WI: no J. Edgar Hoover

Hendryk

Banned
In late 1918, a young employee of the US Justice Department named J. Edgar Hoover died of the Spanish flu, one of hundreds of thousands of Americans to be felled by the pandemic.

What next?

Hoover was probably the single most important figure in US law enforcement in the 20th century, and his ideological priorities became to a large extent those of the US law enforcement apparatus as a whole from the 1930s to the 1960s. Let's see what happens without him around.
 
The FBI would stay a small limited power Federal investagating agency with no arrest powers whos only growth path was the Forensics Division. The FBI would continue to run by a handicapped New York attorney Franklin Roosevelt, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and cousin of TR well into the 1940s
 
The FBI would stay a small limited power Federal investagating agency with no arrest powers.

MI5 and the German security service has no arrest powers and I belive they still are powerful. No arrest powers are interesting in it self by the way. It means that they have no duty to arrest either and can ignore crimes making it easier to infiltrate criminal groups.

And I dubt it would have stayed small, with or without Hover. It was a era of expanding federal goverment after all. The only difference is the butterflies. Could they have gone after the mafia earlier? Ignored the communistes? And what would happen when the CIA is founded? Hover was something of a opponent on civil rights grounds none the less. Could CIA have the right to opperate on American soil?
 
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