![]() ![]() He thought it unlikely ever to fill up: ‘Such as it is, it is likely to remain.’ But the federal government was about to boom, and boom. During his American tour of 1842, Dickens had found Washington an underpopulated ‘City of Magnificent Intentions’, with too many ‘public buildings that need but a public to be complete’. He spent his whole life in Washington – his family had lived there for generations – and never seems to have doubted that he’d follow his forebears into government service. Hoover liked to say that he began his ‘extensive and penetrating study’ of international communism just after the First World War, when he was put in charge of the ‘radical division’ of the Justice Department. Hoover knew this sounded incredible, but ‘it took only 23 men to overthrow Russia,’ and he had it on good authority that, ‘after the actual seizure of power’, a revolution in the US might ‘develop even more swiftly’ than in less happy lands. Anyone fortunate enough to be spared liquidation or internment in a concentration camp would become, ‘as so many already have, 20th-century slaves’. The state would decide ‘what streetcars you ride’ or ‘whether you walk’, even ‘the time your alarm clock goes off in the morning or the amount of cream in your coffee’. This minority would insist on moving the capital to a ‘large industrial centre, probably Chicago’, where communal kitchens would be set up ‘so that women would be “free” to work in factories and mines along with the men’. He warned his countrymen that the ‘blueprints’ were ‘already made’ of a new America, in which a ‘tiny minority, perhaps ten or twenty men, would rule’. He was said to have transformed the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the free world’s greatest bulwark against the ‘anarchy and lawlessness and immorality that passes imagination’. But it was only to be expected that Hoover would be more popular than any president he served under, or any politician who might have checked his power in Congress. Keeping on top of Hoover’s fan mail, one of his deputies reported, required ‘thousands and thousands of man hours’ there was always too much of it and the author of ‘every letter received’, no matter how reverential, had to be ‘checked out in the FBI’s central files’. For decades, Hoover could luxuriate in the knowledge that he was, quite possibly, the most admired man in the country – or at least in the District of Columbia, which to him usually amounted to the same thing. It was a result, the pollsters claimed, ‘virtually without parallel in surveys that have dealt with men in public life’. Only 2 per cent expressed strong disapproval. , Gallup asked Americans for their opinion of J. Edgar Hoover (wearing the hat) with Clyde Tolson in 1936.
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