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Currently on the docket of the Bureau are 15,000 cases. The Bureau is actively investigating 6,000, which means that each G-Man has between 30 and 40 cases on his hands simultaneously. All Federal violations, except the illegal use of narcotics, counterfeiting, smuggling or the violation of Postal and Immigration laws now come under the Bureau's province, which means that a G-Man may find in his dossier a collection of violations against such widely divergent statutes as the Seed Loan Law, the Migratory Bird Law, the Federal Eight-Hour Law, the Admiralty Law, the Antitrust Law, the Copyright Law. Major portion of the Bureau's toughest work is the investigation of fraudulent bankruptcies.
Director. In the Federal Bureau of Investigation there is a very unsanguine attitude toward the regenerability of criminals. Day after day, thousands of old familiar faces and fingerprints of habitual offenders turn up, and in the great L-shaped print file room a dozen red tabs attached to cards of fugitives from justice, almost always parole violators, bristle up every time a file drawer is pulled open. This was the scene J. Edgar Hoover had in mind when he eloquently addressed the International Association of Chiefs of Police at Atlantic City last month. As able a talker as there is in the capital, he began: "I know that I speak to my own people. . . . Here at this meeting, a criminal is understood to be a criminal, with a gun in his hand and murder in his heart. It is not necessary here, in discussing what shall be done with that human rat, to persuade some altruistic soul that he is not a victim of environment or circumstances or inhibitions or malformed consciousness, to be reformed by a few kind words, a pat on the cheek and freedom at the earliest possible moment. . . . No one in this assemblage, I feel sure, will scoff at the theory of parole. ... I said theory, not practice. There is a vast difference. The theory is beautiful. The practice approaches a national scandal. . . . I am free to admit I am biased. . . . When I figure that every man in the Federal Bureau who has been killed was the victim of a man who has been the recipient of some form of executive clemency, that should not be hard to understand."
Like all leaders of enterprises which require great morale, Director Hoover can always be counted on for an effective theatrical gesture where one seems needed. Like all men of action, he has a strong streak of sentimentality. On the desk of his handsome office is a copy of Kipling's "If," a photograph of his dog. He is a bachelor, living with his semi-invalid mother in the pleasant frame house where he was born in an unpretentious section of southeast Washington.
His job gives him little time for friends, who are few and include no women. Author Courtney Ryley Cooper (Ten Thousand Public Enemies), Mr. Hoover's assistant Clyde Tolson and Gun Expert Frank Baughman occasionally go fishing with him on the nearby Patuxent River. But, gabby Walter Winchell to the contrary, Mr. Hoover has never been seen in a Washington night club.