Wanted Women: An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover by Mary Elizabeth Strunk, and: The FBI and the Catholic Church by Steve Rosswurm (review)

Abstract

WANTED WOMEN: An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover. By Mary Elizabeth Strunk. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2010.THE FBI AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. By Steve Rosswurm. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2009.Steve Rosswurm and Mary Elizabeth Strunk share a common scholarly agenda. Until recent decades, historians and journalists largely depicted former FBI director J. Edgar as a scourge of American democracy, relying on once-secret Bureau files to reveal the depths of his subterfuge. Rosswurm and Strunk, by contrast, seek to understand Hoover's public influence as a religious moralizer and cultural mythmaker. Following the lead of historians such as Richard Gid Powers and Claire Potter, these two scholars aim less to expose Hoover's FBI than to explore the contradictions of its cultural legacy, especially on the subject of gender.As journalist Tom Wicker famously noted in the 1970s, wielded more power, longer, than any man in American history-48 years as FBI director. Part of that bureaucratic success, Rosswurm and Strunk suggest, lay in Hoover's ability to crafta widely recognized public image as a masculine, conservative, law-and-order crusader. Strunk explores this development through the popular media, dissecting film and pulp magazine depictions of female outlaws in the 1930s and 1970s. Rosswurm adopts a more institutional approach, delving into the FBI's internal culture of Catholic conservatism and its external ties to the anticommunist wings of the Catholic church. Both conclude that the homosocial and aggressively gendered culture of Hoover's FBI had a significant influence on how Americans thought about crime, family, and politics in the middle decades of the 20th century. If an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man, they suggest, then American culture is in part the shadow of an institution.Despite Strunk's subtitle-An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover-the FBI plays a significant role only in the first half of her book. The opening three chapters focus on the 1930s, emphasizing Hoover's distaste for female criminals as dirty, filthy, diseased women (31). As Strunk points out, exhibited an almost pathological interest in female deviance during these years, blaming seductive and venal gun molls for luring otherwise innocent men into crime. He found a receptive audience in the decade's emerging Hollywood culture, which established both the upright G-Man and the beautiful but dangerous female gangster as cinematic types.In the book's second half, Strunk leaves behind the reign of J. Edgar Hoover to examine female outlaws whose notoriety post-dated the director's 1972 death. By contrast with the earlier chapters, the subjects here are political radicals: kidnapped-heiress-turned-revolutionary Patty Hearst; her onetime compatriot Kathleen Soliah, unearthed by the FBI in 1999 as Minnesota housewife Sara Jane Olsen; and Black Panther activist Assata Shakur, who escaped from prison in 1979 and was last seen living in Cuba. Wanted Women provides an engaging account of the 1970s' strange cultural brew, with its simultaneous romanticization and condemnation of revolutionary politics. …