John Edgar Hoover

John Edgar Hoover

G-men, Feds, Special Agents and Detectives, all names for members of a nationally, elite police force known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But how would you act if you found out that the G-men was started by a cross dressing homosexual?

John Edgar Hoover was born in Washington, D.C. on January 1, 1895. His father, Dickerson Hoover, was a printmaker, but he had a mental breakdown in 1921 and he spent his last eight years in Laurel Asylum. This dramatically reduced the family income and Hoover had to leave school and seek employment. Hoover found work as a messenger boy in the Library of Congress, but highly ambitious, spent his evenings studying for a law degree at George Washington University.

After Graduation, Hoover's uncle, a judge, helped him find work in the Justice Department. After only two years in the organization, Alexander M. Palmer, the attorney general, made Hoover his special assistant. Hoover was given responsibility of heading a new section that had been formed to gather evidence on "revolutionary and ultra-revolutionary groups.” Over the next couple of years Hoover had the task of organizing the arrest and deportation of suspected communists in America. This was known as the Red Scare.

From his previous work in the Library of Congress, Hoover decided to catalog all of the suspected communist. Over the next few years 450,000 names were indexed and detailed biographical notes were written up on the 60,000 that Hoover considered the most dangerous. Hoover then advised Palmer to have these people rounded up and deported.

On 7th November, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested in twenty-three different cities. However, the vast majorities of these people were American citizens and had to be eventually released. However, Hoover now had the names of hundreds of lawyers who were willing to represent radicals in court. These were now added to his growing list of names in his indexed database.

Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. The three years that he had spent in the organization had convinced Hoover that the organization needed to improve the quality of its staff. Great care was spent in recruiting and training agents. In 1926 Hoover established a fingerprint file that eventually became the largest in the world. The power of the bureau was limited. Law enforcement was a state activity, not a federal one.