Cheers to Crime
The Position of the Underworld in American Society in the
Roaring Twenties
A dead body found in a Chicago speakeasy (circa 1920) Source: www.pbs.org
Hester Martin
MA Thesis American Studies Faculty of Humanities
University of Amsterdam, June 2014 6045219
hester.martin@student.uva.nl Advisor Dr. Jochem Riesthuis Second Reader Dr. George Blaustein
Contents
Introduction 3
A Shortcut to a Dry Utopia 4
The Bootlegger Training School 9
Discontent with Prohibition 11
1 A Tradition of Organization 17
The Nineteenth Century 18
Corruption 20
Changing Criminal Structures 23
Statistics 25
The Coincidental Creation of Crime 27
Shaping Public Opinion 30
2 Science of Crime 33
Early Criminology 35
Differential Association 38
Criminology in the 1920s 40
Scientific View on Gangs 42
3 Crime and Culture 45
The Hard-Boiled Detective 45
Black Mask Magazine 48
Sam Spade and Race Williams 49
The Silver Screen 54
Real Gangsters and Movie Gangsters 55
Bull Weed 56
A Turning Point 59
Conclusion 62
Introduction
The 1920s were roaring for a reason. It was the age of Jazz, Charlie Chaplin, Disney’s
Steamboat Willie –the first animation with sound- and influential writers such as Sinclair
Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Culture was not the only thing that flourished in the 1920s, it was also the decade in which Henry Ford introduced his Model T, and Charles Lindbergh was the first to make a nonstop flight across the Atlantic. Yet it was also the period of the Eighteenth Amendment, banning alcohol consumption nationwide. This measure was called Prohibition, and many academics, then and now, believe that it served as a catalyst for crime, bringing the criminal underworld into the ‘upper world’1 –the world in which law-abiding Americans lived. Crime had been a factor in American life for a long time, but with the enforcement of national sobriety a whole new enterprise opened up to criminals, as dealing in illegally distilled or smuggled liquor turned out to be a very lucrative business.
While there are many fascinating aspects of the Roaring Twenties that are worth looking into, this thesis will focus on the aspects of an increase in lawlessness on the one hand, and stricter law enforcement on the other. Whereas crime had always been under the radar, the twenties were an era in which the line between a law-abiding citizen and a criminal became very thin. It was a decade in which crime was hard to ignore as it was prominently featured in newspapers, magazines, and movies. Various circumstances contributed to this phenomenon. The media, as mentioned above, played a crucial part, but the new restrictive Prohibition laws should be taken into consideration as well. The underworld, “an area of life and activity characterized by the absence of the ordinary conventions and largely given over to predatory activities and the exploitation of the baser human appetites and passions,”2 played an essential role. As I will present, America had known a form of organized crime prior to Prohibition, but because the underworld became a supplier to the legal upper world, these worlds to a certain extent started to fuse. This created a sense of lawlessness as well and placed a dilemma of how to deal with this.
In this thesis I will answer the following question: How did America of the 1920s cope with the fusion of the criminal underworld and the legal upper world, and how did this affect American society? Before looking into this, it is essential to understand that the twenties in terms of crime were not supposed to be roaring at all. The era actually commenced with ideas to improve society by taking away one of the allegedly most dangerous elements: alcohol.
1 The word ‘underworld’ does not officially have an antonym. ‘Upper world,’ however, suggests the opposite
and is the word I will use to describe the legal world.
A Shortcut to a Dry Utopia
Prohibition started on January 17, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect. The amendment stated that “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purpose” was prohibited.3 In other words, from now on alcohol consumption was banned, the nation had to go dry and Americans were forced to sober up. The National Prohibition Act, more commonly known as the Volstead Act, intended to implement the objectives of the Eighteenth Amendment .
The idea behind this enforcement of nationwide sobriety was that banning liquor consumption would instantly reduce crime and corruption. It was believed, moreover, that it would solve social problems and relieve the taxpayer by reducing the need for prisons and poorhouses. Additionally, it would improve health and hygiene.4 In practice, it turned out to be an illusion that an entire nation would abide such a restrictive law: right after the
enforcement of Prohibition less people were arrested for drunkenness than in the years before, but as the table below demonstrates, the consumption during Prohibition increased
significantly.5
Table 1
The Consumption of Spirits 1920 to 1929
Year Estimate of consumption of spirits, per gallon, per capita 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 .15 .38 .72 .93 .93 .94 .98 1.02 1.10 1.04
Source: C. Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition (1932) 102.
Even though alcohol consumption was illegal, people did find ways to consume liquor, which was most likely provided by underworld figures. As presented in the table above, the year
3 The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, section 1, 1920.
4 M. Thornton, ‘Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure’, Cato Institute Policy Analysis, No. 157 (1991) 1. 5 E. Sutherland, Criminology (Philadelphia 1924) 43.
Prohibition was initiated, the consumption on spirits was the lowest, but this consumption steadily increased to almost a 100 percent of its initial number in 1928.
But why was such an immensely restricting measure called for in the first place? Prohibition did not emerge out of the blue; the United States had a long history of
Temperance and abstinence movements, along with a culture of drinking. For instance, in 1821 Harvard professor George Ticknor explained to Thomas Jefferson that if people would keep consuming alcohol the way they were doing -seven gallons of pure alcohol per person a year- “We should be hardly better than a nation of sots.”6 Therefore, it is not surprising that temperance and moderation sentiments arose, despite a long tradition of alcohol
consumption.7
That anti-alcohol sentiments arose more strongly in the second half of the nineteenth century can partly be ascribed to the emergence of feminist movements. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), for instance, advocated abstinence. Their desire for prohibition derived from an approach that had a lot to do with men’s cultural dominance. Women had a different approach to liquor than men, because they were the ones who fell victim to their husband’s alcohol consumption habits, as Jed Dannenbaum points out in his article “The Origins of Temperance Activism and Militancy among American Women”:
The Crusade and the WCTU have been viewed as symbolic reassertions of cultural dominance: indications of moral anxiety generated by Reconstruction era corruption; disguised attacks on male culture and expressions of anti-male feelings; responses to the decline of the importance of the family and the woman’s place within it; and opportunities for women to exercise power, to make men and communities do what they wanted, under the protective cover of an altruistic and religious movement.8 Another influential body was the Anti Saloon League (ASL), established in 1893, with a protestant foundation. The ASL was especially important because it was one of the first American pressure groups that was able to develop tactics and create a force that was necessary to rewrite the Constitution in 1920. What made the ASL effective was their focus and the way they were able to intimidate.9 The league did not aim at improving the world (as
6 D. Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York 2010) 9. 7 Okrent, Last Call, 7.
8 J. Dannenbaum, “The Origins of Temperance Activism and Militancy among American Women,” in: Journal
of Social History, vol. 15 (1981) 235-252, 235.
WCTU in a sense tried to do by concentrating on women), “they cared only about alcohol, and about freeing the nation from its grip,” and because of this, they were almost militant in their approach.10
The next step for the movements was to become politically active and not only advocate prohibition, but also try to enforce it nationwide. As a result, the dry movement activists called for the imposition of new income taxes. These income taxes would provide the income the government would need to compensate the loss of the income generated by the enormous taxes imposed on alcohol that would eventually make the alcohol trade collapse.11 In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment that empowered Congress to levy taxes was passed. The ASL described this as “The Next and Final Step” and commented that:
The chief cry against national prohibition has been that the government must have the revenue … The adoption of the Income Tax Amendment to the Federal Constitution furnishes an answer to the revenue problem … National prohibition can be secured through the adoption of a Constitutional Amendment.12
In the build-up to Prohibition, United States’ participation in World War I also played an important role. Because of the war, the country got accustomed to drastic legislation that bestowed new and wider powers upon the Federal Government. The war made it necessary to save food for rationing and made prohibition a patriotic manifestation. 1920s historian
Frederick Lewis Allen argues in Only Yesterday, an Informal History of the Nineteen
Twenties (1931) that the war created a mood of Spartan idealism that the Eighteenth
Amendment eventually would represent:
The American people were seeing Utopian visions; if it seemed possible to them that the war should end all wars and that victory should bring a new and shining world order, how much easier to imagine that America might enter an endless era of efficient sobriety! And finally the war made them impatient for immediate results: in 1917 and 1918, whatever was worth doing at all was worth doing at once, regardless of red tape, counter-arguments, comfort, or convenience. The combination of these various forces
10 Okrent, Last Call, 36. 11 Ibid, 56-57.
was irresistible. Fervently and with headlong haste the nation took the short cut to a dry Utopia.13
According to Allen, “The country accepted [Prohibition] not only willingly, but almost absent mindedly.”14 He points out that it only took thirteen hours of debate to get the Eighteenth Amendment passed before the Senate in 1917. The House of Representatives accepted it a couple of months later. It is thus remarkable that although the Eighteenth Amendment passed so easily, people turned against it as soon as it was implemented.
Not only did the war centralize authority in Washington and made it urgent to save agricultural products, it also gave way to anti German sentiments.15 As a consequence, people turned against big breweries and distilleries since many of them were owned by people of German origin. Within the Prohibition debate, race and ethnicity played an important role. Prohibition in the South, for instance, was seen as a means to keep “the Negro sober and in his place,” as some of the Southern states initially saw Prohibition as a measure against blacks.16 White Americans backed Prohibition because they hoped it would boost their status in the light of the ongoing cultural challenges that were posed by racial threats, immigration and urbanization. Drys, as the proponents of prohibition were called, did not like foreignness: “Many of the same progressives who battled the big-city political organizations, campaigned against the saloon, and supported labor unions also embraced the cause of immigration restriction.”17 In some Southern states, where over 99 percent of the population was native-born, these sentiments prevailed especially. For instance, it was during this time that in Atlanta the Ku Klux Klan was founded: “The Klan, which supported woman suffrage on behalf of Prohibition, in turn supported Prohibition as a weapon against the immigrants.”18
Prohibition was thus not only seen as a measure to control crime. The law that went into effect in 1920 was advocated by organizations that had a very paternalistic approach in the way they tried to control human behavior. This fits into the ideas of Progressivism (1890s-1920s). According to Richard Hofstadter, the Progressive movement tried to
Restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great
13 Okrent, Last Call,, 247.
14 F.L. Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties (1931) 246.
15J. Mennell, ‘Prohibition: A Sociological View’ in: Journal of American Studies, vol. 3 (1969) 170. 16 Mennell, 169.
17 Okrent, Last Call, 87-88. 18 Ibid, 86.
corporation and the corrupt political machine; and with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was also believed to have been lost.19
This idea of Progressivism in a way may have nurtured the motivating forces behind Prohibition. Prohibition’s goal was not to solve crime or to ban it as a whole; it was just thought that Prohibition would create obedient citizens by taking a dangerous element like alcohol out of society. A song written by American songwriter Albert Von Tilzer (1878-1956) called “I Never Knew I Had a Wonderful Wife Until the Town Went Dry” illustrates this ideal society that people believed would arise because of Prohibition:
Jonesy used to roam, stayed away from home,
He’d go out with the boys and leave his wifie all alone, But when the town went dry, Jones began to cry, "With no cafes or cabarets, I know I’m going to die." …
Jones began to stay, ‘round the house all day,
His wifie wondered what it was that made him act that way. He’d run out to the store, help her scrub the floor,
He’d hug her and he’d love her like he never did before. His friends thought he was crazy, they told him that he was, But Jones said if I’m crazy then I’m satisfied because
I never knew I had a wonderful wife until the town went dry. I used to make excuses and go out to the club,
And when I think of what I missed I knew I’ve been a dub.20
The main character, Jonesy, was never home with his wife. He spent all his time drinking in bars and the WCTU and ASL considered him a bad husband. Jonesy did not believe in Prohibition until it was enforced: all of a sudden he stayed at home and helped his wife and showed her he could be a proper husband. From a dry perspective, the song shows how
19 R. Hofstadter, Age of Reform (1955) 9.
Prohibition will stop the misery alcohol consumption causes and how it will create better civilians and a better domestic environment.
“The Lips that Touch Liquor, Shall Never Touch Mine,” Songbook by Geo T. Evans, (San Francisco 1878)
Source Library of Congress.
Both the Von Tilzer song as the image above that shows the front cover of a Temperance songbook illustrate the Temperance movement’s move into popular culture. The movement not only advocated temperance and abstinence directly, but also used music to gain ground.
The Bootlegger Training School
The police force that was responsible for the enforcement of the anti-alcohol laws was highly understaffed. In 1920 there were only 1,520 prohibition agents and as late as 1930 the force numbered only 2,836. If this force were to protect the coast lines and borders, and would not take any heed of any other illicit stills or illegal alcohol related activities within the United States borders, there would still have been only one agent to patrol every twelve miles of
10 shore and border.21 Moreover, the agents only earned between thirty and fifty dollars a week (2,400 dollars a year)22 which is far less than smugglers and bootleggers would offer them as a bribe. Being an honest agent thus required quite some perseverance and commitment to the cause.23
Prohibition Officers Raiding Lunchroom, 25 April 1923 Source Library of Congress.
Despite being understaffed and to a certain extent corrupt the Prohibition agents did
confiscate illegal liquor, like in the photograph above. Photographs like this can be found in many archives. Most likely these images were used to boost the agents’ image and send a message that Prohibition agents are active to track down illegal booze.
The Prohibition Bureau was a branch of the Treasury Department. The Bureau became notorious for employing agents on the basis of political patronage. Moreover, quite a few agents were untrained or simply unfit. The Bureau seemed incompetent and corrupt and had a record number of 30 agents killed in 1923. Not only were the agents murdered, the agents themselves were known to kill hundreds of innocent civilians. Andrew Mellon’s motives, who was the head of the Bureau, were quite dubious as well as he had invested millions of dollars
21 Allen, Only Yesterday, 250.
22 “Only Colored Man Appointed Prohibition Agent,” in: Cleveland Advocate (1920). 23 Allen, Only Yesterday, 250.
in the liquor trade just before Prohibition went into effect and is not very likely to have had much interest in enforcing the new laws.24 Instead, “the bureau was viewed as a training school for bootleggers because agents frequently left the service to join their wealthy adversaries.” 25
It was not only a matter of enforcing Prohibition legally, but also a task to keep Washington in line. It was not a problem for the Drys to control Congress, since the ASL had seized control of both House and Senate already in 1916 and had only tightened it since. The president, however, was another story. President Harding, who was only in office from 1921 till 1923, was a notorious drinker and apparently kept a stash of liquor in the White House. It is said that Harding and his administration were corrupt when it came to Prohibition, as the Department of Justice sold whisky that was confiscated by the government to bootleggers.26 Gangsters during the 1920s could violate the law because local and state police were not capable to maintain law and order. Sometimes this was the case because they simply lacked recourses or skills, but also because of their corruptness. Corruption became common as soon as Prohibition was enforced. Bootleggers who tried to smuggle liquor, had to pay federal, state, and local police for protection.27 However, the Bureau of Investigation, especially under directorship of J. Edgar Hoover from 1924 until 1972, tried to bring down organized crime and lock up all members engaged in it.
As the force of Prohibition agents was not very strong, the Bureau of Investigation started to gain ground. With the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, crime increased significantly. This was not only crime related to liquor, but an unprecedented wave of bank robberies and kidnappings also occurred. The impact of the Bureau of Investigation was quite significant. Their agents were referred to as G-man, and it was believed that they, unlike state and local police were able to protect the citizenry from all those violent and dangerous criminals.
Discontent with Prohibition
Initially the public did not seem to care too much about the ‘crime wave’ that took off during the first couple of years of Prohibition. Instead, “a general tolerance of the bootlegger and a disrespect for federal law were translated into a widespread contempt for the processes and
24 H. Abadinsky, Organized Crime (Chicago 1985) 90. 25 Abadinsky, Organized Crime, 90.
26 T. Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York 2012) 51-52.
duties of democracy.”28 The provision of alcohol became a public service; despite being prohibited it could not be regulated by law. This means that the gangsters and bootleggers had to find ways of their own to create a set of rules. Walter Lippmann gives a good overview of this in his 1931 Forum essay titled “The Underworld, Our Secret Servant:”
The liquor industry has not only to break down the prohibition law… it has to break down officers of the law by bribery; it ends by settling its own disputes, since it is outlawed from the courts, by coercion and murder. This whole fabric of systematic lawlessness rests on the fact that respectable society has driven outside the boundaries of its own law and order the merchant of liquor whom it continues to patronize.29 With the start of Prohibition in 1920, the image of the gangster changed significantly. He gained respect and was able to acquire great wealth with bootlegging: “For the gangster, Prohibition violation meant money; and money bought happiness. This happiness came in the form of social acceptance and enormous political influence.”30
The Monmouth County Library Headquarters in Manalapan, New Jersey, set up an exhibition on Prohibition in New Jersey in 2003. In their archives I found a couple of cartoons that perfectly illustrate the attitude towards Prohibition shared by many Americans at that time. The first cartoon, “No Team Work,” made in the first year of Prohibition, shows Uncle Sam who is overwhelmed by all the bootleg liquor while the ‘Wet State and Town Officials’ (the man on the left), do not provide Uncle Sam with any help, showing the corruption and the drifting apart of local politicians and the rest of the Federal Government.31
28 A. Sinclair in: H. Abadinsky, Organized Crime, 90.
29 W. Lippmann, “The Underworld, Our Secret Servant,” in: The Forum (1931) 3.
30 W. Moquin and C. Van Doren, The American Way of Crime: A Documentary History (New York 1976) 108. 31 “No Team Work,” in: Trenton Evening Times (August 24, 1920).
“No Team Work,”
Source: Trenton Evening Times (August 24, 1920)
The second cartoon, “Some People Are Like That,” made in 1929, also shows the discontent with Prohibition. The cartoon shows an oblivious Prohibition proponent who does not seem to realize how the evils of crime and bribery arise out of Prohibition, which he compares to a disgusting swamp.32
Some People Are Like That,” Source: Trenton Evening Times (July 5, 1929)
These cartoons show the public’s rejection of Prohibition. From the start people seemed to turn against it, even though it was a law that was voted for. It is not surprising that people did not like Prohibition and turned to illegality: in the blink of an eye, something that had always been allowed became illegal.
In 1933 Prohibition and the Volstead Act were repealed in the Twenty-First Amendment. This meant that alcohol consumption was no longer illegal. Al Capone commented on the 1920s era of lawlessness in March 1930 to a Chicago Tribune reporter:
All I ever did is sell beer and whiskey to our best people. . . . They talk about me not being on the legitimate. Why, lady, nobody's on the legit. You know that, and so do they. Your brother or your father gets in a jam. What do you do? Do you sit back and
let him go over the road, without trying to help him? You'd be a yellow dog if you did. Nobody's really on the legit, when it comes down to cases; you know that.33
Capone argues that “nobody’s really on the legit,” since the underworld and upper world both needed and used each other in the 1920s. In order to answer the question why the American upper world started to accept the fact that the underworld was present in their lives and that both worlds started to participate in each other’s and how this affected society, I will first look at the criminal situation in the United States in and prior to the 1920s and the forces that changed the outlook on crime. Secondly, I will look at 1920s scientists who created new standards for crime during the 1920s and I will question whether their new vision on crime fully covers the (criminal) events that are taking place simultaneously. Finally I will look at the cultural aspects of crime and determine how crime in movies and magazines was portrayed.
The first chapter, ‘An Established Practice of Organization’ will provide a historical overview of crime in the United States prior to 1920, and during the 1920s decade. Many academics argue that organized crime did not exist before the 1920s. I will, however,
demonstrate that forms of organized crime already existed in the nineteenth century that can be seen as foundations of organized crime syndicates that emerged in the 1920s. Moreover, this chapter will discuss the relation of organized crime and Prohibition, and how Prohibition can be seen as an unforeseen catalyst of crime.
The second chapter, ‘Science of Crime,’ will look at the changing perspectives within the scientific criminological field. Whereas criminologists prior to 1920 believed that a criminal could be distinguished from a ‘normal’ citizen by looking at certain aesthetic features, or at his descent, in the 1920s new theories emerged. Especially sociologists and criminologists of the Chicago School of Sociology came up with pioneering ideas. Crime was once more defined and the idea that there was a criminal type was rejected: criminals were a product of their surroundings and therefore crime was subject to environment. This chapter will also look at the theory that environment played a crucial role in crime and how this works in relation to organized crime.
Finally, the third chapter, ‘Crime and Culture,’ will look at the way crime was presented in the 1920s in crime magazines and movies. The immense popularity of fictional crime altered the way people looked at criminals and gangsters. These criminals were
33 D. McDonough, “Chicago Press Treatment of the Gangster, 1924-1931,” in: Illinois Historical Journal, vol.
portrayed in magazines and, especially in movies, as heroic figures. In this chapter I will determine how the popularity of the fictional criminal can be explained and how this fictional character of a criminal fits into the 1920s.
To answer my research question, I will look into various sources, both primary and secondary. However, besides being difficult to find, primary sources on crime are not
necessarily the most reliable ones. For instance, it is overall stated that the 1920s experienced a crime wave, but how can this be measured? Not all crimes might have been reported, or all reports collected, and therefore not all numbers can be looked at. Finally, as the second chapter will show, crime is susceptible to what people at a certain place and time consider it to be, and therefore might be incomparable to our standards.
Instead of statistics, in my first chapter, primary sources consist of various other documents, for instance a yearbook of the ASL, and crime research carried out by John Landesco, who was a 1920s criminologist and conducted a lot of criminological research in Chicago. The second chapter will use the ideas of 1920s criminologists such as Edwin Sutherland as a primary source to establish a foundation of what people believed crime to be, and the third chapter will use crime stories published in Black Mask Magazine and 1920s movies, Underworld (1927) for instance, to see how ideas of crime are reflected upon in these sources.
Secondary sources vary from scholarship that offer a general overview of the decade such as academic works on the representation of crime in popular culture, and work on specific aspects of the history of crime and its representation in this period. It is remarkable that most scholarship on the history of organized crime has been published around the 1970s, whereas it seems that Prohibition and popular culture of crime in the 1920s is something that recently gained more ground. The 1970s experienced a new ‘crime wave’ of the American mafia and a sense of insecurity in cities in general. Also movies such as The Godfather that came out in that decade might have contributed to these sentiments. Recently HBO has been airing the series Boardwalk Empire on Prohibition in Atlantic City, which might have sparked the more recent interest in Prohibition.
1 A Tradition of Organization
An organized crime is any crime committed by a person occupying, in an established division of labor, a position designed for the commission of crime, providing that such division of labor also includes at least one position for a corrupter, one position for a corruptee, and one position for an enforcer.34
This definition of organized crime, provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1969, is followed in this research, as it allows a more uniform interpretation of government and legal reports. 1920s criminologists stress non-professional crime as an ongoing event, however forms of organized crime or professionalized crime were already gaining more and more ground from the nineteenth century onwards. It is difficult to establish when crime is defined as being organized, or professional, for various definitions emphasize different aspects.
Every criminal group is different; therefore the definition should be interpreted and adapted accordingly when looking into a specific gang. However, there are traits that most gangs have in common. For instance, organized crime groups are not motivated by
ideological concerns. Gangs can be involved in (local) politics, but this is mostly restricted to gaining protection or immunity. Organized crime groups are always hierarchical and have distinct leadership, and membership is restricted to specific groups based on ethnicity, kinship, race, and criminal background. Another trait that organized crime groups often have in common is a specialization or division of labor, which means that there are certain
functional positions that are filled by qualified members. There has to be an “enforcer,” who has to carry out all difficult assignments that involve violence, a “fixer” who is occupied with corrupting the law enforcers and a “money mover” who is an expert at laundering illegally gained money.35 Also, as an organized crime group does not like competition, it will strive for dominion over a particular geographic area and/or certain (illegal) business. Lastly, a criminal organization always has rules that its members must abide by.36
Looking at 1920s interpretations of crime by sociologists and criminologists suggest that organized crime only played a minor part in crime and does not suggest that there has been a longer tradition of the professionalization of crime at all, but that there was a tradition
34 Abadinsky, 4. 35 Ibid, 6. 36 Ibid, 5-7.
of crime in general. They argue that crime has been around ever since the start of mankind, as American sociologist Maurice Parmelee showed in 1918:
In the beginning man was perfect but yielded to temptation, and since then has been the subject of an everlasting contest between the powers of light and the powers of darkness for the possession of his soul; that man not only knew good from evil, but was endowed with “free will,” and had the power to choose between good and evil; and that when he did wrong he deliberately chose to do so out of an abandoned and malignant heart.37
The Nineteenth Century
‘Man’ in the quotation suggests that crime was something that was committed by individuals. However, looking back at the nineteenth century shows that next to crimes committed by individuals such as larceny, robbery and perhaps even murder, there existed already a complex network of prostitution that extended far beyond the individual and focused on a network of people depending on each other.
An era in which this was explicitly evident was the so-called ‘gilded age’ which comprehended the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth and was an era of “unregulated enterprise and pseudo-individualism whose theme was simple: Get rich!”38 The era had two faces. On the one hand, the northern part of the country and the coasts experienced a wave of industrialization and economic growth that made some people very rich, but also caused extreme poverty on the other hand as the country attracted many poor immigrants from Europe. Politics in large cities was often corrupt and urban politicians used the power of rising gangsters in poor areas to win elections. In turn, the politicians protected the gangsters from prosecution. Wayne Moquin and Charles Van Doren argue therefore that the period that ran from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I was characterized by a greed for gain and a degradation of the value of politics and law enforcement and in turn a predominance of violence and crime.39 This is to exemplify that the outbursts of crime as seen in the 1920s found their origins a long time ago and show that
37 M. Parmelee, Criminology (New York 1918) 28. 38 Moquin and Van Doren, The American Way of Crime, 1. 39 Ibid, 2-3.
whenever organized crime is being discussed, one should not only focus on the criminal act alone but should see it in a broader perspective in which many factors play a part.
One of these aspects that is repeatedly emphasized, both in works written at that time and more contemporary scholarly works, is the influence of immigrants. Historian Humbert Nelli has written extensively on the role of Italian immigrants and their affiliation with crime. The majority of Italian immigration to the United States at the turn of the century moved to the urban areas in the East and Mid-West, which also meant that by 1891 criminal groups were active in any American city that contained Italian immigrant populations.40
Criminologist John Landesco acknowledged in the twenties that there was a relationship between crime, gangsters and ethnicity as he describes how children of Italian descent all lived in the same Chicago neighborhoods and experienced poverty and slowly slipped into a tradition of crime:
Usually the gangster is brought up in neighborhoods where the gang tradition is old. He grows up into it from early childhood in a world where pilfering, vandalism, sex delinquency and brutality are an inseparable part of his play life. His earliest relation with the law is with the policeman on the beat, who always has something on the little gang, and “copper hating” is the normal attitude.41
However, according to 1920s criminologist Edwin Sutherland, there is no evidence that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American born citizens are. He does acknowledge that twice as many immigrants were incarcerated in 1910, but he does not ascribe this to ethnicity but to the location where immigrants live: Almost all immigrants settle in large cities, and cities have higher rates for arrests and convictions than rural areas.42
Gangs, or crime syndicates, have been around in the big cities ever since the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century New York City already knew street gangs, but as a movement they were unstable and small scaled. When the focus of these gangs shifted to gambling, new structures within the gang were required.43 One of the first gangs that emerged in New York City was the Five Points gang in a notorious area in the Lower East Side. The gang operated from tenements, saloons and dance halls in the area.
40 H. Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (New York 1976) 69-71. 41 J. Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago. Part III of the Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago 1929) 1043. 42 E. Sutherland, Criminology (Philadelphia 1924) 97-98.
43 E. Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s
Corruption
Gambling was only one enterprise in which gangs were active. Racketeering, a system of organized crime aimed at extorting money by intimidation and violence, and prostitution were other prevalent forms of illegal businesses that crime syndicates were engaged in during the gilded age. Another form of criminality that is associated with organized crime at the turn of the century had to do with local politicians and corruption. Tammany Hall in New York City, for instance, was a strong working political machine that was known for its corrupt politics. The situation in Chicago, at that time the second largest city in the United States, was not much better. At least in New York the politicians tried to disguise their corruption, whereas political corruption in Chicago was shown out in the open according to journalist Franklin Matthews who, in 1889, tried to compare and map vice in both cities and its relation to corruption:
We found that a system of police blackmail is in existence in Chicago which matches in its unscrupulous nature an extent the worst phases of the police blackmail that was levied in New York under the palmy days of Tammany rule… We found block after block of low dives in the heart of the city in what is known as the “levee district,” where thieves and thugs and persons of revolting character passed in and out, the like of which the Bowery in the heyday of its prosperity never saw.44
The reason for this, according to Matthews, had everything to do with politics. He reasoned
that national party movements were mostly active in larger cities, but despite the fact that the parties were aimed at the nation, their local politicians were focused on their own areas and violated the laws by turning to gangsters.
The emergence of gangsters and street gangs as allies of local politicians is something that can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. Bosses of various wards in Chicago called in street gangs to control elections. In return, the bosses would provide protection from the police. As this process continued, gangs got involved in politics and were closely
connected with local political machines. Gangs started to see politics as a reliable route to acquire wealth and power as it turned out to be far more lucrative than street crime: “The criminal-political alliance proved useful in ensuring the success of more lucrative illicit
44 F. Matthews, “Wide-open Chicago,” in: Harper’s Weekly (1898), published in Moquin and Van Doren, The
enterprises such as prostitution, narcotics and gambling.”45 Not only did gangs befriend politicians, they were also used within various labor movements to intimidate union members and to obstruct or prevent unionization.46
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time the phrase ‘organized crime’ showed up in literature was in 1929 in John Landesco’s Organized Crime in
Chicago.47 This might suggest that there was no organization of crime earlier on, but this is
not the case since aspects of organized crime can clearly be traced back to the nineteenth century. Even though it looks like Landesco coined the phrase, he confirms that the phenomenon existed earlier on as well: “Organized crime is not, as many might think, a recent phenomenon in Chicago.”48 However, the twenties did turn out to be the decade in which organized crime manifested itself as a business that was known by the wider public and entered the stage as a criminal force that would occupy United States law enforcement up to today.
Even though in current research, as that done by Moquin and Van Doren,
acknowledge the importance of the 1920s to the rise of crime syndicates, 1920s criminologists did not did not stress the relation of Prohibition and organized crime at all. Therefore
Landesco’s work is interesting to analyze and interpret because he seems to be one of the few 1920s contemporaries who actually used the phrase to describe this phenomenon.
Landesco states that “a crime is but a rebellion against organized society and the laws under which organized society has chosen to be ruled and governed.”49 He believes that the causes that led to the organization of crime can be traced back to circumstances that were created in Chicago during its beginnings as an American metropolis and slowly but certainly opened up opportunities for crime to exist out in the open and be established as a professional business:
For many years, indeed, Chicago has been under the domination of the underworld. For many years Chicago has tolerated vice and now the underworld and vice have it by the throat. We have complained of crime: we have preached the gospel of respect for the law: yet we have exhibited to our youth the spectacle of policemen in full uniform acting, not only as customers of, but often as partners in our brothels, our gambling
45 Moquin and Van Doren, The American Way of Crime, 38. 46 Ibid, 48.
47 www.oed.com
48 Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago, 25. 49 Ibid, 815.
houses, and in liquor selling. For all this the public is responsible: for the public has allowed it to exist.50
He describes organized vice as a form of “extra-legal government” that is not formally organized, but is best defined as a kind of feudal system that is held together by powerful leaders, loyalty, and codes of conduct and morality set up by the gangsters themselves.51
Landesco argues that it is only when a gangster steps out of his underworld and gets in contact with persons in the “regular world” that it becomes apparent to him how his business distinguishes itself from regular businesses. This is remarkable because the gangster’s
response to this shows how he considers his business legitimate, but realizes that the contrary is believed once he enters a world in which crime is considered a violation of law. The way to defend his business is by claiming that every person has a ‘racket’: “The gangster grows to consider the world a place in which everyone has a ‘racket’ … and almost anything in his world can be ‘fixed.’”52 This shows that there is an apparent notion that there are two worlds, and these two worlds function completely differently, as they know different codes of
behavior. Whenever these two worlds coincide, the gangster does not adapt to the code of conduct of the other world, but finds it perfectly normal to stick to his own rules.
The Capone gang, the best-known gang in Chicago, if not in the entire United States, is an example of this. The gang was originally formed by Johnny Torrio, but later handed over to Al Capone. The gang’s interests were related to the business administration of various establishments of vice, gambling and liquor. Every man in the gang had his own tasks and it was alleged to be very hierarchical, young boys had to work their way up. Landesco
interviewed a gambler and confidence man, and believes that his statement is typical of any person involved in a gang:
The men of the underworld are the brainiest men in the world. They have to be because they live by their wits. They are always planning something, a “stick-up,” a burglary, or some new “racket.” … The leading men of the underworld can move in every circle of society. They are at home in Chinatown, along then “main stem,” in gambling dives, or in the best hotels and the “Gold Coast.” When they have a lucky
50 Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago, 816. 51 Ibid, 1092.
break they can live like millionaires: when their money is spent they plan new schemes.53
This gambler’s argument can be seen as a validation of a life of crime: it does not matter whether a person functions in the underworld or in the upperworld, both worlds consist of rackets in which everybody participates to a certain extent. As the quote shows, the
underworld and upper world are no longer two separate worlds: the underworld leaders can have rackets anywhere and are capable of joining every circle of society. This makes the presence of crime and criminals in a way inevitable: it is hard to control the sphere in which the criminals are active as they are able to move around between the two worlds.
Changing Criminal Structures
The organization of crime has a long tradition in the United States, dating back to the early nineteenth century. However, The introduction of Prohibition and the Volstead Act drastically changed the nature of organized crime in the 1920s, as a whole new enterprise of bootlegging opened up to the professional criminal. Prohibition also signaled a very remarkable shift in the hierarchical structures of crime. For instance, in a city like Chicago, before 1920 the ward boss acted as a patron for the criminals and the gangs. This ward boss was usually Irish and there was a hierarchical structure in which Italian and Jewish crime leaders stood below him.
Prohibition related crime unleashed levels of violence that were unprecedented. This violence was mostly aimed at gangs themselves, which made protection from other gangs more important than protection from law enforcement (by ward bosses). This completely changed the structure in which criminal enterprises used to operate. Howard Abadinsky, in
Organized Crime (1985) argues that:
Prohibition acted as a catalyst for the mobilization of criminal elements in an unprecedented manner. Pre-Prohibition crime, insofar as it was organized, centered around corrupt political machines, vice entrepreneurs, and, at the bottom, gangs. Prohibition unleashed an unparalleled level of competitive criminal violence and changed the order -the gang leaders emerged on top.54
53 Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago, 1048-1049. 54 Abadinsky, Organized Crime, 91.
This is not to say that suddenly all the gangs in the country started to operate this way. It was a process that needed some time to start up. At first, there were only a few who realized the immense profits that could be made from the illegal liquor business. Abadinsky continues that: “As the gangs earned and learned their way through the early 1920s, they fought themselves for control of the liquor business. Gradually, a few of the more enlightened mobsters moved toward cooperation and combination.” While gangs at the start of
Prohibition tended to fight each other, cooperation later on became important. Not only did it create a network of crime that could operate nationwide, it also functioned as a means to cease violence (this did not always work. In Chicago the Italian Al Capone gang and Irish O’Banion gang kept fighting each other in Cicero). Nonetheless, in 1929 the first organized crime meeting was held in Atlantic City.
This meeting is particularly interesting because I consider it to be the start of the American Mafia. The conference was held from May 13 to May 16 in Hotel President on the Atlantic City boardwalk. The meeting was very secretive and was not mentioned in any of the papers, neither local or national. Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and John Torrio, the greatest gangsters of that time, were all there.55
Crime was a particularly vicious cutthroat and tommy-gunning line of work, in which rivals for market share had one another killed and their trucks hijacked. Some
mobsters thought that a commission or tribunal of some sort could settle disputes and restrain wildcatting. Another concern was the need to unite to lower the prices charged by suppliers… Another concern was to explore new criminal opportunities given the prospect that Prohibition would eventually come to an end.56
There is only one photograph known that serves as a remnant of this conference. The photograph was published on January 17, 1930 in the New York Evening Journal. It shows Enoch (Nucky) Johnson,57 second man on the right, Al Capone, on his left, and Meyer Lansky, left from Capone.
55 Abadinsky, Organized Crime, 92.
56 M. Mappen, Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation (New Brunswick 2013) 82. 57 Johnson was city treasurer in Atlantic City and considered to be thoroughly corrupt. The main character in the
Johnson, Capone and Lansky on the Atlantic City Boardwalk Source: New York Evening Journal, January 17, 1930.
Statistics
Authorities did not really know how to deal with organized crime and this relatively new aspect of law enforcement. This is probably also why 1920s criminologists have a hard time defining organized crime and focus on unorganized crime. Racketeering, and later on also bootlegging, posed an entirely new problem of law enforcement that differed substantially from the way ‘old’ crimes such as murder and robbery were dealt with. The nation had years of experience in dealing with this kind of crimes and establishing laws and punishments that would follow once one committed such a crime. The problem that bootlegging eventually posed, was that the Prohibition laws were laws were not supported by society at large.
It is difficult to find organized crime rates and establish whether organized crime increased based on statistics. Although statistics are a great source of finding actual numbers, in this case they are very hard to work with: all statistics I found, were either incomplete or very specific which makes it impossible to reach any large scale conclusions based on them. Edwin Sutherland on the one hand acknowledged the incompleteness of statistics, but on the other hand, figured since his work was based on field research, a great proportion of his findings would contain statistical information. He looked for instance at the average number of homicides, various forms of violent crime in Chicago and the arrests in Chicago.
Source: E. Sutherland, Criminology (Philadelphia 1924) 37.
Source: E. Sutherland, Criminology, 42. Table 3
Average number of arrests per year per 100,000 in Chicago
Year Felony58 Other Total
1905-1909 1910-1914 1915-1919 1920 1921 1922 539 483 528 567 614 568 3107 3664 3967 2929 3954 4536 3646 4147 4495 3496 4568 5104
Source: E. Sutherland, Criminology, 43.
The first table indicates that there was a steady increase in the number of homicides in the United States, as the number almost doubled in the second period. Both the first and the second table show a decrease in homicide rates from 1919 to 1920 and an increase from 1920 to 1921. Interestingly enough, the rates of violence known for burglary and robbery go down over the investigated period, but according to the third table the number of arrests overall in Chicago go up. Reaching a conclusion on crime rates based on these three tables would be far from reliable. Statistics do not provide a definitive answer. Not only because of the numbers,
58 “A felony is a crime sufficiently serious to be punishable by death or a term in state or federal prison, as
distinguished from a misdemeanor which is only punishable by confinement to county or local jail and/or a fine,” www.dictionary.law.com.
Table 1
Average number of homicides per year, per 100,000 citizens in areas that were registered by the Bureau of the Census (in 1920 about 82% of the country)
Year Number of homicides
1900-1904 1905-1909 1910-1914 1915-1919 1920 1921 2.42 5.64 6.70 7.20 7.11 8.50 Table 2
Crimes of violence known by the Chicago Crime Commission
Year Murder Burglary Robbery
1919 1920 1921 1922 330 194 190 228 6108 5495 4774 4301 2912 2782 2558 2007
but also because the underlying issue cannot be captured in these statistics: the number of convictions does not necessarily say anything about the number of people that were involved since not everybody will get caught. Moreover, these numbers only look at crimes that were known about in the “upper world” and do not say everything about gang activity in the underworld.
The Coincidental Creation of Crime
In the light of the changing ideas on crime that emerged in the 1920s, Prohibition is a very accurate example of a changing criminal climate. While the consumption of an alcoholic beverage was perfectly legal prior to 1920, once Prohibition was enforced, this act was a criminal offence. Alcohol consumption had become illegal because in the years leading up to Prohibition people believed it was harmful enough to make it a criminal offence.
According to Walter Lippmann’s Forum essay, organized crime is not something that can be prevented by law since “it is integral to the policy which our laws have laid down, and to the assumptions upon which Americans have thought to govern themselves.”59 He rather considers that organized crime is a “creature of our laws and conventions, and it is entangled with our strongest appetites and our most cherished ideas… the underworld performs a function based ultimately upon a public demand.”60
It was thought that creating a ‘better’ society in which one could not drink was a noble experiment that would reduce crime –people would behave better. On the contrary, this new law affected every member of society above the drinking age (only a couple of states are known to have had a drinking age restriction prior to 1920) instantly created more people that were likely to violate laws. All of a sudden a whole nation was expected to abide a law that prohibited something that was very common in almost every household and was part of a daily routine. Or, as Herbert Packer encapsulated this:
Resistance [to Prohibition] can be fatal to the new norm, and moreover, when this happens, the effect is not confined to the immediate proscription but makes itself felt in the attitude that people take toward legal proscriptions in general. Thus, primary
59 W. Lippmann, “The Underworld, Our Secret Servant,” 1. 60 Ibid.
resistance or opposition to a new law such as Prohibition can result in disregard for laws in general: negative contagion.61
Right after the enforcement of Prohibition started, alcohol consumption supposedly dropped, but soon rose back to pre-prohibition numbers. The Anti Saloon League Yearbook of 1921 tries to clear the air about this alleged crime wave that supposedly started right after the enforcement of Prohibition:
Some of these police chiefs admit that there was undoubtedly some increase during the latter part of 1920 in the more flagrant and violent crimes. This was reflected in the newspapers in many cities, although of course no-one can get true perspective from newspaper accounts of sporadic crimes any more than one can judge of the social importance of certain murder trials or divorce actions from the astounding and
unwholesome publicity they secure. It may well have happened, as in New York, that a series of sensational crimes occurred in close proximity, causing some enterprising newspaper reporter to invent the excellent headline phrase of ‘crime wave.’62
The ASL was very biased in their approach to crime and alcohol consumption as they were the strongest Prohibition proponents and would not have liked to acknowledge any negative side effects. There is, however, a more reliable source that does demonstrate an increase in crime. Economist Clark Warburton (1896-1979) wrote extensively on the various effects of Prohibition (predominantly on the economy). Warburton acknowledges an increase that is presented in the following table:
61 H. Packer in: H. Abadinsky, Organized Crime (Chicago 1985) 90. 62 Anti Saloon League Yearbook (1921) 71.
C. Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition, 226.
The table shows that there was a steady increase in homicide rates, but that the conviction rate in New York State fluctuated. It must be noted as well that homicide rates had already
increased prior to Prohibition, which suggests that this ‘crime wave’ as the ASL calls it might have started earlier. The period 1918-1920 and 1920-1922 are the only years in which the consumption of alcohol went down, these are the post World War I years, and the first years of the enforcement of Prohibition.
Economists Jeffrey Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel confirm similar patterns in more recent research. They argue that the consumption of alcohol fell directly after the enactment of Prohibition to 20 to 40 percent of its pre-Prohibition level, but that alcoholism and
drunkenness steadily increased and indicate a rebound in consumption from 1921 to 1927.63 It is interesting how Miron and Zwiebel believe Prohibition to have affected alcohol
consumption. They consider three factors that could possibly have had an impact. First, there was an increase in supply costs because of Prohibition. Secondly, it became more difficult to access alcohol, therefore its price would have increased. Finally, there was the notion that Prohibition generated the sentiment that alcohol consumption was immoral. But as it turns out, these three factors only had a small impact on consumption: “Changes in consumption during Prohibition were modest given the changes in price,” because, even though “alcohol consumption declined sharply at the onset of Prohibition, within several years it rebounded to 60-70 percent of its initial value and did not increase substantially immediately following the repeal of Prohibition.”64
63 J. Miron and J. Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition,” in: The American Economic Review,
vol. 81 (1991) 242-247, 244.
64 Ibid, 245-246.
Table 4
Alcohol Consumption and Criminal Activity: Annual Average Rates for Various Periods
Period
Homicides in large cities per 100,000 capita
Convictions in New York State per 100,000
population (Courts of record)
Consumption of alcohol in the United States, gallons per capita 1900-1903 3.8 58 1.45 1911-1914 8.2 82 1.69 1918-1919 8.7 74 .97 1920-1922 9.0 85 .73 1925-1927 10.7 78 1.13
Shaping Public Opinion
Another factor that made crime surface more frequently in the 1920s was the fact that it became a public affair as it was prominently featured in newspapers. This media attention also fired imagination as crime in popular media was either glorified or presented without any moral judgment. This also meant that crime was not just an issue that the police and law enforcement were interested in, but that it became of interest to other organizations and groups. An example of such an organization is the still existing Chicago Crime Commission, that describes itself as a “non-partisan, not-for-profit organization of civic leaders committed to improving the quality of public safety and justice” that was founded in 1919.65 Back in 1919, the Commission was founded by the Chicago Association of Commerce and tried to “promote the efficiency and activity of all officers and departments of the State, County and City administrations charged with the duty of suppression, prevention, and punishment of crime.”66
Interestingly enough, the organization does not have any political or legislative power, it is a body designed to fight crime by creating awareness of crime, and through this assists citizens to create a safe environment. Therefore its statement that it would “fight crime and criminals” is quite ambiguous because the commission did not have any power to perform police work or prosecute cases. Nonetheless, the Commission’s aim was quite progressive because its operations tried to generate a ‘proper’ public opinion.67 This public opinion was not directly related to Prohibition and was not pushed forward by a legislative body. The Chicago Crime Commission saw crime as a public affair that not only the government had to deal with. Crime never seemed much of a public affair until various circumstances in the 1920s brought it into vision of the public eye.
The Commission also made Landesco’s work not the only work in this period to use the phrase organized crime in the context we use it. Landesco might have used it first in his official document that was part of the Illinois Crime Survey, the Chicago Crime Commission had already used it in its pamphlet in 1921. The document states that the Commission has “recognized organized crime as a business,” continuing that: “crime in Chicago is a business, organized and operated by men of efficiency in their chosen pursuit, earning comfortable dividends for them and never embarrassed by a dearth of apprentices.”68 The creation of public opinion about crime is not only something that is mentioned by the Chicago Crime
65 Website Chicago Crime Commission: http://www.chicagocrimecommission.org/. 66 Chicago Crime Commission promoting document (1921) 1.
67 Ibid, 1-2. 68 Ibid, 3, 13.
Commission. Even though this concerns a different city, the New York Crime Commission uses the same strategy to find the causes of crime in the city, by studying the relationship of the press to crime, the press being one of the shaping factors of public opinion.69
But why is public opinion all of a sudden a force that is seen as a contributing factor to shaping the image of crime that these crime commissions want to exploit in order to fight it? Effective law enforcement is impossible if the public is on the criminal’s side. In his extensive crime survey, Landesco has paid attention to this peculiar phenomenon in which the public shows an increasing interest and fascination with the underworld. Landesco associates this increasing awareness of the public of crime to specific events that trigger interest in crime. In this case the assassination in 1926 of assistant state attorney William McSwiggin, who had two gangster companions, is used as an example because the court case that followed shed light on the world of organized crime and the way organized crime attempted to control elections, public officials and the courts. The investigators considered various reasons for the murders, but all led to ties with the underworld. I do not think it is necessary to scrutinize this particular murder case as it only sets an example of the plentiful murders that occurred: between 1922 and 1926 over 200 murders took place in Chicago alone that are associated with the underworld and the ongoing booze wars because of the Prohibition laws in particular.70
According to Landesco, this murder dramatized to the public the relation between gangs and the political machine. The judicial system was not capable of solving the murder, and showed again that there was an existence and power of such a thing as organized crime. It is evident that the judicial system in this particular case failed to solve the murder which in fact shows the power of the underworld and its infiltration in the upper world. As Landesco states:
In recent years in Chicago, the public has become familiar with the bold practices of criminal gangs in terrorizing witnesses and in exacting the death penalties upon them and upon members of the gang who are suspected of having given information to the police.71
69 State of New York Report of the Crime Commission (1928) 11. 70 Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago, 828.
When looking at 1920s newspaper articles, it becomes clear that when the public learned about organized crime, people started think about their own relation to crime. Disrespect for the law by otherwise good citizens, as for instance argued in 1925 in the New York Times would emerge out of sentimentality when dealing with criminals, “laxity in the home and bad examples set to children by their fathers and mothers in reckless pleasure-seeking and
divorce, and upon the failure of modern education to emphasize morals and ethics,” and people trying to get out from their responsibilities, moving them to other people.72
To recapitulate, there is not one universal definition of the term organized crime, but, regardless in what way organized crime is looked at, there are certain features that it always has in common. Criminal groups or gangs that are active in organized crime are always hierarchical; membership is restricted and based on factors such as ethnicity, class, race, neighborhood, and criminal background. It also strives for dominion over a certain area or a certain trade. Even though 1920s criminologists do not seem to bother to look into organized crime, this does not mean that it did not exist. Various forms of organized crime can be traced back to the nineteenth century and were focused around immigrant groups or politics. This is not to say that immigrants were more criminal in nature, but they were mostly living in poor urban areas that in general experience more criminal activity. Especially during the so-called gilded-age, political and criminal organizations benefitted from each other. The organizations would make sure politicians would win elections and in return they received protection. A similar relationship can be seen within labor unions. Looking at the scope of organized crime is very difficult since statistics merely focus on non-professional crime, are highly incoherent and do not provide definitive answers. Nonetheless, the organization of crime differed
significantly from earlier days, not only because it extended it scope (partly because of new Prohibition laws), but also because the public became aware of it and started to form an opinion.
2 Science of Crime
In the 1920s criminologist Edwin Sutherland (1883-1950) started his sociological research into crime and the place of criminology within the sociological field. Sutherland’s main focus was on Chicago, at that time one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country. Sutherland was part of the Chicago School of Sociology, the first school in the 1920s and 1930s that started specializing in urban sociology. Their point of departure was that human behavior was controlled by a combination of social structures and environmental elements. Robert E. Park, who is seen as one of the founding fathers of the Chicago School of Sociology, argued that sociology was experiencing a transition from a philosophy of history into a science of society, because it became focused more and more on ethnographic research. This fitted with the idea at the time that numerous social surveys had to be done in order to solve problems: “Nothing could be done to solve social problems until they first studied the changes in detail.”73
With this in mind, Sutherland started to conduct his research, that is still considered as groundbreaking criminological research. In order for something to be considered illegal or criminal, it must mean that something is forbidden first: “Crime is a violation of law. If there were no laws there would be no crimes.”74 Sutherland illustrates this with the example that half of the persons arrested in 1912, would not have been arrested in 1892, simply because the things they were arrested for were no offences twenty years earlier. Thus, the definition of crime is subject to a time and place in which moral conducts and certain established laws prevail and decide what is allowed and what is not. This makes crime a social construction because it involves a set of relationships. For instance, this relationship is based on a value that is important to a group that has political importance, on the other hand there has to be an isolation of another part of that group so that the people who belong to this isolated part that, could possibly endanger the values of the predominant group because they do not appreciate those values as much.75
One of the core values of the Chicago School of Sociology was their field research. Statistics play an important role in that research, but are, according to Sutherland, not the easiest sources to interpret in the realm of criminology. Statistics might indicate a crime wave, but that this crime wave showed up in the statistics does not instantly mean that there actually
73 F. H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal 1977)
103.
74 Sutherland, Criminology, 18. 75 Ibid, 21.
was an increase in crime. For instance, when looking at the start of the Prohibition era, crime rates for public drunkenness decreased immediately, however, there was a significant increase in crime committed in connection with illicit liquor distilling and bootlegging. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, something must be illegal or considered not done first before it can be recognized as a criminal offence. Prior to the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, there was nothing illegal about obtaining liquor and one could not be prosecuted for this. Once alcohol consumption was banned, the overall crime rates dropped for a little while, while crimes that were related to alcohol consumption (public drunkenness for instance) increased because obedience of the liquor laws was watched more strictly. Therefore, statistics according to Sutherland should always be regarded in relation to something else in order to put it in perspective.
Chicago School map, “showing places of residence of 7541 alleged male offenders placed in the Cook County Jail during the year 1920, 17-75 years of age,” published in 1929.
The Chicago School map on the previous page is one of the many examples of how the Chicago sociologists and criminologists believed the city had to be looked at. They saw Chicago as an urban ecological center. The map shows where offenders of the Cook County Jail used to live before they were incarcerated. By mapping crime, the sociological and
criminological ideas prevailing at the Chicago School at that time, prove that environment and statistics are crucial: because of this map it is easier to reach conclusions based on
environment and allocate centers of crime.
Early Criminology
Edwin Sutherland’s approach to criminology distinguishes him from other criminologists because of his way of conducting research and putting emphasis on statistics and on the environment and circumstances more than on the individual. Italian criminologist Lombroso (1835-1909), for instance, argued that a criminal was a certain type of person with certain traits that could easily be traced by looking at physical features. He claimed he could indicate one’s possible criminal intentions by looking at certain signifying characteristics that would indicate a criminal type: an asymmetrical cranium, long lower jaw, flattened nose, a scanty beard, and a low sensitivity to pain.76 Sutherland does not believe in a physical criminal type and does not think criminals can be distinguished from other people anatomically or
genetically.
Lombroso’s typical criminal traits published in C. Lombroso, Criminal Man (1876).
