The United States
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century By Beverly Gage. Viking, 2022, 864 pp.
The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism
By Lerone A. Martin. Princeton University Press, 2023, 352 pp.
Two new books explore the life and times of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was a font of contradictions, posing an unusual challenge for a biographer.
For decades, he was one of the most admired men in the United States, but within a few years of his death became one of its most disgraced. His career at the top of a major government agency spanned an incredible eight presidents—four Republicans and four Democrats—but he was more than just a masterful bureaucrat. He was a skilled leader and an institution builder who virtually created the FBI, modernized and professionalized it, and never gave less than total dedication to his work. On the other hand, his personal life did not come close to meeting the standards he insisted on for the thousands who worked for him. Although he preached devotion to the law, the revelations of the Senate’s Church Committee showed that he freely ignored due process and regularly ordered his agents to commit illegal acts. He was openly racist but was known for many years as a protector of civil liberties. He had many triumphs against gangsters, Nazis, and especially communists, contributing enormously to the country’s security. But when his primary attention turned to the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests, he allowed personal grudges to become obsessions and turned increasingly to sordid acts of secret surveillance, infiltration, manipulation, and distortion, perhaps most egregiously in the case of Martin Luther King, Jr. Gage deftly treads this shifting ground, covering the key events of an unparalleled career and making full use of newly available archival material.
Martin adds an important new aspect to Hoover’s story, also based largely on newly released material,
showing how he played a large role in the rise of conservative, white, male, Christian nationalism—what the FBI director called “Americanism.” The FBI’s purpose, in his words, was to “defend and perpetuate the dignity of the Nation’s Christian endowment.” He used a stable of FBI agents on the public payroll to write and to ghostwrite for him essays that ran as lead articles in Billy Graham’s Christianity Today (a journal whose readership far exceeded that of William F. Buckley’s National Review).These writings were preached, sometimes verbatim, from pulpits. Hoover had them reprinted on Department of Justice letterhead— embossed with the FBI emblem and the notation “Reprinted from Christianity Today,” fusing the three institutions—and distributed by the tens of thousands. Preachers and the public wrote to the FBI for both religious and political guidance, and received answers. In training, FBI agents took a pledge that began, “I shall, as a minister, seek to supply comfort, advice and aid.” Martin argues that the pervasive use of a government agency over many decades to promote this particular brand of evangelicalism has had lasting effects on national politics. It explains in part why evangelical leaders have valued pragmatism and power over morality, and it left the FBI unprepared for the threat that manifested in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Whereas the Department of Homeland Security had recognized “white supremacist extremism” as the chief domestic terrorist threat a year earlier, as a result of the decades under Hoover, “white, Christian nationalism has a home within the FBI.”
The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America By Philip Bump. Viking, 2023, 416 pp.
Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture By Kevin Munger. Columbia University Press, 2022, 216 pp.
Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America By Stephen Bullivant. Oxford University Press, 2022, 272 pp.
Three books chart significant portentous demographic trends underway in the United States. Bump and Munger both deal with the tectonic demographic shift embodied in the departure from the scene of the baby boom generation even as it retains unprecedented political, economic, and cultural power. Bullivant writes about a quite different demographic change, the rapid rise of so-called nonverts, individuals raised in some religion who now identify as having “no religion.” All three authors make a convincing case that the consequences of these shifts are likely to touch most aspects of American life.
Baby boomers, the most dominant generation in American history, were born between 1946 and 1964 and today make up 23 percent of the population. They have passed their peak in terms of raw numbers, but their power continues to grow. Today, they constitute 38 percent of voters and 43 percent of homeowners and own more than 50 percent of the country’s wealth. Among them
are four of the country’s 46 presidents ( Joe Biden is too old to count as a boomer) and 58 percent of members of Congress. (The average age of lawmakers in both houses is currently the oldest in history.) Boomers control all the country’s major institutions (except technology companies), the two main political parties, and the mass media. Boomers are predominantly white, making age and race inseparable factors and a source of confusion in analyses of the changes in progress.
Both Bump and Munger foresee significant generational conflict in coming years with the smaller Generation X population, born between 1965 and 1980, and the much larger cohort of Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996. Bump argues that the discrepancies in wealth and political opinion among them are “simply unsustainable.” Munger emphasizes the tension between the world boomers grew up in and the penetration of revolutionary information technology that “changes all the rules.” Both books include many graphs, some quite complex, some staggering in their impact. Death is certain: beyond that the coming changes can only be sketched. Among the more definite problems ahead is the question of how boomers’ jobs will be filled as the number reaching retirement age peaks near the end of this decade.
Growth or decline in religious observation generally occurs over generations. Something else is occurring in the United States.The increase over the last 30 years of the number of those who have converted from some religion to none—now one in six Americans—is “wholly unprecedented.” Nearly all were brought up in a Christian denomination. “Nones” now account for 30 percent of American adults and 44 percent of those aged 18 to 29.
Why this rapid shift is happening is unknown, as are its likely consequences. It would be odd, Bullivant believes, if a segment of the U.S. “religious market” should suddenly expand so enormously and so rapidly “without it playing havoc” with the areas of American life shaped by religion including, to name a few, family, morality, identity, marriage, sex, race, ethnicity, and community. It should change, as well, the national self-image, from its earliest days, as a “Christian nation.”
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration By Jake Bittle. Simon & Schuster, 2023, 368 pp.
Bittle has overcome the great difficulty in writing about environmental crises: in many cases, the story becomes so depressing that readers turn away in despair. In this valuable, well-written book, which breaks new ground, he seamlessly blends an expert, policy-level treatment of the causes and consequences of the displacement of Americans being driven by climate change with a narrative of the often heart-rending impacts on particular individuals. Although the book’s subtitle uses “migration,” he notes that that word implies an intentional movement from one place to another, whereas what is happening is a diffuse movement in many directions that is unpredictable and chaotic. Driven by fire, floods, and heat, this “shambling retreat from mountain ranges and floodprone riverbeds, back from the oceans, and out of the desert” will “reshape the demographic geography” of the United States, pushing even more Americans
into metropolitan areas, in which around 80 percent of the country already lives (and making the U.S. Senate even less reflective of the country than it already is). The economic impacts beyond the housing market will be felt in enterprises from meatpacking to outdoor theme parks. Bittle shows where government policy and the shortcomings of private markets have made a now unavoidable problem worse, and he addresses some of the changes that need to be made, especially in the mortgage and insurance markets, and the urgent need for a national plan for adapting to (as opposed to slowing) climate change.