When it comes to World War II, the soldiers fighting overseas tend to get all the glory. This doesn’t give FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover nearly enough acclaim for handling security threats on the home front. To give just a few of the red alerts that reached Hoover’s desk and required the heroic intervention of the FBI:
In 1941, an FBI double agent broke up a German spy network operating inside the US. The FBI arrested 33 members of the spy ring, the largest espionage case in US history.
In 1942, eight Germans landed on US shores via U-boat, planning to sabotage US infrastructure. One of the eight had second thoughts, turned in the rest to the FBI, and six of them got the death penalty.
In 1943, an old lady in Cleveland called J. Edgar Hoover gay.
Now, there are just a few things to cover before we go any further. This is a delicate topic, so I’m going to be vague, for all the parents who read this blog to their young families before bed.
The first is that some people, below the belly button but above the thigh, have a thing there that hangs off their body. It’s how they get rid of waste if they drink too much Mountain Dew, and it’s used for something else that’s even grosser than that.
Everyone who doesn’t have a gross thing has no thing, just a hole. And on the back side, everyone has a hole, regardless of whether their front side has a gross thing or not.
The next thing to know is that sometimes, when your eyes come across another person, you become filled with lust. And some of the time, when that person looks back at you, the emotion they are filled with is also one of lust. So you lie down next to each other, and you don’t stand back up again until you have relieved your lust.
The key thing here is that any two people can feel lust for one another. One person could have a thing and the other could have a thing. One person could have a thing and the other could have a pair of holes. Or the two of them could have holes galore.
The final thing to know is that a long time ago, before World War II, there was a couple named Adam and Eve. At first it was just Adam by himself. But his landlord said, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” because he wouldn’t stop playing with his thing. So Eve became his partner in crime. Eve had no thing, just holes. They got along great, probably because they were both super laid back. Their motto was: “No shirt. No shoes. No problem.”
Eventually they got evicted for violating the terms of their lease. But their landlord didn’t stop there. He put a curse on the land they used to grow food, and vowed that Eve, during childbirth, would experience harrowing pain. (For context, this took place before the tenant rights movement.) Eve gave birth to two sons, one of whom grew up to murder the other.
Americans in the mid-20th century knew this story well, and concluded from it that couples should only ever consist of one Adam and one Eve, due to how successful their relationship was. And if you preferred to be in a couple with two Adams or two Eves, people got really mad.
Take, for example, the case of Frank Kameny. He was an astronomer with a Harvard PhD who worked for the Army Map Service in the 1950s. He got fired, and barred from working for the government. This happened because his stance on the things-and-holes issue was that if having one thing around was good, two was a party.
And it wasn’t just people’s jobs at risk. If the police got wind of two Adams behind closed doors doing the dance with no pants, they would barge in and say, “Stop! Too many things! You need more holes!” The police, I’m sorry to say, did the same to those who just wanted to enjoy a rousing course of holes galore.
That, finally, brings us back to J. Edgar Hoover and the old lady in Cleveland.
The saucy old trout was at her weekly bridge match, when another biddy teed her up by noting that J. Edgar Hoover was a bachelor. The blabby old bag replied that he was no mere bachelor, and told the group what he liked to do with his thing when he was randy.
At this moment, the war with Germany was hanging in the balance. It would only take one of these chirpy old birds to send a letter to the front with the rumor of Hoover’s thing-loving. Then the news would spread like wildfire, and soon the entire armed forces would hear how Hoover likes to do the hanky panky. The soldiers would shake their heads in disbelief, lay down their weapons, and surrender.
Then the leader of Germany would win the war and take over the world. And trust me, you wouldn’t want this guy in charge. He was bad. If anything, that might be an understatement!
Fortunately for all of us who don’t like the German guy, the hostess of that week’s bridge match reported this incident to her nephew, who worked for the FBI. When he learned about the tittle-tattle happening between the old broads at the weekly card game, he alerted an assistant director of the FBI. The assistant FBI director considered the gravity of the situation, and notified J. Edgar Hoover himself.
This is not the type of incident where there’s time to waste. So the FBI already had a plan of attack ready to neutralize exactly this type of threat. Before giving Hoover word of this menace, the assistant FBI director, following standard procedure, ordered a Special Agent in the Bureau’s Cleveland office to return fire.
The Special Agent summoned the mouthy old bat to his office to give her the business. He expressed his distaste for her “malicious and unfounded” statement. She gave her heartfelt apologies, and vowed to set the record straight the next time the old ladies met for bridge.
And the nation escaped a moment of great peril.
Postscript: This was unfortunately not the last crisis that Hoover faced. In the coming years, the owner of a beauty salon, a guy at a party, an American in London, a prisoner in Louisville, and a budget examiner for the National Labor Relations Board all made similar remarks about how Hoover liked to get raunchy. Each received a surprise visit from the FBI.
This post has two main sources: 1) James Kirchick’s book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, and 2) a video I watched in a middle school sexual education course.