G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century is a biography by the Yale professor and historian Beverly Gage. It examines the life of John Edgar Hoover, best known as the founding director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who ran the bureau from 1924 (then the Bureau of Investigation) until his death in 1972. In this capacity, he was the most influential American law enforcement official of the 20th century. The first biography of Hoover published in nearly 30 years, G-Man draws on a wealth of previously unavailable sources that Gage was able to procure through Freedom of Information Act requests. Gage also studied the enormous database of files from the notorious COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program), Hoover’s project for surveilling and often disrupting suspected political radicals, although she admits that the files are simply too voluminous for any one person to cover on their own.

In interviews, Gage has stated that a new biography is necessary because he has become a caricature in the public consciousness. In his portrayal as a supervillain, he used his perch atop the FBI to amass files on everyone from political opponents to the rich and famous, and then used that information to bend even presidents to his will. Also known as a hypocrite, he was a closeted gay man who dressed in women’s clothing and attended lurid parties, all while presenting himself as an upstanding moralist. Popular culture has reinforced either or both of these narratives, most notably the 2011 film J. Edgar. Gage is not trying to debunk the charges that Hoover was authoritarian or that there was a dissonance between his public and private life, and she offers considerable evidence in favor of both. She instead adds nuance to the standard portrait of Hoover and places him within the context of his era. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Hoover’s life runs parallel with the emergence of the United States as a preeminent global power, and Hoover played a more important role for longer than anyone else during that formative era. Studying Hoover is both interesting in its own right and a useful insight into American society.

This study guide uses the 2022 Viking hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source text contains discussions of suicide, mental illness, sexual assault, racist violence, and anti-gay bias.

Summary

Gage employs the standard format of a bibliography, beginning with his family background. The Hoovers were among the relatively few families to have settled in Washington, DC, a small city at the time. The family endured the loss of Hoover’s older sister at a young age, the scandalous murder of a relative, and the persistent depression of Hoover’s father, Dickerson. Hoover would live his whole life in the city, partially out of his dedication to government service but also to care for his mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1938. The young Hoover excelled academically but had difficulty with social relationships; fascinated with ideal manhood, he struggled to live up to that standard himself. As a result, he would pursue positions of power from which he could surround himself with the kind of men he admired.

As a student at George Washington University, he joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which venerated the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, and in addition to carrying many of its racist attitudes throughout his life, Hoover prioritized the hiring of Kappa Alpha men for the FBI. Hoover joined what was then the Bureau of Investigation in 1917, as the United States was entering World War I, and he became head of the “Radical Division” that monitored foreign dissidents for possible arrest and deportation. This was the first example of Hoover’s attempt to develop sophisticated methods of intelligence gathering and investigation and then use them to crack down on political dissidents, especially those on the political left.

Starting as interim director under President Calvin Coolidge, Hoover proved a deft political operator, able to ingratiate himself with Democrats and Republicans alike and making himself indispensable by building the FBI in his image. He even achieved a degree of celebrity, first for the pursuit of notorious gangsters in the mid-1930s and then as the self-professed leading expert on communism, which became particularly salient during the Cold War. Even his harassment of civil rights leaders and antiwar protestors was not roundly criticized at the time, although it has certainly tarnished his reputation. Since he never married or had children, while maintaining a lifetime companionship with fellow FBI agent Clyde Tolson, his personal life and sexuality were matters of widespread speculation, and while Gage finds considerable evidence of sexual confusion and inner conflict, she cannot prove that he was gay and considers the cross-dressing story highly improbable. Overall, Gage finds him a deeply flawed yet fascinating figure, driven by contradictions between tradition and modernity, racism and lawfulness, public confidence and private doubt—contradictions also embedded in the country he served.