“We are a fact-gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody.” – J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover Biography

John Edgar Hoover was born on 1 January 1895, in Washington D.C. in the United States. His mother, Anna Marie was from a Swiss-German background. There was also German, mixed with English ancestry in his father’s background too. Interestingly, although two of his siblings had birth certificates, which was a requirement at the time in Washington, John Edgar didn’t have one, and what’s more, one would not be filed for him until 1938 when he was 43 years old.

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Hoover’s first job came along when he was eighteen years old, in 1913. It was this job, as a messenger in the orders department for the Library of Congress that Hoover credited with giving him a foundation for collecting and collating material and information, something which would be profoundly important when he began to accumulate evidence and profiles during his work at the FBI.

Hoover grew up in the neighborhood of Capitol Hill in an area called Eastern Market and went to Central High School. He taught himself to talk at a fast pace in order to overcome a stutter and this characteristic would continue into adulthood. After High School, J Edgar attended the George Washington University Law School from where he graduated with a bachelor’s law degree in 1916. He received a masters degree in law the following year.

As soon as he received his master’s degree, he was hired by the Justice Department’s War Emergency Division and became head of the Alien Enemy Bureau which was given powers to arrest and detain without trial at the beginning of World War I any foreigners who were deemed to be disloyal.

After the war, in 1919, J Edgar Hoover became head of the new General Intelligence Division within the Bureau of Investigation and later in 1921 became the Bureau’s deputy head. On 10 May 1924, he was made the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation by President Calvin Coolidge. When he took over, Hoover was found to be unpredictable in his management style, often firing agents or managing them out of the Bureau simply for looking stupid or because they were “pinheads”. Law enforcement officers around the country though often received praise and support from Hoover, a tactic which enabled him to create a huge network of support and admiration across the country.

During the 1930’s J Edgar Hoover moved to get certain crimes such as bank robberies and the activities of criminal gangs recognized as federal crimes so that his department could get involved and take credit for apprehending suspects. Eventually, this paid off, after some setbacks, most notably in Hoover’s attempt to arrest notorious bank robber John Dillinger, something which came close to ending his career, Hoover’s men started to gain notable successes. Machine Gun Kelly was arrested in 1933 and sent to Alcatraz, John Dillinger was killed by Bureau agents in 1934, and on 1 May 1936, a year after the Bureau changed its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI for short, the gangster Alvin Karpis was arrested by Hoover himself.

In the late 1930’s and in the lead-up to the Second World War, the FBI investigated any possibility of German saboteurs planning attacks within the United States and was the primary agency responsible for counterespionage in the United States. It was during the war that the FBI received permission to wiretap persons suspected of subversive activities from President Roosevelt although including within this was a requirement for the Attorney General to be informed of each case where wiretaps were used. The Attorney General at the time, though,