J Edgar Hoover Button

J Edgar Hoover creepy button. Hoover held control of the FBI for 48 years. An amazing thing to think about. That much control; that much power for that long. This is just a little blend of history with the great Orwell dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hoover seemed to fit right in both worlds, so we made an INGSOC propaganda poster that looks as if it were wheat-pasted on the side of some building generations ago. Torn, distorted, and distressed through the natural decay of time, the paper matches the harsh, menacing glare of Hoover's portrait. (We even added stains to it from some rebellious pleb that tossed a drink at the poster.) As Time magazine put it in 1975: "The fact that such a man could acquire and keep that kind of power raises disturbing questions not merely about the role of a national police in a democracy, but also about the political system that tolerated him for so long.) Illustration by Dan McCall.