The display case outside J. Edgar Hoover’s office was not necessarily what President Roosevelt had in mind when he called upon law enforcement to “interpret” the problem of crime. But it was a start, a hint that Hoover was taking notice of the public interest in crime narratives and adjusting his self-presentation accordingly. Another clue came when Hoover began to push for a new name to replace the “Division of Investigation.” Since the end of Prohibition, he had longed to break away from what remained of the Prohibition Bureau—technically a separate entity, but still under the roof of his division. He had also advocated for a renaming, pointing out that other government agencies maintained their own “divisions” of investigation, a source of frequent confusion.
In March 1935, just after completing the move into his new office, he got his wish. For all its later significance, the adoption of the name Federal Bureau of Investigation—FBI—occurred with little fanfare. Many other bureaus went through similar shifts during the 1930s, losing an initial here, gaining another there. As a reconfigured “alphabet agency,” the FBI was little different from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Works Progress Administration (WPA), or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), three-letter agencies born of early New Deal planning.
Still, the name meant a great deal to Hoover and his inner circle, who had toiled for more than a decade to prove themselves different from the tainted Bureau of the past. To them, the name “FBI” provided a long-desired opportunity to draw a line with the past and redefine itself for the dawning age of government public relations. “Those initials also represent the three things for which the Bureau and its representatives always stand: ‘Fidelity-Bravery-Integrity,’” an inspector declared in the Bureau’s in- house magazine.
The press liked the change. “It’s F.B.I. Now,” declared one of Hoover’s favorite reporters, labeling the three-initial formula a “godsend to headline writers.” A new name and a new office only went so far, however. Roosevelt’s larger questions remained: How would the FBI interpret the issue of crime? To come up with an answer, Hoover turned not to Henry Suydam, the Justice Department’s press agent, but to Courtney Ryley Cooper, the circus man turned news reporter who had worked so closely with Hoover in the early 1930s.
In the fall of 1934, just before the crime conference, Cooper had proposed to Hoover that they collaborate on a book: Cooper would write the text and Hoover would write the foreword. Together, they would produce just what the moment called for: a “crime book” that “book-sellers all over America . . . can get behind and push to the limit.”
Coming from anyone else, the offer would certainly have been rejected. Since it came from Cooper, Hoover took a chance and said yes. In contrast to press conferences, where he offered statements and reporters wrote whatever they wanted, the book provided an opportunity for him to put his own stamp on the crime-war narrative, to g
