• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As America celebrated the end of the war, Edgar’s future was uncertain. With the War Emergency Division about to be disbanded, he started looking for a new job. He applied to join the Bureau of Immigration, was turned down, then went to his boss, John Lord O’Brian, and asked for a transfer to the Bureau of Investigation. He did not get that either, but O’Brian mentioned his name to the Attorney General-designate Mitchell Palmer, the ‘Fighting Quaker.’

A clutch of senior officials, including O’Brian, quit the Bureau as soon as possible once Palmer was named for the post. During the war, when he had been Alien Property Custodian, millions of dollars in seized German assets had ended up in the hands of Palmer’s Democratic cronies. He had ambitions to be President and saw the Justice Department merely as a stepping-stone. Just when he needed one, a political bandwagon appeared – in the shape of a wave of hysteria about Bolshevism.

Palmer took office in spring 1919, as Lenin was calling for world revolution. After months of horror stories about socialist upheaval in Europe, the American middle classes were shocked by waves of strikes at home – 3,000 that year alone. Then a bombing campaign began, including a midnight attack on the home of the new Attorney General. The Senate called for a probe into an alleged plan to overthrow the government, and Congress funded an all-out investigation of radical groups.

The great Red scare had begun. Palmer hired William Flynn, former Chief of the Secret Service, to head the Bureau of Investigation, with Frank Burke, the Secret Service’s former Russian expert, as second-in-command. As he cast around for assistants in his own department, Palmer remembered Edgar Hoover – one of only two wartime legal staffers who had asked to stay on.

A Secret Service check on Edgar turned up nothing remarkable – except that his father was now ‘very ill’ in an asylum, and that Edgar was paying the bills. At twenty-four, Edgar became a Special Assistant to Palmer and head of a new section formed to gather evidence on ‘revolutionary and ultra-radical groups.’

His day-to-day chores were directed by Assistant Attorney General Francis Garvan, a counter-subversion zealot with a visceral hatred of foreigners – and Edgar soon became known as ‘Garvan’s pet.’ The job was tailor-made for the young man who had once delighted in sorting his books and keeping a record of his clothes sizes, then gone on to toil among the stacks at the Library of Congress. He now used his experience at the Library to build a massive card index on left-wingers.

The index proved to be astoundingly efficient by the standards of the time, the nearest thing to today’s instantaneous retrieval by computer. Names and cross-references could be located within minutes. Half a million names were indexed during this, Edgar’s first big operation, along with biographical notes on 60,000 people.

Edgar immersed himself in Communist literature. ‘I studied,’ he was to recall, ‘the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as the activities of the Third International.’ Those doctrines, he reported to his superiors, ‘threaten the happiness of the community, the safety of every individual … They would destroy the peace of the country …’

As a reading of Soviet Communism, this was accurate enough. Yet few historians believe there was any real risk of violent revolution in the United States in the twenties. In the wake of the bombings, however – not least thanks to Palmer and his bright young men – the country lost its balance.

Edgar’s chosen assistant was George Ruch, a friend from high school days who held extreme right-wing views. Ruch’s concept of democracy is summed up in one of his reports, which expressed astonishment that left-wingers – like other citizens – ‘should be allowed to speak and write all they wish against this government …’

Later, when Ruch left the Bureau to head the Industrial Police for a Pittsburgh coal company, Edgar would assign