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Two Conditions. Such was the demoralized outfit that Assistant Director Hoover took over at 29, when the erupting scandals of Teapot Dome finally blew Daugherty out of office. Hoover told the new Attorney General, Harlan Fiske Stone, that he would take the job on two conditions: no politics and no outside interference. Said Stone: "Those, young man, are the only conditions under which I would give you the job."
Back came all the honorary badges; out went the political hangers-on and crooks. Director Hoover began to gather around him a new kind of cop: a bright young college graduate who owned either a law degree or a C.P.A.'s certificate. The first laboratory was set up, with one man and a few test tubes. The few scattered fingerprint files in existence were gathered together.
Hoover's men were trained to physical fitness, but spent most of their time digging through the dusty files of bankruptcy and antitrust cases. They had no power of arrest, no authority to carry guns.
The 21 Laws. One March day in 1932 a German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann sneaked into a house in Hopewell, N.J. and kidnaped the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh. Across the country the unchecked armed mobs of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and the Barker gang were leaving a trail of robbery, murder and kidnaping.
An angry nation and an aroused Congress demanded that the U.S. Government enter the gang-busting business. The Department of Justice stepped forward with 21 ready-made laws that would give Director Hoover the power he needed, and Congress quickly passed them.
"Don't Shoot." Within a year Kidnaper Hauptmann was arrested (though the credit belonged more to local police and T-men than the FBI). Pretty Boy Floyd was cornered on an Ohio farm and riddled with FBI bullets. Baby Face Nelson was trapped and shot down in a Chicago suburb. In January 1935 Ma and Fred Barker were killed after a two-hour FBI siege in the little Florida town of Oklawaha.
That year the bureau was officially renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the FBI men had already earned their more famous nickname. Trapped in the bedroom of his Memphis hideout, George ("Machine Gun") Kelly, kidnaper of Oklahoma Oilman Charles Urschel, cowered in a corner with his hands up, begging: "Don't shoot, G-men. Don't shoot."
By 1938 G-man Hoover could say that the day of the gangster was over. His G-men were the new popular heroes, immortalized ever since on the screen and on the air, and on a thousand box tops, bearing the morning cereal to American boys. The pursuers, not the pursued, had become the object of hero worshipers' affections.
Trick Mirror. From gangsters, the FBI graduated to bigger fish. Within 24 hours after 1125 p.m. on Dec 7, 1941, the FBI had put 1,771 enemy aliens behind bars. The FBI scored spectacular wartime coups: arresting ten German saboteurs who landed from submarines along the Atlantic coastline; trapping a 33-man spy ring in Manhattan with the help of movie cameras and a trick mirror. All through the war, FBI agents helped man a radio station which Nazi agents had set up on Long Island, and saw to it that Berlin received just the transmissions the U.S. wanted it to hear.