nd his original salary of $1200 was increased so that he assumed a substantial part of his parents' support. He was also able to establish a lifestyle that his mother had desired during his childhood. He not only obtained a servant to do the cooking and cleaning; he installed an electric footbell at the dinner table to call her. This along with one of the first private telephone lines in the area was a symbol of his newly achieved status. He constantly upgraded this standard of living whenever possible, usually in a manner accommodating to his mother. After an attempted assassination on the life of Attorney General Palmer, Hoover was named special assistant to the attorney general in charge of "developing and coordinating information to be used to prosecute radicals, both alien and native-born." This brought Hoover directly under the Bureau of Investigation, which was at the core of the antiradical plan. It was at this time that John Edgar Hoover became J. Edgar Hoover that in some form seemed to try and impart grandeur. He was still young at this time, only being twenty-four years old, yet his ability to show great initiative towards the job demonstrated to his superiors what type of person he was. Also his ability to manipulate someone or something to accomplish his task proved that for him the means were not as important as the end. During the "Red round-ups" of 1919 and 1920 Hoover gathered information on 150,000 "undesirables" in the nation. This was partly due to his previous experience with the Library of Congress and its almost endless card catalogue. With it he could undertake the task of collating the information on groups considered to be a danger to the Bureau and to the attorney general. In the end he personally orchestrated the arrests of nearly 3,000 people with his research. Of these 250 aliens were deported back to their home countries, many of which were Russian and one of which was Emma Goldman. While these depor...
