Chapter 1Seward Square

Foreword

In the reading room at College Park, Maryland, a researcher may call up two hundred and ten cubic feet of paper that sat for forty eight years in one man's office. It is all there: the memoranda, the routing slips, the folders on presidents and senators and film actors, the initials in the margins, the neat blue annotations of a man who read everything.

Sixty miles of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's central records are open too, and the Church Committee's volumes, and the counterintelligence files, and the millions of pages released under the Freedom of Information Act since 1974.

What is not there is thirty two file drawers, which a seventy five year old woman spent seventy six days destroying in the basement of a house in north west Washington in the summer of 1972.

Every biography of John Edgar Hoover is written in the space between those two facts, and this one says so on the first page rather than the last.

He is the most familiar unexamined figure in American public life. Eight presidents held office while he ran the Bureau, something near eighteen attorneys general were nominally his superior, and he outlasted every one of them. Almost everybody knows the name and the jaw and the association with something sinister; almost nobody can say what he actually did between nine in the morning and six at night for forty eight years. The answer is that he read and annotated documents, approved and refused requests, designed filing systems, argued about appropriations, and decided what would be written down and who would be permitted to see it. That is the whole of it. He was not a detective and he was not a spy. He was an administrator of exceptional ability, and the argument of this book is that administration was the form his power took and the reason it lasted.

The reason it lasted is not a mystery requiring blackmail to explain, although blackmail has been the standard explanation for fifty years and this book examines it and declines it. He lasted because he was extremely good at the job, because the public liked him, because the Bureau he built was genuinely clean when almost nothing else in American law enforcement was, and because no institution ever worked out a procedure for removing a man whose removal would have to be explained to voters.

Two things follow, and they are usually kept apart when they belong together.

The first is that the achievement was real. In 1924 he inherited an agency that had been used to burgle the offices of a United States senator, and he made it, within a decade, a professional service with entrance standards, a laboratory, a training academy and a reputation for not taking money that it held for the rest of the century. That was not public relations. It happened, and the country was better for it, and it is why he was believed.

The second is that the same instruments made the rest possible. A fingerprint index built to identify criminals becomes a file on a hundred and seventy million people. A requirement that no action be taken without written headquarters approval, imposed to stop agents freelancing, becomes the administrative spine of a fifteen-year covert action program against American citizens. A relationship with local police departments built on giving them free services becomes a national reporting network on political opinion. Nothing in that sequence required a change of character. It required only that the instruments already exist and that somebody decide to point them somewhere new, and the person who decided was the person who had built them.

That is the shape of the thing, and this book tries to show it happening rather than announce it.

It also means that the familiar question about him, whether he was a patriot or a tyrant, is the wrong question and produces nothing. He was a civil servant who believed what a great many respectable Americans of his generation believed, who was better at organizing than any of them, and who was given, by a series of presidents who found him useful, an instrument of a kind the country had never possessed and had never voted to create. The interesting question is not what sort of man he was. It is how a constitutional republic came to have a domestic intelligence service that no statute established, no court supervised and no legislature examined for half a century, and the answer to that is not about his character at all. It is about the eight presidents and the eighteen attorneys general, most of whom knew, and none of whom stopped it, and several of whom asked him for favors.

A word about what this book is made of.

The documentary record on Hoover is enormous and it is not evenly distributed. The Church Committee's volumes, published in 1976, remain the foundation for anything written about the Bureau's domestic operations, and nothing since has replaced them. Beverly Gage's work on the Official and Confidential files, Athan Theoharis on the Bureau's records systems, David Garrow on the King operation, Douglas Charles on the Sex Deviates program, Curt Gentry on the last weeks, Betty Medsger on the Media burglary and Taylor Branch on the early sixties are the scholarship this account rests on, and where their findings conflict the conflict is reported.

What this book adds is not new documents. It is an arrangement. The existing literature tends to divide into the institutional histories, which are strong on how the Bureau worked and reticent about what it did, and the exposures, which are the reverse. The proposition here is that these are the same subject, that the filing system and the abuses are one story and not two, and that the story is legible only if the reader is shown the forms.

Some notes on what is here and what is not.

There is a great deal about paperwork, because the paperwork is where the power was. Readers who come for the gangsters will find them in one chapter and will find that the chapter is largely about press releases.

There is one chapter on Clyde Tolson which sets out what is documented, what is testimony, what is inference and what is not evidence at all, in that order and under those labels, and refuses the most famous story ever told about the two of them, and explains why. Readers who want that story confirmed will be disappointed. Readers who want it denied will be disappointed too. The honest position is narrower than either and it is stated as narrowly as the evidence permits.

There is no chapter on the assassination of John Kennedy, on which the Bureau's conduct was poor and the literature is enormous and the connection to this book's argument is thin. There is no chapter on Chicago in December 1969. Some of the ground this subject touches belongs to other books and is better told there, and where that is so this one goes around rather than over.

And there is a running problem which the last chapter confronts directly and which the reader should have from the beginning. The archive is curated. It was curated continuously for forty eight years by a man who understood better than any American official has ever understood that the record is the thing that survives, and it was curated one final time in the eleven weeks after his death. When this book says that no evidence exists for a proposition, that is a statement about a collection somebody edited, not a statement about the world.

That is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to be exact about which claims rest on documents, which rest on recollection, which rest on inference and which rest on nothing. This book tries to do that in the prose itself, so that a reader can weigh each claim as it arrives, instead of taking the whole on trust and checking the notes afterward. Where accounts conflict, both are given. Where a date is disputed, it is disputed on the page. Where something cannot be established, the sentence says so.

One last thing about timing.

In 1977 a federal judge ordered the tapes, transcripts and logs produced by the Bureau's surveillance of Martin Luther King sealed in the National Archives for fifty years. That period ends on the thirty first of January 2027. As this book goes to press the government has been in court asking to open the material early and the family of the man it concerns has been in court asking that it never be opened at all, and a judge has refused the early release, and the fifty years are nearly up.

Whatever is decided, the decision will be about an object the Federal Bureau of Investigation manufactured under an authorization it obtained for one month in the autumn of 1963. Every party to that argument was a child at the time or unborn.

He is not the subject of it. He is its author, and the argument is still in progress, which is the best evidence available that this is not a closed chapter of American history but an open question about what a state may write down, keep, and refuse to show.

Chapter 1 · Seward Square

Washington in the eighteen nineties was a company town and the company was the federal government. It manufactured nothing. It shipped nothing down a river and dug nothing out of a hill. What it produced was paper: charts, surveys, pension rolls, patent applications, tariff schedules, census returns, and the salaries of the people who produced them. In 1890 the District of Columbia held two hundred and thirty thousand people. By 1900 it held two hundred and seventy eight thousand seven hundred and eighteen, and almost none of them had any say in how the place was run, because Congress governed the District directly and its residents could not vote for president or for anyone else. A man in Washington did not rise by winning an election. He rose by being useful to the men who had won theirs somewhere else, and by staying in the building longer than the people who came and went with the administrations.

That arrangement produced a particular kind of household, and it produced a great many of them. The clerk class of Washington was not rich and did not expect to be. It was salaried, it was stable, and its stability came entirely from the survival of an agency and the goodwill of a chief. Its men wore suits to work and carried no tools. They were graded and ranked and paid according to schedules printed in the back of appropriations bills. They understood, in a way that a farmer in Iowa or a machinist in Cleveland did not have to understand, that a career could be ended by a change of party or a reorganization or a paragraph in a report, and that the way to survive was to be correct, to be punctual, and to be the person who knew where the file was.

Twelve years before Hoover was born, Congress had passed the Pendleton Act, which created a Civil Service Commission and required competitive examination for a slice of federal employment. The Act was a response to an assassination: a disappointed office seeker had shot President Garfield in a Washington railroad station in 1881, and the country decided it had seen enough of the spoils system. But the reform arrived by installments. It covered only a portion of the service at first and was extended agency by agency over the following decades, so that through the whole of Hoover's childhood the federal workforce was a mixture of two principles. Some of it was appointed on merit and protected from politics. Some of it was still handed out. Every clerk in Washington knew which category he was in and knew that the categories moved.

That is the economic fact under the neighborhood, and it explains something about the son that the anecdotes do not. He grew up inside a proposition that had not yet been settled: that a government job could be a profession rather than a favor, that a person could be hired for what he could do and kept for how well he did it, and that the alternative was a city of hangers on waiting for the right man to win. When he got the chance to run something, thirty odd years later, the first thing he did was fire everybody who had been given a job by a congressman. He did not arrive at that idea in 1924. He was raised in it.

The Hoovers were that household exactly. Dickerson Naylor Hoover was born in Washington in 1856 and worked at the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey for forty two years, rising from plate maker to chief of the printing division. His father had worked for the same agency before him. The Survey was the oldest scientific body in the government, established in 1807, and its business was the reduction of the American coastline to numbers and lines that a ship's master could trust. It measured, it computed, it engraved and it printed, and it did all of this to a standard where an error was not an embarrassment but a wreck. Dickerson Hoover ran the part of it that put the results on paper.

What that work actually involved matters, because the household ran on it. A survey party in the field took angles and soundings and depths and sent the numbers back to Washington. Computers, who were men with pencils, reduced the numbers. Draftsmen turned the reductions into drawings. Then the engravers cut the drawings in reverse into copper plates, line by line, including every depth figure and every name, and the printing division pulled the charts and checked them and issued them, and corrected them as the coastline and the channels changed. A chart was not a picture. It was a legal instrument that told a captain how much water he had under him, and a wrong figure on it could put a ship on a bar. The whole apparatus existed to make certain that what was on the paper matched what was in the world, and that the paper could be trusted by a stranger who would never meet the men who made it.

That is a fair description of what the son spent his life claiming to do, and a fair description of the standard he is most often accused of abandoning.

He married Anna Marie Scheitlin, known as Annie, who came from a Swiss line with its own connection to the machinery of official Washington: her uncle John Hitz served as Swiss honorary consul general to the United States. She ran the household's discipline and its religion. Her youngest son was closest to her of anyone in the family, and Beverly Gage, whose biography drew on the family's own papers, describes a woman inclined to instruction who was nonetheless openly affectionate with him. The house was Presbyterian, and Sunday was not optional.

The house itself stood at 413 Seward Square in the southeast quadrant, three blocks behind the Capitol, where North Carolina Avenue crosses Pennsylvania. It was a two story stucco house on a square named for Lincoln's secretary of state. It is not there now. The Capitol Hill United Methodist Church occupies the site, and there is a stained glass window in the church dedicated to the boy who was born in the vanished house.

The square sat two blocks from Eastern Market, the brick market hall Adolf Cluss designed in 1873, where the neighborhood bought its meat and its produce and where boys waited to carry the baskets home. Around it lay a grid of respectable rowhouses occupied by exactly the sort of people the Hoovers were: middle managers of the federal establishment, chief clerks, division heads, men with pensions in view. It was a good address in an ordinary way. Nobody on Seward Square was important. Everybody on Seward Square worked for somebody who was.

The geography of that neighborhood is the first fact of this book, and it has nothing to do with charm.

Washington's original street plan had produced unusually deep blocks, and over the second half of the nineteenth century the interiors of those blocks filled up with a second city. Narrow alleys ran in off the numbered streets and opened into courts lined with small frame and brick dwellings, built without foundations, without plumbing, with open privies behind them and a single hydrant at the corner serving everybody. On Capitol Hill, Navy Place was one of these. After emancipation the city's Black population had more than tripled, and by the last decades of the century the alley courts were where a large part of it lived. Health board inspectors described the alley houses in the eighteen seventies as dilapidated shanties with leaking roofs and broken floors. A 1909 report on the elimination of insanitary and alley houses complained of one alley, in language that gives away the whole official attitude, that its labyrinth of houses offered security from police supervision.

So a boy on Seward Square in 1900 lived perhaps two hundred feet from a Black community and in a different world from it. The front street and the back alley did not touch. They had separate entrances, separate water, separate schools, separate churches and separate futures, and the distance between them was measured in yards. As early as 1883 the Washington Star had observed that the city's colored residents lived as separately as they had under slavery. The census of 1900 counted eighty six thousand seven hundred and two Black residents of the District against one hundred and ninety one thousand five hundred and thirty two white ones, which is to say that nearly a third of the capital was Black, and that the capital had arranged itself so that the other two thirds could go about their business without noticing.

This is not background. It is the first lesson available to a child in that place: that a society can be sorted, that the sorting can be invisible from the front step, and that the sorting holds because everybody agrees to walk down the street rather than the alley. Nothing in the record says the child noticed. Everything in his later career says the arrangement seemed to him natural.

What the record does say, and says plainly, is that the house on Seward Square was not the house he later described.

In public, across five decades, Hoover gave interviewers a childhood of almost aggressive ordinariness: church, school, chores, a first job carrying groceries at Eastern Market where he discovered that a boy who ran faster than the other boys got better tips. He told the grocery story often. It is a good story and there is no reason to doubt it. It is also, on the evidence, a curated one, and what it was curated to leave out is a family history of mental illness and violent death that ran through three generations.

Take them in order, since the accumulation is the argument.

In 1880, fifteen years before Hoover was born, his maternal grandfather drowned himself in the Anacostia River. He left a note. The note complained of the hypocritical and false swearing people who had brought him to it. That document survives; Gage quotes it.

In 1890 the Hoovers had a fourth child, a daughter, Sadie Marguerite. She was born on the second of June. She died on the second of August 1893, at three years old, of diphtheria, and she was buried in the family plot at Congressional Cemetery, a mile east of the house, where her parents and eventually her youngest brother would join her.

Diphtheria in 1893 was the ordinary terror of American childhood, a bacterial infection of the throat that grew a membrane across the airway and suffocated small children over several days while their families watched them do it. There was nothing to be done about it that summer. Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato had shown in Germany at the start of the decade that serum from an immunized animal could neutralize the toxin, but the first successful human treatments with horse serum came in 1894, New York's health department began producing it that winter and the following year, and the first American commercial production started in Philadelphia in 1895. Sadie Hoover died in August 1893. She was on the wrong side of that line by about eighteen months, and within a decade the disease that killed her was killing less than half as many children in the cities that could get the serum.

What the record establishes about that August is the date, the cause, the age and the grave. It does not establish what was said in the house on Seward Square, and this book will not invent it.

Seventeen months after that funeral, on the first of January 1895, Annie Hoover gave birth in the same house to a fifth child and named him John Edgar. His brother Dickerson was fifteen. His sister Lillian was thirteen. He was, in effect, a second family: a New Year's baby arriving into a household that had buried a daughter in the summer before last, with a mother of thirty four and siblings old enough to have been his aunt and uncle.

Then, when he was about ten, his uncle's wife was murdered, in a case scandalous enough to reach the front pages of the Washington papers.

And through the years in which the boy was at school and winning prizes, his father was coming apart. The illness has a name in the family's own documents. Dickerson Hoover Senior went into the Laurel Sanitarium, a private institution in Maryland founded in 1905 for the treatment of mental illness and addiction, whose proprietor was known for discretion about which Washington families sent him their people. He died at 413 Seward Square on the thirtieth of March 1921, and the cause given on the certificate was melancholia and inanition: severe depression, and the loss of the will to eat.

Set these beside one another. A grandfather in the river. A sister in the ground before the subject was born. An aunt murdered. A father who spent his last years in sadness and rage and then in an institution and then dead of not eating. That is the household. Against it, place the public account: church, school, chores, groceries, tips.

The gap between those two versions is not hypocrisy exactly, and it is not simple shame either, although shame is certainly in it. Mental illness in a Washington clerk's family in 1917 was not a private sorrow. It was an occupational hazard. The family's income, its house, its standing on the square and its expectation of a pension all rested on the reputation of a chief of division at a scientific agency, and a chief of division who could not work was a chief of division who could be replaced. What the family did about the father's illness is what such families did. They did not put it in writing.

This is a book about a man who spent his working life deciding what went into files, and he learned the arithmetic of that at home, before he could have named it: some things are recorded, and some things are managed, and the difference between them is the difference between a household that survives and one that does not.

The certificate is where that difference shows.

The District of Columbia required the registration of births in 1895. It had required it for years. Dickerson Junior, born in 1879, had a birth certificate. Lillian, born in 1882, had one. For the child born on the first of January 1895 at 413 Seward Square, no certificate was filed at the time, and none was filed for the next forty three years.

The document that now exists in the District's records was created in 1938. Its number carries the suffix used to mark a delayed filing. Its supporting evidence is an affidavit sworn by Dickerson Hoover Junior, stating that he was present at the birth and that he was fifteen years old at the time. The affidavit does not mention a doctor. Hoover's own account of his birth, given to journalists over the years, has a physician in attendance.

The date of the filing is the part that has kept people busy for a century. Annie Hoover died in February 1938. Her son, then forty three and eleven years into running the Federal Bureau of Investigation, applied for a certificate of his own birth in the months that followed, using as his witness a brother who had been a boy at the time rather than a mother who had been in the bed.

There are two honest things to say about this and it is worth saying both.

The first is that the delay is real, that it is odd, and that it has been used to support a specific claim: that Hoover was of mixed race and that the family concealed it. That claim was set out at length in 2000 by Millie McGhee, a Black writer from Mississippi whose family's oral history holds that its Hoovers and the Washington Hoovers were the same people. A genealogist, George Ott, examined the claim on her behalf, found some circumstantial support and some irregularities in the Washington records, and found no conclusive proof. No document has ever been produced that establishes it. Historians working from the archive, Gage included, do not accept it.

The second is that no innocent explanation has ever been documented either. Nobody has produced a letter, a diary entry or a departmental memorandum explaining why the third surviving child of a records keeping family in a records keeping city went unregistered for forty three years, or why the omission was repaired in the specific season it was repaired in. Delayed registrations were common enough in America in the eighteen nineties; they were less common in the District, and less common still in a household where the other children had been done properly. The plainest reading is the least dramatic one: an oversight in a grieving house in the winter of 1895, unnoticed for decades because nobody needed the paper, and attended to at last when a middle aged federal official found himself wanting a document that everybody else had.

The record does not choose between these. It gives a fact and withholds the reason, and a biography that pretends otherwise is selling something.

But there is one thing in it that is not speculation, and it is the reason the certificate belongs at the front of this book rather than in a footnote.

By 1938 the man applying for that piece of paper had built the largest identification system in the world. The Bureau's fingerprint files, begun in 1924 by consolidating the collections at Leavenworth and the police chiefs' association, had grown into a national index of tens of millions of cards, and he had spent fourteen years persuading every sheriff and police chief in America to send him more. His argument, made in speeches and articles and radio talks, was always the same: that a modern country identifies its people, that identity is a matter of record rather than of assertion, and that the record protects the innocent as much as it catches the guilty. He believed it. It was the most genuinely progressive thing about him.

And for the first forty three years of his life the man who said all that was, in the eyes of the District of Columbia, a person who could not prove he had been born. Not a criminal, not a fugitive, not anyone the system was designed to catch. Simply a citizen whose existence had never been entered anywhere, in the city that entered everything, three blocks from the Capitol, in a house whose front windows looked out on a square named for a secretary of state, with an alley behind it whose residents the census counted and the police did not follow.

He fixed it in 1938, in the months after his mother's funeral, on the sworn memory of a man who had been fifteen years old on a January morning in 1895 and who was now nearly sixty, testifying to the one fact about his brother that no file in Washington contained.