J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover

Introduction

(Washington, 1895 - id., 1972) American lawyer and politician decisively pushed the FBI, making it a powerful state agency headed remained for nearly fifty years. Their management is clearly anomalous in length, was positive for its modernization efforts, but was not without criticism.

J. Edgar Hoover studied law at George Washington University, after which he went to work in 1917 in the Department of Justice. He was assistant attorney general from 1919 to 1921 and assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation from 1921 to 1924.

In 1924 he was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation under the banner of reorganizing and removing corruption. The agency (which took the name of Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, in 1935), was established in a police force to pursue criminals across the country, state boundaries without limitations. J.Edgar Hoover Institution modernized and became the most powerful global research agency. To this end he founded a school for spies and detectives, the FBI National Academy, and organized an extensive bank of fingerprints, which included hundreds of thousands of people.

In the 1930 the agency was undeniable successes in the fight against gangsterism. Its functions are then extended to the counter and the fight against subversion and social policy, especially during World War II and the Cold War. His desire to investigate any suspected illegal or subversive activities making led him to closely monitor from members of the Ku Klux Klan to the Rev. Martin Luther King, and many actors, actresses, writers or other professionals.

For his anti-obsessive and his inflexible conception of law and order, management began to be heavily debated in the 50 and 60. Each new president seemed to represent the cessation of J. Edgar Hoover as head of the powerful police. But even beyond his control successive presidents and attorneys general, who at times threatened to reveal alleged scandals should be removed, which enabled him, despite the criticism, remain in office until his death in 1972 beyond the legal retirement age.

Discussion

As FBI director, Hoover ended political appointments, recruited college graduates, created a national fingerprint database and a crime laboratory, established an academy for training federal agents, and imposed a conservative code of conduct on all agency personnel. During the Hoover years, the FBI dealt with gangsters and kidnappers in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist radicals and German spies in the 1940s, communists and Klansmen from the 1940s through the 1960s, and student protesters and New Left activists in the the 1960s and 1970s. From his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 to published works such as Masters of Deceit (1958) and The Study of Communism (1962), Hoover largely shaped public opinion on communism in America.

Hoover came to link the civil rights movement to communism, a viewpoint that was openly challenged in 1970 by William C. Sullivan, a top-level FBI official. The following year, Sullivan was forced into retirement. In the late 1960s, Sullivan had contradicted Hoover by arguing that the Ku Klux Klan, not the communist movement, was the number one domestic threat. Some accused Hoover of racism, noting ...