end “degeneracy” by transforming American boys from “flat-chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” into “robust, manly, self-reliant” men. Boys needed exercise, outdoor activity, camaraderie, and discipline, all agreed, along with a strict set of rules to follow. [6]
Hoover absorbed these ideas as he approached adolescence, composing lists of good habits and proverbs to stave off sloth and decline. His homegrown “Weekly Review” featured instructions on how to grow from a selfish, lazy boy into a self-disciplined man. He liked to cite Ben Franklin: “Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation”; “What is worth doing is worth doing well”; “One to-day is worth two tomorrows.” In the surviving issues of the paper, neatly typewritten in blue or black ink, Hoover comes across as a boy trying to become an adult as soon as possible.[7]
The newspapers document an emerging focus on crime, violence, and death. Perhaps in reaction to his aunt’s murder, eleven-year-old Hoover went out of his way to note all manner of violent occurrences throughout his neighborhood, including heart attacks, suicides, explosions, and even a near miss when his mother’s hair caught fire in the kitchen. He seemed particularly interested in sudden death. “Mr. Jones, the purser of the Anne Arundel, dropped dead on board the boat Tuesday night,” noted one entry. “Fritz Reuter committed suicide in the parlor of his hotel on Monday about 11 o’clock,” read another. The writing shows the peculiar lack of affect that so many people would comment upon later in life; according to “Editor J.E. Hoover,” the people of Washington “dropped dead” or “committed suicide in the parlor” without so much as a fond goodbye. But he also liked jokes and funny little ditties, especially those that seemed to evoke the secret world of adult men. “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards,” he instructed his readers, citing Franklin.
The main feature of each paper usually focused on the tale of a great man who had overcome laziness, indifference, or temptation to forge a life of masculine virtue. In one edition, Hoover described an odd incident in which a young Abraham Lincoln allegedly showed up late to court, covered in filth, because he had stopped to rescue a pig stuck in the mud. Another article presented a tribute to George Washington, blaming “George’s cousin, Ike” for the infamous chopping down of the cherry tree (which Hoover worried might actually have been a persimmon tree). Hoover’s reading habits showed a fascination with tales of adventurous men: Robinson Crusoe, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West. His reading reinforced the same message he heard all around him: to become a man, a boy had to show both vigorous physicality and the ability to discipline himself at all moments.[8]
Hoover had a hard time living up to these prescriptions. On January 1, 1908, near the end of his time at the Brent School, he began to keep a diary, documenting a growing seriousness about his identity as a young man but also a record of some of the ways he fell short. He made note of his physical characteristics: At the age of fourteen, Hoover was just over five feet tall and weighed 88.5 pounds—a skinny, even scrawny boy of below-average height. As a rule, he preferred to be indoors, immersed in books or magazines, or attending to a mysterious duty described as “routine clerical work.” He seems to have been concerned about his health—perhaps a result of his parents’ fear of losing another child, perhaps an inborn aspect of his temperament. He noted various ailments: “Went to bed with grip”; “Cloudy. Sick. Cool. Read magazines.” He also endorsed the prescriptions of the Brent School’s Good Health Club: “Don’t eat adulterated food. Don’t eat too much. Don’t eat between meals. Clean your teeth.” He would maintain these preoccupations—with food and weight, germs and cleanliness—into adulthood, even as he learned, like Teddy Roosevelt before him, how to project “vigor.”[9]
And when he did encounter sickness or disability, Hoover took pains to hide it. He grew up with a stutter, all too easily classified as a sign of nervousness or lack of verve. There is no evidence that he ever received professional treatment for the problem. Instead, he seems to have overcome the challenge by experimenting with various speech patterns, then practicing hour after hour in front of a mirror. The result was a rapid-fire, clipped speaking style that would emerge as one of the remarked-upon features of his adult bearing. As with many aspects of his early life, Hoover never spoke publicly about his stutter. But his style of speech earned him the nickname “Speed”—and that, too, stuck into adulthood. In later years, he attributed the nickname to his speed in delivering groceries to Washington society ladies, and the press by and large accepted this idea. Born of a childhood struggle, his fast talk became a symbol of efficiency and manly determination, as if he operated at a swifter pace and on a higher plane than everyone else in Washington.[10]
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There was another, more potent secret that Hoover began to keep as he moved into the complications of adolescence: his father, Dickerson, the man who should have been his role model and guide, was not at all well. Dickerson had never quite fit the mold of the vigorous man. He was too gentle, too content with his modest job at the Coast Survey. But what Hoover witnessed as he moved into his early teenage years was something altogether different, a level of emotional instability and mental anguish that went far beyond a mere personality quirk. Details are hard to come by. “All’s I ever heard was it was probably depression,” one relative recalled. Another thought that Dickerson had “a nervous breakdown,” though precisely why or what sort was never entirely clear. For a boy of Hoover’s temperament and anxieties, the timing could hardly have been worse. As he struggled with what it meant to become a man, his own father was fading.[11]
The idea of depression as a disease barely existed at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead, most Americans understood the problem as a failure of the will and a dismal reflection on an individual’s character. Popular medical writers often suggested that patients simply buck up. “The lesson to be learned from this is as follows,” read one neurologist’s treatise. “Lead an active but varied life.” The advice made sense within the cultural conversation about manhood: living vigorously was both a prescription and a cure. It also may help to explain Hoover’s growing lists of proverbs and good-living rules. By gaining control of his body and health at an early age, perhaps he hoped to protect himself from the disease that afflicted his father. Dickerson managed to hold on to his job at the Coast Survey, trudging back and forth each day to the print shop. At home, though, he was apparently prone to mood swings and periods of fierce, immobile sadness.[12]
What must it have been like for Hoover to spend his early adolescence in the shadow of his father’s depression? Today’s medical literature is unswerving in at least part of the answer: coping with a depressed parent becomes one of the defining facts of a child’s life. Some children respond by becoming depressed themselves, carried down by the weight of example, circumstance, and heredity. Others show a surprising resilience, pushing back with a determination not to allow the same thing to happen to them. Hoover fit into the latter category, but it is difficult to imagine that he escaped entirely unscathed. At the very least, Dickerson’s illness must have accentuated Hoover’s worries about his own health and mental fitness.[13]
Annie’s guidance may have helped her son. She, too, had witnessed her father’s mental collapse, then suicide, and had come through all right. But her brothers had not fared nearly so well, and continued to provide disturbing evidence of how a father’s troubles might be passed down through the generations. Her brother Rudy remarried a year after Mary’s murder but soon found himself divorced again, scraping together a living as a naval-yard laborer. Annie’s youngest brother, Johnny, who had been just eight years old when his father committed suicide, seems to have led a life of chaos and frustration as well, fueled by alcohol abuse and financial woes. For money, he worked as a laborer, carpenter, painter, and clerk. He married and had several children, but the family never quite achieved stability. In southeast Washington, Johnny was well known for his “drunken escapades” and for drinking up his family’s wages.[14]
The one man from Annie’s family who managed to provide a redemptive example turned out to be her uncle John Hitz, whose poor stewardship of the German-American Bank had made headlines so long before. After serving his sentence, Hitz had worked his way back into the good graces of the local Swiss elite. He eventually assumed a charitable role as superintendent of the Volta Bureau, an experimental organization for the deaf founded by Alexander Graham Bell. There, Hitz built friendships with celebrities such as Helen Keller and Clara Barton, even doubling as Barton’s personal secretary in his final years. Hoover grew up knowing his great-uncle as a figure of renewed esteem, an imposing old man with a long white beard who liked to read from the Bible. Then, on March 25, 1908, when Hoover was thirteen, Hitz collapsed and died at Union Station, eliminating yet another source of strength and guidance. The funeral preparations kept Hoover home from school. The funeral itself attracted dignitaries including Bell, Keller, and Barton—Hoover’s first close-up glimpse of a Washington power gathering.[15]
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With Dickerson now an on-again, off-again father, and with few viable role models among the family’s other men, Hoover turned to his brother, Dick, who became an independent man just as his little brother entered adolescence. After graduating from law school, Dick went to work at the federal Steamboat Inspection Service, where he set a good example for his brother by advancing rapidly. What may have mattered most to Hoover, though, was the way Dick negotiated through the thickets of temptation and lassitude that had felled other men in the family. Far more directly than other Hoover relatives, Dick forged the path that Hoover would follow: high school stardom, then George Washington University law school, then a dedicated rise through a government agency. Dick also laid the foundations of Hoover’s emerging religious faith. In addition to his schoolwork and professional commitments, Dick developed a reputation as a successful lay preacher and Protestant missionary. He brought his little brother along with him.
Like nearly every other institution in American life, the Protestant church was experiencing its own “masculinity crisis” in the early twentieth century, a worry that men had left the pews, never to return. According to a 1910 study commissioned by the Young Men’s Christian Association, women outnumbered men at Protestant churches by almost two to one. The imbalance was particularly acute at Sunday school, where female teachers dominated the ranks, and where women allegedly spent their time instructing boys in a “goody-goody, wishy-washy, sissy, soft conception of religion,” in the words of one scornful critic. Hoover’s childhood years saw an outpouring of books on so-called Muscular Christianity: The Masculine in Religion, The Manhood of the Master, Manly Songs for Christian Men. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, one of the movement’s leaders, recommended that Christ himself be buffed up as a way of increasing Protestantism’s appeal. In a public opinion survey, Hall discovered that most viewers turned to words like “sick, unwashed, sissy, ugly, feeble” when presented with a standard painting of Christ on the cross. Hall advocated a Jesus with muscles and bulk, fighting back against his persecutors rather than succumbing meekly to crucifixion.[16]
