G-Man, page 8
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When President Wilson arrived in 1913, Washington still retained some of its small-town feel, but the level of conflict was picking up fast. “We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest,” social commentator Walter Weyl had noted the previous year. The presidential contest had reflected this sense of urgency. All of the 1912 candidates expressed concern about the growing inequality between the nation’s rich and poor, and about its pernicious effect on American democracy. All agreed, too, that only the federal government could hope to counterbalance the economic might of gargantuan corporations like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Washington would now have to be a place not only to administer the government but also, in their shared progressive vision, to transform the nation.[3]
Wilson brought a polite but hopeful tone to that discussion and to the city of Washington itself. A former president of Princeton, he looked upon the capital as a place chock-full of potential but in need of serious help. Theodore Roosevelt had treated the city as a playground, to be enlivened with fistfights, exotic animals, and boyish spectacle. Wilson showcased the college man’s reserve and authority, a thin-faced, paled-eyed patrician with narrow wire spectacles and an air of constant surprise. His presence made Washington a professional man’s city, in which books and expertise could be prized over masculine showiness. Perhaps this intellectual environment provided consolation for Hoover: if he could not go off to Princeton, at least some of Princeton had come to him.
As a scholar of government, Wilson specialized in the study of public administration, an emerging field in which his work exerted a pioneering influence. He believed in the value of a nonpartisan, professional civil service, the area of government in which the Hoover men had long worked and, sometimes, thrived. Wilson had also tackled the problem of partisanship among elected officials. He had concluded that it was possible, under the right leadership, for everyone to work together on the public’s behalf. During his first few years in office, he attempted to show how the administrative state ought to work, rallying a Democratic-majority Congress to create new executive-branch institutions including the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve. He also helped to push through the nation’s first income tax, aimed at the colossal fortunes of men like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. While these laws hardly touched middle-class families like the Hoovers, they set an example of what a determined, progressive leader might accomplish under the right conditions.
Wilson embraced segregationist politics along with his tributes to experts and administration, a combination not at all unusual among the era’s progressives. Though he had lived for decades in New Jersey, he was a Southern man by birth, a proud son of Virginia. Like most white Southerners, Wilson felt that Reconstruction had been an unmitigated disaster, its damage contained only once white Southerners pushed Black men out of political office and established Jim Crow. When he came to Washington, he brought with him a generation of Southern-born appointees raised on this story. Fully half of his cabinet consisted of Southern men, a situation not seen since before the Civil War. They in turn brought what they had learned as “redeemers,” white Democrats who had spent the past few decades creating and enforcing segregation in their home states.
Wilson licensed these men to carry out a similar program within the federal government, where generations of both Black and white public servants—including the Hoovers—had managed to carry on their work side by side. Under the Wilson administration, many government departments built walls between their Black and white employees, forcing Black clerks into separate bathrooms and out of government cafeterias. Others fired their Black employees rather than bother with the effort of segregation. The result of Wilson’s initiatives was a sudden reordering of Washington’s social geography, the drawing of clear racial lines where things had been blurry before. As a boy, Hoover had always attended segregated schools and churches. Now, just as he prepared to enter the more egalitarian realm of federal employment, that world became segregated, too.[4]
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Hoover knew the Library of Congress well by the time he began working there in 1913. As a boy, he had taken in the building’s grandeur, with its triple-arched entrance, vast flights of exterior stairs, and greenish dome and cupola—all just a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from Seward Square. As a high school student, he had studied there in preparation for key debates, an earnest researcher in white shirt and dark pants, dwarfed by the library’s brilliant-colored murals depicting the finest achievements the world of arts and letters had to offer. The library shared the values that had once animated the Coast Survey—reason, order, knowledge, and expertise. These were carved into its stonework, a “gorgeous and palatial monument,” in the words of one guidebook, “to its National sympathy and appreciation of Literature, Science and Art.” In more than one way, the Library was a familiar place to Hoover.[5]
He got his job there in the usual Washington fashion, through a combination of merit and personal pull. It was not unusual for a Central boy to work at the library; the 1912 class president, a year ahead of Hoover, was already there, earning his way through Georgetown. Hoover had the extra advantage of an uncle who belonged to the Cosmos Club, where the library’s chief administrator, Herbert Putnam, happened to be a member. An opinionated red-haired Boston man, Putnam had come to the library in 1899 hoping to do what William Bache had done at the Coast Survey a generation earlier: turn a government body into a center of professionalism, science, and intellect.[6]
Hoover began his job in October 1913 at a salary of $360 per year, his first government paycheck. He worked in the “order division,” acquiring and sorting the endless run of materials that arrived at the library each day. During his first year on the job, the library processed more than 125,000 new books and pamphlets. Its accessions included not only books published in the U.S., but obscure and priceless works from nearly every world civilization: a Hebrew-language “Semitica” collection donated by philanthropist Jacob Schiff; Chinese, French, and Italian literature; a compendium of pamphlets and books on “the social revolutionary movement in Europe,” including early German-language editions of Marx and Engels. Hoover helped to track these works as they made their way onto the library’s shelves.[7]
After the excitement of high school, there was no avoiding the fact that this was drudge work: sorting and filing, hour after hour, for low pay. At Putnam’s library, though, the challenge of processing information came with a certain frisson. One of Putnam’s great innovations had been the creation of a card index (known, appropriately, as the Library of Congress system) through which the library’s enormous archive of books and information could be retrieved at a moment’s notice. Until Putnam’s arrival, there had been no reliable method of searching and sorting the library’s collections. In that sense, his new classification system was nothing short of revolutionary, the Google of its day.
Looking back, Hoover complained that other clerks urged him to slow down with his sorting and classifying. He ignored them. By the time he left his library job in 1917, he had more than doubled his starting salary, and he had acquired skills that put him at the cutting edge of the era’s information technology. One of his great selling points when he arrived at the Justice Department was his ability to sort immense amounts of data and to find it when needed.[8]
He learned other things from his time at the library as well, practical lessons in how to manage people and how to make a government bureaucracy function. Of all the men Hoover encountered during his early years in government, it was Putnam who first showed him how to run an effective agency. Putnam believed in the library’s identity as a nonpartisan professional organization; he went to Congress for money because he had to, not because politicians knew best. He nurtured a powerful institutional identification among the library’s employees, insisting that clerks and librarians subordinate their desires to “the personality of the institution itself.” He also demanded unflinching loyalty.
As a public figure, Putnam was extraordinarily sensitive to the library’s image, developing elaborate codes of behavior for how employees ought to interact with congressmen and citizens alike. He enforced these rules through a blizzard of “General Orders,” infamous memos outlining everything from proper cataloging procedure to how to greet patrons. Meticulous to a fault, he exercised personal control over staff, budgets, communications, and ordering for the library collections—in short, everything that mattered. When he found even the slightest error by a clerk or librarian, he was famous for tirades of such “precision and eloquence” that they “would arrest circulation and scar the flesh” of his employees. To the degree he was willing to delegate, he insisted on being able to choose his own staff and fought to keep them outside civil service rules, established in the 1880s to reduce partisan influence over government staffing. The civil service merit-testing system, in which bosses were supposed to accept all eligible comers, reduced employers’ hiring discretion—presumably the reason Putnam rejected it.
Putnam’s methods yielded a mixed reputation in Washington. Some viewed him as a truly inspiring leader, brimming with “the energy and nerve that could ensure success.” Others saw him as a tyrant and megalomaniac. Hoover went on to replicate many of Putnam’s best and worst qualities.[9]
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After a full day’s work at the Library of Congress, Hoover set off across town for the GW law school, located in the second floor of the Masonic Temple, an imposing limestone monolith in the heart of the Northwest. As a university, GW was something of an oddity, at least compared to more tradition-bound schools such as Harvard and Yale. Founded in 1821 as Columbian College (and renamed in 1904), the school was supposed to have been the premier national university, an institution that would draw culture, science, and intellect to the capital, like the Coast Survey and the Library of Congress. Over the years, it had instead become a profession-oriented night school for local students like Hoover.
Students and faculty alike took pride in the idea that GW might yet prove itself against the odds. “The history of the George Washington University has been that of the struggle of perseverance and determination,” the student yearbook noted in 1914, at the conclusion of Hoover’s first year. For students from Central High—and there were many of them at GW—it was another familiar culture, at once striving and defensive, deeply rooted in local government culture. As one professor noted during Hoover’s freshman year, up to 75 percent of GW students worked during the day, usually for the government. The school specialized in two- and three-year night programs; students graduated with degrees in dentistry, medicine, library work, teaching, engineering, or law. From there, with the possible exception of the doctors and dentists, the vast majority returned to government work, theoretically with a brighter future and higher salary.[10]
When Hoover started, there were about two hundred students enrolled at the law school. Many of them came from Washington, either because they grew up there or because they had migrated as young adults seeking federal work. Like Central, GW included both men and women, but they tended to be divided by professional program: men mostly became doctors, lawyers, dentists, and engineers; women became teachers, nurses, and librarians. GW had no Black students, a policy of segregation that it would maintain well into the 1950s.[11]
Hoover’s course schedule offered little flexibility, a plod through Corporations, Contracts, Equity, Property, Domestic Relations, Torts, and Evidence. Like most turn-of-the-century law schools, GW ascribed to the case-law system; students spent hours poring over individual cases and puzzling out the application of legal principles. Hoover thrived in this sort of detail-oriented environment. He saved all of his law school notebooks, filling them with rules, regulations, and exceptions. Some of the classes provided a foundation for his later work. He studied federal procedure as well as “brief-making,” two areas where he would soon excel. There were also some notable absences. Apparently Hoover the future crime fighter never took a class in criminal procedure. Nor did he ever formally study constitutional law. Many of the questions that would come to dominate his career—about free speech and civil liberties, federal criminal jurisdiction and civil rights—barely existed during his time in law school.[12]
Even for district residents like Hoover, GW’s greatest selling point was not its classroom instruction but its access to the rest of Washington. By catering to federal employees, the law school developed a network of students and alumni connected to nearly every conceivable form of government and political work. During his first year, Hoover attended a law school banquet featuring Maryland senator Blair Lee and speaker of the house Champ Clark, whose son, Bennett, attended GW. In his third year, it was Virginia attorney general John Garland Pollard and “Uncle Joe” Cannon, the famed Republican congressman who had preceded Clark as house speaker. The dynamic eighty-year-old Cannon, who got his start under Abraham Lincoln, warned GW’s students that their generation “will be up against a new order of things.” Like many GW students—ambitious but practical, well connected but not quite elite—Hoover planned to be in the thick of it.[13]
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The Library of Congress and GW law school equipped Hoover with the technical and professional skills to successfully navigate a government career. But there was a third institution that came into his life during these years, and it mattered as much as the other two. This was Kappa Alpha, the Southern fraternity Hoover joined during his first months on campus. In a college life constrained in so many ways, Kappa Alpha became Hoover’s chief source of sustenance and friendship. It also solidified the conservative racial outlook he would preserve, with minor variations, for the rest of his life. Kappa Alpha described itself as the nation’s most influential Southern fraternity, a gathering place for “the Southland’s favored sons.” When Hoover joined, the national fraternity included sitting congressmen and senators from many Southern states, including Texas, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina. These men shaped how Hoover thought about the essential questions of the day—racial segregation first among them.[14]
Established just months after the end of the Civil War, Kappa Alpha dedicated itself to carrying on the legacy of the “incomparable flower of Southern knighthood” known as Robert E. Lee. According to fraternity legend, its early members also helped to create the first Ku Klux Klan, founded around the same time. Both Kappa Alpha and the Klan traced certain origins to Kuklos Adelphon, a defunct prewar Southern fraternal order known as “old Kappa Alpha.” When Hoover joined half a century later, at least one national Kappa Alpha leader was still insisting that “we started the Ku Klux Klan and should claim our part in its work.” The fraternity’s official journal neither confirmed nor denied the claim.[15]
Kappa Alpha promoted an exclusive regional identity. Members boasted that they belonged to “the single fraternity which has confined itself to Southern territory or to soil where Southern sentiment prevails.” They also described themselves as knightly “gentlemen” modeled after Lee’s style and principles. They took as their motto “Dieu et les Dames” (“God and the Ladies”), a phrase intended to evoke a tradition of white masculine chivalry tarnished by Confederate defeat. To those in the know, the phrase was shorthand for all the values of the Old South, including the idea that white women needed to be protected from the supposedly dire threat of Black sexual violence. The Mississippi legislature inscribed “Dieu et les Dames” on the ceiling of its new statehouse, built in 1903—a sign of Kappa Alpha’s political reach and regional influence.[16]
One of the most prominent Kappa Alphas around Washington was John Temple Graves, a Southern newspaper editor and early Kappa Alpha member who rose to fame as a passionate defender of both segregation and lynching. Born before the Civil War, Graves had come of age with the fraternity, joining as a member in 1871 and rising to Knight Commander, the fraternity’s highest national post, a decade later. In the years since, he had emerged as an outspoken believer in “separation” as the only possible solution to the “serious, menacing, and supreme” racial problem bedeviling the South. Graves called for deporting Black people to the Pacific Islands, some “untaken and undeveloped” Western territory, or even “the dark continent” itself, as a possible alternative to segregation. He also argued for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which allowed Black men the right to vote, labeling it “the American mistake of the century.” In 1906, he helped to spark the Atlanta race riot by encouraging white violence to stem an alleged epidemic of crime and sexual violence at the hands of Black men. Black leaders identified Graves as the most influential voice—“South or North, white or black”—in support of the riot, which saw dozens of Black residents shot, hanged, and beaten to death. Kappa Alpha took a more positive view of his actions. In 1907, just a year after the riot, the fraternity’s Atlanta chapter held a banquet in his honor.[17]
Another of Kappa Alpha’s favored sons was Thomas Dixon, famed for his admiring trilogy of novels about the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. Born and raised in North Carolina, Dixon had joined Kappa Alpha at Wake Forest before moving on to a gadfly career as a lawyer, actor, journalist, and minister. By the time Hoover enrolled at GW, Dixon was best known as a fiction author and playwright—in effect, the nation’s bard of white supremacy. His novels portrayed the Klan as an avenging, godly force, sent to save Southern white women (and civilization itself) from rape and pillage at the hands of debauched former slaves. Dixon believed the men of KA had a special role to play in carrying on this legacy. “God ordained the southern white man to teach the lessons of Aryan supremacy,” he maintained, and he considered Kappa Alpha one of God’s best vehicles. He also wrote widely on the evils of socialism. One novel, published during Hoover’s Central High years, depicted a California commune’s descent into starvation, tyranny, and violence as a result of its socialistic experiments.
