>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Well good afternoon and
welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the Director of the
Library Center for the Book.
The Center for the Book
was created many years ago,
1977 by Daniel Boorstin when
was Librarian of Congress.
His notion was to have the Library
of Congress use its knowledge
and knowledgeable experts and
its resources and its prestige
to promote books in reading and
to reach out and in particular
to help promote the writing of
books as well as the use of books.
Today the small Center for the Book
which is a private-public
partnership has 5 employees.
We operate around the
country largely
through affiliated state
Centers for the Book
which you can imagine promote
writers of that particular state.
And secondly, a network of
nonprofit organizations interested
in books and reading.
And here at the Library of Congress,
one of the major ways we promote
books in reading are through talks
such as the Books & Beyond
series where we feature authors
who have written books of special
interest to the Library of Congress.
And that's where we
certainly are today
with this particular
speaker Ken Ackerman.
All of the talks here are--
in this series are videotaped
for later presentation
on the Library of Congress'
web site.
And for that reason I ask you
to please turn off
all things electronic.
The plan is to have not only
Ken's presentation but a period
for discussion after
about 30 or 40 minutes
and we invite your questions.
I will say that by questioning
Ken and being part of the program,
you are also giving us your
permission to perhaps be part
of our web site eventually and I
will thank you in advance for that.
We'll have a book signing and
Ken will explain the connection
with the book but I will as well.
Ken wrote a book on Young J.
Edgar as many of you probably know
that was published several
years ago and this book 2007.
And I'm also, in addition to
being the Director of the Center
for the Book, someone very
interested in the history
of the Library of Congress
and I had remembered
that J. Edgar Hoover had worked
at the Library of Congress
and I wasn't exactly
sure of the dates.
But I went back to
Ken's book and surely--
sure enough there was
a description of this.
And knowing of course that the
film J. Edgar was about to come out
and knowing as an employee
of the Library of Congress,
I walked in the main
reading room one day
and here was the card catalog,
which really doesn't exist
anymore, set up for the film.
And those of you who've seen the
film realize that was in the middle
of the main reading room which it
never was that used to be really
in built in cabinets in the very
beginning and then it was eliminated
for a while and of course
there's no such card catalog.
We still have the original
card catalog but it's
down in the basement,
it's the official catalog.
And so nothing like what
happened in the film with regard
to that card catalog really
resembled physical situation at all.
Let alone, the action part of it
which I'm going to let Ken address
and then take questions
and answers about this.
But I think it was-- so the
light bulb went off and I happen
to see Ken at another event here at
the Library of Congress and the two
of us said, "Hey this
is the opportunity
to shed some enlightenment on that
film," and I haven't seen it by then
and now we have something
to talk about in particular
through Ken and his work.
Kenneth Ackerman is a writer
and an attorney in Washington
and Ken is a veteran of senior
positions in Congress being
in the executive branch and he also
is, as I've said, a lawyer but he--
I know him through his special
interest really in biography
and this is either his
4th or 5th biography.
And we had Ken as a
speaker here of--
in 2004 for a biography
of James Garfield
about whom there have been
some other recent books.
This is called Dark Horse,
The Surprise Election
and Political murder
of James A. Garfield.
And finally, I will add that one
of the features of these talks,
in addition to the give and take
in the discussion and the filming
on the web site and the book
signing, is that he-this talk is now
on the Center for the
Book's Facebook page
where discussions can continue and
where your comments would be welcome
and where you can learn about some
of the other talks in the series.
We also have a schedule of
future talks that's on the table.
It is my pleasure now to
present to you Ken Ackerman
who will be talking actually a
bit about both J. Edgar Hoover
and the Library of Congress and
the larger context of what we saw
in the film as is presented
in his book,
Young J. Edgar Hoover
and the Red Scare.
Please help me welcome
Kenneth Ackerman.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you John for that
introduction and thank all of you
for coming out on a Tuesday, or
excuse me, on a Wednesday afternoon.
I'm Ken Ackerman.
This talk grew out as John mentioned
a conversation that John and I had
when I was here last summer
for a talk very much like this.
It was around that time, just a few
days earlier, that the film approve
for the movie J. Edgar had been
here at the Library of Congress
and everyone was all abuzz about
the celebrity seeing Clint Eastwood
and Leonardo DiCaprio
and seeing the way
that the main reading
room was set up
and all the gossip
about the filming.
And we thought it would be a
good thing to talk about the book
but also just give you some
of the basic facts of that
when you see the movie or
if you've seen the movie
so you have a sense
what's real and what's not.
We could talk more in the question
period about this and there's a lot
of interesting things in
that movie that are right,
some things that are more
borderline, more hypothetical,
but on this part they
did pretty well.
In the spirit of not burying
the lead, let me just start
with the basic facts about J. Edgar
Hoover and the Library of Congress.
J. Edgar Hoover worked
here for about 4 years.
He started in 1913 at the
time he was 18 years old.
He had just graduated from
Central High School which at
that time was the magnet school here
in Washington, the best high school
where the smartest kids went.
After high school, he had gotten
into George Washington University
Law School where he decided to go
as a night school student.
He had also gotten into the
University of Virginia Law School
but he wanted to stay here--
he wanted to stay local
to live with his parents.
At that time, you didn't have
to go college first
before going to law school.
You could go straight
from high school
to law school and that's
what he did.
So while he was going to law school
at night, George Washington was on,
at that time, their law
school was on New York Avenue
in 13th street Northwest,
so not on Foggy Bottom
where the school is today.
Hoover grew up in this neighborhood.
He lived on Seward Square which
is that little park on 4th Street
in Pennsylvania Avenue where the
Hawk & Dove Restaurant used to be
and that still sounds strange,
the Hawk & Dove used to be.
But that's where he grew up so
for him this was very convenient.
He could walk over here and work
the day and then go to law school.
He started as a 30-dollar
a month clerk.
Do the math, given inflation, 30
dollars in modern money you multiply
by around 30 so that's
about 900 dollars a month.
His job was as a cataloging clerk.
So he would-- as books
or manuscripts
or magazines would come in, he would
put together the cards for them
and at that time that the
card system at the Library
of Congress was very
innovative thing.
It was developed around the same
time as the Dewey Decimal System
but the Library of Congress had
its own separate version of it.
And while it's true, he
did a very good job here.
He was promoted several times.
The people who worked here with
him had very glowing things
to say about it.
By the time he left, he was
making double his original salary.
He did not actually invent it
like they suggest in the movie
but he learnt it very well.
It is true that this is where young
Hoover came up with his epiphany
that you could use this card system
to track things other than books.
And a few years later I'll talk
about when I talk in a few minutes,
when he started at the justice
department and he had his big break
in 1919 to head the
radical division.
One of the first things
he did was to set
up a card catalog system
for the files.
Every name of every subversive or
radical or radical organization
or radical journal that came across
his desk, he put together a card
and through that he
revitalized the FBI files.
Within a few months,
he had 60,000 cards.
By 1921, he had 450,000 cards.
You could go and look at these
cards here in the National Archives.
They're quite something to see
and what's striking about them is
that Hoover's cards looked a lot
like the cards you could see here
at the Library of Congress.
They had a code number
in the top corner,
then they have the various
references to how to find the files.
Some of them are very
complicated, they had codes
that some things are hidden.
For instance, to find
Felix Frankfurter's file,
there is no Felix Frankfurter
file, however the paper work
on him is hidden in another
organization's files Hoover happen
to know which one to look for.
So you could use it to hide
things as well as to find things
and he did it with both, but
yes the epiphany came here
at the Library of Congress.
So with that, the book I wrote
was called Young J. Edgar.
I wrote this and as John
mentioned, it came out in 2007.
I wrote it in the shadow
of the aftermath
to the 9/11 attacks on our country.
And I was trying to deal with
two things, one a question
of how America treats civil
liberties in time of stress
like that and second,
some things that struck me
about J. Edgar Hoover himself.
And since celebrities
always come first
with America, let me
start with that.
Hoover was one of those people whose
image and legend was so big and was
so deliberately built, both
by friends and enemies,
that it's very hard to cut
away fact from reality.
If you ask most people today
particularly before the movie
about J. Edgar Hoover and
particularly younger people,
you mostly get a snide remark
about some fat, no neck,
corrupt old man wearing
a dress and a boa.
[ Laughter ]
That unfortunately is the one thing
about him that is probably not true.
During most of his life, J.
Edgar Hoover was a national hero.
J. Edgar Hoover was the director
of the Bureau of Investigations
that changed names now and then,
that was the FBI for
most of that time.
For 48 years which is a
remarkable feat of sheer longevity.
He served from 1924 to 1972.
He had held that position
under 9 different presidents
from Calvin Coolidge to Richard
Nixon and 16 attorney general
from Harlan Fiske Stone
to John Mitchell.
He made his name publicly in the
1930's when he and his men brought
in a generation of gangsters back
when gangsters had cool names
like Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine
Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson.
He brought scientific law
enforcement to the Bureau.
He created an FBI Academy, an FBI
Crime Lab, Uniform Crime reports,
fingerprints, all of the above.
He created the image of the G-Man
as a clean cut effective law
enforcement professional,
people who always get their man.
He did this very consciously and
deliberately through action toys,
bubble gum cards, radio shows, comic
books and Hollywood movies with some
of the best stars of the era, James
Cagney, Jimmy Stewart and later
on T.V. after [inaudible] Junior.
It was so successful that by the
1950's or 1960's it was as hard
to become an agent at
the FBI as it was to get
into an Ivy League College.
They accepted about 7
out of 100 applicants.
Unfortunately the full truth
about J. Edgar Hoover finally came
out after he died when a number
of investigations were
finally conducted.
And it turned out that much
of his image was a veneer
that Mr. Hoover had a
very pronounced dark side.
There you see, I mean
as an older man.
It came out that the FBI kept
hundreds of thousands of files.
Sex files, secret files on
movie stars, presidents,
senators that were used
for blackmail and sometimes
for their personal amusement.
According to the Church Committee,
one of these investigator groups,
as of 1960 the FBI had 432,000 files
simply for the category subversive.
Starting in the 1950's, a
program called COINTELPRO,
he instigated the use of black
bag jobs, secret wire taps,
dirty tricks, sabotage aimed
at pretty much anyone he considered
subversive and in the 1960's
that became primarily
civil rights groups.
Martin Luther King was
fairly the head liner as well
as anti-war protesters
from the Vietnam Era.
He seemed to be obsessed
with two things, communism
and his remaining in office.
By the time I started doing research
on him, he came across to me as one
of the most hated people
in American history.
It was extremely hard to find anyone
who would support him
in a conversation.
He came across as a possibly
gay man who harassed gay people,
a man with probably an
African American ancestor
who harassed African Americans
and a law enforcement person
who placed himself above the law.
So the question that this raised
for me was how does
somebody get to be like that?
And in most people I don't just
pop out of the womb and decide
to be an autocratic bully.
Now, yes he did have those 4 years
at the Library of Congress and--
[ Laughter ]
But what's striking about
him as a youngster is
that his upbringing
was shockingly normal.
Here you see him playing with his
bike like any young person would do.
He's about 10 years
old in this picture.
And he grew up here in Washington.
He was the youngest of 4 children.
He was-- he had a lot of friends.
He was his parent's favorite when
he was at Central High School.
His classmates elected him
valedictorian even though his grades
made him only 4th.
He was elected to be the captain of
the cadet corp. So he had friends.
He was a very normal young kid,
very bright, very energetic.
There is that old slogan,
absolute power corrupts absolutely,
and that there's certainly
an element of that here.
But to me looking at it, what was
very striking, I'm of the belief,
I graduated high school, I went to
college and started college in 1969
at the height of the Vietnam
Era, the anti-war protest
and I strongly believe
that anyone who came of age
in that Era was shaped by
it in some fundamental way.
And when you look at the era
in which Hoover came of age,
something very similar was going on.
Hoover finished college or
finished law school in 1917,
that was the year America
entered World War I.
Most of his friends were
immediately drafted or shipped off
or volunteered to go over
there and fight the war.
Hoover should have been a
top choice for the military.
As I mentioned, he was captain
of his cadet corp in high school.
He enjoyed it.
He enjoyed the camaraderie.
He enjoyed the marching.
He was in good shape.
He was a star on track
team and on the cadet team.
But he could not go
because the year 1917
when he graduated, his
father lost his job.
His father had been a 40-year clerk,
that was when clerk was
a good position to have
at the geodetic society that
was the precursor of Noah.
He was map printer.
He suffered from mental
illness, melancholia.
And he lost his job with no pension.
Young Hoover became the
bread winner for the family.
His first job, which he got
through a family connection,
was a draft exempt job at
the Justice Department.
It was in something called the War
Emergency Bureau which was the part
of the Justice Department
that handled issues raised
by our participation in World War I.
That included at the time
the jailing of dissidents
under the Espionage Act, the
requiring of German-Americans
to register with the government,
the crack down on slackers,
the tracking of saboteurs,
a period of wartime
where wartime security always trump
any issue of personal liberty.
And his first big assignment came
in 1919 where fate would put him
at the very center of the Red Scare.
Now 1919 was a very strange period
in America it was very similar
to the period in this country after
the 9/11 attacks, a period of fear,
of paranoia, of crackdown,
of vigilance.
It sounds almost silly to say today,
90 years later but there was period
of about 9 months from mid
1919 to around mid early 1920
when it was the mainstream view
in this country among rational,
well informed, well intentioned
people that we stood on the verge
of a Russian style worker lead
Bolshevik Revolution right here
in the U.S.A. Now there
were reasons for it.
We all know how things turned out,
but back then there were
reasons to think this way.
It was immediately
after World War I.
Now, we don't talk much
about World War I today.
We talked a lot more
about World War II.
World War II was the good war,
the war in which America
defeated fascism.
We were on the right side
and we were victorious.
World War I by contrast
was a real stinker.
Some 16 million people
were killed in World War I,
a carnage beyond comprehension
at that time including
7 million civilians.
116,000 American soldiers died in
World War I, that's twice the number
as Vietnam and that's even though
we got in only at the very tail end.
Most Americans up till the point
we entered the war considered it a
pointless blood bath led by
incompetent generals on both sides,
a battle between European monarchies
in which we had little to do.
Woodrow Wilson was re-elected
in 1916 because he kept us out.
Once we got in though,
we went in whole heart.
After the war was over
rather than peace,
the world immediately
entered a new round
of turmoil mostly headlined
by Bolshevism.
We mistakenly looked back at
the Russian Revolution of 1917
as something that happened
in Russia.
The Russian Revolution
however was a global event.
After it happened and as soon as
the war ended, there was a series
of socialist uprisings in
Germany, Hungary, Italy, Argentina,
countries all around the world.
And for a while, no one knew
how this was going to turn out.
The entirety of Eastern Europe was
engulfed in the Russian Civil War.
We the United States had
8,000 soldiers who were part
of an expeditionary force in
Russia that had intervened
in the Russian Civil War.
So we were fighting the Red
Army all through 1918 and 1919.
Within America itself, there was a
rising tide of upheaval, race riots,
lynching, shootings, political
clashes, the economy was in turmoil,
3 million people went on strike
that year for better wages,
and most of the leaderships
had opened ties to socialism.
Just as scary at that time with
the faces of who the militants were
and who the union members were,
most of them were recent arrivals
from what we're seeing
as the poorest,
most backward countries on earth.
Russians, Poles, Jews,
Italians, Eastern Europeans,
people with what were considered
unpronounceable last names
who spoke these odd languages,
who congregated in city slums
and joined societies
of just themselves.
They were considered highly suspect.
It peaked in 1919 in June with a
series of bombs across the country
and this was portrayed in the movie.
On June 2nd, 9 bombs went
off in different cities all
at about 11 o'clock at night
and that killed 2 people.
One of those bombs went off in
the house of the Attorney General
of the United States,
Mitchell Palmer.
Palmer was in his bedroom
at that time.
He and his wife had just
gone upstairs to bed,
their teenage daughter
was down the hall.
If the bomb had come
a few minutes earlier,
they all would have been killed.
When they investigated the
bombing, what they found outside
on the street were a set of
hand bills on pink paper written
by a group called the Anarchist
Fighters demanding warfare
and revolution.
So who was this Mitchell Palmer?
Here you see him as
a young congressman
with his friend, Woodrow Wilson.
Palmer was from Pennsylvania.
He represented the
Poconos in that area.
Woodrow Wilson was the Governor
of New Jersey in this photograph
and the two of them
were very friendly.
Up until 1919, the
moment of the bombing,
Palmer was about the last
person you would expect
to lead a crackdown of
the type that he did.
He was a progressive democrat.
He was a Quaker socialist, or
excuse me, a Quaker pacifist.
He had introduced legislation for
women suffrage, to end child labor,
to recognize labor unions.
He had been offered-- Woodrow Wilson
offered him the job of Secretary
of War in 1914 and
he turned it down,
because he said I'm a pacifist, it
goes against my religious beliefs.
Woodrow Wilson appointed him
Attorney General after the war
as a sign of moderation of post
war reconciliation with the idea
that Palmer would end the
repressive measures of war time.
And in fact in his first few
months, Palmer freed about 50 people
who had been jailed
under the Espionage Act
and another 2,000 Germans
who had been rounded
up as alien enemies during the war.
But, you know, there's something
about a bomb going off in your house
and almost killing your
family that focuses the mind.
And immediately and literally the
next morning, Palmer announced
that he was not going to
let this happen again.
He felt as Attorney General, he
had a responsibility to crack
down on this lawlessness and
to act before the Anarchist,
before the bad guys
could strike again.
Not knowing who the bad guys were,
he decided on a massive
preemptive strike.
He would round up as
many anarchists,
radicals as he could find
and get them off the streets
using whatever tools that he have.
And the best tool that he had at
that time was the immigration laws.
During war time, that allowed
you to deport an immigrant
if they had any connection
to anarchism.
President Woodrow Wilson was often
[inaudible] negotiating the Peace
Treaty at that time, but
there was every indication
that Wilson knew what was going on
had been briefed and was supportive.
Certainly most of Wilson's
Cabinet was supportive.
To run this operation,
Mitchell Palmer looked
for the brightest young man
he could find in his office
and that was our friend
Young J. Edgar Hoover.
So who was J. Edgar
Hoover at this point?
J. Edgar Hoover was 24 years
old, 2 years out of school,
a guy living at home with his
parents who had gotten his job
at the Justice Department from--
through a political connection
through one of his relatives.
However, during his time
there, those 2 years,
he had made a real impression.
He had impressed all of his
superiors as an extremely bright
and effective young
person on the rise.
He had been given several
promotions, several pay raises
and had-- and after the war had
gotten a job as a junior attorney
in Mitchell Palmer's
office just down the hall
from the attorney general's office.
At work, he dressed well.
He was extremely smart.
He had a good eye for
detail, a clean desk.
He was well organized.
He volunteered for
assignments, did them well.
He worked nights and weekends.
He studied issues, collected
data, always had answers
to questions and was a workaholic.
You all probably know people
like that, look out for them.
[ Laughter ]
So what happened?
With Palmer's leadership
and Hoover's management,
off they went on the
famous Palmer Raids.
Oh, here you see him in
high school as a cadet.
Here you see him with some
of his friends palling
around before going off to a
party, I just like that picture.
This cartoon gives you the basic
strategy of the Palmer Raids.
Send them back where they belong,
the quicker and harder the better.
Between November 1919 and January
1920, a period of about 3 months
under Hoover's management through
a group called the Radical Division
that he was assigned to lead
working with local police
and various vigilante groups, the
Federal government launched a series
of raids in 30 cities and
dozens of smaller towns.
The biggest raids were
done on January 2nd,
this was New Year's Eve weekend
when people were out having parties.
And during these raids, they rounded
up between 5 and 10,000 people,
nobody has the exact number, the
raids were extremely violent.
There were beatings, they
broke into peoples houses,
dances, community centers.
When they would round-- when
they would do a raid at a dance,
they would arrest the dancers, the
musicians, the chef's, the waiters,
the people parking the cars,
everyone they could find.
The idea was they thought they would
sort out later who the bad guys were
but meanwhile they
would bring in everyone.
They had no criminal warrants.
This was all done through
immigration warrants
of which they had only a handful.
Interrogations were done in
secret, no lawyers were permitted,
bail was set at exorbitant
levels at a time
when most working people had no
bank accounts and no credit cards.
Most of these people
were held for months
in makeshift cramped 6prisons,
denied access to family or lawyers
and then ultimately they were
released not charged with a crime.
What happened in the meantime
was that not only did the word
about the abusive arrest
leak out but once all
of these people arrested
have their opportunity
for a deportation hearing,
the fact came
out that the cases were
extremely flimsy, extremely thin.
It was a large exercising
guilt by association.
I guess the best example I could
give you is there was an Italian man
in Chicago who was on one of these
communist party membership list.
When he got to his hearing,
the judge asked him,
"So why did you become a communist?"
And he said, "Well,
it's because I wanted
to learn how to play the violin."
And at first, everyone laughed
at him until finally his lawyer,
he had a pro bono lawyer insisted
that somebody translate
the actual minutes
of the meeting where he signed up.
And it turned out that the
communist party recruiter told them,
"Well we have dinners and we have
concerts and this is a chance
to socialize with many of
your friends from Russia
and we have a very good orchestra
and if you join the communist party,
we'll teach you how
to play the violin."
And most of the people who joined,
it turned out had little idea
of what these organizations
were about.
The communist party did
not exist until 1919.
The word was brand new.
Most people thought it was
either a social organization,
a way to keep track of
current events in Russia
or to if they were backing political
change, it was along the line
of socialism as espoused
by Eugene Debs.
Sure enough, word got out
about what was going on.
What has started as a very,
very popular exercise,
the rounding up of these
radicals, became very unpopular
in a short period of time.
In my book, I talked about some of
the people who led the opposition.
I'll skip that now
for time purposes.
This is Felix Frankfurter who
was then a lawyer at Harvard
who led a habeas corpus action
on behalf of the communist
who were arrested in the Boston
area that he used to disclose some
of the abusive methods that
have been used by the police.
This is Clarence Darrow who
represented many of the communist
who had been arrested in the
round ups on free speech grounds.
They were dramatic trials
in very hostile court rooms
that only someone like Clarence
Darrow would have had the
wherewithal to carry off.
And finally this is a
man named Louis Post,
as the Assistant Secretary
of Labor at that time.
He was in charge of
deportations and he--
basically when these reached his
desk, he canceled several thousand
of them to the point that Hoover and
Palmer tried to get him impeached.
Much of what we know about
the Palmer Raids comes
from the transcript of the
impeachment's trial of Louis Post.
Louis Post was not impeached.
He acquitted himself very well.
All of which brings us
back to our friend, Hoover.
Michel Palmer was destroyed
politically by the Palmer Raids.
He did run for President in 1920.
He went to the Democratic Convention
that year which ran for 44 ballots.
He lost to James Cox.
James Cox in turn lost to Warren
G. Harding, the Republican.
Warren G. Harding was
promising a return to normalcy
which after the Palmer Raids made
a lot sense to a lot of people.
Not withstanding Hoover's
role, however,
he managed to turn
defeat into victory.
He survived not only the
transition from the Hoover--
from the Woodrow-Wilson
Administration
to the Harding Administration,
but in May 1924, 4 years later,
he was asked by Harlan Fiske
Stone, the new Attorney General
to become the acting director
of the Bureau of Investigation.
The irony is that Harlan Fiske
Stone was one of the lawyers
who opposed the raids, who took
a substantial personal risk
to present testimony to
congress against the raids,
accusing Palmer of abuse of power.
Yet 4 years later, he
met this bright young man
who he thought he could use as
his vehicle to reform the bureau.
And once in power,
Hoover implemented
that reform very effectively.
It was a master piece of
bureaucratic dexterity.
Hoover learned much from
his coming of age adventure.
He learned a life long distrust
of communism, a life long distrust
of liberals, anyone who defends
criminals behind the veneer
of civil liberties and free
speech, and a life long sense
of empowerment either to protect
the country or protect himself.
And all these started here
at the Library of Congress.
[ Laughter ]
So I hope all of you do your
work well, do your research well
and you too can achieve great things
but I hope you will keep
the dark side under control.
[ Laughter ]
And with that I thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> We do have time for
questions and comments.
My instructions are since we're
tapping, if you have questions,
I will repeat them so that
they'll be on the tape.
Yes sir?
>> Just a comment on
the J. Edgar movie.
I saw it and I was
fascinated with it.
I read Richard Gid
Power's biography of Hoover
which I thought was very well done
and I assume you drew on that.
>> Yes.
>> Who wrote the book.
I think the problem with the
movie is that there are scenes
that are presented that
seem to be objective reality
but in fact Hoover is dictating
his memoirs at that time.
So he's embellishing but
without a voice over,
you don't-- you lose tract of that.
You don't understand that
it's Hoover's version.
He's condemning the card
catalog and then posing
to the Naomi Watts character.
So I think that's where you
deal with the confuse in terms
of the inaccuracies of the movie.
>> [Inaudible] and I think it's
a good point that the movie
as I saw it, I saw it in very
similar way that to you is
that it tried to do a
lot of different things
and probably bit off
a little too much.
>> Yeah.
>> As a result some parts of it got
confusing particularly the flash
backs back and forth.
The flash backs were
generally, as you say,
Hoover dictating his biography
and sometimes it became
unclear what was intended
to be his point of view.
But some of those flash backs
which start as his point of view
and then morph into the
story of him and Mr. Tolson
which became more what
was supposed to be more
of an objective story even though a
lot of that was based on conjecture.
So it was-- there were
parts that were confusing.
Yes ma'am or yes sir?
>> Another question about the movie.
When Hoover was challenged
that he had never arrested the
victims himself, he goes out
and gets a machine gun,
he gets some support
and makes [inaudible] really
involve arrest in the movie.
Was that real state--
was that reality I mean?
>> Well he was involved in the
arrest of Alvin Karpis although--
which is one of the ones
they do portray in the movie,
although it's-- his
exact role is unclear.
Obviously, he went in
with a group of people.
He was the administrator
of the agency.
It wasn't his job to be the guy
with the gun arresting people.
I pointed out in an article on this
recently that people accused Hoover
of being personally not being a--
of showing personal
cowardice 'cause he wasn't
in the front line arresting
people and I thought
that was an unfair criticism.
That wasn't his job.
He was the head of bureau
administering a nationwide
organization of police.
When he was young during the
Palmer Raids and he had that job,
he did have an opportunity to go out
on one particular raid in Patterson,
New Jersey which was
in fact very dangerous.
A group that was quite radical
and violent and he made a point
to go out with his agents.
He was right there
at the front of them.
He personally conducted several
of the interrogations and,
you know, he showed his stuff.
You know, yes, he did not
conduct many arrest 'cause
that wasn't his job, but to me that
criticism was a little over done
and I thought his reaction to it--
his defensiveness about
it was also overdone.
Yes sir?
>> The house on Seward Square where
Hoover grew up if it's still there
and if it was not still
there, what's there?
>> It's not there however.
>> You have to repeat the question.
>> Oh I'm sorry.
The house on Seward Square where
Hoover grew up, is it still there
and if it's not there, what's there?
The house is not there however a
lot of the houses from that era are.
And so if you go over
to Seward Square,
you can see exactly what
the house looked like,
just look for the other
houses on the block.
I believe the number was 413 or
415, so somewhere in that range.
And I believe there's a church
on that specific spot right now.
>> I believe there's a church there.
I believe the window is named
to J. Edgar Hoover, a window.
>> That would make sense.
That would make good sense.
>> Upon the way out.
A few weeks ago, there
was an article
and they post 5 myths
about J. Edgar Hoover.
>> Yes.
>> I think you wrote
that, is that correct?
>> Yes I wrote that
article in Washington Post.
[ Laughter ]
>> I'm guilty as charged.
>> But I hear because
the movie came out
and I thought it was very accurate.
I was in the Library of
Congress in 1959 for a few months
and I later went and became
an FBI agent for 25 years.
I know J. Edgar Hoover but
I appreciate your comments
about J. Edgar Hoover and how some
things in that movie might be missed
or might be over extended.
>> Well, I appreciate
it thank you very much.
It was an article in the
Washington Post called 5 myths
about J. Edgar Hoover.
The one-- I'll just
bring it out because it's
that one question everyone always
raises which was so what's the story
with Clyde Tolson which
always comes up.
And basically this, yes Hoover
and Clyde Tolson had a very
longstanding relationship.
He-- Clyde Tolson was
hired into the bureau
by Mr. Hoover in the late 1920's.
He made him his associate
director basically the number 2
in the bureau in the early 1930's.
They travel together both
on vacations and personally.
They have lunch together everyday.
They spent a lot of their
personal time together.
There are a lot of old photographs
of them when they were young coming
to work in matching clothes.
In fact not just matching clothes
but you would see a, you know,
a dozen or so gray looking
men and then these 2 guys
in sharp suits together
in the middle.
That's a well known, when Hoover
died, he left the bulk of his estate
to Mr. Tolson in his will.
What they did behind closed
doors, these were two people
who were extremely discreet.
They recognized that if--
that if anything was going on,
if they did have a gay relationship
that it could destroy both
of their careers and these
were 2 people who were not
about to let that happen.
So the fact that we don't
know is not a surprise
but the fact is that we don't know.
Yes ma'am?
>> Were there any photos
of a girl who--
while he was working at the library?
I suspect not or [inaudible].
>> Yeah, I've never seen any.
There maybe, but I've
never seen them.
Yes ma'am?
>> What about the relationship
with his mother?
>> The relationship with his mother.
His mother Annie Scheitlin
was her name,
she was the granddaughter
of a Swiss diplomat.
Her grandfather was the first consul
from Switzerland to
come over to America.
And he was very well
known in this country.
During the Civil War,
he had a high profile.
He and his family made a point
to go in and work at in hospitals
where Union soldiers
were being treated.
After the war, he made a
lot of money as a banker.
He helped create what was called the
[inaudible] Institute for the Deaf.
He helped create-- he was very close
to the founder of Gallaudet College.
At his funeral, which is
a very striking event,
and Young J. Edgar was like a 12
year old, remembered going to it.
It drew a slew of celebrities.
Helen Keller was there.
Clara Barton was there.
The Swiss Ambassador was there.
Alexander Graham Bell was there.
So a very well known person
and there were several other very
prominent people on the Hoover,
excuse me, on the Scheitlin
side of the family.
She was the stronger personality
certainly in the household.
Mr. Hoover, J. Edgar's father was
a 40-year long federal employee
as I mentioned, a map printer.
He did suffer from mental illness.
He had what they called melancholia.
That was the word they used,
what that meant is very unclear.
He was committed to an
asylum in Laurel, Maryland.
How exactly he was
treated is very unclear,
although the way they treated
people back then was not--
what we would consider I think
barbaric by modern standards.
They used shock therapies
of different kinds
on people who were there.
But at any rate as a result of that,
she was very much the stronger
personality in the household.
He did live with-- his father died
in the early 1920's and after that,
Hoover stayed in his
mother's household
until the day she died
in the mid 1930's.
He described her later on
to reporters as the person
who taught him discipline,
right and wrong,
who had a certain marshall
spirit in the household.
So that the way she was
portrayed in the movie
as the very strong personality,
the shaping personality,
there is a lot behind that.
Whether she was quite as controlling
as they made her out of the movie,
I don't know but, but that
basic dynamic seems to hold up.
In the back?
>> Oh yes when Frances Perkins
became Secretary of Labor,
as soon as she took
over the department
which included immigration at
that time, she found a huge number
of irregularities in the immigration
records and a number of people went
to jail for shaking down immigrants
and were essentially
blackmailing even legal immigrants
that they would pursue
and try to extort money
from them to permit them to stay.
She was very fearful after that and
kept off her own records of things
because she was afraid of
what would happen to her.
Did you ever come across any--
anything in the '20s and early '30s
where Hoover might have been in some
way associated with any corrupt,
you, know for financial
gain deporting [inaudible].
>> A couple of things on that.
It's-- we have a very
gauzy, nostalgic image
of what immigration was like in this
country in the 1920's and 19-teens
when our grandparents and
great grandparents came over.
It was a very tough system.
And in fact on Ellis Island
in the teens and '20s,
there were several investigations
into corruption and rings
that were shaking down
immigrants in many different ways
from the cafeterias
to the railroads to--
there was quite a lot of
fraud that was going on.
There were several investigations,
several prosecutions.
Hoover personally was not
really involved with that.
His involvement with
immigration had been on the--
through the deportations,
his attempt to deportations
in the teens and '20s.
During World War I, Ellis
Island was essentially a prison.
It was the place where German
sailors were being held
until they could figure out what to
do with them at the end of the war.
It was where subversives
were being held.
If any of you go Ellis Island,
you'll notice the big main hall has
been restored to its current status.
But there are a couple of other
buildings that have not and one
of them, I had a chance to see
when I was researching the book,
it was the baggage
and dormitory room
which is basically a big prison.
It was where Emma Goldman was kept
with Alexander Berkman while they
were getting ready to deport them.
People were kept several
hundred to a room.
So it was very tough.
Hoover as far as being having
anything to do with these kinds
of bad practices towards immigrants,
I've not ran into anything
that would support that.
The fact that Frances Perkins
found all of these and the fact
that she felt that she
had to be as careful
as she was is very
documentable, it's very sound.
More questions?
>> What became of Hoover's
siblings and did they--
what kind of relationship did
they have with him or comments
on what his career ended up being?
>> He had a very kind of
competitive relationship with one
of his brothers, one
of his older brothers.
His brother got a big job right
around the time that Hoover got
to be the head of the
radical division.
He was-- became the inspector
general of the steamboat commission
which at that time was a very
important agency in Washington.
We had a lot of steamships
in America and so--
it was like being the head
of the aviation commission.
So it's a very good job and he
used to needle Hoover over it.
He used to needle J. Edgar over it.
This is Hoover, Annie
Scheitlin Hoover,
very much favored her youngest son.
And Hoover's older-- J.
Edgar's older brother
resented it quite a bit.
Their interviews that he gave
as a middle aged man describing how
he had to push around Young J. Edgar
in a baby carriage all over
Capitol Hill when he was growing
up because mother wanted him to take
care of precious little J. Edgar.
He had one younger sister
who died in child, excuse me,
older sister who died in childbirth,
another older sister who got married
when Hoover was quite young.
The wonder, who he had
the nicest relationship
in a way was his niece, Margaret.
J. Edgar's oldest sister got married
and moved into the house next door
on Seward Square and they had
2 daughters and 1 of them was
about 10 years younger than J.
Edgar, her name was Margaret.
They show her at one point
in the movie but Hoover used
to pal around with her a lot.
There are stories about how
when they were growing up,
they used to takes walks
together in the summer.
Washington's summers are
terrible as you know.
The weather here is
hot, hazy and humid
and it is terrible
to be in your house.
So Hoover and little Margaret
would walk all over town,
sometimes hours at a time.
They would walk down to 7th Street
to see movies and they
were friendly.
There was one time when they
eluded to go see a movie
but they didn't really explain it.
There was one point
when Hoover was--
when J. Edgar was suffering
from stress related to all
of the pressure of arresting all
those people during the Palmer Raids
and a doc-- he went to see a
doctor and the doctor told him
that he needed to start
smoking cigarettes.
[ Laughter ]
And you laugh but it was a very
common thing in the teens and '20s,
doctors felt that cigarettes were
good to settle to your nerves.
They were a common influence.
And so a doctor told
him to start smoking.
And he thought he was doing a
favor but he tried to get Margaret
to start smoking because he
thought it would be good for her.
She was very young at that
time, she tried it and didn't
like it at all and stopped.
But that was probably the one that
he was closest to, was Margaret.
Uhm-- hmm?
>> His card goes to the high school,
a successive Central High School?
>> Yes, that's correct.
[Inaudible] high school
is that building.
Uhm-- hmm?
>> Any reflections on his
personal relationship with any
of the presidents he served with?
>> On the presidents he served with.
You know, it's interesting the
image always is that Hoover managed
to keep his job by blackmailing
presidents and that's, you know,
yes there is some of the files
he had could be embarrassing
to a number of presidents and
probably with John Kennedy,
Hoover did come across
some of his affairs
with women before they
became public knowledge and,
you know, yes that was an issue.
But what's I guess is surprising
is that his relationships
to presidents were generally
much better than the image.
If anything he had a
particularly good relationship
with Franklin Roosevelt.
Both of them-- when you think
about it, both of them believed
in a strong central government.
FDR for purposes of the new
deal and reviving the economy,
Hoover for purposes
of law enforcement.
So the two of them
saw things eye to eye.
It was Franklin Roosevelt
who asked Hoover to get back,
involved in counter
espionage in the late 1930's
against the fatuous semicommunist.
Hoover did not ask to that.
It was FDR who raised it.
Given the chance, Hoover of
course jumped in with both feet
but it was FDR who raised it.
As mostly the post war presidents
that he had problems with.
>> Two more questions.
>> Okay, ma'am?
>> I presume J. Edgar didn't
have any personal favors.
What were some of your best sources?
>> Well, obviously the
Library of Congress.
There were John that mentioned there
were some 14 paper collections here
that [inaudible].
>> [Inaudible] in the manuscripts.
>> Yes. It's just in the manuscript
division plus the newspapers
and magazine sections.
In addition to that, probably
the best source was the FBI files
themselves from that period.
There is a very good collection
from them some time in the 1950's.
They threw them all out
and they microfilmed them.
The card catalog itself covers
a hundred reels of film.
The rest of the files cover
another thousand reels of film.
This is just from the
period of 1918 to 1922.
>> Oh my goodness.
>> And so, it's a huge
source of material.
What I did find though that--
was that to talk about Hoover as a
young man, it was impossible to talk
to anyone because no one is
neutral about J. Edgar Hoover.
Everyone has an attitude
one way or the other.
I felt the only way I could do
the job honestly was to look
at contemporary papers, what
people were saying at the time.
>> Yeah.
>> Before they had a chance
to become prejudiced one way
or the other, and one more?
>> Alright, we will end.
Let's give Ken a hand.
[ Applause ]
>> Okay.
>> Okay.
>> And not only was that a thorough
presentation about the topic
but you could get a sense of
Ken's thoroughness as a researcher
and Caroline [phonetic]
in fact reminded me,
I forgot to mention how many
of the resources at the Library
of Congess that Ken had used.
But you can tell that he
is a [inaudible] researcher
and an articulate spokesperson
and really a wonderful biographer.
And we will now move to the
book signing part of this
and I'll have Ken sit here.
And if we could form the line this
way as it works a little better.
The book or the paper back version
of this is on sale from the shop
at the Library for 17 dollars.
And you could get it signed
today but let's conclude
with another round of
applause for Ken Ackerman.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.