Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [7]
What distinguished those early months of 1933 was that so many Americans had no money to enjoy any of this. The stock market crash of 1929 had degenerated into an economic depression. Hundreds of thousands of men lost their jobs. On reflection, that spring would be seen as a low point. Muddy shantytowns spread along the Potomac River, beneath Riverside Drive in New York, and in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. Thousands of families, including a legion of dirty children, lived nomadic lives in railroad cars rumbling across the Midwest, lurching from town to town in search of a better life that was nowhere to be found. In Washington there were marches, some of them violent, scenes of tanks and soldiers pushing back desperate men hungering for jobs. People were angry. They blamed the government. They blamed the banks.
As Roosevelt delivered his inaugural address that drizzly March morning, a group of government bureaucrats in dark suits listened around a radio in a third-floor office at the corner of Vermont and K Streets in downtown Washington. What they did was little known to anyone outside their families. Their supervisor was a squat, beady-eyed man, thirty-eight years old, with a flattened nose and loose bags under his eyes. His resemblance to a bulldog was much remarked upon. That morning J. Edgar Hoover was preoccupied with keeping his job.
Today, going on four decades after his death in 1972, it’s difficult to remember a time when Hoover was not the monolithic figure whose secret files cowed American presidents, who underwrote Senator Joseph McCarthy’s star chamber, who hounded national figures as varied as Martin Luther King, Jr., Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs. For four decades Hoover dominated American law enforcement as no person before or since, single-handedly creating the country’s first national police force. His legacy is as complex as the man himself. Before Hoover, American law enforcement was a decentralized polyglot of county sheriffs and urban police departments too often crippled by corruption. By and large, it was Hoover who brought the level of efficiency, professionalism, and centralized control the nation knows to this day. But his accomplishments will forever be sullied by the abuses of power—rampant illegal wiretapping, break-ins, and harassment of civil rights groups—of his later years.
Hoover’s power did not evolve slowly. It erupted during the Great Crime Wave of 1933-34. He entered this period an anonymous federal functionary, his bureau struggling to shake past scandals. In twenty months he emerged a national hero, a household name lauded in films, books, and comic strips. In six hundred days, the modern FBI was born. This book is the story of how it happened.
That morning, Hoover was director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Not the Federal Bureau of Investigation; it wouldn’t get that name for another two years.a He had been in office nine years, since 1924, but he had enemies, lots of them, and Roosevelt’s men made it clear that he would probably be replaced. The final decision was to be made by the new attorney general, a confirmed Hoover-hater named Thomas Walsh. That Thursday, two days before Roosevelt’s address, Walsh,