Understanding J. Edgar Hoover's America

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J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI director.

History has cast him as powerful, paranoid, a man not afraid to use the power of the FBI to intimidate and investigate his critics. But that’s how he’s seen now.

What about then?

“He was more popular than most of us remember in these days,” historian Beverly Gage says. “That’s really important because it means that his story, the things that he did, the things that he stood for, were also popular.”

So popular that he held his job for 48 years and eight presidencies.

“He really had his fingers in almost everything that happened in American politics from the 1920s up through the 1970s,” Gage adds.

“How his power worked is really critical to understanding how politics and social movements and culture worked itself over the course of that period.”

Today, On Point: Understanding J. Edgar Hoover’s America.

Guests

Beverly Gage, professor of 20th-century U.S. history at Yale University. Author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. (@beverlygage)

Book Excerpt

G-man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage. Excerpt used with permission of the publisher, Viking. Not to be reprinted without permission. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2022 NPR]