Weeden Lecture Engages, Informs, and (Pleasantly) Surprises

The 2023-24 Weeden lecturer, Yale University Professor Beverly Gage, took an esoteric topic and used it to frame the political and social history of America in the 20^th century. The result was an engaging view into the life, career, and outsize impact of one of the period’s most enigmatic – and often maligned – personalities, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

At 800 pages and reflecting a dozen years of research and writing, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” is Gage’s most recent book. Its long list of prestigious awards includes the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale, where she specializes in American politics, government, and social movements.

Gage began by explaining why she would “spend more than a decade of her life with one of the great villains of the 20^th century.” Hoover headed the FBI for 49 years through eight presidential administrations, serving through the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II, the Cold War and McCarthyism, and the protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s. “That was one of the things that drew me to him,” she said, citing the corresponding growth of the federal government during his FBI tenure.

Tracing Hoover’s life from his origins in Washington, D.C., under Jim Crow laws to his membership in a college fraternity that “celebrated” the Ku Klux Klan, Gage outlined his embrace of two seemingly contradictory political traditions – a strong federal bureaucracy and conservative ideology, especially with regard to race, religion, and later, Communism. Hoover carried these ideologies into his leadership of the FBI, engendering the agency’s expertise in scientific methods of investigation and the establishment of the FBI training center at Quantico, but also kindling its early support for McCarthyism and its commitment to domestic surveillance of student activists and civil rights leaders. Gage shared graphics illustrating how Hoover’s harassment of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was instrumental in transforming his image from popular proponent of religion and family to national pariah.

According to Gage, Hoover’s personal life was seemingly as contradictory as his professional beliefs. He and his number two at the FBI, Clyde Tolson, functioned as what she termed a “social couple,” traveling together, dining together, and attending official functions together. At the same time, the pair were leading investigations into the sexual orientation of government employees and firing those who were suspected of being gay.

“Hoover started out as an idealist but came to believe in his own righteousness,” said Gage in her conclusion. After serving four Democratic and four Republican presidents, and forming deep friendships with politicians on both sides as well as numerous influential others, she closed with the observation that Hoover offers “a lesson in too much power and too little accountability.”

Gage’s lecture was met with enthusiastic applause, and a query during the questions and answer session that followed, seeking her tips for historical research, spoke to the serious interest of the students in attendance. “Be prepared to spend a lot of time in archives,” she said, “and be sure to have an organic connection to your subject.” Gage spent the following morning visiting history classes to share her knowledge around the Harkness table. 

The Weeden Lecture Series was established in 1999 by the late Walter Buckley, Class of 1956, to honor the legacy of History Master Chuck Weeden, whose name is still synonymous with history teaching at Lawrenceville. Over the past 25 years, the Weeden Lecture has hosted some of the most prominent names in our national conversations about history.

For additional information, contact Lisa M. Gillard H'17, director of public relations, at lgillard@lawrenceville.org.