Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [10]
Edgar was born when the Civil War was still a vivid memory, when the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was little more distant in the past than is that of President Kennedy today. The Union Lincoln had forged still had only forty-five member states. The year 1895 saw talk of war with England over territories in Latin America, and soon there would be conflict with Spain, resulting in U.S. conquest of the Philippines. Just four years before Edgar was born, the white man’s war against the Indians ended at Wounded Knee.
Edgar, who would die in the era of the jumbo jet, was born when Edison’s two inventions, his Light System and his Moving Picture Machine, were still marvels. The telephone was reserved for government officials and the wealthy. There were less than 150 miles of paved road in the nation, and only a few thousand cars. The bicycle, in exotic variety, was the fashionable thing on city streets.
American cities were already overcrowded, although the great wave of immigration was yet to come. Those earliest immigrants, the blacks, faced renewed persecution as southern states applied racist segregation laws. The morning Edgar was born, a black man was lynched by a southern mob – a common enough occurrence then.
The whitewashed frame house that was Edgar’s birthplace – a mile or so from the White House – was insulated from all these miseries. His father, Dickerson Hoover, was thirty-eight when Edgar was born, the descendant of settlers who had moved to Washington in the early nineteenth century.
Later, Edgar’s propaganda department would describe Dickerson as ‘a career man in the government service.’ This was technically true, but the post he held was not grand at all. Like his father before him, he worked as a printmaker for the government mapmaking department.
Edgar’s thirty-four-year-old mother, Anna, ‘Annie’ to intimates, had a classier background. Her forebears had served as senior local officials in the Swiss village of Klosters, now the celebrated ski resort. They had their own coat of arms and a fine ancestral home next to the church. One scion of the family had become a bishop.
Annie’s immigrant grandfather had been the first Swiss Consul General to the United States. Her grandmother, besides bearing thirteen children, had found prominence in her own right. A trained nurse known as ‘Mother Hitz,’ she had been a Florence Nightingale to wounded Union soldiers camped on Capitol Hill during the Civil War.
Edgar’s mother had a privileged upbringing – St Cecilia’s school for girls in Washington, then a convent in Switzerland. The granddaughter who probably knew her best, Dorothy Davy, remembered her as ‘very much a lady, a very interesting person. She was loving, but she was also very proud. Granddaddy was kindly and gentle, but she was the strong one in that combination.’
A family photograph shows Edgar’s father as a troubledlooking figure of the Victorian clerical class, cramped in high collar and formal dress, his bowler on his knee. His wife stands behind him, severe in high-necked blouse and dark jacket, her hair piled on top of her head, her lips tightly compressed, trying and failing to smile.
The couple’s marriage, fifteen years before Edgar’s birth, was remembered in the family as ‘the largest wedding Capitol Hill ever had.’ For Annie, such a grand affair may have been in the normal course of things. For Dickerson, of humbler stock, it was probably overwhelming.
Edgar was the last of four children. A male heir, Dickerson, Jr., had been born in 1880, followed by two daughters, Lillian and Sadie. When Edgar was conceived, his parents