John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—the FBI's predecessor—in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972. Hoover built the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and instituted a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover also established and expanded a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List.
Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have routinely violated both the FBI’s own policies and the very laws the FBI was charged with enforcing, to have used the FBI to harass political dissidents, to amass secret files for blackmailing high-level politicians, and to collect evidence using vigilantism and many other illegal methods. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others.
John Edgar Hoover was born on New Year's Day 1895 in Washington, D.C., to Anna Marie (née Scheitlin; 1860–1938) and Dickerson Naylor Hoover (1856–1921), chief of the printing division of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, formerly a plate maker for the same organization. Dickerson Hoover was of English and German ancestry. Hoover's maternal great-uncle, John Hitz, was a Swiss honorary consul general to the United States. Among his family, he was the closest to his mother, who was their moral guide and disciplinarian.

Return to J. Edgar Hoover Autograph Profile