White was more forgiving of frailty than Hoover was, and he often
tried to shield his men from the boss man’s anger. When Hoover
became inflamed after one of White’s agents failed to use the one-
page format in a report on the Osage murder cases, White told
Hoover, “I feel that I, myself, am altogether to blame for I looked
over this report and gave it my approval.”
Under Hoover, agents were now seen as interchangeable cogs,
like employees in a large corporation. This was a major departure
from traditional policing, where lawmen were typically products of
their own communities. The change helped insulate agents from
local corruption and created a truly national force, yet it also
ignored regional difference and had the dehumanizing effect of
constantly uprooting employees. Speaking only “with the
betterment of the service in mind,” White wrote to Hoover that he
believed an agent who was familiar with a region and its people
was more effective. He noted that one of his agents who had gone
undercover as a Texas cattleman in the Osage case was ideally
suited to working on the frontier—“but put him in Chicago, New
York or Boston and he is almost worthless.” Hoover was unmoved.
As one of his yes-men wrote in a memo, “I do not agree with Mr.
White at all on this matter. An Agent who is only acquainted with
the characteristics of inhabitants of one section of the country had
better get into some other line of work.”
At a makeshift training school in New York, agents were
indoctrinated in the new regulations and methods. (Hoover later
turned the program into a full-fledged academy at Quantico,
Virginia.) Agents were increasingly trained in what Hoover hailed
a s “scientific policing,” such as fingerprint and ballistics
techniques. And they were taught formal rules of evidence
gathering, in order to avoid cases being dropped or stalled, as had
happened with the first Osage investigation.