Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: Rethinking J. Edgar Hoover
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4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2022
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
Emily Bazelon talks with author Beverly Gage about her new book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, a detailed account of the life of the first FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover. They discuss Hoover’s hostile relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., why he should have quit at the end of the 1950s, and how Hoover’s childhood shaped his reign [MOU1] as director.
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Podcast production by Cheyna Roth
[MOU1]“tenure”? Maybe I’m overthinking this.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Gabfest Reads for November 2022. I am Emily Bazlon, one of the hosts of Slates |
| 0:11.8 | Political Gabfest. I am here with great excitement with Beverly Gage, who is a professor of 20th |
| 0:21.7 | century American History at Yale. She is previously the author of the book The Day Wall Street |
| 0:27.5 | Exploded, which is about the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. |
| 0:33.0 | And she is currently the author of G-man, a major new biography of Jay Edgar Hoover that draws from |
| 0:40.8 | never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of this man who dominated half a |
| 0:48.0 | century of American history from the 1920s to the 1970s. And Bev is going to argue, |
| 0:54.0 | planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape. Bev, thanks so much for joining |
| 0:59.2 | us. It's great to be here. I should also mention that you are a dear friend of mine and I have been |
| 1:04.4 | watching the development of this book with enormous excitement and pleasure for low these |
| 1:08.8 | many years. So today's taping is a special joy for me. So you're writing the first major |
| 1:16.8 | biography of Jay Edgar Hoover in over a quarter century. Why did you pick him as your subject? |
| 1:22.8 | When I first started to get to know him a little bit, which was when I was writing my first book |
| 1:28.8 | looking at radical politics and the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, |
| 1:35.7 | a couple of things struck me. One was that even then, and this was probably 15, 20 years ago, |
| 1:42.4 | a lot of the literature that had been written about him was getting out of date. And then secondly, |
| 1:48.0 | that I could see many of the ideas in him as a young man in say 1919 and 1920, which is the moment |
| 1:55.3 | I was studying, that continued for the rest of his life. And so I was really struck by the scope |
| 2:03.0 | of his career. He was head of the FBI for 48 years and by some of the consistency in his ideas |
| 2:10.7 | from that very early moment through all of these dramatic changes in the course of the 20th century. |
| 2:17.6 | Wait, I mean, he proves to be this connective tissue and important actor in everything from |
| 2:24.3 | kind of the rise of the FBI as like an administrative entity that does crime fighting. |
... |
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