During debates, he argued against women getting the right to vote and against the abolition of the death penalty. He attended Central High School, where he sang in the school choir, participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, and competed on the debate team. Hoover lived his entire life in Washington, D.C. Two of his siblings did have certificates, but Hoover's was not filed until 1938 when he was 43. Hoover did not have a birth certificate filed upon his birth, although it was required in 1895 in Washington. A stained glass window in the church is dedicated to him. Hoover was born in a house on the present site of Capitol Hill United Methodist Church, located on Seward Square near Eastern Market in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Among his family, he was the closest to his mother, who was their moral guide and disciplinarian. Hoover's maternal great-uncle, John Hitz, was a Swiss honorary consul general to the United States. Dickerson Hoover was of English and German ancestry. Coast and Geodetic Survey, formerly a plate maker for the same organization. John Edgar Hoover was born on New Year's Day 1895 in Washington, D.C., to Anna Marie ( née Scheitlin 1860–1938) and Dickerson Naylor Hoover (1856–1921), chief of the printing division of the U.S. 2.5.5 Plans for suspending habeas corpus.2.5.4 Plans for expanding the FBI to do global intelligence.2.5.1 Florida and Long Island U-boat landings.2.5 Investigation of subversion and radicals.
Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including multiple sitting presidents of the United States. He was found to have routinely violated the very laws the FBI was charged with enforcing, to have used the FBI to harass political dissidents, to amass secret files for blackmailing high level politicians, and to collect evidence using vigilantism and many other illegal methods. Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. Hoover also established and expanded a national blacklist, referred to as the FBI Index or Index List. Hoover built the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and instituted a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States.