Yale historian Beverly Gage discusses her Pulitzer-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, detailing his thirty-eight-year FBI tenure, anti-communist deportations of figures like Emma Goldman, and controversial wiretapping campaigns under Nixon. She reflects on her recent road trip book covering U.S. history sites from Colonial Williamsburg to Disneyland, noting gaps in public knowledge about icons like Davy Crockett. Gage emphasizes teaching primary source research at archives to counter AI reliance and considers Jane Addams as a future subject, ultimately valuing historical inquiry over private equity for its cultural capital. [Automatically generated summary]
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From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
unidentified
Now, from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., best-selling author Beverly Gage, a professor of American history at Yale.
Her book, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Making of the American Century, received numerous literary awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Her most recent book is This Land is Your Land, a road trip through U.S. History.
Join us now for a stimulating conversation between Beverly Gage and our host, David Rubinstein.
Well, today we're going to be in conversation with Beverly Gage about her incredible number of books that have won prizes and about her life as a historian, including her most recent book, This Land is Your Land.
We're coming to you from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
And we are in the Thomas Jefferson Building, which is the first building built for the Library of Congress, the original building.
It opened in 1897 under budget.
It's hard to believe it was built for under $10 million.
And it's named for Thomas Jefferson because he sold his library to the United States government when the United States government's Library of Congress lost all of its books in the burning of Washington in 1814.
Thomas Jefferson sold his entire collection, which was the largest collection of books by any private individual at the time.
So thank you very much for being here.
And I want to go through a lot of your books, but let's talk about your background for a moment.
You are a professor of history at Yale University.
I grew up in Delaware County, so that is a suburb of Philadelphia in a town called Wallingford, which is right next to Swarthmore, where Swarthmore College is.
Yeah, I think there is a good theory, which I would accept as the most likely theory, that it was someone who was in the same circle of anarchists as Sacco and Vanzetti, who were very famous figures of that moment, and that they were the ones that set the bomb off.
Well, I'm happy to say it's still pretty popular where I teach, but it is not as popular as it was for sure.
And I think a lot of it is pressures of the job market that students are told that you need to have a particular set of technical skills if you want to enter the job market.
I think maybe historians might be a little responsible for it.
I think maybe there are ways that we could teach history that are more engaging.
And so I've tried to experiment with some of that in both my teaching and writing.
When you teach at Yale, do you find the undergraduates say, is this going to be on the exam, which is what they used to do when I was an undergraduate?
Or do they say, I really want to learn more about history?
I teamed up this semester to also teach a course with two of my colleagues, Joanne Freeman, who teaches the American Revolution, David Blight, who teaches the Civil War.
And we decided we were going to do all 250 years of American history in one semester, team taught, and there were three or four hundred undergrads in that class.
We brought in lots of community members to participate.
And I thought, why am I spending the best years of my glorious adult life with this man, J. Edgar Hoover, who was not always the most open and interesting interlocutor?
Okay, so why did you want to spend 13 years of your life on J. Edgar Hoover?
For those people that may not have been alive when he was alive, who was he and why was he so important that you wanted to spend 13 years of your life on him?
J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI for 48 years.
So from 1924 to 1972, that is, Kelvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.
And part of what interested me was this vast span of time in which he was here in Washington.
His first job actually was at the Library of Congress, and he grew up just a few blocks from here on Capitol Hill.
But he was this creature of Washington.
He's someone who had his fingers in just about everything that happened in American politics and government over this incredible span of time, which is the period that the United States is really building the federal government in the ways that we know today and in which it's beginning to exercise all sorts of new power in the world.
He went to law school and he got his first job here at the Library of Congress, really learning to process information and sort books and do all of that.
And then he entered the Department of Justice straight out of law school in 1917.
And he was always a very white-collar, kind of legal-side bureaucrat.
He was not a cop.
He was not a policeman.
He did not make arrests.
He did not shoot his weapon.
But that was what they wanted as the Bureau was starting to grow.
But the 1930s, they're this fascinating period because you take this bunch of lawyers and accountants and suddenly they're told you've got to go after kidnappers and bank robbers and kind of become the FBI as we know them today.
So Dillinger was one of their big cases.
Hoover wanted all the credit.
He was a little upset when one of the men who led the investigation named Melvin Purvis tried to take some of the credit.
And so he promptly fired Melvin Purvis, kicked him out of the FBI so Hoover could get it all.
And when the war came along and it was clear you were going to need somebody who could deal with espionage and sabotage and a variety of intelligence-related threats, they looked around and said, oh, hey, no one in the United States knows how to do this stuff.
So Edgar, why don't you figure it out?
So it's another fascinating period when they had to take on a whole new set of duties, figure out how to do them under incredible pressure pretty quickly, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully.
So there are two presidents who really didn't like J. Edgar Hoover.
One was Harry Truman, the other was John Kennedy.
And Truman, writing in his diaries, said that he was worried the FBI was becoming a Gestapo.
He was very concerned about civil liberties questions.
But he didn't really make any move to try to push Hoover out either.
I think he understood quite rightly that by that point, Hoover had at least as much power in certain areas as he did, that it would be a big drama to try to force him out.
It is in many ways really the cause of his life, anti-communism.
His first big job in the Justice Department when he was just 24 years old was running something called the Radical Division, which was surveillance of left-wing radicals, especially communists.
And so he really kept that throughout his career.
And then in the 40s and 50s, when this became the issue of American politics, lots of people turned to him as a reliable narrator, or, you know, not everyone agreed on that front.
Yeah, he helped in 1919 when he was this 24-year-old recent law school grad to get Emma Goldman deported.
So he really was in it, and he really did go down to the tip of New York and talk to her and say, you know, goodbye and watch her be sent off to Russia.
Now, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it was often thought that Hoover kept personal files on members of Congress or people that might be president of the United States even, and that was a source of his power.
They did exist, and Hoover brought in all kinds of information.
He was a very careful and serious power broker, and a lot of the power that he wielded was the information that he had about people.
Now, some of it was kind of innocuous.
They just kept kind of clippings on anyone who was important.
But if you look at the files on important people, it also has a lot about their sex lives, their accusations of alcoholism, their political machinations, all sorts of things are in there.
I don't know if they knew all of them, but yeah, there's a lot of information in there.
It was, you know, hard to keep track of everyone.
But from the 1940s, when he had an affair with a woman named Inga Arvad, who was thought to maybe be associated with the Nazis, the German government, some people thought she was a spy.
From that moment onward, there's an awful lot of material in there.
Well, in your book, you point out that the head of the Chicago mob had a girlfriend, and that girlfriend also turned out to be, let's say, a good friend of President Kennedy's.
Did Robert Kennedy get informed about that by Jay Edgar Hoover?
It's a little hard sometimes to follow exactly who knew what when, but it is a kind of amazing moment in American politics when the president and the head of the Chicago mob had basically the same girlfriend.
And so there were warnings issued and that relationship was more or less cut off.
The relevance of this for the purpose of the book and for history was that during those years that Hoover was the FBI director, for many of those years, if you were gay, you would be fired automatically from the federal government.
You didn't have to be caught doing something.
You just said you were gay, you get fired.
And Jay Edgar Hoover led the effort to fire people in the federal government just because they were gay.
Yeah, in the 40s, 50s, and into the 60s, it was the policy of the U.S. government that you could not be a federal employee and be gay.
So I don't know if it's fair to say that Hoover led that in the sense that he didn't make the policy, but once that policy was in place, he was one of the main people who enforced it.
So we often talk about the red scare of the 40s and 50s.
Well, there was a parallel scare going on that's now referred to as the lavender scare, and he was certainly one of the big figures in conducting those investigations.
Usually, Hoover would report to people who are attorney generals who are older than him.
Robert Kennedy became attorney general.
He was 36, and Hoover was probably then in his 60s, I guess.
So I guess he didn't like reporting to Robert Kennedy.
But Hoover was very concerned that people, according to your book, would think that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been an FBI informant or somehow connected the FBI.
And what did he do to try to make it clear that wasn't the case?
The Kennedy assassination is so complicated and has produced so many theories over the years, in part because Lee Harvey Oswald was a very strange character.
He had been a defector to the, he had gone and lived in the Soviet Union and come back and been mixed up in all sorts of strange political movements here.
And then, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed.
So you weren't going to have a courtroom trial and have the ability to air all of this.
So Hoover was very concerned, and there were lots of rumors about this, that because of Oswald's strange background, he would be thought to be an FBI asset or a CIA asset or to be working with the government in some way.
And so the Warren Commission really was set up to try to sort all of this through.
Hoover worked with the Warren Commission, but he was very suspicious of them.
He didn't want them to criticize anything the Bureau said.
Well, did he say to President Johnson, we need to have a Warren Commission, or he didn't want a Warren Commission because he said it was done by Oswald.
So the irony is that no president was able or even thought about firing J. Edgar Hoover, but the one person who said, I've got to fire him, was Richard Nixon, who was his buddy.
But what happened to the effort to fire J. Edgar Hoover when Nixon was given that task?
When Nixon became president, he thought, this is great, my buddy Edgar, this is all going to work out well.
But partly because Hoover was getting pretty old at that point, and then partly because they ran into friction around a number of things that Richard Nixon wanted Hoover to do.
And even J. Edgar Hoover said, I'm not sure that's a very good idea, Richard Nixon.
They ran into some conflicts.
But yeah, Nixon sat down with Hoover and had a whole script written by his staff that said, you know, Edgar, it's time for you to retire.
And he came out of that meeting saying, oh, he's not going to retire.
So there were the main FBI files, and then there were a couple of collections: one, the official and confidential collection, one his personal collection that had some, we think, official materials.
And one of them survived and the other didn't.
So he asked his secretary to basically destroy his whole personal file.
Now, when biographers spend five years, 10 years, 15 years or so with a person, they often fall in love with them because they spend so much time with them and they see the best attributes of them.
Did you fall in love with J. Edgar Hoover, or did you come away saying, Jesus is not as good as I thought or wished he was?
And I was just, I knew when the announcements were going to happen, but you don't know that you're a nominee and you don't know if you're a finalist and you don't know if you've won until the whole world finds out.
So I was just on my laptop.
But of course, as you can imagine, my Wi-Fi went out.
And so I kind of had to run into my front yard with my phone.
And anyway, it was complicated, but that's how I found out.
Well, let's talk about a new book that you've written called This Land Is Your Land.
And it's a really interesting story about how you decided to tour the United States looking at historical sites.
You weren't going to beaches necessarily.
You weren't going to see the typical tourist sites that people might want to go see.
You're going to places like Colonial Williamsburg or let's say Fort Sumter or in Los Alamos where the A-bomb is developed, the atomic bomb is developed, or things like that.
If you were only the places that were off the beaten path.
So as you said, there are lots of pretty famous historic sites like Independence Hall and the Alamo that I went to because they are fascinating in their own right.
But I ended up really liking places like Medora, North Dakota.
Anyone?
Okay, so Medora, North Dakota is a tiny little town in the Badlands where Theodore Roosevelt spent a little bit of time when he was just coming of age as a young man and trying to sort out what he cared about and what he thought about.
I think Mount Rushmore is really a wonderful place to visit.
So I went to South Dakota as well.
I went to Mount Rushmore.
I went to the little town of Deadwood, which is an old mining community and that has been sort of both preserved and reconstructed as a Western gunfighting town, basically.
It took a long time to get it done, but the dedication is 1970, and the person who comes to do the dedication is the Vice President of the United States, in effect saying a Confederate monument is a great thing to honor.
Were you surprised that people were still in love with the Confederate leaders?
So we've gotten into the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s by then.
So a lot of it's about the Erie Canal, which is built during those years and kind of opens up all of these new communities.
But upstate New York becomes this amazing laboratory of reform up there.
So Frederick Douglass lived there, and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and John Brown, and they all knew each other and they were all working together.
So it's not the most beaten path in terms of historical tourism, but there are fascinating little sites up there that reveal this whole history.
Now, because of the fame of the Oppenheimer movie in the book that also won the Pulitzer Prize, the Oppenheimer site, or the site in Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed, was a place that you regarded as historic, and you visited that.
This is part of the chapter that goes through the southwest, so mainly New Mexico, but other places around there too, to tell the story of World War II and then the Cold War, because so much of that military development happened there.
So Los Alamos was really fascinating.
There's a whole museum and preserved site.
You have to go really far up into the mountains.
And when I was driving up there, all I could think was, how did they, in the 1940s, with not very good roads, get all of the things up this mountain that you need to create a nuclear weapon?
But it was really a fascinating place.
And then I left from there and went to a place outside of Roswell and spent the night in a nuclear missile silo that has become an Airbnb.
The book starts in Philadelphia with the Revolution and it ends in California, right?
Like a road trip, though it goes in different places along the way.
But I ended in Disneyland in part because I think Walt Disney has been one of our great historical mythmakers.
A lot of early Disneyland was really planned around these stories of the American past, Frontierland, even tomorrowland, kind of thinking about the tech boom of the 1950s.
And so I was fascinated by Disney as a character, and I was also fascinated by his rival, Walter Knott, who started the much less successful nearby theme park, Knott's Fairy Farm.
This probably is something like a decade, which is why I had to write the little book in between, because I couldn't go from writing about one guy to the next.
I'm definitely a morning writer, so that is where my best energy is.
And I have played around over the years with how much is enough.
So I end up with about 500 words when I'm really in writing as my minimum.
Now often I get beyond that.
But I'd say the most important thing about my writing process is that I really tend to sort of sketch the whole thing out and have it sort of half written in sentence fragments or I know which story goes where and what the transitions are.
And I do all of that.
And then I sit down and I turn it into proper prose.
And so it's sort of a multi-stage process that's not just from not writing to writing.
For the Hoover book, I used what is a glorified electronic version of index cards, which is a program called FileMaker.
And so FileMaker allows you to make this elaborate database, but where you basically have something like what you would have for an index card and lots and lots of check boxes and date fields that allow you to sort your research.
So I put all of my Hoover research in that one place and there were something like 23 or 24,000 entries.
I do sometimes say that to people, but not quite that way.
Actually, I find that teaching and research go pretty well together, not always in terms of time commitment, but in terms of conceptualizing what I'm doing.
I often design classes that will help me think about the things that I want to think about.
And I also try to write the way that I teach.
Teaching is about distilling information down and communicating it and being in conversation.
Now, Yale has very good students, but are you surprised that they do not know as much about American history as you think they should when they get there?
Or they actually know a fair bit when they already get to Yale?
Well, I think they should go on road trips and go out and see the country and visit its historic sites.
But seriously, I did write the This Land is Your Land book, geared to the 250th, not only because I wanted to learn some new things and experience some of these places, but I'm really hoping that other people will take the almost literal roadmap that is in that book and go out and do some adventuring.
So if, now you're a 20th century American historian, would you say?
So if you could interview anybody that has lived in the 20th century who was a great American leader, political leader, governmental leader, scientific leader, whatever it might be, who would you really like to interview?
I think I'd have to go with Franklin Roosevelt because I think that he both witnessed and managed so much history through the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and also because he died in office.
And so he actually was not able, unlike most presidents, to narrate his own life and his own experiences.
Well, I would definitely ask him about Clyde Tolson, but I don't know that he would answer that.
And what would the other one be?
You know, I think that I might ask him about the Rosenberg case, actually, the atomic spy case, because there's a lot of interesting material suggesting that he did not want the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to play out in the way.
Ronald Reagan, if I could talk with him about anything.
That's a good question.
I've just started doing that research.
I think maybe I would talk to him about the theme that is most interesting to me, how he sees these kind of through lines of anti-communism in his life.
But I think Reagan also, quite famously, is someone who biographers had a hard time getting at his personal life.
As a 20th century historian, what would you say is the most significant thing that actually happened to this country in the 20th century?
The Depression, World War II, World War I, Vietnam War.
What would you say is the most important thing that happened in this country for the good and maybe the worst thing that happened in this country in the 20th century?
World War II was such a massive event that touched every aspect of American life from the economy to the government to the U.S. role in the world to race and civil rights and the role of women.
And it is, yeah, I'd say it's the defining event of the 20th century in lots of ways.
I guess I would, I guess I would take on the question of race and racism, you know, which has been a very complicated part of the 20th century and there have been high points and low points, but I think that I would think about that.
Well, I think there is a lot of interest in the 20th century for a couple of reasons.
I mean, it's the recent stuff, and so people can see very clearly how it's shaping the world that we live in.
As I said, today's students have no living experience of the 20th century.
And so I teach a big course that's on the 20th century overall, and then a couple of smaller courses that are a little more geared to my interests.
And there seems to be lots of enthusiasm for that.
Honestly, the later you go in the 20th century, I think the more interest there is, and the less students seem to know because their AP U.S. history class will get to like World War II or Vietnam, and then it doesn't get much beyond that.
So early on in the 20th century and for much of the 20th century, American history was written by men.
Now, in recent years, fortunately, we have a number of women historians who've written great books about American history, obviously your books, Doris Gearns-Goodman's books, among others.
So are you surprised that more and more women are interested in this subject?
And in your classes, do you find your classes 50-50 in terms of men and women, or is it more women or more men?
And are women today as interested in American history as you were?
And yeah, I think the history profession has become very, very open to women historians.
I think one of the things that is nice that's happened is that for the first generations of women historians, often they were expected to and committed to writing about women in particular.
But often we're sort of pigeonholed into doing that, whether it was their primary interest.
And that certainly isn't the case anymore.
I mean, as you can see, I just wrote a whole giant book about a man who basically barely spoke to women who were not his secretaries.
And I think that if I were ever to do that, and I'm not sure that I will, because I think I might write some things other than biographies, but I think it would be Jane Addams.
So Jane Adams was one of the kind of great figures of the late 19th and early 20th century.
And she was this amazing American reformer.
She's best known for Hull House, which was a settlement house in Chicago that provided education and various services to mostly poorish immigrant families in the neighborhood.
But she went on to help create the NAACP.
She helped to create the ACLU.
She won the Nobel Prize.
She wrote lots and lots of books.
And so she's just this big figure and a big character.
So for somebody watching today who wants to learn about American history in the 20th century, is there one or two books you would recommend for kind of an overview of the 20th century?
What is there a textbook you use from the 20th century American history at Yale, or is there no such book and you have to read a lot of different books to catch up on the 20th century?
We mostly look either to more targeted monographs or works of history or just go straight to secondary, I mean primary sources.
So we're reading from that moment.
For my class that I taught when I was working with my colleagues, I had four weeks to do the whole 20th century, and so I had to pick only four books for that, but they were primary sources.
Well, I have redesigned my classes to some degree around this question.
But for the research papers, the first thing that I do, not only because it gets out of the AI trap, but because I think it's the most exciting way to do history, is that I send students to the physical archives that we have, in this case at Yale, but in places like the Library of Congress, because actually most of what historians do is not digitized at all anywhere.
And so they're in these amazing paper collections.
I know you kind of end your journeys on the road a little bit in Walt Disneyland.
So we brought out, this is Walt Disney's handprint, which is sort of just a delightful snapshot of just the wide array of things that we have here in our division and also at the Library of Congress.
And we have this handprint of Walt Disney, and I know it's just really hard to resist the urge to put your hand right over it and see it.
You're not supposed to do that.
I'm not supposed to do that, unfortunately.
Walt Disney, he has his handprints at the Library of Congress because we have the papers of a woman who is probably the leading palm reader of her age.
Her name is Nellie Simmons Meyer, and she wants to try this thing called what she calls scientific palmistry.
So where she thought that other palm readers of her generation were sort of cranks and would make stuff up about how they could predict the future.
What Nellie Simmons-Meyer wanted to do was to understand why people became successful.
So she took the hand and prints of a lot of famous people.
We have Walt Disney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Wilker T. Washington, Amelia Earhart's hands all in the same collection.
And so she took their handprints in order to read their poems to understand, oh, these are the characteristics that make somebody successful.
And for Walt Disney, she discovered that in fact he had this bottomless well of joy that he could draw upon and that he had an original and active imagination.
Yeah, we don't usually think of Walt Disney himself as being deeply interested in American history, but he really was.
I mean, he sort of built his parks at least a little bit with American history in mind.
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Absolutely.
We brought you some items as well from the Geography and Map Division, and we thought it could only be appropriate to start off with an ode to the great American road.
Yeah, so this is probably something you recognize, a classic gas station map.
This particular one is from the 30s, and it's utilitarian as well as fun, pictorial, and nostalgic.
On the front side, we have facing up, you can see great attractions across America, national parks, other sites that you will certainly recognize, and many that appear in the book.
And on the back of it, there are highways, so it is still a utilitarian map in a way.
And so we brought this out thinking it's, of course, a great ode to the book and to the topic of the book, but also just really fun, I think, to see that history is already a lot of fun as a playground on its own for people even almost a century ago.
And I think that you can really see the nostalgia in the image at the lower right, where you see that there's an automobile that is overshadowed by a faint silhouette of a wagon train.
So that pioneering American spirit is really spoken to here.
So we thought we could only start here, of course.
It's kind of amazing to see the road trip being invented and then reinvented.
This is pretty early in car travel, and you say there are a lot of highways on the back, but there aren't highways the way that we know highways if this is the 1930s.
In my book, I tried to start each chapter with someone traveling from one place to another.
And you see the ways that travel itself changed over these 250 years.
It was pretty miserable in the 1780s, and whatever miseries there are now, they're a lot less daunting.
unidentified
Certainly.
And of course, still always sights to see, no matter the impact map.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And then we brought you a place that is not only on that map, but of course, very prominent in the book.
A good starting place for any road trip, especially as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation this year, is a map of Philadelphia.
And this particular map is pretty special because it's the first known depiction of the State House, which of course became Independence Hall after Independence.
But this map was produced in 1753, so it long predates those events of 1776.
But also, the building itself wasn't even completed when the map came out.
Philadelphia Map Start00:02:46
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So it seems that the map makers were working from plans and they knew this was going to be a really important map to be, or a really important building to be able to document.
So a good starting point in Philadelphia.
See more with Beverly Gage and the Library of Congress's artifacts and watch past episodes of America's Book Club at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold, original series, Sunday, April 5th, with our guest best-selling author, Arthur Brooks, who has written 13 books about finding purpose, connection, and cultivating lasting joy.
His books include Love Your Enemies, Build the Life You Want with co-author Oprah Winfrey and his latest The Happiness Files.
He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.