Today's Reading
In the early 1930s incoming FBI agents were told during training classes that they were not to consider themselves "flatfeet"—that is, ordinary beat cops who chased after street criminals. As late as 1933, the Bureau's agents were still serving mainly as fact finders, investigating bank fraud or antitrust violations or compiling crime statistics for the United States. Not the sorts of activities that required wielding a lethal weapon. Although the frequently repeated
claim that FBI agents were "not allowed" to carry guns back then is mistaken, it's true that most agents did without them. It just wasn't a very dangerous job.
Interstate sex trafficking and transportation of stolen autos across state lines were about the only federal offenses that offered any prospect of risk to FBI men. No FBI agent had been murdered in the line of duty since 1925, when Edwin C. Shanahan was shot to death, while unarmed, trying to arrest a big-time car thief in Chicago.
Even for the few federal crimes over which the Bureau had jurisdiction, FBI agents generally had to enlist a local police officer, sheriff, or US marshal to make the actual apprehension. Odd as it may seem today, FBI men back then had no power of arrest of their own. If they caught a federal offender in the act, they'd search around for a telephone to call a qualified arresting officer or drive somewhere to find one. By that time, it might have been too late.
Hugh Clegg, a Mississippian who joined the FBI in 1926, recalled the dilemma vividly. He remembered being accompanied by local police officers to the homes of federal fugitives and being told, "You guard the back, and I'll go in the front. You don't have a gun, so I'll go in." Clegg would stand at the back door with a brick as a weapon, hoping the fugitive wouldn't come out that way. "If he'd come out shooting, I had no defense at all," he said.
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The twenty-nine-year-old Hoover became the acting and then permanent director of the FBI in 1924 when his predecessor, William J. Burns, was forced to resign after being implicated in the Harding administration's bribery scandal involving Teapot Dome oil reserve leasing. The Justice Department was known then as the Department of Easy Virtue, and the FBI was filled with many lazy, incompetent, corrupt agents. Once in charge, Hoover began weeding out the political hacks. He sought to divorce the FBI from politics as usual and instituted merit-based employment.
Of course, "merit" was in the eyes of a single beholder: J. Edgar Hoover. He personally interviewed every new applicant. And because Hoover had managed to exempt the Bureau from the civil service system, he was free to set his unique criteria for hiring—and firing—agents at will.
Hoover wanted morally upright, all-American boys whose integrity would be beyond reproach and whose loyalty would be to the Bureau—and to him. They had to be at least five foot seven, athletic or at least slender, and well tailored. (Hoover, while increasingly on the pudgy side, was always a natty dresser.) A gentlemanly demeanor was also important, and for Hoover's entire career as director, all of his special agent hires were men. Nearly all were white. Most of them were clean-shaven; some wore mustaches, but none had beards. Almost everyone smoked.
At a time when fewer than one in ten Americans attended college, the vast majority of Hoover's young agents had at least a bachelor's degree, and most had graduate degrees. Himself a law school graduate (George Washington University, in his native Washington, DC), Hoover expressed a strong preference for lawyers and accountants, though the rule was never absolute. Membership in a fraternity (Hoover was Kappa Alpha) was a big plus. Having grown up middle-class, the son of a federal government worker, Hoover chose most of his agents from the same demographic.
New agents had to be between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. As Doris Rogers, secretary and assistant to Melvin Purvis, the head of the FBI's Chicago field office, put it, Hoover liked his men " young and grateful."
Although he kept a few old-timers on board, Hoover proceeded to build a cadre of young, college-educated men to serve as FBI special agents. Most of them "had no inkling of the shoot-to-kill future which awaited them," Rogers recounted. "They looked forward to careers in the more polite forms of investigation."
How wrong they were.
Americans were shocked and outraged by the Lindbergh kidnapping. Then in May 1932, two months after the abduction, little Charlie Lindbergh Jr.'s decomposed body, his skull crushed, was found by a truck driver off the road less than five miles from the Lindbergh home. The perpetrator had buried the toddler in a shallow grave before fleeing.
A month later, a galvanized US Congress passed what became known as the Lindbergh Law. Although it did not apply retroactively to the Lindbergh case itself, the new law henceforth made it a federal felony to transport a kidnap victim across state lines and make a ransom demand.
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