John Edgar Hoover Accomplishments

John Edgar Hoover was born January 1, 1895, to Dickerson Naylor Hoover and Annie Marie Scheitlin Hoover, two civil servants who worked for the U.S. Government. He grew up literally in the shadow of Washington, D.C. politics in a neighborhood three blocks from Capitol Hill. Hoover was closest to his mother, who served as the family’s disciplinarian and moral guide. He lived with her until she died in 1938, when he was 43 years old.Highly competitive, Hoover worked to overcome a stuttering problem by learning to talk fast. He joined the debate team in high school, where he achieved some notoriety. Wanting to enter into politics, he worked for Library of Congress after high school and attended night classes at Georgetown University Law School,

Edgar Hoover obtained a draft-exempt position with the Justice Department. His efficiency and conservatism drew the attention of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer who appointed him to lead the General Intelligence Division (GID), created to gather information on radical groups. In 1919, the GID conducted raids without search warrants and arrested hundreds of individuals from suspected radical groups. Though known to history as the “Palmer Raids”, Hoover the man behind the scenes. Hundreds of suspected subversives were deported. Palmer suffered politically from the backlash and was forced to resign, while Hoover’s reputation remained stellar. In 1924, the 29-year old J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation. He had long sought the position and accepted the appointment on the condition that the bureau be completely divorced from politics and that the director report only to the attorney

Edgar Hoover intensified his personal anti-Communist, anti-subversive stance and increased the FBI’s surveillance activities. Frustrated over limitations placed on the Justice Department’s investigative capabilities, Hoover created the Counter Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO. The group conducted a series of covert, and oftentimes illegal investigations designed to discredit or disrupt radical political organizations. Initially, Hoover ordered background checks on government employees to prevent foreign agents from infiltrating the government. Later, COINTELPRO went after any organization Hoover considered subversive, including the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Ku Klux