“Hoover did believe that white people were superior and that African Americans were innately inferior. Hoover grew up in racially segregated Washington DC and was more than ready to uphold white supremacy in the US. “He worked during the day and went to law school at night and took over the FBI and tried to baptise the FBI in his own image and make it a place where folks saw themselves as not just working for the federal government but actually working for God.” In fact, he claimed that he had planned to go to seminary and become a minister but his father had fallen ill, was labelled as melancholy at the time – what we know now today as more likely depression or mental illness – so Hoover felt compelled to go and make money. “Hoover saw himself throughout his life as this minister and soldier. Martin says: “When he became head of the FBI in 1924, he made his agents sign a law enforcement pledge which explicitly said they would conduct themselves as ministers seeking to give aid and advice to those who need it, and as soldiers waging warfare against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It was an assignment he took earnestly and seriously: his diary was filled with Sunday school lesson plans. He had been raised in the Presbyterian church and taught Sunday school as a teenager. Martin outlines how the FBI sent agents to services of worship that established religious identity as synonymous with American citizenship the FBI worked with white evangelicals to promote Christian nationalism as the only form of religion that would protect the US during the cold war and the FBI policed other forms of religion, for example by persecuting King and aiming to discredit the civil rights movement. There were a number of things the FBI did out in front and they were heavily supported by the American public.” “But we never really considered: what about the other expressions of Christianity in America that saw the FBI as a saving grace? Because of the emphasis on surveillance in the FBI, we’ve been slow to recognise that there’s also a form of cooperation and partnership, that the FBI wasn’t doing everything cloak and dagger behind the scenes. “We imagine the FBI – I did when I began – as spying on Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hamer and all these religious communities,” the 43-year-old says by phone from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Previous studies of Hoover and the FBI have rarely considered his faith or its influence on the nation, Martin argues. In an elegantly written book, The Gospel of J Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, he makes a persuasive case that Hoover was a white Christian nationalist and convenient ally for evangelicals, embedding race and religion in the foundations of the national security state – and allowing white supremacy to fester to this day. The FBI is tending in that direction.” Biographer Beverly Gage has called him “the 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left”. President Harry Truman, alarmed by Hoover nosing into Americans’ sex lives, warned: “We want no Gestapo or secret police. He used the FBI’s extensive intelligence-gathering capabilities to monitor political dissidents, civil rights leaders and other groups he deemed a threat to national security. He was notorious for strong-arm tactics, political manipulation and disregard for civil liberties. The FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington is named after him, his desk has pride of place at the National Law Enforcement Museum and Leonardo DiCaprio played him in a biopic directed by Clint Eastwood.īut Hoover’s legacy has aged about as well as Gone With the Wind’s. Hoover was a workaholic who devoted his life to the agency.
He took on mob bosses and organised crime, established a centralised fingerprint database and implemented scientific techniques such as forensic analysis.
Hoover would serve as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972, spanning eight presidents (four Democrats, four Republicans) over nearly half a century.
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