Counting Crime: J. Edgar Hoover, the Wickersham Commission, and the Problem of Criminal Statistics

MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW
[96:1109 
Bureau director seeking to play a more significant role in crime control 
and in the structure of federal law enforcement. 
I’ll tell you a little bit about how this story played out in a minute.
First, however, I want to say a few words about why I think this moment 
is especially interesting for thinking about the history of J. Edgar 
Hoover and the FBI, as well as about broader questions of crime control 
and the legacy of the Wickersham Commission. 
When Hoover began engaging with the Wickersham Commission, 
the FBI was still known as the Bureau of Investigation. It was a small, 
fairly insignificant agency—not by any means the monolith that we now 
know as the FBI. As one might expect from a man who made a career 
of magnifying his own power, Hoover sought to use the Wickersham 
Commission in order to expand his political and bureaucratic base, and 
with it the power and influence of the Bureau of Investigation. This fits 
quite nicely with our well-established image of Hoover as a behind-the-
scenes power broker, someone who sought throughout his career to 
increase his own jurisdictional reach. But there are certain aspects of 
this moment that complicate the conventional story, and tell us 
something slightly different about Hoover as a federal law enforcement 
official. 
While at many moments in his career Hoover sought to expand the 
Bureau’s power, he was actually very strategic about the sorts of things 
that he wanted the Bureau to do. He had specific ideas about which 
duties did and did not suit the Bureau’s interests. In his view, new law-
enforcement activities should never subject his agents to the kinds of 
corruption and temptation that plagued local police forces. In the 1920s, 
this meant that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with Prohibition 
enforcement or any kind of drug policing. Hoover also wanted the 
Bureau to be involved only in areas of law enforcement where his agents 
would perform well in a purely technical sense. 
He saw the collection of statistics as one of these areas. But there 
were many other activities that he rejected, because they were too 
difficult, because they seemed too politically controversial, or because 
they threatened to put the Bureau in the middle of a partisan 
Washington struggle. For instance, Hoover resisted aggressive 
enforcement of civil rights law before 1964, when Congress passed the 
Civil Rights Act and President Lyndon Johnson (one of Hoover’s close 
friends) encouraged the FBI to open a new office in Jackson, 
Mississippi. Finally, Hoover did not want to be engaged in forms of law 
enforcement that he himself objected to ideologically. His resistance to 
civil rights enforcement was again a case in point—as much the result of 

---

12
G
AGE 
(D
O 
N
OT 
D
ELETE
) 
6/23/2013
11:08
AM 
2013] 
COUNTING CRIME
1111 
Hoover’s views on race and his suspicions of communist subversion as of 
any jurisdictional or legal questions. 
The point is this: When we think about Hoover as a figure, and 
about his interactions with the Wickersham Commission, we want to 
understand his campaign not only as an attempted expansion of power, 
but as a very particular set of strategies and visions for the Bureau. 
I’d also like to mention one other area for consideration: We often 
imagine Hoover as someone who maintained his political power by 
keeping files on powerful people. This was partly true, especially in his 
later years. But at the moment he engaged the Wickersham 
Commission, he was quite a young man—basically a mid-level employee 
of the Attorney General. He was not someone with the power to 
intimidate higher-ups. So it’s interesting to look at the kinds of 
techniques that he tried to use in order to transform the Bureau into a 
powerful and effective bureaucracy during these years in particular—
well before he had any ability to shape his political environment through 
strong-arm tactics. 
One of my larger aims in writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover is 
to get away from the one-dimensional image of Hoover as a villain, 
supposedly manipulating the world with his secret files. Instead, my 
book tries to situate him in a broader story about American political 
history, especially about the growth of the American administrative and 
bureaucratic state. Some of Hoover’s career did involve secret files and 
illegal activities. But his power also rested on his bureaucratic 
strategies, political alliances, and networks of grassroots support—a 
much less well-known story. All of those came into play in his early 
showdown with the Wickersham commission over the problem of 
criminal statistics. 
As I said, J. Edgar Hoover—not Herbert Hoover—was a relatively 
young man at the moment that the Wickersham Commission began its 
work. He had been born in Washington, DC, in 1895, and in many ways 
he was a product from birth of the federal bureaucracy. He graduated 
from law school at George Washington University, which in those days 
was famous for producing federal bureaucrats and lawyers who worked 
for the American government. Like many federal employees, he 
attended GW’s night school program, working by day at the Library of 
Congress and going to law classes in the afternoon and evening. 
Hoover entered the Justice Department in 1917 and rose quickly 
through the ranks. During World War I, he helped to administer the 
“enemy alien” program, aimed at both naturalized and non-naturalized 
Germans living in the U.S. In 1919 and 1920, as the first director of the 

---

12
G
AGE 
(D
O 
N
OT 
D
ELETE
) 
6/23/2013
11:08
AM 
1112