Gossip Men

J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation

Christopher M. Elias

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780226823935
  9780226624822
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226751528
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn were titanic figures in midcentury America, wielding national power in government and the legal system through intimidation and insinuation. Hoover's FBI thrived on secrecy, threats, and illegal surveillance, while McCarthy and Cohn will forever be associated with the infamous anticommunist smear campaign of the early 1950s, which culminated in McCarthy's public disgrace during televised Senate hearings. In Gossip Men, Christopher M. Elias takes a probing look at these tarnished figures to reveal a host of startling new connections among gender, sexuality, and national security in twentieth-century American politics. Elias illustrates how these three men solidified their power through the skillful use of deliberately misleading techniques like implication, hyperbole, and photographic manipulation. Just as provocatively, he shows that the American people of the 1950s were particularly primed to accept these coded threats because they were already familiar with such tactics from widely popular gossip magazines.

By using gossip as a lens to examine profound issues of state security and institutional power, Elias thoroughly transforms our understanding of the development of modern American political culture.
 

1

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MODERNITY

In their 1929 book Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd explored how modernization had affected a small Midwestern city between 1890 and 1925. The Lynds concluded that “Middletown”—later revealed to be Muncie, Indiana—had undergone transformative changes largely as a result of new technologies such as automatic machinery, electrical devices, automobiles, and motion pictures. Those technological developments led to economic and social ones, affecting nearly every aspect of life for Middletown’s residents: how they earned a living, how they ran their home, how they raised their children, how they spent their leisure time, how they practiced their religion, how they participated in their community.

Among other cultural changes, modernization allowed Middletowners to fully participate in a thriving national print culture. Popular publications like The American Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal instructed their readers in both cultural trends and social propriety.1 But as some national magazines largely reaffirmed Victorian-era moral values, others helped question them. In addition to those middlebrow titles, the postal workers of Middletown were delivering a new type of periodical in high numbers, what the Lynds called “sex adventure magazines.” Focused on presenting first-person, purportedly factual stories of romantic relationships, sex adventure magazines included articles such as “The Primitive Lover (She Wanted a Caveman Husband),” “How to Keep the Thrill in Marriage,” and “Can a Wife Win with the Other Woman’s Weapons?”2 Approximately one of every ten Middletown residents subscribed to a sex adventure magazine like True Story, True Confessions, True Detective, True Stories, and Live Stories. Those publications pledged to provide their readers with “a knowledge of the rules of life.” This promise to reveal hidden truths about how the modern world operates was also a key element to the gossip magazines that were then being produced in major American cities. In the eyes of one Middletown mother, the new, salacious periodicals were impacting the actions of her town’s youngsters: “Children weren’t bold like they are today when we were young!”3

She was not alone in her unease. Though the citizens of Middletown were quick to embrace “new ways of behaving toward material things,” similar shifts in personal relationships and toward “non-material institutions” prompted anxiety.4 Modernization had promised simplicity and efficiency, but the Lynds discovered that those changes had also caused the people of Middletown to feel an “increasing sense of strain and perplexity in [their] rapidly changing world.”5 They worried about ill-defined “social problems,” which encapsulated anything from the actions of “the young generation” and “corrupt politics” to issues with “housing” and “street traffic.”6

In nearly every corner of the country, Americans struggled to find their place in a brave new world. Some, like the young J. Edgar Hoover, reaffirmed their ties to institutions—including churches, schools, and the government—even as those stabilizing organizations were changing to keep up with the times. Others embraced the new social and cultural landscape that modernization had wrought, looking to novel resources such as sex adventure magazines and the emerging gossip press as a way to understand modern life. These varied, sometimes paradoxical navigations were motivated by many of the same anxieties and ambitions that built surveillance state masculinity.

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*

The house that once stood at 413 Seward Square in Washington, D.C., was unremarkable. It was a two-story frame home with large, dark shutters. In one of the few nods to decoration, the small porch was crowned with dentil molding. It was almost exactly a half mile southeast of the US Capitol building, in a neighborhood replete with government workers, most of whom were Protestant, all of whom were white. It was in this simple dwelling near the corridors of power that J. Edgar Hoover lived for his first forty-three years. That home witnessed the Hoover family’s youngest child become a successful leader in high school, a law student, a government clerk, and finally the leader of the first federal bureau of investigation. It was a path that fostered in Hoover the characteristics that came to dominate his personality (and that of the bureaucracy he built): boundless ambition, a desire for respectability, moral absolutism, and an unshakable fidelity to order. But Hoover’s early life and young adulthood concurrently imbued him with many of the anxieties that would also mark his path and that of the nation, most notably the need for acceptance coupled with the paralyzing fear of being considered unfit for membership in the power elite.7

Hoover was deeply influenced by the anxieties of the Protestant middle-class that were born of Progressive Era modernization and its accompanying harbingers of social upheaval, including immigration and urbanization. This crucible of uncertainty forged the values that would so deeply impress themselves on Hoover’s character. In some ways he can be seen as a nineteenth-century relic attempting to guide the twentieth, seeking to promote an ethical code unsuited for the nation’s social realities. At the same time, the values imparted to Hoover during his childhood and adolescence would help him manage human and informational capital so deftly as to become arguably the most powerful American of the twentieth century.8

John Edgar Hoover entered the world on January 1, 1895, at the outset of what Henry Luce would come to christen “the American century.” His mother called him “Edgar,” while the rest of the family referred to him as “J.E.” His parents, both Washington natives, had married fifteen years earlier. Edgar was their fourth child, though the couple’s second daughter, Sadie, had died at age three of diphtheria—sixteen months before Edgar was born. As the baby of a family so recently touched by tragedy, Edgar would receive fawning treatment from his parents and older siblings, Dickerson Jr., and Lillian.9

Like many of his neighbors, Dickerson Hoover Sr. worked for the government, serving as the director of the printing office at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. Government service was the family business: Edgar’s paternal grandfather also worked for the Coast and Geodetic Survey, his mother’s grandfather and uncle both served as the ranking Swiss diplomat in the United States, and his older brother would eventually work for the US Steamboat Inspection Service. In short, Hoover was born into bureaucracy.10

Though he was quiet around the home, the letters of Dickerson Sr. reveal an emotional attachment to his family. In a 1904 missive to his youngest son, from the St. Louis World’s Fair, Dickerson Sr. adopted the tone of a sentimental roughhouse:

I wish you were here so that I could fight you in the morning. Mama might think you aint strong but just let her try to fight you and she will find out . . . Take good care of Mama . . . Be a good boy. With a good big kiss. From Papa.11

Thought of as a “replacement” for his deceased older sister, Edgar was deeply loved by the rest of his family. In the words of one biographer, “Edgar was the adored and achieving son of doting parents . . . the cherished brother of an older sister and brother . . . the pet of the Hoover household, protected by its care and love.”12

Yet this tenderness did not mean that Edgar was spoiled or enjoyed unchecked freedom. His mother instilled a sense of order. The daughter of a mining engineer, Annie was a strict disciplinarian who “encouraged Edgar with rewards and punishments.”13 Her sense of control permeated the domestic space; she was particularly tough on the family’s servants, who were often relieved of their duties at the slightest provocation.

Whatever scolding Annie directed at her youngest son did not seem to strain her relationship with him. According to political operative (and friend of Hoover’s) George E. Allen, Edgar was “very much a mother’s boy.”14 Annie was the greatest influence in Edgar’s life and his loyalty to her was unshakeable. Edgar only moved out of the Seward Square house following Annie’s death in 1938.

As a child, Edgar stuttered. He researched the problem extensively and learned of a theory that the trick to surmounting the verbal speed bumps of stuttering was to speak as rapidly as possible. The technique largely worked and is partially responsible for Edgar’s childhood nickname “Speed.” He would speak rapidly throughout his life and the stutter would plague him only during moments of great stress.

The other root of the Speed nickname was Edgar’s nimbleness at his first job, delivering groceries. Hot for tips, Edgar made his deliveries at a breakneck pace, quickly weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic in Southeast Washington. In an effort to bolster his image, Hoover would later claim that the nickname had been bestowed on him on the football field, or would at least not correct those who said so.15 In reality, Edgar’s small size meant he was cut from Central High School’s football squad early in his freshman season. In a similar massaging of the facts, members of the FBI’s public relations team were directed to say that “the Director is just a shade under six feet tall,” even though that added at least a couple of inches.16 In the words of one biographer, “A raised dais under [Hoover’s] desk, the avoidance of tall people at parties, and the rare promotion of tall agents to headquarters positions helped maintain the illusion.”17

While Washington was not quite a sleepy Southern town (after all, it was the fifteenth-largest city in the country in 1900), it did enjoy a certain level of stability during Hoover’s boyhood.18 Such constancy was particularly apparent in the Hoovers’ neighborhood. In the words of Richard Gid Powers, “Seward Square was a microcosm of white, Protestant, middle-class America. There were within its borders few rich and no poor; except for the servants who came each day to do the cooking and cleaning, it was all white. The only religious differences were friendly rivalries among the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists. A child of Seward Square would have grown up knowing no one who was, in any essential respect, different from himself.”19 The neighborhood’s homogeneity fostered in Edgar a lifelong awareness and distrust of the “other,” whether that difference manifested itself racially, ethnically, religiously, politically, or sexually.

This demographic sameness extended to Edgar’s schooling. He always attended public schools, first Brent Elementary (which stood only a block from his house) and then Central High. Living south of the Mason-Dixon line in the age of Jim Crow, Edgar was enrolled only at all-white institutions. In those years, Washington’s public schools “stressed citizenship and discipline (corporal punishment was not abolished until 1913). Dress was formal: boys wore jackets and ties, knickers in the lower grades, trousers by the eighth grade; girls wore dresses or skirts with middie blouses.”20 Edgar’s decision—his, not his parents’—to attend Central High is illuminating; though Eastern High was closer to the Hoover house, Central was thought to provide a more challenging and rigorous education. There was likely little surprise in the Hoover household when the ambitious Edgar made his selection.

At Central, Hoover earned a reputation for enrolling in the most demanding elective courses and was eventually named class valedictorian—an elected position that demonstrates his popularity.21 His junior year report card shows that he earned “excellent” marks in all his subjects: English, French, geometry, history, trigonometry, and drawing. He also earned perfect marks for “neatness,” never missed a day of school, and was always on time for class.22

Following his freshman year, his extracurricular energies were expended on two pursuits that played to his strengths: debate and drill. The Central High School Debate Society dominated the city’s circuit so completely that it often held meets against the debate teams of regional colleges as a challenge. By his senior year, Hoover was considered the society’s best speaker, displaying a “cool, relentless logic” in debates about women’s suffrage, the presidential primary system, and the governance of public utilities. His arguments often relied on a higher sense of justice; in a debate over capital punishment, Hoover defended the practice as both biblically sound and supported by “all Christian Nations.”23 This appeal to Christian morality foretold Hoover’s fidelity to an ethical and masculine standard to which he would aspire throughout his career.

Hoover’s other focus outside of class was the drill team, the Central High School Brigade of Cadets. Though not popular nationwide, military-style drill teams were an important part of public school life in Washington. Each of the public high schools fielded a cadet corps of approximately 180 students organized into three companies, and each spring saw a drill competition on the White House Ellipse. In 1913, Hoover led Central’s cadet corps down Pennsylvania Avenue as part of the four-hour parade celebrating Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Hoover’s rise through the ranks was capped by his elevation to the command of Company A during his senior year. He implemented policies that he believed would make the corps more orderly and efficient, including mandatory weekly meetings of all cadets. At the end of the school year, Company A placed second in the citywide drill meet, losing to a larger company that executed more challenging maneuvers. Still, Hoover’s leadership earned him the admiration of his peers and placed him in the upper echelons of popularity in school, second only to the leaders of Central’s athletic squads. So proud was Hoover of his association with the Brigade of Cadets that he even wore his freshly pressed uniform to church on Sundays.24 Cadets would often gift ribbons featuring the insignia of their company to their girlfriends, and the citywide Cadets’ Ball was considered the most important dance on the teenage Washingtonian’s social calendar.25 Yet when asked about Hoover’s romantic life during high school, his classmates replied that though they were sure he went on dates, he never went steady with any one girl because his focus was elsewhere; Hoover was “in love with Company A.”26

It was a relationship that became essential in molding numerous aspects of his character, personality, and value system. It taught him the joy of commanding others, the sense of self-worth and empowerment that results from leading a group of individuals toward a common goal. It also instilled a belief in the value of a tiered organizational structure, both in the sense of operational layout and adherence to a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE:  The Topography of Modernity
• CHAPTER TWO:  The Professional Bureaucrat in the Public Eye
• CHAPTER THREE:  Populist Masculinity in the American Heartland
• CHAPTER FOUR:  The Power Broker as a Young Man
• CHAPTER FIVE:  Scandal as Political Art
• CHAPTER SIX:  Under the Klieg Lights
• EPILOGUE:  The Long Life of Surveillance State Masculinity
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index