Crime

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CRIME

In the popular imagination, the Great Depression is not seen as an era of violence or of criminality. Viewed through the lens of nostalgia, it is thought to be a simpler, calmer time. But nothing could be further from the truth. The early Depression saw a stunning increase in the homicide rate, and was one of the most violent periods to that point in American history. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, criminals also played an important role in American culture, with many Americans following their actions closely—and, one imagines, identifying with them on some level, despite the fear many people had of violence or of being a target of crime.

It is difficult to come by meaningful crime statistics for the period before the 1930s. The federal government only began to count crime statistics in 1930, and experts believe that crime was systematically underreported early in the century, so it is hard to make valid comparisons for property crimes, burglaries, robberies, rapes, and other criminal activity between the Great Depression and earlier periods. The significant exception is the murder rate. During the early part of the twentieth century the murder rate in the United States rose from 1.2 homicides per 100,000 people in 1900 to 6.8 in 1920. Between 1920 and 1930, it climbed again, reaching 8.8 in 1930—a higher murder rate than in the 1970s. In the early 1930s it reached a high point for the entire century, peaking at 9.7 homicides per 100,000 people in 1933, and declining afterwards for the rest of the decade.

THE CRIMINAL AS BUSINESSMAN

Why was American society so violent in the 1920s and early 1930s? The most generally accepted explanation is that rampant violence was one of the unexpected consequences of prohibition, the ban on producing, distributing, or selling intoxicating beverages that began with the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919 and the Volstead Act the next year. Bound by the fiscal conservatism of the times, the federal government quickly found that it was all but impossible to enforce prohibition. Alcohol intended for any variety of commercial or industrial purposes was re-distilled and sold as drinking liquor, produced in shops that employed sweated labor. People smuggling alcohol from other countries did a brisk business. In 1925 alone, prohibition agents shut down 172,000 illegal alcohol shops.

Most important, however, was the rise of a $2 billion illegal industry of producing and selling alcohol, run by organized crime. Paralleling the rise of the corporation, organized crime became big business during the prohibition years. Contracts between producers, distributors and salesmen could not be enforced through any courts, and the market was highly competitive. So the bootleggers sought to make their agreements stick and eliminate their competitors through shootings, beatings, threats, and other kinds of violence. Often, Italian and Irish immigrants ran these criminal organizations, and for many they represented one of the few chances working-class ethnics had to make phenomenal amounts of money and join the American elite. Despite the extreme violence of the gangs, for many working-class Americans—especially those who resented prohibition—the wealth and notoriety of the ethnic mobs became a point of identification and pride.

The Torrio-Capone gang in Chicago was the model for this new kind of organized crime. A few months after the passage of the Volstead Act, Frankie Yale of Brooklyn, New York, executed one of Chicago's preeminent mobsters, James "Big Jim" Colosimo. Legend has it that Johnny Torrio, one of Colosimo's henchmen, hired Yale to commit the murder so that Torrio could diversify the gang from brothels and illegal gaming into the purchase and sale of liquor. Torrio brought in a group of hired guns from Brooklyn, one of whom was Alphonse "Al" Capone. Capone was one of the most colorful characters in Chicago's underworld. A young man who listed his occupation on his business cards as "secondhand furniture dealer," he ran the Chicago gang's business to the tune of two hundred gang-related murders a year in Chicago in the mid-1920s. He was very open with reporters and the press—who covered him enthusiastically—about his role in murders, such as that of Dion O'Banion, a nemesis of the Torrio-Capone gang, in 1924. The rivalry between the Torrio-Capone gang and the O'Banions reached its peak with the St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, when members of the Capone gang dressed as police officers slaughtered seven unarmed O'Banions. When Capone finally was brought down for income tax evasion, federal investigators estimated that his organization's annual income from liquor, prostitution, loan-sharking, extortion, slot machines, and gambling was $70 million. He was truly the big businessman of the crime world, and his power seemed to mirror that of corporations during the 1920s.

With the stock market crash of 1929 came revelations of corporate malfeasance often not captured in crime statistics. The great crash may have made it appear to ordinary Americans that some kind of massive criminal operation was afoot—how else could all that money simply vanish? But while ordinary speculation and irresponsible lending decisions were primarily responsible for driving stock prices sky-high during the bubble, there were speculative "bull pools" and insider trading operations. There were also white-collar criminals like Ivar Kreuger, a Swedish mogul who ran the International Match Company, which sold $150 million worth of stock before being revealed as little more than Ponzi scheme in the crash.

THE CRIMINAL AS FOLK HERO

The early 1930s saw a dramatic acceleration of violent crime—murders, robberies, and kidnappings alike. The late days of prohibition may have been one cause, and the social dislocation of the Depression another. The baby of aviation celebrity Charles A. Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. Businessmen were kidnapped and held for ransom. The Barker-Karpis Gang stole $240,000 from the Cloud County Bank at Condordia, Kansas.

But the imagination of the American public was especially captivated in the early 1930s by a pair of robbers who drove the back roads of Texas, holding up banks and stores: Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The young duo met in 1930, as the Depression swept across the country. Parker, born to a poor family in West Dallas, had waited tables as a teenager in the late 1920s as her first marriage fell apart. Barrow had grown up in a desperately poor family outside of Dallas, and was involved in car theft and robbery as a teen in the late 1920s. They met, fell in love, and—though separated for two years by imprisonment—embarked in 1932 on a series of bank robberies and hold-ups at stores such as the Piggly Wiggly, which would lead to the deaths of twelve people and the wounding of several more.

Bonnie and Clyde were on the run for a year and a half, driving aimlessly through Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas (Barrow wrote a letter to Henry Ford, telling him that the Ford was the best car ever made), committing robberies and killing police officers and paying occasional visits to family members, to whom they were deeply attached. In May 1934, they were ambushed and shot in Louisiana. Bonnie was twenty-three years old at the time of her death, and Clyde was twenty-five. Quickly, they became legends. Before being killed, Bonnie had already started to contribute to the story of their nihilistic romance, writing "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde" and other poems in the country-ballad tradition celebrating her hopeless life on the road. After their deaths, crowds gathered around the ambush site to seek bits of the bullets that had killed them, and their funerals were mass public events.

Bonnie and Clyde were not the only violent criminals to gain a public following. There were other bank robbers and criminals who became almost like folk heroes in the early 1930s. Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd was the son of a tenant farmer, born in Georgia and raised in Arkansas. He stole from banks and acquired the status of a Robin Hood figure, with the desperation of a small farmer in the Great Depression. George "Machine Gun" Kelly gained his notoriety by kidnapping Charles F. Urschel, an Oklahoma City oil millionaire. John Dillinger, scion of a strict Indianapolis grocer, became a juvenile delinquent at an early age, leading a child gang known as the Dirty Dozen. The Dillinger Gang was one of the best known bank-robbing gangs of the early 1930s. It flaunted authority and mocked the F.B.I. and the police, and the gang members claimed legitimacy by presenting themselves as the people's thieves. As Henry Pierpont, one member of the gang, said, "I stole from the banks who stole from the people." F.B.I. agents shot Dillinger down in front of Chicago's Biograph Theater in the summer of 1934. He had had plastic surgery while on the run, however, and as befits a larger than life legend, there were many people who doubted that he had really died.

Although it is difficult to know why certain figures attract so much more cultural attention than others, it does seem that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, each historical era had the criminals best suited to it. For people in the business-crazed world of the late 1920s, there was little to separate legitimate business from crime. Figures like Al Capone dramatized the violent competition of the free market and represented the anarchic dimensions of market hysteria. In the early years of the Depression, the evaporation of possibility, the dire poverty of unemployment, and the absence of direction exemplified by the wandering rage of Bonnie and Clyde struck a deep chord in people across the country, for whom the young, desperate, and doomed pair seemed less violent murderers than star-crossed lovers, outmatched by the law. The violence of the early Depression began to decline later in the decade, as liquor became legal once again, mob activity declined, and political activism began to replace the fear and uncertainty of the early 1930s. But the spike in violence of the early 1930s should make people who rhapsodize about the calm and social cohesion of the past think twice, for the chaos and criminality of the era—both its famous criminals and its less well-known high crime rate—easily match the crime waves of the more recent past.