J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972, is one of the central figures in the twentieth-century development of the federal government and the national security state. For decades he was one of the most widely admired Americans, only to become one of the most reviled following revelations of his racism, redbaiting, abuses of power, and persecution of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. 

Beverly Gage, a professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, has recently published a monumental biography of the FBI leader entitled G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. While the book follows Hoover from birth to death, focusing on his service under eight U.S. presidents, it also analyzes Hoover as a political actor whose career explains the growth of federal power and Cold War ideology during America’s rise to global preeminence. 

Gage highlights the duality that accounted for much of Hoover’s success and popularity. On the one hand, he promoted “conservative values ranging from anti-communism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity.” At the same time, he also embodied faith in progressive government, scientific authority, professionalism, and apolitical expertise. As Gage points out, “Today, when the Republican Party regularly denounces both federal authority and nonpartisan expertise, it can be hard to imagine these ideas fitting together.”  

In this podcast discussion, Gage analyzes Hoover’s complexities, which included: 

- his allegiance to the Confederate-worshipping Kappa Alpha fraternity along with his FBI operations against the Ku Klux Klan,

- and his forty-year marriage-in-all-but-name with the FBI’s number two official, Clyde Tolson, even while he launched the Lavender Scare persecuting homosexuals along with the Red Scare of the mid-twentieth century.

Gage says that to look at Hoover, the American Century’s “quintessential Government Man,” is also “to look at ourselves, at what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see.”