F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature by William J. Maxwell (review) (original) (raw)

the FBI director who added the "Federal" to the Bureau's name, managed and symbolized American state power for a longer term than any U.S. president. The photograph of this national bulwark on the jacket of J. Edgar Hoover on Communism (1969), one sequel to Hoover's anticommunist classic Masters of Deceit (1958), depicts a ruddy, graying, older man, stocky and tidy. He sits at the edge of a desk and balances an anonymous book on his right thigh, the red of the binding offsetting his neatly coordinated blue suit and tie. His face is dominated by the loose jaw, spatulate nose, and wide, baggy eyes that inspired his frequent caricature as a bulldog (see figure 1.1). Yet for all its resonance, this familiar image of the sturdy, vigilantly literate Hoover, the Cold War icon who personified a watchful "Fourth Branch of Government, " has blocked our view of the comparably significant young Hoover first hired by the Bureau's Radical Division in 1919. Then pictured as a "slender bundle of high-charged electric wire" (Vaile), this twenty-four-year-old Hoover embodied a clean-cut, streamlined, dynamically modernized shift in American police leadership. In shades of Nick Carraway, the true star of The Great Gatsby (1925), one Jazz Age newspaper feature cast him as a dead ringer for "an active young bond salesman" (qtd. in Hoover, Scrapbooks). 1 While the FBI was attracting some of its first headlines by chasing African American boxer Jack Johnson, an even younger John Edgar Hoover was earning the modern nickname "Speed" by delivering groceries in his native Washington, D.C., grinding out the grades that made him valedictorian of the Central High class of 1913, and drilling Company A in his school's corps of cadets. His zealous neatness, watertight memory for written detail, gift for steering