G-Man, page 6
Dick embraced this form of Christianity. He seems to have enjoyed the evangelist’s challenge, working the Anacostia waterfront and the local jail as a missionary to hard men. By the time Hoover was old enough to join him on such outings, Dick had acquired experience preaching not only at missions and soup kitchens but also to church groups. Though he started out as a Presbyterian, Dick switched his allegiance to the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Pennsylvania Avenue, helmed by an “energetic and magnetic” young pastor named John Weidley. Under Rev. Weidley’s authority, Dick became superintendent of the Sunday school and a leader of its youth outreach.[17]
Hoover followed along. Under Dick’s tutelage, he became a dedicated Bible student and boy soprano. He even won a prize—his own copy of the New Testament—for memorizing catechism verses. Hoover followed his brother into leadership roles as well, winning election as secretary of his Sunday school class just a few days after his thirteenth birthday. Of all the events mentioned in his adolescent diary, few are recorded as consistently as his church activities. Hoover also made careful note of his brother’s attention: “Took a walk with Dick cross the bridge”; “Dick took supper in here.”[18]
Dick’s teachings reinforced what Hoover was learning elsewhere: that self-discipline and adherence to the proper rules made for a godly and manly life. “As a youth, I was taught basic beliefs,” Hoover recalled. “For instance, I was taught that no book was ever to be placed above the Bible.” While Dick may have led his brother into the church, Hoover made an active decision to stay, concluding that what he heard at prayer meetings and church services spoke to something important within. From the pulpit, Rev. Weidley stressed positive thinking, the ability to rise above adversity and “to accomplish your task.” “In this life there are many dark clouds to limit the horizon of our vision,” he explained, “but the joys set before us, and the brightness illuminating our pathway are far more numerous.” It is not hard to see why such a message might have appealed to Hoover, newly confronted with family troubles. A few days before his fourteenth birthday, Rev. Weidley baptized him in a private ceremony. Dick was there to watch and support his younger brother in the transition from a boy into a man.[19]
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Ultimately, though, Dick had his own life to lead. In September 1907, he married a fellow churchgoer named Theodora Hanft, the daughter of a clerk at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. (“The day was unsettled in the morning but cleared up in the evening,” Hoover noted in his journal. “Dr. Weidly [sic] officiated.”) The following June, his sister Lillian married a high school acquaintance named Fred Robinette, who worked with Dickerson at the Coast Survey. Her wedding took place at the Hoover home, which had been spruced up with palms and white flowers. Annie wore black for the occasion, still in mourning for her uncle John. A few weeks after that, on “a cool beautiful evening with a full moon” (in Hoover’s description), Dick’s wife gave birth to a daughter and Hoover became an uncle for the first time.[20]
By any reasonable standard, Dick and Lillian stayed close to home and remained involved in their brother’s life. Dick bought the house next door to his parents, and they fenced in the two backyards together. Lillian moved a few blocks away, but came back frequently and even gave birth to her first child in the family home. There was no mistaking the change in Hoover’s life, however, as he went from being the pampered youngest son to the only child in the house. With Lillian’s wedding, Hoover became the sole daily witness to his parents’ domestic joys and struggles, the child most responsible for their happiness and well-being. In later years, he would come to resent his brother and sister for abandoning him just as their parents began to grow older and (though he did not say it quite so explicitly) as their father was starting to flounder and fail. At the time, though, it may have looked more promising, less a moment of abandonment than a coming-of-age.[21]
Chapter 4
Jump High and Leap Quick
(1909–1913)
Hoover in his high school cadet uniform, around 1912. At Washington’s Central High School, he was a stand-out student: valedictorian, debate star, captain of the cadets.
COLLECTION OF THE National Law Enforcement Museum
If Hoover had followed Dick’s example down to the last detail, he would have attended Eastern High School, just a short walk from Seward Square. Instead, in September 1909 he enrolled at Central High, several miles away in the heart of the Northwest. Both Lillian and Dick had attended Eastern. Central was a step up, widely recognized as the most competitive and desirable of the city’s white public high schools. Family connections helped to ease the transition. Hoover’s uncle Halsted, Dickerson’s youngest brother, ran Central’s music department, conducted the glee club, and helped to supervise the dramatic association. Though Hoover preferred to think of himself as a boy who rose through merit alone, he started at Central with an important advantage.[1]
He made the most of it. For Hoover, the high school years turned out to be “formative,” in his later description, a time when he acquired lasting ideas about discipline and success, about how to win political arguments and how to behave as a Christian man. Central High also gave him his first taste of real-world accomplishment and success. During his time there, Hoover emerged as an undisputed class star: valedictorian, debate champion, cadet captain. On this small stage, he also began to test his capacity as a leader of men.[2]
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Central High was the product of a civic dream. Conceived in the 1880s at a moment of great hope for public education, the school established itself as the crown jewel in the city’s network of free high schools. Like most local institutions, Central was segregated. Black students attended their own high school (later renamed for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar) several blocks away. For its white students, the city provided facilities unimaginable during Annie’s and Dickerson’s childhoods, when most Americans had considered high school an elite privilege. Central’s first building, a three-story brick structure, featured more than a dozen classrooms, a military exercise space, an exhibition hall, a library, scientific laboratories, and a teachers’ lounge—thirty rooms all told. By the time Hoover entered in 1909, a push was on to relocate to a bigger and better building, with updated lighting and sewage systems, a larger auditorium, and better science labs. “The school has been continually advancing in rank among the preparatory schools of the country,” the Central yearbook reported in the spring before Hoover’s freshman year.[3]
Central’s curriculum reflected its aim to compete with the best. Students learned not only the three R’s but also German, French, Latin, and Greek; chemistry and biology; drawing, music, and history. Outside the classroom, they participated in football, track, baseball, tennis, and basketball; debate and student government; the cadet and rifle corps; theater and glee club. The culture of the school emphasized discipline in all aspects of student life, including strict silence in the hallways. The students seemed to have absorbed and accepted this striving ethos. In the fall of 1909, as Hoover began his first year, the school newspaper featured a poem urging the new crop of freshman to “jump high and leap quick” as they faced the challenges of high school life.[4]
Hoover embraced Central’s culture of achievement. During the first few weeks, he observed with relief that he seemed capable of meeting the school’s demands. “Did fine in studies at school,” he wrote on September 22. Things also went “fine” on September 24 and 26. One classmate remembered Hoover as a focused, unsmiling teacher’s pet, determined to prove himself in the classroom. “John Edgar would enter Miss (or is it Mrs.?) Farr’s math class, speak no word to anyone, circle the back of the class, and seat himself directly in front of that most excellent teacher and drink in every word she uttered.” He was the same boy at Central that he had been at Brent Elementary: attentive to teachers, eager to please, and even more eager to demonstrate his abilities. His grades bore this out. During his first year, Hoover achieved grades of E (for “excellent”) in all his classes, except for one G (“good”) in Latin and another in spelling. In his sophomore year, he received E’s in everything but spelling. As a junior, he earned an E in “neatness,” as well as in his academic subjects, with his only end-of-semester G coming in French. In a school renowned for its high academic standards, his grades helped earn him a reputation as the “Perfect Student,” according to a classmate’s description.[5]
As a matter of social standing, however, good grades got him only so far. Like the rest of the country, Central High believed that it had a “boy problem,” simultaneously identified as a lack of heft among its brainy male students and as an excess of disruptive behavior among the rest. Girls outnumbered boys two to one (in school as in church). But even the most talented female students were expected to play cheerleading roles while their male counterparts engaged in “active battle,” as one girl wrote in the school paper. In late 1908, the year before Hoover enrolled, Central established a study hall specifically for third-year boys, led by a male teacher, in hopes that “the boys under his direction shall become more manly, of greater self-reliance, and better able to uphold the reputation of Old Central as it should be upheld,” according to a student account. Outside the classroom, the school’s principal urged boys to pour their energies into sports and physical conflict. To encourage them, Central organized an assembly with Harvard president Charles Eliot, who emphasized physical as well as mental education, thus transforming the typical Harvard student “from a stooping, weak and sickly youth into one well-formed, robust, and healthy.” Even more than most boys at Central, Hoover was under pressure to demonstrate that he fit into the latter category, that his academic prowess would not undermine his success beyond the classroom.[6]
Hoover’s closest relative at Central, his uncle Halsted, was not much help in this area. An artistically minded man, Halsted was Dickerson’s youngest brother by some fourteen years; he had been just eight years old when their father died. Halsted grew up with his mother, Cecilia, as sole parent, and stayed on with her after he reached adulthood, a harbinger of Hoover’s own future. She died at the start of Hoover’s freshman year, leaving Halsted alone in the family house, a personal loss that elicited expressions of “sincere sympathy” in the Central High paper. Halsted was popular with the students, who called him “Pop Hoover” and regularly praised his singing. But his subject—music and choral performance—hardly offered a solution to Hoover’s “boy problem.” Instead of following his uncle’s example, Hoover chose to follow his brother, Dick, and try out for the football team.[7]
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Dick had played at Eastern, a star in the most important sport the school had to offer. At Central, Hoover went to freshman tryouts and was immediately cut from the team, one of the few blows he encountered during his high school years. He turned instead to the cadet corps, and there he found his social home. The cadets offered junior military training (something like a high school version of today’s ROTC). At Central, the corps practiced regularly throughout the year, culminating in a citywide regimental competition. The final drills often took place on the White House Ellipse, with the secretary of war or the secretary of the navy presiding. In the spring of 1909, just before Hoover’s freshman year, President William Howard Taft himself had attended the proceedings, offering a “highly complimentary” review of what he saw.[8]
Hoover never expressed any interest in a military career, either as a teenager or as an adult. But in high school the cadet corps was a major point of pride. “There is not the slightest doubt that the drill is beneficial to schoolboys,” declared Hoover’s company captain in his junior year. “It is a form of athletics—one of the best forms—and the discipline and training develops those traits in a young man’s character which he will need most in after life.” Unlike football, where Hoover was considered small and weak, the cadet corps demanded relatively little coordination or strength. What mattered among cadets was the ability to walk a straight line, to execute drills in rain and snow, to submit to discipline and hierarchy, to put up with shouldering a rifle for hours on end.[9]
Most Central boys found such conditions hard to tolerate. Hoover did not. Even as a freshman, he gloried in the discipline of the corps, noting cadet practices in his diary, only occasionally—and then only in the dead of winter—giving any hint that drill practice might be less than ideal. He was especially fond of the cadet uniform, with its high collar and gold epaulets. A photo of Hoover in cadet dress shows a thin, frowning teenager, the visor of his boxy cap pulled low over his eyes, his shoulders thrown back in an approximation of soldierly style. It is the photo of someone who takes himself seriously and who is trying, despite protruding ears and a youthful countenance, to be taken seriously in turn.[10]
In his junior year, he earned promotion to second sergeant of Company B, ranked just below Company A in the school hierarchy. In that position, he became known as an enthusiastic drillmaster. “Is that a lion roaring, or is it an approaching thunderstorm?” ran a joke in the student paper. “O’ no sir; it is just Hoover counting cadence for Company B.” Though still in high school, Hoover was beginning to think through many of the ideas that he would later pass on to his employees: organizational loyalty, exhaustive discipline, attention to hierarchy, the need to “fight” in order to succeed. He was also starting to learn about the importance of community support for maintaining morale within the ranks. Despite their best efforts, Company B often failed to attract much of an audience among fellow students, who vastly preferred football games to drill competitions. Company officers found themselves begging for “loyal support from the school, in order to produce a drill of which every supporter will be proud.”[11]
All of this conveys an image of Hoover as a stern young man, beholden to duty, honor, and accomplishment. Yet it is clear from his diary, and from scattered evidence in the school paper, that he enjoyed the corps and viewed it as a source of camaraderie and good times. During freshman year, his corps meetings evoked one of the few expressions of genuine enthusiasm—indeed, of any emotion—in his personal diary. “Went to squad meeting . . . ,” he recorded on January 7, 1910, “corporal. Capt. Lieunt + serg all there. Had a great time.” Later, as an officer, he reveled in weekly strategy meetings that lasted well into the night, “convening early in the evening and often adjourning early in the morning,” by his own account.[12]
The one area of cadet life where Hoover seems to have stumbled was in the annual dances with members of the opposite sex. For many students, these events marked the high point of their social lives. School publications were packed with gossip about which boys looked best in uniform, and about who might be accompanying whom to the big events. Hoover is curiously missing from all such gossip, and from any other speculation about dating or sexual experimentation. The chief evidence that he even attended such events is a 1913 dance card that he saved for many years. Under “partners,” the lineup is blank.[13]
Hoover preferred to spend his time with other boys—especially with Lawrence Jones, better known as “Biff.” Jones was everything Hoover’s brother, Dick, had been: “Big, brawny, intelligent,” in the words of Central’s yearbook, not only a football star but also class president. Hoover seems to have regarded Jones with the same giddy admiration that infected the rest of the school. “Biff Jones and I buddied around together all the time,” he later recalled, “and it always drew a laugh from our friends to see the big, powerful Biff accompanied by a youngster half his size.” Jones joined the cadet corps, where he and Hoover forged a friendship, spending hours side by side at drill practice and strategy meetings. As the cadet corps drew to a close during senior year, Jones expressed the fervent adolescent wish that it might go on forever. “Now that the guns of our men are in their racks, our sabres sheathed for the last time, and no more cadet life is left for us,” he wrote, “we feel the loss of it all very keenly.” Ultimately, he would organize his adult life around the pillars of his high school success, going on to lead the West Point football team, first as a player and later as head coach.[14]
Hoover, too, held on to certain patterns from high school. He would always reserve his greatest affection for other men, a fact readily ascribed to boyish camaraderie during high school but one that would raise difficulties and questions in years to come. Mostly, he chose men with whom he shared an institutional bond, as in the cadet corps, where he and Jones labored side by side together in a clear hierarchy and common purpose. When he could hire his own employees, he proved partial to men like Jones as well: big, amiable football players, models of what American men were supposed to be.
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Hoover’s final area of achievement at Central was the debate team, a sphere that fortuitously involved brains rather than brawn. For a boy who had once struggled with a stutter, competitive public speaking may have been the ultimate proving ground, showing how he had prevailed over supposed weakness and disability. The debate team contained both boys and girls. Like so many activities at Central, however, it was prized most for its ability to turn ill-formed young men into self-disciplined, powerful leaders. “Public men are unceasing in their expression of the true value of good instruction in public speaking,” noted one student essay. Given the school’s location and ties to the political world, Central students assumed that boys who succeeded there would go on to public service, and that growing up in Washington would give them an edge. “In our city we have the Congress of the American people—a body of men whose political existence depends on their ability to debate,” explained the school paper. “We also have the Congressional Library, an institution which offers opportunity for unlimited study on any subject under the sun.” With these tools at his disposal, Hoover learned how to craft an argument, how to conduct in-depth research, and how to claim a political voice in the wider world.[15]
