Young J. Edgar by Kenneth D. Ackerman  by Michael Patrick Brady
5 June 2008   In the days after the close of the First World
War, there was a room in Washington D.C. where communists and
anarchists dwelled with Harvard professors, union organizers,
lawyers, politicians, and government bureaucrats. It wasn’t a
seedy, back-alley speakeasy or elite underworld salon where
these presumed leftist agitators plotted bloody rebellion
against the United States government. No, all these
personalities were brought together in an archive at the
Department of Justice, neatly filed into a card catalog system
of substantial depth, complexity, and organization, by a
24-year-old assistant to the attorney general named John Edgar
Hoover. It was the genesis of a system of surveillance and
observation, of information mining, that would hang like
Damocles’ sword over the city for nearly half a century.  In
Young J. Edgar, author and lawyer Kenneth J. Ackerman explores
the beginnings of Hoover’s public career and how the attitudes