When J. Edgar Hoover went to war with rock and roll: “Presley Fan Clubs that degenerate into sex orgies”
The FBI is an organisation that has seen more well-manicured arseholes over the years than Hugh Hefner’s pool parties. However, unlike those parties, culture has often been something the besuited crime-stoppers have struggled to fully grapple with. They spent years investigating the lyrics of ‘Louie Louie’, spurned resources desperately trying to deport John Lennon for nothing much, and just as the unstoppable force of rock ‘n’ roll got moving, J. Edgar Hoover tried to be the immovable object in its path.
Hoover had already been suspicious of the uprising of youth culture shortly after he helped to found the FBI in June 1935. Much of his early work was focused not on crime but on sustaining a level of conservative order. After all, the Great Depression had just hit, and people were questioning the ideals of America. The communist party’s membership numbers were rapidly on the rise, and a lot of it was being driven by the disenfranchised youth.
As a result, Hoover was always cautious. So, when Elvis Presley arrived, saloon doors swinging off their hinges, he vowed to put a stop to the hip-snaking revolution he heralded. As one letter from a former Army Intelligence Service officer reporting back to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover stated in 1956: “[Elvis] a definite danger to the security of the United States.”
Continuing, he said: “[His] actions and motions were such as to arouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. One eye-witness described his actions as ‘sexual self-gratification on stage’ – another as ‘a strip-tease with clothes on’.”
Before very troublingly concluding: “It is known by psychologists, psychiatrists, and priests that teenaged girls from the age of eleven,” which strictly doesn’t even make them teenagers, “and boys in their adolescence are easily aroused to sexual indulgence and perversion by certain types of motions and hysteria – the type that was exhibited at the Presley show. There is also gossip of the Presley Fan Clubs that degenerate into sex orgies. From eye-witness reports about Presley, I would judge that he may possibly be a drug addict and a sexual pervert.”
This makes for wild reading today. Not only is it worded sickeningly like an obverse Lolita fantasist without any of the postmodern subversion, but there is an ignorant face-value take-down certainly not befitting of any official intelligence. If Elvis had truly been looked into, then his patriotism would’ve been instantly apparent.
In fact, when he was invited to FBI headquarters in 1970, the king of rock ‘n’ roll happily shared his belief that “the Smothers Brothers, Jane Fonda, and other persons in the entertainment industry of their ilk had poisoned young minds by disparaging the United States in their public statements and unsavoury activities.”
He had found himself in the headquarters by writing a letter not too dissimilar from the one brandished against him 14 years earlier. That letter reads: “First, I would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley and admire you and have great respect for your office. I talked to Vice President Agnew in Palm Springs three weeks ago and expressed my concern for our country. The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it the establishment. I call it America and I love it. Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out. I have no concern or motives other than helping the country out.”
Elvis’ own transition from transgressor to traditionalist is, in part, evidence of the amount of time Hoover put into manipulating culture wars and alienating the youth movement as something decidedly un-American. This, in essence, is the exact same thing currently unfurling to an even more potent extent. As Bob Dylan: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, Please get out of the new one, If you can’t lend your hand, For the times they are a-changin’.” And if you don’t accept that, then whatever sullying you hurl can quite easily look as stupid as the letter decreeing Elvis as an orgy instigator in the sands of time.
