Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [8]
For Hoover the reprieve was temporary. After all he had achieved in the last nine years, it was galling to him that mere politicians held his fate; if not for him, the Bureau of Investigation might have been eliminated years before. It was an odd little outfit, “a bureaucratic bastard,” one critic called it, responsible for investigating a grab bag of federal offenses, including sedition, interstate auto theft, breakouts from federal prisons, and crime on Indian reservations. One writer termed it “an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility.” Hoover’s agents did not possess arrest powers; if they wanted to mount a raid, they were obliged to bring along local policemen. Nor did they carry guns. This was a policy, not a law; Hoover’s model was Scotland Yard. His men were investigators, not policemen. “Fact finders” was the word his aides used.
The Bureau had a sordid history. Created in 1908 to investigate antitrust cases, it had devolved over the ensuing fifteen years into a nest of nepotism and corruption. By the early 1920s, its agents, scattered across fifty domestic offices, were hired mostly as favors to politicians. Its most notorious employee, a con man named Gaston Means, earned his money blackmailing congressmen, selling liquor licenses to bootleggers, and auctioning presidential pardons. In the wake of a mid-1920s Congressional investigation, the Bureau acquired the nickname “The Department of Easy Virtue.”
The day he was promoted to clean up the Bureau in 1924, Hoover was a stoic twenty-nine-year-old government attorney who still lived with his adoring mother in the house where he was raised, a two-story stucco building at 413 Seward Square in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. He was a boyhood stutterer who overcame his disability by teaching himself to speak rapidly, in staccato bursts so fast that more than one stenographer was unable to keep up. Neat, intense, and disciplined, Hoover grew up surrounded by civil servants in the bosom of the Washington bureaucracy. There was little question that he would follow his father, a deskman at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, into government work. Hoover went to night school at George Washington University, where he joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity. Working days as a clerk at the Library of Congress, he received his bachelor of law degree in 1916 and his master’s a year later, the same year that he passed the District of Columbia bar.
In July 1917 he took a job as a clerk at Justice. Many of the department’s up-and-coming young lawyers were gone, enlisted in the war effort, and Hoover, sharply dressed and a demon for detail, stood out, earning two promotions in his first six months. He went to work in the alien-registration section and moved up quickly; by 1919, at the age of twenty-four, he was named head of the General Intelligence Division, a newly created bureau charged with prosecuting labor radicals, anarchists, and Communists. He earned high marks—and his first interview in the New York Times—as a driving force behind the department’s January 1920 raids on Communists in thirty-three cities, which led to the arrest of more than three thousand people. He lobbied for and received his new job as assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation in August 1921.
A Senate probe of the Bureau in 1924 led to the resignations and indictments of the BI chief and the attorney general. The new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, was at a loss about what to do with the Bureau. He scribbled down notes of its problems: “filled with men with bad records . . . many convicted of crimes . . . organization lawless . . . agents engaged in many practices which are brutal and tyrannical in the extreme.”2 Stone had