ONE G-MAN’S FAMILY: POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT

FORMULAS AND J. EDGAR HOOVER’S

F.B.I.

 

RICHARD GID POWERS

College of Staten Island

 

 

 

IN SEPTEMBER 1974, NINE YEARS AND 240 EPISODES AFTER IT STARTED,

television’s “The F.B.I.” closed its last case. Inspector Erskine is still  chasing crooks before the news or late  at  night  in  reruns,  but  when Quinn Martin taped the final  show  and  turned  Efrem  Zimbalist,  Jr., Philip Abbott, and William Reynolds loose  to grow fat on  their  residuals, it was the end of one of the  most  remarkable  partnerships  in  the  history of American popular culture.

 

As a government patron of the arts, there have been few rivals to J. Edgar Hoover. For 40 years  his F.B.I. public relations office, the Crime Records Division,  helped produce radio shows, comic strips, pulp magazines, movies, and television programs dedicated to the greater glory of the G-man. J. Edgar Hoover’s courtship and conquest of the entertainment industry left in its wake a bizarre collection of  memorabilia­ G-man bubble gum cards and coloring books, decoder rings and Junior G-man badges, souvenir fingerprint cards and machinegun targets-a treasure trove for the nostalgia collector.

 

And a treasure trove for the historian. Hoover’s G-man was a most peculiar  type  of   secret   cop,   an   undercover   man   who  got front-page

coverage during the thirties shooting it out with Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, during the forties in assaults against the fifth column, during the fifties assaulting the first amendment. Measured by the tribute Americans paid to the F.B.I. in popular entertainment during the thirties  and  forties, the G-men and their Director were national  heroes.  And  then,  by  the  same pop culture standards, they  stopped  being  heroes.  The  G-men movies stopped being made, the F.B.I. detective magazines  folded,  the radio shows went ·off the air, the Junior G-men stopped sending in their boxtops for their badges. During the  fifties  and  sixties  there  were  only the shows the F.B.I. sponsored  itself.  These  had  bigger  budgets  and larger audiences than ever, but now they were isolated forays into public opinion, no longer part  of  a  tidal  wave  of  spontaneous  idolatry.  And then even the official productions disappeared.

 

A lot  happened  to  the F.B.I.  between  the  thirties  and  the  sixties, and

F.B.I. entertainment is one clue to the  changes.  As  a  mirror  of  the F.B.I.’s role in public fantasy, the changing formulas of G-man entertain­ ment suggest some  reasons for  the  rise of  the F.B.I.’s  popular   reputation

-and its fall.

 

The original formula for G-man entertainment was tirelessly repeated during the thirties in unofficial films like G-Men, Public Hero Number One, Public Enemy’s Wife, Show Them No Mercy, and Let ‘Em Have It, radio shows like “Gangbusters” (unofficial)  and  “G-Men”  (official), comics like the unofficial “Secret Agent X-9” and the official “War on Crime,” and the G-man detective pulp magazines. These took the action detective of the Old Sleuth-Hawkshaw-Nick Carter tradition (young, handsome, brainy, and brawny), smartened him up a bit, quieted him down a little, and turned him into the leg man for the F.B.I. team. The G-man was different from the  other  detective  heroes  because  he spent less time with his girl and  more  time  in  the  classroom, the laboratory, and on the phone to Washington. He was also different  from  the private eye competition because he had the  whole  F.B.I.  organization  backing him up: files, labs, machinegun ranges, and step-by-step instructions from the Director. But what really set the thirties  G-man  apart from  the common run of fictional detectives was what he represented, the kind of cases he solved, and what it was supposed to mean when he solved them. G-man entertainment of the 1930s was loaded with political symbolism.

 

Advertisements for Public Hero Number One (with Chester Morris as the Special Agent with top billing) said that the film  was  a “public  service” that let  the  public “see Uncle Sam  draw  his  guns  to  halt  the  march  of   c rime.” The G-man hero was the embodiment  of  public  wrath,  called into combat with  the  public’s  enemies  because  local  law  enforcement had broken down. The films were filled with hysterical anticrime protest rallies and montages of  scare  newspaper  headlines.  The  movie  G-men got their commission directly from the people ( via a joint session of Congress in Cagney’s G-Men), and the  dramatizations  of  the  F.B.I.’s battles with the gangsters were passed off as national victories over the underworld.  Warner  Brothers   billed  G-Men  as  _{“THE   FIRST  GREAT  STORY} OF   THE   MEN    WHO   WAGED   AMERICA’S   WAR   ON   CRIME”   and  bragged  that “the last hold of the criminal mobs on the imagination of the public will be broken by this picture which shows criminals  as  they  really  are­ and how helpless they are when the government really starts after them.” The gangsters hunted down by the fictional G-men were widely identified with the real Public Enemies of the early thirties: The Literary Digest ignored the enormous liberties Warner Brothers had taken with the facts in G-Men  and  claimed  that  “the  action  …  follows  the  Federal  hunt of the late John Dillinger and his colleagues during three years with remarkable fidelity to known facts.” Publicity for G-man entertainment during the thirties claimed that it offered the average citizen a chance to enlist in the national anticrime crusade. The Ledger Syndicate’s  ads for its “War on Crime” comic strip called the feature “part of a National educational movement to stamp out crime in America-a movement which has the 100% interest and backing of every law-abiding man, woman and child in the  country.” F.B.I.  entertainment  of  the  thirties  transformed the detective formula by giving it manifest political significance-G-man shows were almost national pageants, metaphors for the country’s unity against an attack from the underworld .

 

Advertisements for newspaper features and movies have never been notable for understatement, but it seems not to have been absolutely laughable during the thirties to say that reading an F.B.I. comic strip or going to a G-man movie had an occult relationship to real-life  gang­ busting. The link was supplied by the law  enforcement  rhetoric  of  the New Deal.

 

Attorney General Homer Cummings believed, with the rest of the administration, that the greatest danger the nation faced was,  in  Roosevelt’s famous phrase, fear itself: a catastrophic national  loss of  confidence in itself, its institutions,  and  its laws.  The last  of  these  Cummings  took as his assigned responsibility. During  the  Hoover  administration  the public, inspired by the sensational press, had turned Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, and Mad Dog  Coll  into  national  symbols  of  crime , and their immunity from punishment into a symbol of the break­ down of law enforcement. Herbert Hoover refused  to  accept  responsibility for the crime problem  with  the excuse  that  law  enforcement  was a matter for local authorities. Homer Cummings  saw  that  in  the  new  order of things it was public opinion, not the Constitution, that defined governmental jurisdiction, and so he turned the  national  hysteria  over crime into an opportunity for dramatizing federal leadership of what he called the national anticrime “movement.” On June 19, 1933, the Justice Department put out a press release stating that “Attorney General Cummings at Washington accepted the murder of  a  Department  of  Justice agent . . . [at the  so-called  “Kansas  City  Massacre”]  as  a  challenge  to the government … [and] outright defiance of a government agency which gangdom has long respected.” A  month  later  Cummings  responded  to an upstate New York kidnapping to explain “it is almost like a military engagement between the forces of law and  order  and  the  underworld army, heavily armed. It is  a  campaign  to  wipe  out  the  public  enemy, and it will proceed until it succeeds.”12 Throughout 1933 and 1934 the Justice Department bombarded the country with the news that the war against crime was “real,” that “the Federal Government’s warfare against organized crime was getting underway.”

 

Cummings kept the public’s attention focused on a succession of new “public enemies” while he provided his anticrime movement with administrative substance: new laws (“The Attorney General’s Twelve Point Program”), national  organization  (“The  Attorney  General’s  Conference on Crime” held in Washington from December 10-13, 1934), a “super prison”  for  “super  criminals”  (Alcatraz),  and,  with  the  loudest  fanfare of all, a new “super police force.” This was, of course, the F.B.I. that J. Edgar Hoover had been leading unobtrusively since 1924.

 

Had Homer Cummings simply dispatched the F.B.I. to track down and kill a few celebrated gangsters during 1933 and 1934, the payoff would  have been a few sensational news stories, some momentary political adulation: nothing in the way of lasting political significance. But Homer Cummings and J. Edgar Hoover were after something bigger than a few headlines. When the shooting had died down, and the smoke had  cleared, the F.B.I.’s publicists had just begun to type.

 

According to Hoover’s favorite reporters, Rex Collier of the  Washington Star and Courtney Ryley Cooper of  American  Magazine, each  of the F.B.I.’s cases was a  full-scale  demonstration  of  what  all  American law enforcement could be like if the nation’s police accepted F.B.I. leadership and coordination, adopted F.B.I. training methods and procedures and used the F.B.I. technical facilities, and if an aroused public cleaned up political interference with justice and supported police professionalization. The public’s imagination was seized by Attorney General Cummings’ dramatization of each big case as “an open challenge to our civilization.” It was the drama of this symbolic struggle between  the G-man and the Public Enemy that dragged audiences into the  movie theatres. But once they sat down to enjoy  their  G-man  adventures  they also got a full dose of  the  J.  Edgar  Hoover  gospel:  documentary-like tours of the F.B.I. labs and classrooms, peeks at the fingerprint files and ballistic microscopes, and the message that the “F.B.I.  method” developed by J. Edgar Hoover was  the secret  weapon  that  would  rip  up “the  roots of crime.” Justice Department publicity also stressed that the public had a vital role to play in  the  crusade,  since  “the  Department  of  Justice  and the government must have public support to make its drive against the gangsters a success.”15 The depression  public did  not  need  much  urging  to applaud the F.B.I.’s  sensationally  publicized  adventures,  especially when Washington was saying “crime will truly begin to slide downhill” when public support had finally forced all law enforcement to adopt the F.B.I.’s methods. G-man entertainment of the thirties had political impact because the public interpreted the F.B.I.’s adventures as the wave of the law-enforcement future.

Hollywood’s   1935   G-man   cycle   turned   J.   Edgar   Hoover   into the

national symbol of law enforcement,  and, as might have been  expected, his speeches  continued  the Cummings  policy  of  making  the  F.B.I.  (and

F.B.I. publicity) the key to solving the nation’s crime  problem.  “Our country depends on the majesty of our laws,” began a typical  Hoover speech. The fundamental cause of crime was “disrespect for the law,” and this disrespect was caused by the failure of law enforcement. “Until the criminally-minded person, the extraordinarily selfish person, the ultra­greedy person who wants what he wants and  cares  not  how  he  gets  it, can be taught the inexorable lesson that he cannot get away with violating the laws of society without adequate  punishment-until  that  day  arrives, just so long you will have the constant menace of serious crime.” The F.B.I.’s victories against the Public  Enemies  provided  one  such  lesson, but until all law enforcement was as effective as the F.B.I., the fight against crime would be only a partial success.

 

Hoover would then furnish illustrations of the new weapons  the F.B.I. was developing to win the crusade against the crook. Sometimes he would give the audience a peek into the mysteries of fingerprinting or tear gas. Other times it would be the use of blood-typing or handwriting analysis. Then he would tell how the F.B.I.  was  ready  to indoctrinate  local  police in the same procedures that had made the F.B.I. great: “Consider for a moment the possibilities of the F.B.I. National Police Academy. The primary purpose of the F.B.I. National  Police  Academy  is  to  train selected officers in order that they may return to their respective police organizations and impart the training received at Washington, D.C. to the  members  of  their  local  departments…. Certainly,  here  is  the  fore­ runner of a new day in law enforcement.”  After he had  given  his audience a view of the millennium, Hoover told them how to get there:

 

Crime will continue to increase until  public  sentiment  crushes  crime  and public sentiment cannot crush crime until a public consciousness is aroused against all  forms  of crime.  .  .  .  Here  is  a  holy  cause.  To  combat  crime there must be a  constantly  growing  band  of missionaries  who  shall  go  into the highways and byways carrying with  them  the  fearlessness  and  the crusading spirit so badly needed in a hand to hand combat  with  a  predatory beast. Its name is _CRIME!

 

Hoover was a thoroughgoing traditionalist and moralist, and so his speeches during the thirties  were  filled  with  pleas  for  moral  education­ in the home, church, and school-as a vital part of the anticrime campaign. Like other New Deal warriors he also appealed  to  flag  and  country  to rally the nation to his crusade, but all of these appeals to personal  values  and morals were linked to a demand for stronger public standards against crime.

 

During the 1930s each distinctive element in  the  G-man  variation  on the action detective formula corresponded to one aspect of J.  Edgar Hoover’s (and the Justice Department’s) anticrime policy: the obligatory technical episodes advertised the Feds’ harnessing of science as a weapon against crime; the regular punctuation of phone calls and telegraph chatter showed the public how modern organization, communications, and  training could make all law enforcement hum if police forces followed Hoover’s methods; and, finally, the ritual of crime and bloody punishment at the center of every G-man drama corresponded to the  widespread  belief (spread widely by Hoover and other law enforcement officials)  that  the sight of criminals getting their poetically just desserts had  an  elevating effect on public morals.

 

World War II found the F.B.I. and the G-man hero riding higher  than ever in the headlines and in popular culture. Roosevelt handed counter­ espionage in the western hemisphere (the Canal Zone excepted) over to Hoover, and popular entertainment mirrored the news in dramatizing the Bureau’s cloak-and-dagger work against the fifth column. There  were official documentary movies (The March of Time’s “F.B.I.  Front”)  and radio shows (“This is Your F.B.I.”), and unofficial thrillers like radio’s “David Harding, Counterspy” and “The F.B.I. in Peace and War.” Jules Feiff.er recalls that Hoover showed  up  so often  in  wartime  comics  that his generation got the idea that F.D.R. and  J.  Edgar  Hoover  were president and vice-president as far as comic book  readers  were  con­ cerned. Just as it had during the thirties, the wartime G-man formula melodramatized the Justice Department’s anticrime program, though gangsters had been replaced  by  spies  and  the  theme  of  F.B.I.  dramas had taken a 180-degree turn in keeping with Hoover’s new counter­ espionage responsibilities. During the thirties Justice Department propaganda and G-man entertainment alike had been intended to draw the public into a national crime crusade. Now Hoover’s public relations and officially sanctioned G-man entertainment tried to keep the public out  of  the spy hunt.

 

Franklin Roosevelt was mindful of the way grass roots spy-hunting and slacker raids had disrupted the home front during the first world war; Hoover remembered the way investigations into the Justice Department’s complicity in the spy and slacker hysteria had destroyed the Bureau’s reputation after the war. For different but related  reasons  the top G-man and the man in the White house wanted the public to leave counter­ espionage to the professionals.

 

In January 1940, Hoover published an article in American Magazine (with Courtney Ryley Cooper’s help) called “Stamping Out the Spies”22 which gave the basic line for the Bureau’s antispy publicity and entertainment. “There is no denying,” he began, “that we have a distinct  menace,  that hundreds upon hundreds of foreign spies are busily engaged upon a program of peering, peeking, eavesdropping, propaganda and actual sabotage.” Then he piled up illustrations of F.B.I. activities  and  procedures to prove that “this country was never so well prepared to combat espionage activities.”

 

Hoover went on to complain that despite the Bureau’s highly publicized

successes against the spies, he had gotten “thousands of letters from earnest citizens, asking how they may aid in the battle against  spydom.”  The answer was that they should leave it to Edgar. “The citizen  should  con­ sider his particular task to be fulfilled when he  reports  his suspicions  to  the nearest F.B.I. office. After that they  [his  suspicions]  should  not become gossip. Idle talk can hamper proper investigations.” Too much public involvement, Hoover explained, could  be  even  worse  than  too little.

In the wave of patriotism  which,  fortunately,  is  rising throughout  the nation, are dangers of overzealousness. We must not stoop to un-American methods,  no  matter  how  great  the  provocation  or  how  patriotic  the  aim.

. . . The nation is better prepared  today  than  in  years gone  by. An  offensive has started. The combined attack by federal  and  state  forces  should  be sufficient  so  far  as  investigation  and  prosecution  are  concerned  cooperation should be limited to passing on to  the  proper  officials  all  questionable facts or rumors which may come one’s way.

Throughout the war Hoover hammered home this message in Bureau­ supported entertainment. Publicity for the film documentary F.B.l. Front carried the slogan, “Let the F.B.I. Handle It,” and claimed that the movie proved that “no layman could hope to compete effectively with the facilities and training of the men whose work is shown in the picture.” The picture was intended to “calm the ambitions of any amateur sleuth who fancies himself an adequate substitute for the trained, scientific, and, above all, humane agents of the F.B.I.”  The tedium  and  complexity  that  the heroes of radio’s “This Is Your F.B.I.”  faced  every  week  discouraged  anyone who thought it might be exciting to catch his neighbor on the phone to Hitler.   Here is a sample of  Frank  Lovejoy’s  narration  from  one episode:

Special Agents of the F.B.I. discovered  that  from  February 1st  to  May  5, 1941, boats  sailing  from  Lisbon   brought   3,095  aliens   and   1,786  citizens to the  Port  of  New  York.  Approximately  5,000  people.   Approximately 5,000 baggage declarations to check. Approximately 5,000 samples of hand­ writing to check against the handwriting on  the  letters  to  Switzerland,  to match,  to  examine,  to  scrutinize,  to  sweat  over,  pore  over,  work  over.

 

By the time all the sweating and poring was over, any would-be spy­ smashers in the audience might conclude that they were having more fun riveting rivets or widgeting widgets than the G-men were having on their jobs.

 

During the thirties and forties, when the F.B.l.’s reputation was at its height, the fictional G-man marched to the not-so-distant beat of J. Edgar Hoover’s anticrime policy. The Bureau used its biggest cases as dramatizations of  its political  program,  and  this encouraged  the  public  to interpret

F.B.I. entertainment as a dramatization of the way the country was winning its war against  crime.  The G-man  formula  was a shorthand  expression  of

1. Edgar Hoover’s brand of crime-fighting, an approach he liked to call “machine gun” (as opposed to “cream puff”) criminology.

 

In 1949 the most successful of the F.B.I. pulps, G-Men, went out of business. In 1952 Walk East on Beacon  with George Murphy  appeared,  the last major release film J. Edgar Hoover  would  endorse  until  1959. And then, after eight years on  the ABC  radio  network,  the official  “This Is Your F.B.I.” went off the air in  1953,  thus  bringing  to  a  close  18 years of authorized G-man entertainment. When the G-man hero finally reappeared in 1959 after a 6-year absence from official  F.B.I.  productions, he was a new man.

 

The first piece of entertainment to feature the remodeled G-man was Mervyn LeRoy’s The F.B.l. Story in 1959, the film adaptation of Don Whitehead’s authorized history of the  Bureau,  published  in  1956  under the same title.25 Whitehead’s book was a history of the Bureau and a wide-ranging  survey  of   Bureau  operations  grafted   onto  a  casebook of F.B.I. adventures. Whitehead was decidedly sympathetic to Hoover (who provided   an  F.B.I.  seal  for   the  cover   and   an   introduction),   but The F.B.l.  Story was not simply a puff job. It was a solid piece of journalism written by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was head of the Herald Tribune’s Washington bureau. The F.B.I. furnished Whitehead with material and went over the manuscript with him,  but,  at  least  according  to the head of the Bureau’s Crime Records Division who had gotten White­ head to write the book, the Bureau did not edit  it.  Like  many  reporters who have covered the Bureau, Whitehead was won over by the enthusiasm and dedication of the agents in the field and their Washington bosses,  and so his point of view was that the Bureau’s successes and laudable ambitions were the real F.B.I. story, and not the occasions  when  the  Bureau  fell short of its own or Whitehead’s expectations. After 38 weeks on the best-seller lists and nationwide serialization in 170 newspapers, Whitehead sold The F.B.l. Story to Warner Brothers at a meeting attended by Hoover and Louis B. Nichols, head of F.B.I. public relations.

 

If producer-director Mervyn LeRoy, who had first gotten into gangster films in 1930 with Little Caesar, had simply filmed the book Don White­ head had written, the result would have been an expanded newsreel documentary of the type Time-Life  had done several  times for the March  of Time series. But Warners intended their “F.B.I. Story” to be a major release aimed at the  mass  market  family  audience,  so  they  were  going to have to reshape it to suit the new  conventions  that  had  developed during the fifties for mass entertainment: it was, of course, going to need a hero, and because he was going to be a  hero  for  the  fifties,  he  was going to need a family. In short,  Mervyn  LeRoy  did  not  simply  tailor Don Whitehead’s “Report to the People” to the dimensions of the action detective formula, a solution that could have  been  taken  for  granted during the thirties and forties. He turned this potential saga of the hard­fighting G-men into a domestic drama.

 

Actually, plenty of Whitehead’s book survived the treatment script­ writers Richard L. Breen and John Twist gave it. The tours of  the F.B.I. labs, the big cases, and the outline of the Bureau’s history were  all  still there in abbreviated form, but the meaning of it all  was  now  something new and different. Don Whitehead had taken the original image of the F.B.I. as fabricated by J. Edgar Hoover and his publicists during the thirties-a relentless, irresistible, scientific crime-fighting  team,  educating the public and reforming American law enforcement while it led a nation­ wide movement against crime-and had used  it  to  give  his  book  theme and structure. Don Whitehead’s book stuck close to the by-now-familiar mythology of what the F.B.I. had done, what it was doing,  and  what  role  it had played in American life. The film version had bits and pieces of Whitehead’s original theme, but the  underlying  concept  of  the F.B.I.  as the vanguard of a national “movement” against crime had been lost. Whitehead’s conception of the Bureau’s crusading spirit had provided his book with its dynamism. The movie replaced the crusade with group dynamics.

 

The group dynamics were the ups and downs of one F.B.I. family, the Hardestys of Nashville. The F.B.l. Story was the story of Special Agent Chip Hardesty (Jimmy Stewart), who solved all the film’s  big  cases, bridged the historical gaps between the dramatic episodes, and gave new agents lectures that instructed the audience in F.B.I. procedures and facilities. If Hardesty’s role in the film had been limited to this he would have been only a  “composite  agent,”  a  device  that  Sanford  J.  Ungar used to give new journalistic readability to his 1976 history of the Bureau, which has superseded Whitehead’s. But Jimmy Stewart had more than Dillinger, Nazis, and Communists to keep him busy. He also had  Vera Miles.

 

Warner Brothers brought  the old G-man formula  up-to-date  by   turning The  F.B.l.  Story  into  something  that  the  Saturday  Review  called   “One F.B.I.  Man’s Family.”  The  dramatic  fireworks  were  not  the shoot-outs, which were reduced to mere interludes; the emotional high voltage was generated by jabs and clinches between the two stars as the domestic tranquility of Hardesty’s all-American brood was disrupted,  time  and  again, by his F.B.I. career.

 

The movie picked up the Hardesty story in 1924. Chip’s girlfriend Lucy (Vera Miles) refuses to marry  him while he “works for that Bureau,” stuck in a “dinky little rut” with nothing to show for his work except a payroll number.  Chip  is  pretty  disgusted  with  the  Bureau,  too-it  is  corrupt, ineffective, and the ceiling fan in his office doesn’t work-so  he  hops  a train to turn in his badge.

 

Chip walks into F.B.I. headquarters at a hallowed moment in  the Bureau’s history. A new  director  has  taken  over,  and  Chip  gets  there just in time to hear Hoover promise his staff a new F.B .I. with freedom from politics, new scientific  procedures,  and  a spirit  “dedicated  not  just to justice but to a love of  justice.” Chip pleads with Lucy  to let  him  stay  in  the  Bureau  and  “study  criminology”  with  this  new  director  who “can make water run up hill.” She relents, and Hardesty  sets off  to  solve the Bureau’s first big cases, some of them conveniently moved from the pre-1924 years into the Hoover era to preserve the  unities  if  not  the record.

 

One case sends Hardesty to the Osage reservation in  Oklahoma,  where he disguises himself as a prospector to solve  one  of  the  most  famous cases of the early Hoover years, but the climax of the episode is not a spectacular arrest. Back in Nashville his wife has been expecting  their fourth  child,  and  on  the  same  night  that  Chip  breaks  the  case  she loses the baby. This gives Stewart a chance for one of his  patented mumbling outbursts: “The Bureau has no right to  send  people  to  hell­ holes like Oklahoma with no schools, no churches.” He swears  he’ll  quit the Bureau and give his wife  the  kind  of  home  she  deserves,  but  now she won’t let him quit because she is proud of his job, proud of Hoover ‘s new F.B.I. The F.B.l. is worth  her  little sacrifice,  she  tells  him,  and  so he has to stick it out.

 

Every  episode  is  another  Hardesty  family  crisis.  When  the  G-men get the right to pack  weapons,  it  turns  out  that  Mrs.  Hardesty  is  afraid of guns. Stewart mulls  that  one  over  and  then  mumbles  something  to the effect that “craftiness can solve many a case but with hoodlums you sometimes need a good hardworking conscientious  machine  gun.”  Later on, under the strain of the constant gunfights of the gangster era, Mrs. Hardesty’s nerves start to go. She leaves home to stay  with  her  mother  until Chip quit s, but she goes back to him when her family shows her clippings of Chip’s cases with headlines like _{“FBI WINNING GANGSTER  WAR.”} When the film finally gets to World War II it turns out to be an F.B.I.­ Hardesty family operation with only a little  help  from  the  Army  and Navy. Pearl Harbor is bombed during another  family  crisis:  Chip’s daughter forgets  her  lines  during  a  school  assembly  speech.  The  news of the attack comes just as Stewart is  telling  her  that  her  little  tragedy isn’t the biggest disaster she will ever have to face. Hardesty’s war  mission is tracking down Nazi spies in the jungles of South America,  but  the  biggest scenes are on the home  front.  During  a  family  chorus  of  “Oh, you beautiful doll” a telegram arrives with  word  that  the only  Hardesty boy is dead in action in the Pacific.

 

The war is finally over, but not for Chip  Hardesty:  “Now  the  enemy was Communism, which threatened labor and management, church and home.” By this time he is high enough  in  the  Bureau  to  have  his  own line to Hoover, so when Hardesty rounds up his reds the two spy-smashers go through  a  “Good  job,  Hardesty-thank  you,  Mr.  Hoover”  routine. Back home Lucy Hardesty is a grey-haired  grandmother  who  just  nods and smiles when  her  ancient  G-man  (by  the  chronology  of  the  movie he would have had to be at least sixty) rushes off  on new  cases.  At  the  end of the picture she has finally become reconciled to the fact that  when she married Chip Hardesty she married  more  than  a  man:  she  took  on the whole F.B.I.

 

Audiences who went to see The F.B.l. Story expecting something like the old G-man movies were a little puzzled by Warner Brothers’ new breed of special agents. The New York Times complained that “the interest and admiration” of the audience

 

are directed not so much  toward  the  brilliant  achievements  of  the  bureau or the brilliance of its daring young men as toward the kindliness of the behavior  of  an  F.B.I.  agent  as  a  family  man….          script  writers  and the producer-director . . . are bent more on  investigating  the  joys  and sorrows of  the  American  home  and  the  bliss  of  domestic  security  than the historic details of crime … the brief episodes of  shooting John Dillinger and ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd  are  offered  as  occupational  hazards  that  seem  to  be sandwiched between such domestic obligations as getting the kids off to school and sitting down to a bowl of breakfast food.  In  short,  the  F.B.l. agent is presented as a pillar of the American home, as much  as-or even  more than-a pillar of law enforcement and protection against Communist spies. And thus these two noble institutions are fervidly conjoined as the obviously most important bulwarks of our American way of life. “This country’s growing and crime will grow with it,” one of the eager beavers says, as a reason for sticking with the Bureau. It sounds like a slogan: “Be  a  G-man  and  Give  Your  Family  Complete  Security.”

 

If this new slogan of  domestic security  (both  national  and familial) fit the movie G-men of the fifties, then the Bureau had not just updated the detective formula that had served it so well during the thirties and forties-it had traded it in for a new one, and not because of any great pressure from Hollywood. According to Mervyn LeRoy, Hoover

 

and his men controlled the  movie.  . . .  Everybody  on  that  picture,  from the carpenters and electricians right to the  top,  everybody,  had  to  be okayed by the F.B.I. I did one scene, the  one  where  he  has  his  first meeting with the men, and after I shot the  picture,  they  discovered  one extra shouldn’t have been there.  I  don’t  know  why.  So  we  had  to shoot  the scene over. I had two F.B.I. men with me all the time, for research purposes, so that we did things right.

 

If Hoover and the Bureau did not actually dictate the way the book was adapted to film, it is certain that they passed on all the changes  and approved them.

 

The F.B.l. Story back-burnered the action-detective aspects of the old G-man formula ( which Hoover had  called  “the  adventure  of  scientific law enforcement” in a thirties speech) and focused on the “nice-guy” characterization that had been taken for granted in earlier G-man heroes.  The F.B.I. of the fifties seemed to think  that  the  G-man’s  role  as  the moral center of his family was more interesting (or at least more important) than his on-the-job heroics. When Hoover plunged into his last major venture in mass entertainment, television’s “The F.B.I.,” this house-broken G-man was the star.

 

“The F.B.I.” opened and  closed  every  episode  with  the  Bureau’s official stamp of endorsement, the F.B.I. seal, protected since 1954 against unauthorized commercial use along  with  the  Forest  Service’s  “Smokey the Bear” gimmick. Crawl credits at the end of each show  thanked  “J. Edgar Hoover and his  associates for  their  cooperation  in  the  production of this series.” Once a month there  was  a  mug  shot  of  a  Top  Ten fugitive with an appeal for information on his whereabouts. Hoover him­  self never appeared on the  program  as  a  character,  but  the  office  of “The Director” was supposed to be next door to Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.’s. Hoover did make guest appearances to kick off the new seasons. For example, at the beginning of the first program of the series’ second year there was a clip of Hoover giving a Freedoms Foundation award  to Ford, the show’s sponsor. When L. Patrick Gray was trying to  claim  the Director’s chair he also barged in as a guest announcer, but  after  he  resigned in disgrace his name was removed from  the  programs  made during his short regime.

 

A viewer would have had to assume that in exchange for all the  official regalia Hoover would have demanded some control. Actually Hoover made no attempt to conceal that he and the Bureau were completely in charge. Shortly after his death TV Guide published an article by Hoover  saying that he had waited out some 600 offers by producers eager to make an F.B.I. television series before he was finally approached by men he was sure he could trust: Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, who had made the unofficial G-Men in 1935 as well as Mervyn LeRoy’s The F.B.l. Story, and James Hagerty, president of ABC, whom Hoover had gotten to know when Hagerty was President Eisenhower’s press secretary. In his TV Guide article Hoover wrote that Warner, Hagerty, and the show’s producer, Quinn Martin (of “The Untouchables”) had agreed to give the F.B.I. complete approval over scripts, personnel, and sponsorship.

 

Scripts shuttled back and forth  between  Hollywood  and  Washington, the Bureau straightening out inconsistent character  details  and  illogical plot elements, persistently requesting that F.B.I. legal jurisdiction be established clearly to justify Erskine’s every move. Crime Records also kept a sharp eye out for smut and gore. “Perhaps we are inclined toward Puritanism in an increasingly permissive world,” Hoover explained, “but foremost in our minds from the beginning episode has been the fact  that ‘The F.B.I.’ is telecast into American homes  at  a  ‘family  hour’  on  a ‘family evening.’ ” Probably nobody but the F.B.I.’s censors would have been aroused by a scene in which some nostalgic old ladies told  Erskine  that they liked “to remember the way it was.” When Erskine smiled in sympathy Crime  Records  protested  that  “this  could  be  suggestive,”  so he had to wipe off the grin.

 

The  Bureau’s  revisions  show  keen  attention   to  any  adverse  implications,  no  matter  how  farfetched,  on  the  F.B.I.’s  reputation  for decorum, thoroughness, and precision. One script with a Florida location mentioned hills: the Bureau pointed out impatiently that “the highest elevation in Florida  was  believed  to  be  less  than  twenty  feet.”  The  same  script tried to send a hunter out after ducks with a rifle: the Bureau’s good old  boys made sure he had the right artillery before the cameras rolled.

 

The Bureau forced writers to  tread  a  thin  line  between  showing  so few crime details that the shows became dull and implausible, or so many that the Bureau would be open to the charge (from the rural bank  presidents whose  telegrams  seemed  to  frighten  Hoover)  that  the  show  was “a blueprint for crime.” Above all,  the  Bureau’s  censorship  of  “The F.B.I.” shows Hoover’s late sensitivity to charges that the Bureau violated civil liberties. One  script  had  Erskine  order  a  person  back  from  a fishing holiday to help in an investigation. “We would have neither the temerity nor the  authority,”  the  Bureau  protested  to  Martin,  “to  order this citizen to return from his fishing trip.”

 

Sex and violence are the meat and potatoes of action detective shows; character and police procedure  are  the  trimmings.  After  Hoover’s  men got finished scissoring “The F.B.1.” there was very little left except characterization  and  procedure.  Efrem  Zimbalist,  Jr.,  said   that  when TV violence became controversial in  the late sixties  headquarters  put  out  a rule that “there would be no more deaths-immortality. We didn’t kill anybody, I think, the last two or three years.”

 

Despite these restrictions “The F.B.I.” was a success by conventional show business standards. Ratings made it the best-liked  new show  during its maiden season and at the time of Hoover’s  death  it was being watched by 40 million Americans every week, with overseas syndication bringing Inspector Erskine to 50 more nations from Canada to Singapore.

 

Some of this success was due to Zimbalist’s considerable camera presence and to the sincerity he was able to bring to his role. Like many established Hollywood stars of his generation, Zimbalist was a staunch traditionalist in his cultural and political attitudes.  His  off-screen  respect for guardians of traditional values buttressed Erskine’s unfailingly noble physical, spiritual, and sartorial demeanor. Another reason for the show’s popularity was Crime Record’s attention to detail which kept the Quinn Martin organization  on  its  toes.  Even  a  politically  unfriendly  reviewer in the Village Voice called “The F.B.I.” “one of the last vestiges of well-produced, well-acted entertaining and engrossing television  series left  to the escapist adult. Politics, shmolitics, who can be fussy?”

 

The professional slickness that let even the Village Voice tolerate “The F.B.I.” as “escapist” was a symptom of what was wrong  with  the  pro­ gram; wrong, that is, if F.B.I. entertainment was still supposed to be a dramatization of the Bureau’s role in leading the nation and law enforcement against crime. Far from using entertainment to rouse the  public in favor of  strong law enforcement  as it  had  during  the  thirties,  the F.B.I.  of the sixties and seventies seemed more worried about offending some­ one. The show’s highly publicized agreement to  ban  the  words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” was the most celebrated example of the Bureau’s eagerness to please everybody, but there were many others. Cartha DeLoach, the Assistant Director in charge of Crime Records who was responsible for creating “The F.B.I.,” claimed that Hoover ordered  him seven times to cancel the show because of some ammunition it had  given his enemies. “Each time I had to write a memo defending it.” Hoover’s timidity   during   his  last  years  was  the  despair  of   DeLoach   and other F.B.I.  brass  who  wanted  to  use  aggressive  public  relations  to  keep  the F.B.I. at the head of the American law enforcement pack. ” After a while Hoover lost his sense of daring,” DeLoach recalled.  “He  would  only  go for sure winner s. No longer was he  creating  an  image for  the  Bureau , but only maintaining it.”

 

The timidity of detail in “The F.B.I.” was less debilitating than the timidity of the show’s overall format, which insulated the program from having any real impact on public opinion. Television’s F.B.I.  was  no  longer a gangbusting outfit leading a national  crusade  against  crime.  It was another version of Chip Hardesty’s family, with an off-screen  patriarch (“The Director”) and an on-screen father figure (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.-Inspector Erskine) with his surrogate family  (Philip  Ward  as  Assistant Director Ward and William Reynolds as Special  Agent  Colby) . Each week their smooth office routine of paper  shuffling  and  chitchat about wives and kids was interrupted by a crisis in  the form  of  a crime,  and then the team pulled together to get things back to normal. No longer were the G-men shooting it out with thinly  fictionalized  gangsters  based on  notorious  real-life   public  enemies.   Gone  was  the  pervading  sense of national crisis, the electric atmosphere of anticrime hysteria. Vanished was the drama of epic conflict between public symbols of good and evil, the evangelical sense of an F.B.1.- led revival of American law enforcement. The crimes  the TV  G-men  solved  were  merely  formal  violations of the law with none of the meaty entanglements with contemporary head­ lines that had made the old-time  G-men  dramas  resonate  between  fact and fantasy. In comparison with the G-men of the thirties and  forties, Special Agent Chip Hardesty and Inspector Erskine were apolitical.

 

A skeleton of the old action-detective formula remained in The F.B./. Story and “The F.B.I.,” but a new set of conventions had been super­ imposed over it. This was the domestic formula, a concoction with  two main ingredients-a  warm,  secure  family  group  and  an  intrusion  from the outside to disrupt it. The characters’ emotional energies (intellectual interests, too, if they had any) were directed  inwards  toward  other members of the family circle; the world outside was simply a source of troubles, funny troubles for families like Lucy’s and the Nelsons’, more frightening ones for families in soap operas and the F.B.I.

 

During the fifties and sixties the two most popular types of formula entertainment, the crime show and the western,  were  brought  up  to  date by having the domestic formula laid over them. Sometimes the hero was given a real family (” Bonanza, ” “MacMillan and Wife”) but more often he had a surrogate family like Inspector Erskine’s , composed of friends and fellow cops (” Gunsmoke,” “The Mod Squad,” ” Ironsides” ). Sheriffs still had their showdowns with the bad guys, cops still chased their crooks, but now these were merely intrusions from the outside world that  disturbed, only to clarify and strengthen, the bonds between friends in a continuing drama of private relationships. The domestic formula shifted the audience’s attention away from the work the F.B.I. did in pacifying society and re­ forming law enforcement. No longer was  the focus  on  what  the  G-men did as public symbols of the law, but on what they were as ordinary human beings: decent, moral, well-behaved-paragons of private, not civic, virtue. The political bite of F .B.I. entertainment had been defanged.

 

The F.B.I. did not junk its old (.and highly productive) entertainment formula for a new one just because of a shift in popular tastes, though the “Togetherness”  ideal may have encouraged  producers like Mervyn  LeRoy and Quinn Martin to trade in the Bureau’s old  motto  (Fidelity,  Bravery, and Integrity) for Kinder, Kirche, and Kiiche. Nor does  the  elderly Hoover’s sentimentalization of the Bureau as the family he never had completely explain the change, though he demanded that his birthdays and anniversaries  be marked by gifts and ceremonies  in a way  that suggests he did see himself  as patriarch of  the Special Agent clan.  The reason  why the F.B.I. changed its entertainment formula in mid-century was that the only man who counted, J. Edgar Hoover, had  changed  his  mind  about  what was wrong with the country and what had to be done to save it.

 

In speeches during his last 20 years Hoover dutifully ran through the statistics that proved the Bureau’s sterling  performance,  just  as  he  had ever since he had taken over the F.B.I., but  his  heart  was  no longer  in  this obligatory flacking for the Bureau’s annual appropriations. He began warming up when he got to flaying sob-sister parole officers, revolving-door courts, and the procedural labyrinths built by civil libertarians, pseudo­ liberals, convict-lovers, and other heathens. But his rhetoric got  red-hot  only when he reached the cause that had become a crusade for Hoover during his last years-the moral reform of America.

 

Hoover’s speeches and books toward the end were more like revivalists’ sermons than the reports of the country’s top cop. A typical speech saw him slide into his subject by saying that “today, there are too many signs that Americans, as individuals, are pursuing the deadly course of irresponsibility which has led to the downfall of other nations and other cultures throughout the history of mankind.”  Then he would catalogue the nation’s slide into degeneracy: “Americans, in growing numbers, are developing a dangerously indulgent attitude toward crime, filth, and corruption. No one can deny that motion pictures are deliberately and defiantly pursuing an increasingly bold courtship with obscenity.  No one can  deny the  role  of the television industry in bringing lurid portrayals of violence and sadism into the living rooms-and even the  nurseries-of  our  homes.  No  one can deny that sensual trash is moving closer and closer to children’s books on the shelves of our newsstands and magazine stores.” Then the Director would call America back to  the old-time traditions and  values:

 

Today, our nation faces the most severe test ever to confront a free people. Here and abroad, mortal enemies of freedom and deniers of God Himself conspire to undermine the fundamental forces which are the lifeline of our country’s vitality and greatness-our most formidable weapons, in peace and war: … FAITH … in a Supreme Being: God, the Author of Liberty; Individualism; …     Courage;  …     Integrity;  …     Discipline;       Vision­ such as led our founding fathers into the perilous wilderness that was to become the proud American Republic in which we live today. These are America’s great bulwarks.  They are under savage attack  today,  just as they were so severely tested nearly 200 years ago at Bunker Hill and at Valley Forge.

 

Even when Hoover addressed professional law enforcement groups his rhetorical climax was a call for moral reform. In 1967 he spoke to the Regional Conference on Crime Prevention of the Michigan State Bar Association. His speech ended like this:

 

The  flames  of freedom …    lighted        in Jefferson’s day have continued

… for nearly 200 years. They have been fed by the spiritual fuel which abounds only in a land where an abiding faith in God and  recognition  of  Him as  the  true  Author  of  Liberty  prevail.  America  is  strong  because she is good. That strength and goodness stem from the presence of God  in  all  areas  of  national  life…. The  laws  of  Moses  must  remain  the guidelines not only for those who engage in  the  practice  of  law,  but  for our entire body of civil and criminal codes. . . . They must remain our National Creed.

 

During the thirties Hoover’s message was that modernized law enforcement would be able to save the country through science and institutional reforms like the F.B.I.’s National Police Academy. During the fifties and sixties Hoover no longer promised that tinkering with the law enforcement machinery would be enough: “Suppose every American,” he wrote in 1958 in Masters of Deceit, “spent a little time each day … studying the Bible and the basic documents of American history, government and culture? The result would be a new America, vigilant, strong, but ever humble in the service of God.  If  communists can be so inspired from error,  falsehood

and hate, just think what we could do with truth,  justice, and love!  I thrill  to think of the even greater wonders America could fashion from its rich, glorious, and deep tradition. All we need is faith, real  faith.”  The nation’s number one G-man had dropped the machinegun and  picked  up  the cross. “Shall I make my child go to Sunday School and church?” he was writing in American Mercury. “Yes!  And  with  no  further  discussion about the matter. … Tell him, ‘Junior, in our  house  we  all  go  to church and Sunday School, and that includes you.’ Your  firmness  and  example will furnish a bridge over which youthful rebellion may  travel  into  rich and  satisfying  experience   in  personal   religious  living.   The  parents  of America  can strike a  telling blow  against  the forces  which  contribute  to our juvenile delinquency, if our mothers and fathers will take their children to Sunday School and church regularly.”

 

Hoover’s shift from police professionalism and a national anticrime crusade to moral redemption as the cure for what ailed America made the action-detective aspect of the G-man formula irrelevant as a projection  of the Director’s program. If faith and family  solidarity  were  the  answers, then the moral of the F.B.I. message was getting the kids to eat their break­ fast before they went off to school, and not shooting down John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. It was Inspector Erskine’s unfailing politeness and decency in spite of provocation, and not the number of “would-be crime czars” he put behind bars.

 

Entertainment formulas, of course, are not the whole answer to  the F.B.I.’s rise  and  fall,  but  the  Bureau’s  public  image  always  towered over its modest actual presence on the national scene (it  still  has  only 8,600 special agents), and formula entertainment had an important part in building that image. It was the public’s belief that the G-men were  the  shock troops in a national crime crusade that lifted the Bureau above the level of ordinary political institutions, and the action-detective version  of the G-man formula helped create that perception.

 

During the fifties and sixties the F.B.I.’s reputation  was  no  longer getting the constant puffs of official rhetoric that had kept it inflated over  the years, because J. Edgar Hoover’s attention had shifted to higher concerns than gangbusting. Hoover’s rhetoric, which overshadowed all rival crime-control theories during his lifetime, no longer used the institution of the F.B.I. as a symbol of how the nation would be saved, and it no longer dramatized the Bureau’s big cases as symbols of the country’s war against evil. The domestic version of the G-man formula was an accurate reflection of the old Director’s new gospel, but it stripped the F.B.I. of  its dramatic symbolism as the one institution that stood between  the  nation and ruin. The domestic formula stressed the G-man’s private role as embodiment of the ordinary decencies-defender of the faith, not public defender. The domestic formula made a virtue out of ordinariness and left the F.B.I. an ordinary institution, vulnerable as all ordinary institutions  are to criticism, attack, and-worst of all-evaluation on the basis of performance, not political symbolism.

 

This new Bible-quoting choir boy image of the G-man was actually a bomb within the F.B.I.’s defenses waiting to explode. The old G-man had been invulnerable-and so he helped keep the  real F.B.I.  defended  against its critics. While the G-man was preeminently a man of action, only defeat on the field of battle could have discredited him. The conventions of American popular culture make it essentially irrelevant whether an action hero smokes, spits, or swears-as long  as he gets  the  job done.  Advertise the G-man as a saint, however, and he can no longer redeem  himself through action.  He becomes vulnerable to every  rumor of  corruption,  and if the slightest hint of immorality is proven  true, he is mortally  wounded. His respectability is transformed to hypocrisy, his moral message into sanctimoniousness.

 

By turning the G-man into a symbol of morality Hoover made the Bureau vulnerable to precisely the kind of allegations that began to surface during the 1960s. The old G-man had never claimed to be a saint; if  he  were caught taking a short-cut around the Bill of Rights, he could always redeem himself by catching another crook or smashing another spy  ring.  This sort of rebuttal was not available to the new G-man. The domesticated G-man based his claim to popular respect on  his righteousness, and so,  according to the unforgiving logic of popular culture,  with the first stain on his cloak of moral perfection he forfeited that claim.