J. Edgar Hoover was figuratively born into the federal bureaucracy. He grew up learning the dead-ends and shortcuts of federal employment the way a country boy soaked up the lore of willow whistles and grapevine cigars.  Hoover’s father and his grandfather spent their lives in the Coast and Geodetic Survey.  His brother worked his way up in the Steamboat Inspection Service to the rank of Chief Inspector, and there were other relatives throughout the federal and district bureaucracy.  On the mother’s side there was a District of Columbia judge, William Hitz, a friend of Louis Brandeis and Woodrow Wilson.

When Hoover graduated from Central in 1913, Washington was, as it still is, a company town, and the company was the federal government.  Then, as now, taking advantage of the opportunities Washington offers depended on personal relationships with the entrenched bureaucrats who controlled access to government employment.  Direct entry into the higher, policy-making levels of the bureaucracy was largely restricted to the allies and proteges of elected officials.  In Hoover’s Washington those families tended to congregate in Northwest Washington and Georgetown.

While admission to the upper reaches of government was generally beyond its grasp, Seward Square did exert a jealous watch over the lower entry-level positions in the federal bureaucracy.  The Hoover’s were part of an almost hereditary order of families who knew their way in and about the federal agencies. By virtue of his family, his neighborhood, and his training J. Edgar Hoover was a full-fledged member of this caste.

For families like the Hoovers the government was not simply an abstract principle or a vague symbol, nor was it an oppressive force or an instrument to be shaped and manipulated.  It was the family’s source of employment, of pride, and of its sense that its values were the official morality of the nation and state.  To Seward Square the federal government was an extension of itself.  The permanent bureaucracy consisted of people like themselves who came from similar neighborhoods throughout the city.

By the time he graduated from Central Hoover had his sights set on a career in law.  Beneath his yearbook photo was a caption saying that “‘Speed’ intends to study law at college, and will undoubtedly make as good in that as he has at Central.”  Hoover probably had a career with the government already in mind:  with the example of his grandfather, father, and brother before him, he would have had difficulty entertaining any alternatives.

Hoover never joined a political party.  As a Washington resident he never voted.  He used his disenfranchisement as evidence of his distaste for corrupt politics.  Even after home rule and the Twenty-third Amendment (1961) he continued to boast that he had never cast a ballot.  This was prudent for an officeholder dependent on elected politicians of both parties who were regularly swept in and out of office as the political currents shifted.

Seward Square’s distaste for politics went even deeper.  Politics was one of the threatening and unsettling forces that periodically threw the bureaucracy into fits of insecurity — and nobody is secure than the long-term bureaucrat.  Besides the conservatism inspired in Seward Square by its white middle-class Protestantism, its connection to the federal bureaucracy, so intimate and familial, made the advocate of any kind of change dangerous and terrifying.

As a young man, Hoover had a significant advantage over his rivals in government service.  As a native of Seward Square he knew exactly how to prepare himself for a government career.  Besides his knowledge of the bureaucracy and the confidence he had acquired at Central, he knew that prestigious credentials were a waste of time and money for entry-level work in the government. The vita of a native Washingtonian in government service who grew up in the District before, say, 1950, is almost predictable:  the public schools, probably Central, but sometimes Western or Eastern, and then night school at George Washington University.  Out-of-towners who moved to the capital during either of the World Wars often came to the same conclusion: once the federal connection was made, it should never be broken, certainly not for anything as superfluous as an education.  The sooner one became part of the great chain of seniority that was federal civil service, the better.  A law degree might be essential, but an early start and continuity of service was even more important.  The most common solution was George Washington University’s night school.  That was Hoover’s path, as it had been his brother’s; so too it would be his niece’s and of many of his top assistants at the FBI,  Justice Department and Bureau of Investigation.

George Washington University was essentially a pragmatic solution to the career needs of the federal bureaucracy. During its early years it survived precariously on tuition.  Its student activities ran on a shoestring.  Founded as Columbian College in 1821 in hopes that it would become the “national” university envisioned in L’Enfant’s plan for the District, for years the university existed in a make-shift collection of buildings near McPherson Square in downtown Washington.  In 1912 the undergraduate college moved to its present location in Foggy Bottom, now a most desirable neighborhood but then an area “miscellaneous in character [that] gave a distinct impression of decadence.”  When the rest of the school moved, George Washington’s law school stayed behind on the second floor of the Masonic Temple at the triangle formed by 13th Street, New York Avenue and H Street NW.  It was a convenient location for a student with his eye on government work.  The Justice Department was then located a few blocks away at K Street and 15th.

The GWU Law School was not particularly prestigious, but by no means disreputable.  It was one of the founding members of the American Association of Law Schools in 1900.  In strictly academic terms it was overshadowed in the Washington area by Georgetown and the University of Virginia.  Its real attraction was that it was one of the few law schools in the country, and the only one in Washington, where it was possible to obtain a degree as a “late afternoon student.” Another attractive feature of the law school was that a student could skip the undergraduate degree and enter directly into the three-year Bachelor of Law program, with an additional year in practices and procedures for the Master of Law degree.  This was the course Hoover followed.

To support himself Hoover located a job at the Library of Congress just down Pennsylvania Avenue from Seward Square. He began work in the order division on October 13, 1913 at a salary of $360 a year.  He was a junior messenger, the lowest rank on the staff.

In 1913 the Library of Congress was being transformed into the nation’s foremost research collection by the remarkable Herbert Putnam, an early example of the bureaucratic empire builder later typified by such men as Robert Moses, Hyman Rickover, and Hoover himself.  Putnam’s professional expertise, academic reputation, organizational ability and, not least, his skillful manipulation of congressmen had won him a large degree of immunity from the political interference and patronage demands that wrecked the efficiency of most government agencies.  His personal reputation and the effectiveness of his administration convinced his congressional overseers to approve his budgets each year just as he submitted them.  Hoover was in a position to observe a rare example of an efficient unit of the federal bureaucracy.  He was able to study how Putnam won personal security and bureaucratic independence through his reputation for efficiency and by skillfully handling congressional requests for service.

Putnam did fill the Library’s professional positions on the basis of merit, but at the non-professional level where Hoover joined the staff, political sponsorship was necessary.  Perhaps Hoover got his job through his brother, or through the senator Dick worked for while studying law at George Washington. The law school may also have had connections with the Library, since the Library was a common employer of GWU law students.  The historian of George Washington University Law school worked at the Library while attending law school, as did Hoover’s niece Margaret, who got her law degree  at GWU in the 1920s.

Hoover spent his three and a half years at the Library (from 1913 to 1917) in the order department, except for a period in late 1915 when he was detached to the cataloging division.  His pay rose steadily.  From an initial salary of $30 a month in October 1913 (about the same he had earned delivering groceries while in high school) Hoover’s pay increased to $840 a year, or $70 a month, when he finally left the rolls of the library on July 31, 1917.  There have been suggestions that Hoover’s experience at the library was valuable when he organized the index files at the General Intelligence Division in 1919, but the Justice Department had long had an efficient system of cross-referencing its case files, as had every organization faced with large masses of information in the days before computers.  If Hoover’s experience at the library had significant influence on him, it was that it gave him the opportunity to observe how a government agency could be managed according to sound administrative principles.

Hoover’s routine at the library was to work from 9:00 to 4:30 and then travel across town to GWU for evening classes from 4:50 to 6:30.  In summer his classes ran from 7:50 to 8:40 in the morning before the heat grew oppressive, and then he spent the rest of the day at the Library.  In the few hours this demanding schedule left him for study, he filled twenty-six bound notebooks, each between one and two hundred pages, with notes on his lectures and reading assignments.  He obtained some practical experience working with the Legal Aid Society, and even managed a social life despite his work and studies.  There was no age difference between the undergraduates and the law students at GWU, so students of the law school were able to join the college fraternities, even play on the varsity teams.  Hoover became a member of Kappa Alpha, a predominantly southern fraternity that originated at William and Mary.  For a while after graduation he maintained this connection, and was president of the fraternity until the early 1920s.

Hoover finished his Bachelor of Law degree in 1916 (without honors) in the minimum period of three years.   Little additional course work was required for the masters, which was intended to recognize competence in practices and procedures, whether acquired by study or practical experience.  Hoover kept his job at the library while he spent the extra year at GWU.

**

On April 2, 1917 Woodrow Wilson delivered his war message to Congress.  On June 5 all men between the ages of 21 and 31 had to register for the draft.  Hoover was 22 years of age and in excellent physical condition, just what the army needed, so in early June, besides receiving his master’s degree and sitting for his bar examinations, he filled out his selective service forms.  On July 3, 1917 he was notified that he had passed the bar examination, and was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia.

Photographs of Hoover at this time show a young man with a thin, intense countenance, and a face of almost grim determination.  He may have been feeling the pressure of a crisis that had been developing at home at Seward Square.  On April 17, 1917 Hoover’s father, who had been in bad health for some time, had to retire from the Interior Department.  He evidently suffered from mental illness;  one of Edgar’s nieces later recalled a “nervous breakdown of some sort.” The elder Hoover was 60 years old and needed medical attention.  This reduced the family’s income by $2000 a year.  The support of their ailing father and their mother (Dickerson Sr. would live until 1922, Annie until 1938) would now depend on Edgar and Dick. Since Dick had a wife and three children, the burden of supporting his family and coping with his father’s mental illness now fell on Edgar’s shoulders.

But Hoover’s family was also a resource he could draw on in this domestic emergency.  Hoover’s uncle, William Hitz, had been a Special Assistant to Attorney General Thomas Gregory during 1916, doing work in the Court of Claims that sent him to Boston and to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Hitz left the Justice Department on November 15, 1916, when he was appointed Associate Justice of the District of Columbia Supreme Court.  Hitz’s recent Justice Department experience made him a likely source of information for Hoover about job opportunities with the department. According to one of Hitz’s other nephews, United States Supreme Court Justice Harold Burton, Hoover was quite close to Hitz, so this connection with a successful Washington jurist would certainly have been valuable to Hoover when he looked for work at the department.

Lawyers begin their practical legal education only when they leave law school and enter into practice, so they often choose their first job as much for its value as legal training as for the pay.  Hoover’s starting salary at the Justice Department was $990, more than the $840 he had been earning at the Library of Congress, but still a very low-paying job.  To put this in perspective, the Attorney General earned $15,000 a year, and his highest subordinates, the Solicitor General and the Special Assistant for War Work, earned $10,000 each.  A politically well-connected Washington lawyer like A. Mitchell Palmer earned $200,000 a year at the outset of the war.  This kind of income was far beyond Hoover’s reach, but he certainly could have done better in private practice unless he had the expectation of early promotion because his finances did not give him the luxury of remaining for any length of time in a low-paying situation.   In later years he usually described his first job as that of a clerk, and there is a reference in his official F.B.I. personnel file to his being a “clerk in the files division.”  It was not a job that required or utilized legal training.

Hoover in fact was promoted to the rank of “attorney” in less than a year.  This paid $1800, about double what Hoover was getting, and just about what Hoover needed to replace his father’s $2000 a year.  It is likely that his uncle’s influence in the department was what gave him the confidence that he would get special attention.

Not only did Hitz know Gregory, but he also was a good friend of the man who would be Hoover’s superior, John Lord O’Brian, whom he had known at Harvard.  During the month of July 1917 (Hoover entered the Department on July 26) Attorney General Thomas Gregory was laying plans for the War Emergency Division of the Justice Department, an agency he would formally establish in late summer.  The lawyer Gregory had in mind to head this Division was the eminent Buffalo lawyer, John Lord O’Brian, who had just finished directing the government’s case in the Sherman Antitrust prosecution of the German propagandist Franz von Rintelen.  O’Brian accepted his appointment to head the War Emergency Division in the fall of 1917, but he was in communication with Gregory about it during the summer while Hoover was looking for a job.

O’Brian was in the habit of attending Judge Hitz’s Saturday luncheons at the Cosmos Club, to which they both belonged.  It was at one of those luncheons in 1917 that O’Brian met his future law partners, the founders of the prestigious Washington firm of Covington and Burling.  O’Brian later said that Hitz “had a good part in shaping my own life in those early days.”

In later years O’Brian, a courageous civil libertarian (and a director of the Fund for the Republic, which the Hoover-backed House Un-American Activities Committee attacked in the fifties),  was somewhat embarrassed about his role in “recruiting” Hoover for the Justice Department.  It was something, he said, that he would “prefer to whisper in dark corners.” It is possible that at one of those Cosmos Club luncheons O’Brian mentioned to Hitz that he needed lawyers for his new war division at the Justice Department, and that Hitz told him he had a nephew who had just finished George Washington Law and needed a job.  His uncle’s line to O’Brian might also have made Hoover confident that he had a good chance to be rescued from the file room, because unless O’Brian’s attention had been called to Hoover, it is unlikely that a man so close to the top of the Justice Department would have noticed a clerk who was so near the bottom, even one as hard-working as Hoover.

One puzzling note on Hoover’s early days at the Justice Department is a reference to him as a “special agent,”  raising the possibility that Hoover’s initial appointment (perhaps only as an administrative formality) was with the Department’s detective unit, the Bureau of Investigation, rather than with the Justice Department proper.  John Lord O’Brian’s first official mention of Hoover (on December 14, 1917) refers to him as a “special agent,” but since many of the Bureau of Investigation’s detectives were working outside the Bureau on the Department’s war work on clerical tasks similar to Hoover’s, O’Brian could easily have been mistaken about Hoover’s appointment.  He could not have been expected to be fully acquainted with all the precise details of all his clerks’ departmental status.

On the other hand, the 1919 Washington City Directory also lists Hoover as a “special agent” with the Justice Department.  The 1919 edition would have been compiled early in 1918, and would have been based on information Hoover or his parents gave to the canvassers.  The reason Hoover may have first joined the Justice Department as a special agent in the Bureau of Investigation was that the Bureau had recently (July 1916) gotten a special appropriation to hire more agents, so it was the branch of the Department that had the most job openings in July 1917.  Later Hoover might not have wanted to have this known by his subordinates because of the unsavory reputation of the pre-1924 Bureau.  It also might have diminished his authority if his subordinates had thought of him as someone who was once taken orders as well as given them.  In any case, if Hoover had once been a special agent, he certainly concealed the secret the rest of his life.

**

As J. Edgar Hoover rode the trolley from Seward Square across town to “K” Street Northwest on July 26 for his first day at the Justice Department the forces that would shape his future were just making themselves felt.  The Bolsheviks, who had helped overthrow the Czar in February, were preparing to seize control of the Russian Revolution.  Left wing members of the American Socialist Party, excited by the developments in Russia, were still two years away from leaving the Socialists to form the Communist and Communist Labor Parties.  Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had been convicted of obstructing the draft on July 9 and were in prison, Goldman in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Berkman in Atlanta.  John Dillinger was a fourteen-year-old apprentice machinist in Indianapolis.

The United States had been at war for four months when the twenty-two-year-old J. Edgar Hoover joined the Justice Department.  Those had been four months of war hysteria, and the Justice Department was at the center of that hysteria.

The Justice Department that Hoover joined was rapidly expanding due to the war, but it was still an old-fashioned place and Gregory was an old-fashioned Attorney General.  His 1917 budget listed an expense of $12.00 for a new pole for his carriage.  Out of the $2486.44 spent by the department to maintain its transportation equipment, all but $1.80 went for the upkeep of the department’s horses, its victoria and its brougham.  The odd $1.80 was spent fixing a broken bicycle.

The Justice Department’s offices were in a collection of leased buildings clustered around the headquarters at Vermont and “K” Street at McPherson Square.  Not until 1934, when the Justice Department moved into its present quarters at Pennsylvania and Ninth Streets, would it be centralized in a building of its own.

Thomas W. Gregory, the first of the nineteen Attorneys General Hoover would serve, was a Mississippi-born Texan, one of Woodrow Wilson’s earliest supporters.  He was credited with persuading the indispensable Colonel House to back Wilson for the presidency.  Gregory took charge of the Justice Department in 1914, succeeding the politically inept James C. McReynolds after Wilson elevated him to the Supreme Court.  Gregory quickly ended the Department’s traditional alliance with industry in labor struggles, and he redirected the Justice Department’s energies towards enforcement of the antitrust laws.  As a progressive-era reformer, he also had the Bureau of Investigation emphasize enforcement of the federal white slave law (the “Mann Act”), in those days regarded as a progressive reform.

Like many of Wilson’s early supporters, Gregory was instinctively in sympathy with reform and reformers.  He urged Wilson to appoint Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, saying that “one radical in nine is not such a bad thing on the Supreme Bench.”  Wilson had such respect for Gregory’s character and intellect that he wanted to appoint him to the Supreme Court when Charles Evans Hughes resigned in 1916 to seek the presidency, but Gregory disqualified himself because he was almost deaf.  Wilson’s cabinet, which was soon to preside over atrocious assaults on civil liberties, entered the war with at least two civil libertarians, Attorney General Gregory and Secretary of Labor Wilson, to help stem the stampede to repressive policies.

Hoover entered the Department as a clerk.  He was soon promoted, and quickly given responsibilities unusual for someone his age. He was not involved in any significant policy-shaping or decision-making during the war, but he was in a position to observe a major government drive to eliminate political dissent against the war. His own assignment was helping administer the Department’s supervision of German aliens, but meanwhile the Justice Department was committing some of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in American history.  It used a major political trial in Chicago in April 1918 to destroy the country’s most militant radical organization, the International Workers of the World (the I.W.W.).  It prosecuted and convicted Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Eugene Debs, the perennial Socialist presidential candidate, for opposing the draft.

The Bureau of Investigation had recently been enlarged to 300 agents, augmented by other detectives borrowed from the Immigration Service.  It was led by Chief A. Bruce Bielaski, another George Washington University Law graduate.  To supplement its own small staff the Bureau joined forces with a civilian army of 260,000 amateur detectives, the American Protective League, an army of amateur spy-hunters organized in March by Albert M. Briggs.  The Bureau supplied the APL with badges identifying them as Justice Department auxiliaries, and turned them loose to hunt for spies and disloyal neighbors.  The Justice Department used the A.P.L. to enforce the draft by rounding up huge numbers of draft-age men on suspicion of being “slackers.”

It was ironic that the Justice Department’s repressive wartime policies were directed by two officials as committed to civil liberties as Thomas Gregory and John Lord O’Brian.  During the wartime emergency Gregory and O’Brian tried their best to preserve constitutional processes in the overheated atmosphere of the war emergency, and to ensure that wartime restrictions of individual rights would only be temporary.  Things could have been much worse if Gregory’s first advisor on war legislation, Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren, had had his way.  Extreme nativists like Warren saw the war as chance to settle old scores with their enemies.  Charles Warren had always regarded immigrants as a major threat to American society.  Warren was one of the five founders of the small but influential Immigration Restriction League, which was organized at a meeting in Warren’s home in 1894.  He and other superpatriots lunged at the chance to use the rough rules of war against domestic “reds,” a broad category that included anyone who was dissatisfied with the established order.

The Justice Department was the command center of the government’s drive to maintain support for the war and foster national conformity.  Hoover could observe the struggle between constitutionalists determined to protect individual rights and those bent on fostering tribal unity by using the war regulations to repress anyone who disturbed the status quo.

The most visible Justice Department operation in the summer of 1917 was the Department’s war against German spies, really more of a public relations campaign to persuade the country the government was dealing competently with a greatly exaggerated spy threat.  Related to this was a bureaucratic battle for jurisdiction over loyalty and espionage cases between Gregory’s Justice Department and its rivals in Treasury Department (the Secret Service) and the War Department (the Military Intelligence Division).

Within the Justice Department there was the struggle of Gregory and John Lord O’Brian to preserve due process and to prevent the use of war regulations to war against unpopular beliefs and groups.  The chief proponent of repression in the Department was Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren.  Held in check by Gregory and O’Brian, Warren’s point of view was shared by many subordinate members of the Department.  After he, Gregory and O’Brian had all left the Department after the war, views similar to his became Justice Department policy in 1919 when A. Mitchell Palmer became Attorney General.

When Wilson signed the declaration of war against imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, the country had experienced almost three years of war news and war propaganda since August 1918, most of it calculated to inflame the country against Germany.  The nature of the sea war — British control of the ocean’s surface countered by German submarines — had made it inevitable that when there were American casualties, it would be the Germans who were responsible, such as was the case in the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 and the French passenger ship Sussex in 1916.  German and British agents in America both ignored American sovereignty, but only the acts of German agents alarmed the public.  This anti-German prejudice was exacerbated by the administration’s pro-British bias.

Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo had his Secret Service agents investigate “German intrigues,” and they produced spectacular disclosures about the German underground.  One such expose was a supposed German plot with Mexican revolutionaries against American interests in that country.  The public’s fear of German agents swelled to a panic in July 1916 when ammunition stored at a munitions depot on New York harbor’s Black Tom Island exploded.  While the German government’s responsibility for the explosion was not legally established until decades later, it was universally assumed that German agents necessarily were to blame.

Three years’ of stories about “German intrigues” convinced much of the public that enemy agents had organized vast numbers of aliens, particularly Germans and Austro-Hungarians, into a secret army poised to sabotage the nation’s defenses.  By the time of Wilson’s war message, according to one observer,

many Americans believed that a declaration of war would     transform the United States into a battlefield, with     every one of the million resident German aliens an agent     of the Kaiser.  Mexicans in league with Germany would     march north, retake Arizona and New Mexico, and cut off     California from the rest of the country.  Japanese would     then land on the Pacific Coast and invade California.  In     the East, German submarines would shell New York.      Sabotage would be particularly widespread in the heavily     industrialized Northeast.  Spies, of course, were     believed to be everywhere.

Hoover’s first months in the Justice Department put him in the middle of this hysteria over the traitors, spies and saboteurs.  In March 1917 the War Department began ostentatiously guarding public utilities and railroad bridges and distributing weapons to factory owners.  On the West Coast public opinion was especially out of control.  Power plant owners surrounded their facilities with barbed wire and electric fences,  gun clubs mobilized to protect their neighborhoods, and citizens were warned to arm themselves.  On March 25, 1917, the War Department imposed a blackout on all news of military movements, and in the absence of hard news about military preparations rumors ran wild about enemy agents.

Under these circumstances government officials who refused to give in to the hysteria risked being accused of failing in their duty.  Within Wilson’s cabinet only a few stood their ground against the hysteria.  Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo were in favor of a sweeping round-up of aliens, but Secretary of War Baker and Attorney General Thomas Gregory remained skeptical that there was any really critical internal threat.

Despite the repugnance Gregory felt for wholesale infringements on political rights, certain factors impelled him to swim with the repressive current.  Most important was his loyalty to the administration in which he was a leading figure and to a president he greatly admired.  With the country and the press screaming for government action against the alien threat, inactivity would have been political suicide.  Gregory also deeply distrusted Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo and his Secret Service, and if the Justice Department appeared lax against aliens the result would have been to cede control of the internal security field to the Treasury.  Gregory felt that eventually McAdoo’s irresponsibility would discredit the government and the administration.

In addition, at the beginning of the war emergency Gregory was forced to rely on Charles Warren for advice who was not above forming alliances with Gregory’s rivals in the cabinet to promote his policies.  Eventually Warren would even propose using military law and courts martial against disloyal aliens, and he would offer these proposals to Congress and the press without Gregory’s approval.

At the beginning of Hoover’s tenure in the Justice Department, Warren was the most influential man in the Department.  He had drafted the Espionage Bill that Gregory sent to Congress in June 1916.  This bill died in 1916, and again in March 1917, but was finally passed in June 15, 1917 during the special war session of Congress.  (This was the law under which the Rosenbergs were convicted and executed.)  Warren also shaped government policy for dealing with the German merchant ships that had berthed in American ports to avoid the blockade.

Warren’s prestige was at its highest in April 1917 when he hit upon the idea of making the old 1798 Alien Act the legal basis for Woodrow Wilson’s April 6 proclamation on “Alien Enemies.” (The phrase is taken from the 1798 law.)  This placed them at the disposal of the President and delegated their treatment to the Attorney General.  John Lord O’Brian later fought Warren over civil liberties and was finally instrumental in forcing Warren’s resignation from the department.  Nevertheless, he admired Warren’s contribution in the early days of the war, writing that

we seemingly had no laws adequate to deal with the     insidious methods of internal hostile activities. . . .      The only statute of any real use was one enacted in 1798     as part of the so-called Alien and Sedition Laws. This     statute conferred on the President the power in time of     national emergency to seize and intern without trial     alien enemies who, in his opinion, were dangerous.

Under this statute and a presidential proclamation     framed by Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren, many     of the active German and Austrian master secret agents     were, on the night war was declared, seized and     imprisoned for the duration of the war.  The importance     of this action and the boldness and resourcefulness of     Mr. Warren in executing it may have never been adequately     emphasized.  For the time being it paralyzed the     operations of the German espionage system in this     country.  Subsequently this power of internment was used     to such an extent that at the end of the war more than     2,500 dangerous alien enemies had been seized and     interned — most of them agents or helpers in the German     espionage system.

Warren convinced Gregory to bow to the public demands for action against German aliens at the beginning of the war.  Shortly before the declaration, he wrote Gregory that “I am confident, from my consideration of the reports of the special agents, that Germans and German sympathizers in the United States intend to commit widespread crimes of violence at the very outbreak of war. No time will be lost by them, and in my opinion, no time must be lost by us to guard against their actions.” Warren drafted the Department’s regulations on zones from which alien enemies were banned.  According to the official history of the Justice Department, “the policing of the system became one of the heaviest tasks of the Department of Justice throughout the war.”  It was, specifically, the task that provided Hoover with his work during the war.

Once O’Brian entered the Justice Department, most of Warren’s responsibilities except (according to O’Brian) the “Trading with the Enemy and a few odds and ends,” were transferred to O’Brian’s War Emergency Division.  Warren later became a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and utilized his remaining time in the department to argue in an article for the Yale Law Review that aliens, like citizens, should be subject to the death penalty under the treason statute.

Warren finally resigned on April 19, 1918, when Gregory, supported by O’Brian, publicly repudiated Warren’s lobbying in Congress for a bill that would have turned espionage investigations and trials over to the army, although he knew the President and the Attorney General were both opposed.  “One man shot, after court martial, is worth a hundred arrests by this Department,” Warren had written Gregory.

Hoover’s first assignment in the Justice Department was to handle the flood of paperwork generated by the regulations governing German aliens.  Since 1914 the Justice Department had been preparing lists of aliens considered dangerous.  “Prior to the passage of the joint resolution of Congress of April 6, 1917,” Gregory reported, “elaborate preparation was made for the arrest of 63 alien enemies whom past investigation had shown to constitute a danger to the peace and safety of the United States if allowed to remain at large.” There were 295 aliens arrested by June 30, 1917, 895 by October 30.  By the end of the war 4000 alien enemies had been arrested by the Justice Department.

On April 6, immediately after signing the declaration of war, Wilson issued a proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Acts.  The principal statute (Section 4067 of the Revised Statues) held that:

whenever there is declared war between the United     States and any foreign nation or government . . . and the     President makes public proclamation of the event, all     natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of the hostile     nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen     years and upwards, who shall be within the United States,     and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be     apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed, as alien     enemies.  The President is authorized, in any such event,     by his proclamation, thereof, or other public act, to     direct the conduct to be observed, on the part of the     United States, toward the aliens who become so liable;      the manner and degree of the restraint to which they     shall be subject, and in what cases, and upon what     security their residence shall be permitted, and to     provide for the removal of those who, not being permitted     to reside within the United States, refuse or neglect to     depart therefrom;  and to establish any other regulations     which are found necessary in the premises and for the     public safety.

There were twelve regulations that prohibited “alien enemies” from possessing guns or explosives, radio transmitters, and documents “printed in cipher or in which there may be invisible writing.”  They were banned from coming within one-half mile of military installations or munitions plants, and from other zones like the Capital and the Port of New York, and were barred from entering or leaving the United States.  Wilson’s proclamation gave notice that all alien enemies would have to register at a later date and threatened prison if “there may be reasonable cause to believe [an alien] may be aiding or about to aid the enemy.”  There was almost superstitious dread of enemy propaganda during the war, and the regulations also sought to silence this:

An alien enemy shall not write, print, or publish any     attack or threats against the Government or Congress of     the United States, or either branch thereof, or against     the measures or policy of the United States, or against     the person or property of any person in the military,     naval, or civil service of the United States, or of the     States or Territories, or of the District of Columbia or     of the municipal governments therein.

Wilson gave the Attorney General the responsibility of enforcing these regulations and of drawing up procedures for alien registration.  On April 16 Gregory gave alien enemies until June 1st to leave the prohibited zones, but he also ordered his marshals to issue permits to aliens who needed to stay in these areas if their presence posed no danger. United States Attorneys were to send him names of alien enemies they felt should be summarily arrested under the terms of the proclamation.  Gregory warned that no arrests should take place until approval had been obtained from Washington unless it was considered it was extraordinarily dangerous to allow the alien to remain free.

Gregory instructed his department that his “plan” was to “take up the case of each individual alien enemy arrested separately and decide . . . what disposition the interests of the country and of justice required.”  His orders required that field agents should transmit information about permit applications to the “Permit Officer, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.” Even at this early date the department was hard put to cope with the work generated by the department’s authority over alien enemies.   At the time Hoover was recruited for the War Emergency Division he was, along with many other clerks, performing the duties of “Permit Officer.”

Hoover’s first four months in the Justice Department are relatively undocumented.  His name first surfaces in a letter John Lord O’Brian submitted to Attorney General Gregory on December 14 in which O’Brian described the organization of the new War Emergency Division.  The substance of O’Brian’s proposal had already been informally approved by Gregory on December 4, so it may be assumed it was sometime before December 4 that O’Brian chose Hoover to be part of his Division’s Alien Enemy Bureau.  It is probable that Hoover had been working on alien affairs for several months before O’Brian formalized his assignment.

The reason so much of the Department’s resources were directed to alien affairs was that Gregory was able to delegate almost all other his war-related work to United States Attorneys or to the A.P.L.  It was only the control of alien enemies that presented the Department with an uncontrollable flow of paper. President Wilson’s proclamation (which first applied only to German and Austro-Hungarian males older than fourteen) gave the Attorney General the “duty of execution.”  Gregory was immediately inundated with thousands of appeals from German aliens who wanted exemptions from the prohibited zone regulations so that they could keep their jobs and homes.

The paperwork mounted fast. Red Cross regulations required all interned enemies be registered.  Forms had to be prepared to allow them to apply for parole.  Aliens who resided or worked in the forbidden areas, which included many large concentrations of the foreign-born, had to register with the department to apply for permission to remain where they were.  A complete registration of all German male aliens, and later, German females (there were, in all, 480,000 German alien enemies in the country, as well as nearly 4 million Austro-Hungarians), was deferred at the outset because of the need for extensive preparations.  On November 16, 1917, Wilson finally ordered the registration first of all German males, and then, on April 19, 1918, of German women.

Hoover’s first assignment in the Justice Department for O’Brian was to assist in the processing of documents required by the internment of German aliens, particularly seamen.  Since a severe labor shortage was already developing, employers were desperate to have their interned alien workers released, and so the Department had to begin processing parole applications almost as soon as the internments started.  This was Hoover’s job.

When John Lord O’Brian, Hoover’s superior for the duration of the war, arrived at the Justice Department on October 1, his first task had been to reorganize the staff that had been assigned to war work. O’Brian’s plan called for the establishment of an “Emergency War Division” or “Temporary War Division or . . . some other similar title” and for setting up four bureaus within it:

1. Supervision of litigations, special arguments in aid of the United States Attorneys, supervision of liquor and vice zones and miscellaneous business chiefly relating to litigation, Mr. Bettman, special assistant to Attorney General, aided by Mr. Mothershead, attorney.

2.   Registration of Aliens, Mr. Sprague, special attorney, assisted by Mr. Blanchard, special agent; other subordinates to be named.

3. Supervision of water-front protection in connection with the Army authorities to be assigned to Mr. _______.     (For the present in charge of Mr. Kenefick, attorney).

4. All work relating to the internment and parole of enemy aliens and supervising issue of permits, etc., to them, to be handled by a subordinate “Alien Enemy Bureau” in charge of Mr. Storey, as attorney.”

Within this Bureau, work to be sub-divided as follows:

All subordinates reporting to Mr. Storey and Mr. Storey reporting directly to Mr. O’Brian, namely:-

(a) Questions effecting arrest and internment of alleged alien enemies Mr. Storey.

(b) Questions relating to the parole of men in detention including the important work to be done in connection with the Department of Labor, relating to interned seamen, Mr. Saxon, assistant to Mr. Storey, aided by Mr.     Hoover, special agent.

(c) Questions effecting permits for aliens, barred     zones, supervision of United States Marshals, etc., including miscellaneous correspondence, Mr. McGuire assistant to Mr. Storey.

By December departmental correspondence shows that Hoover had become part of the Alien Enemy Bureau routine.  He was reviewing cases, summarizing them, and then submitting them to O’Brian with a recommendation for action.  Most of the cases were very clear-cut.  An eighteen-year-old German named Ernest Loehndorff was arrested in El Paso trying to enter the country from Mexico.  “Loehndorff stated that he reported to the German Consul in each city and offered his services on behalf of his country.  He also refused to promise that he will not aid enemy and states that ‘if there is anything any of the high officials tell me to do, I shall try to do that thing even if it costs me my life.’”  Hoover summarized the case and wrote that “the facts in this case lead me to recommend that Ernest Loehndorff be detained for the duration of the war.”

O’Brian’s practice was to intern an alien for the duration of the war whenever anyone in authority had reasonable doubts about his reliability.  He nearly always overruled pleas for clemency, evidently on the grounds that the law required the internment of any alien who gave the slightest appearance of posing a danger.

For the most part Hoover simply passed along the district attorney’s recommendation to O’Brian without comment.  In many cases, however, Hoover and Hoover’s immediate superior, Special Assistant Attorney General Charles W. Storey, recommended action less severe than open-ended internment.  In most of these instances Hoover was overruled, and these cases offer some insight into his attitude about his work at this time. On December 28, 1917, Hoover wrote O’Brian about a German seaman who had been refused permission to work on shipboard or near the waterfront after hostilities began.  The German then violated regulations by signing on a coastal vessel as a deck hand.  Hoover noted that “the attitude of this alien enemy is stated to be sullen and uncommunicative.  The Special agent in charge recommends that Dieriches be interned for the duration of the war.”  All the same Hoover recommended that “in view of the circumstances of the case a parole may be safely granted at the end of thirty days, provided the limits of such are restricted to a rural community.”  Charles Storey disagreed vigorously:  “A willful violation of our most important regulation.  I see nothing to do but recommend detention for the war.  Resp. CES.  P.S.  This is in line with our regular policy in these cases.”  O’Brian concurred: “Intern for War.”

In another case a German was arrested for “selling liquor to soldiers in uniform and soliciting men for immoral women.”  Hoover’s comment was that “this is a case in which parole may be safely granted, provided Schachman is able to secure a competent supervisor and furnish a bond of not less than $1000.”  Storey concurred:  “If the man were a spy he would hardly have acted the way he did in regard to petty larceny and women.  I fancy he is harmless in this respect and am inclined to recommend we remove him from the Naval Base and parole him in some inland town on a bond as stiff as he can put up.”  Bettman disagreed, noting “I think he should be interned for duration [of the] war.  Has violated laws passed to further war.” O’Brian decision was to intern him for the duration.”  In a third case Hoover recommended parole for a German train conductor who had said “It is a shame that the best blood of the United States should be sent to Europe to fight England’s war.”  Again he was overruled.

There were also cases where Hoover recommended treatment more severe than his immediate superiors, although in these cases also O’Brian’s final action was to intern the alien for the duration of the war.  In one case an Otto Mueller called President Wilson “a cock-sucker and a thief”; later, when asked how he liked America, he answered “fuck this god damned country.”  Hoover characterized these as “various vulgar and obscene remarks about the President” and “the most pronounced Pro-German expressions,”  and endorsed the decision of the United States Attorney who “recommends that Mueller be interned for the duration of the war, in which recommendation I concur.”  Charles Storey disagreed with Hoover, saying that “Mueller has unquestionably overstepped the rights of free speech but still his offense is no more than a failure to keep his mouth shut, and I feel that internment for the war for mere talk is rather severe.  Three or four months in jail will be equally effective.

Another time Hoover’s recommendation was more severe than his superiors’ involved a German who, Hoover reported, “engaged in a conversation with a negro in which he indulged in pro-German utterances and in derogatory remarks regarding the United States Government.  He also made disloyal statements to other parties.”  Hoover passed along without comment the United States Attorney’s request for the permanent internment of the alien.  Storey protested that the alien had been in the country for 30 years.  He agreed that speaking “in this manner to a negro lends color to the idea that he was trying to influence the latter against the United States,” but he recommended that the alien be given a month or two in prison followed by parole.  “The additional facts that this man is a drunkard and abuses his wife cut two ways and I do not feel that they should be considered in this case.”  O’Brian interned him for the duration.

The pattern in these cases is important.  O’Brian  was determined to base his internment decisions only on the specific actions of the accused, or on the fact that someone with first-hand experience of the alien thought him dangerous.  Hoover, by contrast, displayed a desire to probe the beliefs and attitudes of the aliens for mitigating or aggravating circumstances.  Hoover was willing to excuse illegal actions by well-meaning aliens, but he was vindictive towards aliens whose actions might be innocuous but whose opinions indicated disloyalty.

Apparently Hoover continued to summarize the case files of interned alien enemies until April 1918.  During this time he also fielded administrative problems arising from the November 16, 1917, registration of German males.

On April 19, 1918, the Department issued regulations requiring the registration of German females.  For the first time Hoover appears to have been deeply involved in the planning as well as administration of a departmental operation.  He may even have directed this project.  On July 3, 1918, he sent O’Brian an editorial from the New York Sun that praised the “efficient work of the Department in the registration of alien females.”  If Hoover was calling attention to the success of this operation it may have been because he was in charge of it.

Beginning in the summer of 1918 letters begin to appear in the files with O’Brian’s signature, but bearing Hoover’s “JEH” initials.  This meant Hoover was the attorney who had drafted the letter and that replies would be routed back to him.  Most of these documents deal with the registration of German alien females, and they show Hoover was beginning to be permitted a fair measure of personal discretion in his decisions, a remarkable advance in view of his age (23 in 1918).

By this time there are also signs that Hoover had become known to his superiors as someone who was reliable and efficient, because they were giving his assignments outside his formal responsibility.  When the Justice Department became anxious about the number of German aliens living on Staten Island, close to the prohibited area of the Port of New York, Hoover collected data to make an estimate of the size of Staten Island’s German population, and he rounded up the names and precincts of the police officers supervising the aliens.

By August 26, 1918,  Hoover was no longer simply summarizing files and attaching his tentative recommendations.  He was evaluating cases from a legal standpoint and was furnishing final decisions to his superiors for their signature.  He was no longer merely reporting to Charles Storey, but was also working for Albert Bettman, who was in charge of war litigation for O’Brian.  Since Hoover had earlier reported to one of Charles Storey’s assistants, this would indicate he had moved at least one echelon up in the Justice Department bureaucracy.

In 1918 Hoover was finally promoted to the rank of attorney when O’Brian gave him the job of “reviewing aliens who volunteered for military duty and wanted to become citizens.”  Since this law went into effect on May 9, 1918, it was probably the assignment responsible for Hoover’s promotion on June 8, 1918.  By the end of September Hoover was also providing O’Brian with opinions on complicated cases involving travel permits for German aliens; he now handled difficult cases from all areas within the Alien Enemy Bureau, although he still kept his hand on his old job:  Armistice Day (November 11) found him also compiling registration statistics on alien enemies.

Both Gregory and O’Brian had notified President Wilson they wanted to leave government service at the end of the war. O’Brian, alarmed that Gregory and Secretary of Labor Wilson had asked Congress for the power to deport dangerous interned aliens, stayed on long enough to review the files of all interned aliens to make sure that they would be not be placed in jeopardy by still being in jail when the new law went into effect.  He released all of them except some German seamen who had refused repatriation during the war and about 150 aliens who had been convicted of violations of the wartime laws.   He also reviewed all the convictions he had obtained under the Espionage Act, and obtained three pardons and 102 commutations from President Wilson.

**

Hoover’s wartime experience in the Alien Enemy Bureau did more than simply give him a foothold in the Justice Department.  It accustomed him to a routine that used administrative procedures as a substitute for the uncertainties and delays of the legal process.  The enemy status of the aliens Hoover supervised had stripped them of the protection of the Constitution.  He got his first taste of authority in circumstances in which he could disregard the normal Constitutional restraints on the power of the state.

Hoover had spent a heady year and a half as a novice lawyer with freedom or prison his to grant with the stroke of a pen.  The war emergency had given his personal judgment the force of law when determining the loyalty or disloyalty of alien enemies.  His latitude to decide the fate of those whose papers were before him had been limited only by his own sense of responsibility and by the review of his superiors.  The end of the war would remove O’Brian and Gregory, with their scrupulous regard for civil liberties, from the Department.  They were replaced by ambitious politicians like A. Mitchell Palmer who were all too willing to use the administrative techniques of the Alien Enemy Bureau in a postwar campaign to repress unpopular political beliefs.

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