Hoover, the FBI, and the Palmer Raids

For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI. In her authoritative new biography, G-Man, Yale historian Beverly Gage brings Hoover to life, uncovering the all-too-human man who played such an outsized role in twentieth-century U.S. political history. Gage's decade of research provides fascinating insights into the troubles that impinged on Hoover's childhood; his formative time in a white supremacist, Southern fraternity at George Washington University, Kappa Alpha; his early years in what was then the Bureau of Investigation and eventual rise to running it; Hoover's personal life and sexuality, including his longterm relationship with Clyde Tolson; and the transformation of the FBI across the 1930s and 1940s, and the ways it drew Hoover into a number of controversies that followed, from the Kennedy assassination to COINTELPRO and the FBI's attacks on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Sources:

Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022)

Michael Kazin, "J. Edgar Hoover’s Long Shadow," New Republic, Dec 9, 2022

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835, 2002)

Please consider making an end-of-year donation to Dissent this holiday season, Know Your Enemy's beloved sponsor. And don't forget to subscribe to KYE on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes.