Welcome to the first Terrible Tuesday Profile. It's Tuesday and I really don't want to be at work, so it's not really a good day. Also, for some reason, when I got here I started reading about J. Edgar Hoover and it was interesting. So interesting that I decided to share with you. I'm gonna try to make this a weekly thing. A terrible person every Terrible Tuesday. And.... I guess I can try to be fair and include terrible people of color. But if it starts to look like they're all white... well... hey... I don't make this stuff up. I was just born here... =]
J. Edgar Hoover was the first director of what we know as the FBI for 37 years. Before that, he was the sixth director of its primitive predecessor. Like most white guys who end up with government jobs he was a lawyer, a member of a secret society, power hungry, and vindictive. He never married or had kids. In fact, his estate was left to a "close friend," one time FBI associate director, Clyde Tolsen. We all know about COINTELPRO and how that killed our black leaders and movements. We all have a general sense of Hoover as this evil powerhouse, but here are 5 things/connections I didn't know. Did you?
1. One of Hoover's career influences was Anthony Comstock. This dude created the NY Society for the Suppression of Vice. WTF? He worked to have a law passed that prohibited the transport and delivery of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" materials and information about birth control. Wowzers... Yes, it was the late 1800s and standards were different then, but a whole organization for the "suppression of vice???" And this is who Hoover admired and after whom he wanted to model his career???
2. With the new Johnny Depp movie coming out, I found it interesting that Hoover was jealous of the guy responsible for killing Dillinger and had him fired. Melvin Purvis was a hot shot agent until Hoover had enough. Purvis ended up committing suicide. Around this same time period, Hoover had a little old lady, Ma Barker, killed. Her sons were the actual criminals, and though she probably knew about it, she never committed any crimes herself. To justify his agents killing her, Hoover made her out to be the mastermind behind her family's criminal endeavors...
3. So... you know about COINTELPRO, the program responsible for the destruction and dismantling of many civil rights groups in american. Did you know that Hoover kept a list of thoooousands of people, american people, that he claimed were "disloyal?" He planned to arrest and detain these people by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. (That's your right of protection from unlawful detention.) WOWZERS! COINTELPRO tactics were really underhanded and illegal, but this dude wanted to take away people's rights. Like... he could claim that COINTELPRO was necessary to keep subversive groups from succeeding (although defending your civil rights is totally different from trying to take down civil authority but...) but how do you explain trying to strip people of basic rights?
4. I didn't know about Hoover's friendship with Thurgood Marshall. Now... I know you've never heard of T.R.M. Howard. I hadn't until my Malcolm X class at SFSU. Even though his name is familiar, I still couldn't tell you what he did. As it pertains to this, he went on a speaking tour after the Emmitt Till verdict denouncing the FBI for a poor investigation and poor execution of justice. Hoover couldn't have this so he enlisted Thurgood to discredit Howard... and he did.
5. You ever notice that in mob and Mafia movies there isn't really an FBI presence? It's always the local authorities going after the dudes. Well this is because Hoover refused to go after the Mafia despite numerous people making cases against them. (Rumor has it that they were blackmailing him... had some info on his sexuality...)
Discovering these things hasn't really changed the myth of Hoover for me. They do tell me that he was a little twisted and he was always maneuvering to keep himself in a position of power. He manipulated the truth to get what he wanted. Reading some of this makes it easier to believe gov vs. black people conspiracies. It's very easy to understand why minorities don't trust white people.
He broke the law in the name of the law for almost 40 years... Truman, JFK, and LBJ wanted to fire him but were advised against it. (btw... the rest of the JFK file will be released in 2017...) In addition to his name being on the FBI building, he contributed a lot of policy to the Bureau. So don't think that just because he's dead, the FBI is a fairer place. He never paid for any of the illegal things he did and authorized. If "the man" ever existed, his name was J. Edgar Hoover.
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