Crime and the Rise of Modern America: A History from 1865-1941

259 Pages·2011·1.671 MB·English

by  Kristofer Allerfeldt

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CRIME AND THE RISE OF
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MODERN AMERICA 6
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Cast in eye-catching headlines, illuminated by the media glow, American crime 8TX
captures the public imagination. From sex crimes to political corruption, from 9
hate crimes to terrorism, the way people break the law shapes national identity. 20
But this is not a new phenomenon, nor one limited to the present day. 1
In his book Crime and the Rise of Modern America, Kristofer Allerfeldt studies 2
the crimes, criminals, and law enforcement that contributed to a uniquely 3
American system of crime and punishment from the end of the Civil War to the 4
eve of World War II to understand how the rapidly-changing technology of 5
transportation, media, and incarceration affected the criminal underworld. 6
In eleven thematic chapters, Crime and the Rise of Modern America turns to the 7
outlaws of the iconic West and the illegal distilleries of Prohibition, the turn-of- 8
the-century immigrants, and the conmen who preyed on the people of the 9
Promised Land, to examine how crime and America both changed, defi ning each 30
other. 1
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Kristofer Allerfeldt is a lecturer at the University of Exeter where he teaches 3
diverse American social and diplomatic history courses. 4
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CRIME AND THE RISE 4
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OF MODERN
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AMERICA 9
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A History from 1865–1941 3x
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Kristofer Allerfeldt
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8TX First published 2011
by Routledge
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270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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by Routledge
2 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
3 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
4 © 2011 Taylor & Francis
5 The right of Kristofer Allerfeldt to be identifi ed as author of this work has
6 been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by
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Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
9 Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by
30 Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO
1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
3 any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
4 from the publishers.
5 Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation
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without intent to infringe.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
8 A catalog record has been requested for this book
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ISBN13: 978–0–415–80044–0 (hbk)
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ISBN13: 978–0–415–80045–7 (pbk)
41 ISBN13: 978–0–203–83032–1 (ebk)
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To Matilda and Frederika Allerfeldt, because I love them.
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CONTENTS
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Introduction 1 8TX
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1 The Crimes of the Century 7
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2 Crime and the West 28
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3 Hate Crime 43
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4 Policing and Imprisonment 59 5
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5 Conmen, Swindlers, and Dupes 78 7
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6 Business and Financial Crime 90 9
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7 Prohibitions 115
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8 Sex Crime 142
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9 Political Crime: Scandal, Sleaze, and Corruption 164
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10 Terrorists: Rebels, Radicals and Freedom Fighters, and
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Criminals with a Cause 184
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11 Immigration and Crime 201 9
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Notes 220 41
Index 243 42
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INTRODUCTION
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It is almost unimaginable that an account of contemporary America would not 8TX
deal with crime. It seems that America is obsessed with crime. Perhaps it commits 9
more crime than any other state—it certainly imprisons more of its population 20
than anywhere else. Americans obsess about crime with their television and in 1
their fi lms. It dominates the newspapers, and forms a recurrent theme in plays. 2
Crime has an entire genre dedicated to itself in novels. It could be argued that so 3
many famous American icons are connected with crime—the western sheriff, the 4
gangster and his moll, Alcatraz, the electric chair, or the hard-boiled detective— 5
that it is perhaps fair to say that crime and criminals could make as a good a 6
defi nition of modern America and contemporary American-ness as any other. 7
It seems like the public will never tire of accounts of spectacular crimes like 8
Bernie Madoff’s colossal swindles and there is an endless analysis of sensational trials 9
like the O.J. Simpson case. There are also the biographies of major criminals. The lives 30
of Jeffrey Dahmer and Jim Jones, for example, will no doubt provide material for 1
biographers for years to come, and are equally certain to attract huge readerships. 2
Fictional criminals, detectives and prison dramas consistently form one of the most 3
popular genres in the bestsellers lists. But it is not as if contemporary, or recent, 4
criminals are unique in their appeal. A quick scan of Amazon.com would show that 5
the lives of Al Capone and Jesse James are perhaps of even more interest than the 6
criminals of recent years and it will also reveal that the novels of such writers as Edgar 7
Alan Poe, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler remain perennially popular. 8
Given this enduring obsession with criminality it is hardly surprising that the 9
history of crime is also a popular genre. There are, for example, countless accounts 40
of the growth of the Mafi a, the impact of Prohibition, the horrors of lynching or 41
the reality of the Wild West. Some of these are well-researched and accurate 42
historical works. Others are less rigorous in their methodology and approach. 43x
2 Introduction
1 Whatever their individual value, there is also another problem with the vast
2 majority of these accounts. Few give a summary of crime across a period as a
3 whole. They are often limited in scope, both geographically and temporally. They
4 may examine John Dillinger in the context of the War on Crime in the Mid-West,
5 or Al Capone in relation to years of Prohibition.
6 Accounts that give a long-term overview, such as those available to, say, the
7 military or immigration historian, are very rare and more often than not limited to
8 purely factual encyclopaedias with little or no analysis or context. There are some
9 very notable exceptions, like Timothy Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale or Charles van
10 Onselen’s The Fox and the Flies.1 Both of these extraordinary books focus on an
1 individual criminal—which necessarily limits the time-span—but unusually they
2 use him (in each case it is a male) to explore the wider world in which he moved
3x as well as the wider nature of his criminality. Both are analysed in fascinating depth.
4 It could be argued that there are a variety of reasons for this void, and two
5 stand out. First, in order to cover this vast subject, such an undertaking would have
6 to either give cursory coverage of all aspects of crime, or it would be edited to an
7 extent whereby it excluded vast amounts of material. Either way it would run the
8TX risk of losing its purpose. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it could be asked,
9 why would such a volume be necessary? Surely if there was a necessity for such a
20 book, then someone would have already produced it. Perhaps it has not been
1 done because it cannot be done satisfactorily.
2 The way in which this volume attempts to overcome these two problems is to
3 take a defi ned period and a tried and tested structure. The period chosen is that
4 during which America rose from a war-weary and divided second-rate nation, to
5 being the most powerful economic and industrial power in the world. This period,
6 from the end of the Civil War in 1865 through to the bombing of Pearl Harbor
7 in 1941, has been called the birth of Modern America. It covers a wide variety of
8 periods of American history, from Reconstruction, through to the Gilded Age, the
9 Progressive Era, the 1920s and the New Deal. It not only sees the massive expan-
30 sion of the economy, but also the Federal Government, the population, the terri-
1 tory (both within its own continent and abroad) and, by the end, the military. It
2 also sees a huge expansion in crime.
3 Just as America became obsessed during this period with a culture of “bigness”
4 in everyday life—from skyscrapers and other engineering projects to accumula-
5 tions of wealth and food portion sizes—so America began to outdo other nations
6 in crime. Americans swindled each other and foreigners out of more money, with
7 the Credit Mobilier scandal (see Chapter 2) and the Ponzi scheme (see Chapter 1).
8 American murderers killed more. This was the period of the fi rst recorded “serial
9 killer”—H.H. Holmes who stalked and murdered young women at the Chicago’s
40 World Fair. Americans fêted their criminals—from Jesse James to Bonnie and
41 Clyde—in a far more overt fashion than, say, France or Britain. During this period
42 America had crime lords, fi gures like Joe Colisimo, Frank Nitti, and Arnold
43x Rothstein, who ruled whole criminal empires and seemed untouchable. Not only
Introduction 3
were American criminals more powerful than those of other nations but they were 1
also somehow more sinister, like the Molly Maguires, the Black Hand, and the 2
Mafi a (see Chapter 5). 3
Perhaps more than any other period in any comparable state, Americans incor- 4
porated crime into their culture. Young men imitated or joined violent urban 5
gangs like the Plug Uglies and dressed in uniforms which displayed their alle- 6
giances. As the twentieth century progressed, these gave way to the “mobs,” 7
“outfi ts” and “syndicates” as gangsters adopted the creed of modernization and 8
collectivized. Nor was such behavior limited to the “criminal classes.” By the 9
1920s, even non-gang members had adopted the patois of the underworld, talking 10
of “heaters,” “stools,” and “the slammer,” and imitated the gangsters’ casual misogyny 1
and disregard for the law. Perhaps as a result of this, during these years Americans 2
were encouraged to idolize their policemen and detectives, with papers running 3x
articles on characters from the brutal Clubber Williams to the meticulous J. Edgar 4
Hoover and the incorruptible Eliot Ness. Young men wanted to grow up to be 5
fearless sheriffs or granite-jawed FBI G-men who caught, imprisoned, or shot the 6
wrongdoers with a combination of moral certainty and sang-froid. 7
As if to show the success of these agents, the nation’s prison population grew 8TX
fi vefold as a proportion of the population, and prisons became household names. 9
Few Americans would not have recognized Alcatraz, Sing Sing or the Tombs. 20
Further, throughout these years, America was outraged by new types of criminals. 1
There was the crazed Negro cocaine fi end, the White Slaver, the juvenile delin- 2
quent, the psychopath, the serial killer and the white-collar criminal. It seemed 3
that each year the threat posed by crime grew ever greater, in its frequency, prox- 4
imity and ruthlessness. In part, this was no doubt the result of more sophisticated 5
methods of categorization, policing and detection. In part, it was probably down 6
to a growing intolerance of anti-social, malicious or dangerous behavior. It also 7
owed much to the explosion in the news media. Starting with the mass-circula- 8
tion newspapers in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the hunger for 9
readers created a thirst for ever more sensational, gruesome and extraordinary 30
crimes which sold copy and fed the hyperbole of the headlines. 1
If crime as a concept became far more widespread in America over these years, 2
it also represents a very good way of interpreting the period. After all, the divisions 3
generally used by historians fi t happily with such an interpretation, and it is simple 4
to map crimes directly on to these divisions. The Reconstruction Era, with its 5
cowing of the South’s black population back to a state of submissiveness little 6
better than the slavery they had so recently left, is surely one of the most blatant 7
representations of the hate crime. Similarly, the Gilded Age, with its winner-take- 8
all capitalism, its monopolies and swindles, can be explained and illuminated by 9
examining not only the fi gures who broke the existing laws, but also those who 40
led to its being changed as well as those who got clean away. 41
When the twentieth century opened and the Progressivism became the domi- 42
nant force in politics, these disparate Christian, urban reformers brought with 43x
4 Introduction
1 them a moralizing, centralizing urge. Few of their actions demonstrate the essence
2 of the era named after them better than their criminalization of what they consid-
3 ered immoral—prostitution, narcotics, gambling and, eventually, booze. Few
4 fi gures fi t the Dollar Decade of the 1920s better than the criminal fraternity. With
5 Capone, Nitti and Rothstein, crime, like most other aspects of American life was
6 syndicated and dominated by the quest for fortune. What could illustrate this
7 better than the corruption in America’s national sport, baseball, or the huge
8 fortunes made from rum running? When the seemingly inevitable crash came, the
9 excesses of the 1920s seemed unattainable. Many of those who lost everything lost
10 faith in the law and even those who did not resort to crime respected many of
1 those who did. In the atavistic times of Depression America, the new breed of
2 motorized bandit was glamorized. Figures like John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow
3x were seen as emblematic of a simpler, self-reliant, more individual lifestyle, one
4 which had disappeared with the change of the nation’s fortunes.
5 Of course, these examples are simplifi ed and generalized, but such overviews
6 enable a clear view of how crime both changed America and refl ected other
7 changes taking place in American society. Crime can be seen not only as both an
8TX exemplar and as a catalyst, but also as an indicator of things to come. It is in this
9 period that so much of contemporary America is shaped. Giants like Lincoln,
20 Wilson and the Roosevelts illuminated the course of America’s philosophical and
1 political mission(s), just as fi gures like Rockefeller, Morgan and Mellon laid the
2 foundations of the hitherto unseen economic power to achieve those goals. This
3 period leaves other legacies, and many of them are tied to crime, and analysis of
4 these not only can help us understand the period of this study, but also the roots
5 of many of the criminal problems of our own times.
6 Perhaps most notoriously, it is in 1914 that America passes the Harrison
7 Narcotics Act, which, by criminalizing the narcotics trade, has arguably done
8 more to shape contemporary America than any other single piece of legislation.
9 This Act set up the mentality which would dictate contemporary America’s rela-
30 tions with many of its neighbors and other nations associated with the drugs trade.
1 It led, for example, to such schemes as the 2009 Merida Initiative, under which
2 the US government pledged $1.6 billion to combat the drugs trade through mili-
3 tary and judicial means in Mexico and Central America. Alongside this was the
4 earlier and on-going Plan Columbia, under which America is committed to
5 fi ghting not only the cocaine trade but also the FARC guerrillas associated with
6 it. It is the huge profi ts from the drugs trade—which, many would argue, is the
7 result of the continuing of the American campaign against their international
8 trade—which fi nanced, and continues to fi nance, many of the enemies of the
9 United States from Nicaragua’s Contras to Al Qaeda.
40 Nor is it only abroad that the reverberations of the Harrison Act’s prohibitions
41 have been felt. At home, the economic and human costs have been enormous.
42 Founded in 1971 as a part of Nixon’s War on Drugs initiative, by 2007, the Drug
43x Enforcement Agency employed over 10,500, nearly half of whom were fi eld agents,