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Hoover, J. Edgar
 Encyclopędia
Britannica Article |
born Jan. 1, 1895 ,
Washington, D.C., U.S.
died May 2, 1972 , Washington, D.C.
J. Edgar Hoover
AP/Wide World Photos
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in full John Edgar
Hoover U.S. public official who, as director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in
1972, built that agency into a highly effective, if occasionally
controversial, arm of federal law enforcement.
Hoover studied law at night
at George Washington University, where he received degrees as bachelor
of laws in 1916 and as master of laws in the following year. He entered
the Department of Justice as a file reviewer in 1917, and two years
later he became special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer, in which post he oversaw the mass roundups and deportations of
suspected Bolsheviks (Communists) after World War I. He was named acting
director of the Bureau of Investigation (as it was then called) in May
1924 and confirmed as director seven months later. Finding the
organization in disrepute because of the scandals of the Harding
administration, he reorganized and rebuilt it on a professional basis,
recruiting agents on merit and instituting rigorous methods of selecting
and training personnel. He established a fingerprint file, which became
the world's largest; a scientific crime-detection laboratory; and the
FBI National Academy, to which selected law enforcement officers from
all parts of the country were sent for special training.
In the early 1930s the
exploits of gangsters in the United States were receiving worldwide
publicity. Hoover took advantage of this to publicize the achievements
of the FBI in tracking down and capturing well-known criminals. Both the
FBI's size and its responsibilities grew steadily under his management.
In the late 1930s President
Franklin D. Roosevelt gave him the task of investigating both
foreign espionage in the United States and the activities of communists
and fascists alike. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI
undertook the intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing
activists in the United States. Hoover's animus toward radicals of every
kind led him to aggressively investigate both the
Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black activists
in the 1960s. At the same time, he maintained a hands-off policy toward
the
Mafia , which was allowed to conduct its operations nationwide
practically free of FBI scrutiny or interference.
Hoover habitually used the
FBI's enormous surveillance and information-gathering powers to collect
damaging information on politicians throughout the country, and he kept
the most scurrilous data under his own personal control. He used his
possession of these secret files to maintain himself as the FBI's
director and was apparently able to intimidate even sitting presidents
by threatening to leak damaging disclosures about them. By the early
1970s he had come under public criticism for his authoritarian
administration of the FBI and for his persecution of those he regarded
as radicals and subversives. He retained his post, however, until his
death at age 77, by which time he had been the FBI's chief for 48 years
and had served 8 presidents and 18 attorneys general.
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