JOHN EDGAR HOOVER

John Edgar Hoover was born on January 1rst, 1895 and died on May 2nd, 1972 at the age of 77 years old. He was the first Director of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) of the United States.

He was the director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972.

Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.

Also, he became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. Hoover's methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps and planted evidence, and his legacy is tainted because of it.

Moreover, he attempted to disband many organizations that were considered subversive, including the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

Hoover’s methods can be put in link with McCarthyism since with his interventions, he restricted the civil rights.

The historian Ellen Schrecker in her book “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America” calls the FBI "the single most important component of the anti-communist crusade" and also writes : "Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau's files, 'McCarthyism' would probably be called 'Hooverism'” .

To conclude J. Edgar Hoover was considered as one of the nation's most fervent anti-communists, and one of the most powerful.