G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Hoover was made acting director of the Bureau of Investigation in May 1925, putting to rest fears that he would be fired during the housecleaning that took place in the wake of Harding’s many scandals. While harboring grand plans for reforming the bureau, Hoover was initially more concerned with pleasing his boss, Attorney General Harlan Stone, even when Stone ordered the closing of the Radical Division in which Hoover had first made his mark. Still, he was able to improve the bureau’s ability to monitor its own agents and established hiring criteria that prized a background in law or accounting. Yet he was closely monitored by both liberals in government, who objected to his harsh methods during the Red Scare, and conservatives, who were eager to roll back Wilson-era expansions of federal power. Hoover tried to thread this needle by depicting his agents as both loyal servants of the Constitution and upright defenders of traditional morality. Prohibition provided a critical test of this proposition: It involved enforcing a constitutional amendment, as well as addressing the nationwide corruption of police departments, whose officers took bribes in exchange for ignoring illegal alcohol sales. This situation created an opportunity to depict the bureau’s activities as an attempt to improve the operations of state and local police, rather than appropriating their functions on behalf of the federal government.

In the first three years of his directorship, Hoover established the bureau as an archetypical example of bureaucratic professionalism and moral uprightness. Many of his agents came from George Washington law school, and particularly the Kappa Alpha fraternity. In the process, Hoover effectively ended the practice of hiring Black agents and began replacing them with white agents likely hostile to integration. One of these recruits was Clyde Tolson, a Missourian and GW alumnus who would become Hoover’s close companion for the rest of his life. Hoover drilled into his new recruits the importance of procedure, equating the errant filing of paperwork with a moral lapse. The bureau was still small enough for Hoover to know, track, and evaluate every agent. At the time, the bureau mostly concerned itself with white-collar crime, although it also developed a reputation for street-level policing when it apprehended a thief responsible for the killing of a bureau agent in October 1925 and exposed a deadly criminal conspiracy against the Osage tribe in 1926 (the subject of the 2017 book and 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon). Hoover’s abrasive and demanding style made him very unpopular throughout much of the bureau, but he also had an inner circle of loyalists and the support of Congress.

Hoover’s early focus on bureaucratic procedure and investigative methodology encountered a major challenge with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and the crime wave that followed. Hoover initially prioritized the accumulation of crime statistics, as local departments might be incentivized to manipulate their own records. At the same time, the Depression was actually one of the best times in Hoover’s personal life, as his employment was secure, and he was respected enough within Washington circles to earn support for his reforms but not well known enough to be a public figure. He also managed to insulate the unique culture he was building within the bureau from congressional efforts to impose uniform standards on the entire civil service. Hoover continued to emphasize the gathering and dissemination of information over crime-fighting, but a turning point came in 1932 with the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. President Herbert Hoover (no relation) responded to public outrage by placing the bureau at the center of the investigation, and Congress made kidnapping a federal crime.

Very little is certain about Hoover’s attitudes toward sexuality and relationships during this time. He presented himself as a bachelor whose responsibilities to his aged mother and devotion to his work precluded marriage and family. There has been immense speculation that Hoover was a closeted gay man, although there is scant proof of any sexual encounters with men. A rare insight into Hoover’s thinking on these matters comes from his correspondence with bureau agent Melvin Purvis, another Kappa Alpha man who had managed to work his way into Hoover’s confidence after languishing in the lower ranks. Their letters begin with Hoover inquiring into Purvis’s marital prospects, Purvis insisting that he had no plans to marry, and a cat-and-mouse effort by Hoover to discover the reason while Purvis demurs. They gossiped, exchanged gifts, and developed the affectionate nicknames “Mel” and “Jayee.” Hoover joked that his secretary, Helen Gandy, was attracted to Purvis, although there is no direct evidence from her or Purvis to support that claim. Hoover’s fondness for Purvis seems to have been genuine, although the language of the letters is too vague to confirm it as romantic attraction, and it is unclear whether Purvis was similarly fond of Hoover or was playing a skillful game in pleasing his boss. Either way, it was impossible to have any kind of relationship with Hoover without acknowledging the disparities of power to which he alluded constantly. Hoover later appointed Purvis as special agent in charge of the Chicago office, just as that city became the focus of the government’s war on crime.

When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, revitalizing the Wilsonian project of well-administered government improving the lives of ordinary people, Hoover was once again unsure if the new administration and party might view him as an unwelcome vestige of their predecessors. Any political disputes with FDR were put aside when a group of gangsters killed four police officers in Kansas City, including a bureau agent. The desire for retribution ran up against the reality that the bureau was not equipped to hunt down and possibly engage with heavily armed criminals. This crime came just after FDR had reorganized several agencies within a new Division of Investigation, which would conduct a “war on crime” under Hoover’s leadership. Hoover gradually expanded the scope of bureau’s activities to include gold hoarding, bank robbery, and gun sales, which were not necessarily federal offenses but were associated with the types of crime the bureau was charged with defeating. Yet Hoover was still reluctant to turn his bureau, which he touted for his bureaucratic competence and investigative skills, into a federal police force ready to do battle with “public enemies.”

Bank robber John Dillinger forced Hoover’s hand: When Dillinger escaped from prison and crossed state lines, the case became a federal one. With the Roosevelt administration’s support, the bureau became much more involved in direct police work, including the bribery of informers and rough treatment of suspects in custody. Purvis reflected this transformation from his new office in Chicago, shifting his image from that of a genteel bachelor to a merciless enforcer. Yet their initial attempt at hard-nosed police work was a botched raid on Dillinger’s camp in Wisconsin during which bureau agents killed civilians for the first time and another bureau agent lost his life. Congress responded by granting the bureau still greater enforcement powers, and in July 1934, bureau agents led by Melvin Purvis ambushed and killed Dillinger outside a Chicago theater. Months later, another Purvis-led squad killed the gangster known as Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd in what appeared to be an assassination rather than an arrest attempt gone awry. Just one month later, two more agents died in the course of killing the gangster “Baby Face Nelson.” The public enemies were gone, but at an extremely high human cost to the bureau, leaving its overall identity in an uncertain place.

With the main “public enemies” all killed in 1934, FDR wanted the use the resulting publicity to make the bureau the centerpiece of a campaign to burnish the image of the federal government. Hoover was wary of direct efforts to enlist public support, but also he wanted to counterbalance the influence of popular media, which he saw as glorifying criminals with sensationalist antihero narratives. Shortly after the bureau moved into new offices (where a display case outside of Hoover’s office exhibited the bloody relics of recent shootouts), the bureau quietly changed its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, part of the New Deal’s “alphabet soup” agencies and a way to create separation between the bureau and its recent past in enforcing now-defunct Prohibition. Hoover sponsored a book glorifying the bureau’s efforts against the public enemies, as well as the film G-Men, which starred James Cagney and turned the actor famous for his gangster roles into the model police officer. Although Hoover resented the film’s depiction of bureau agents as street-tough avengers rather than cerebral bureaucrats, the overwhelming public response quelled his concerns. Hoover himself became a celebrity, and tales of “G-men” became a fixture of pop culture. Seeing the importance of public relations, Hoover tapped Clyde Tolson to lead such efforts going forward.

Tolson’s elevation coincided with a souring relationship between Hoover and Melvin Purvis, whom Hoover resented for the attention he gained through the killings of Dillinger, Floyd, and Nelson. Hoover undertook a campaign of harassment that was most likely personal and resulted in Purvis’s resignation in July 1935. Thereafter, Tolson managed personnel and administration, as well as public relations. He also became Hoover’s ubiquitous social companion as the director became more of a celebrity. Tolson’s roommate from George Washington, Guy Hottel, also rose through the ranks quickly, apparently due to his personal connections more than his competence.

During this time, Hoover reveled in his status as a public figure, rubbing elbows with entertainment personalities as well as government officials, and Tolson was both his companion and guide to the world of the rich and famous. Hoover developed an especially important rapport with Walter Winchell, who could provide Hoover with both publicity and access to other social elites. He brought Hoover and Tolson into the night life of the Stork Club, which Hoover accepted despite his normally ascetic lifestyle. As his connection with Tolson deepened—evidence suggests a profound affection if not outright sexual attraction—Hoover promoted him to assistant to the director, the position he would retain for the rest of Hoover’s life.