Institutional Analysis essay

D avid E. Ruth

Inventing the Public Enemy

The Gangster in American Culture, 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 3 4

The University o f Chicago Press

Chicago & London

Introduction:

The Gangster and

Urban America

i nventing the Public Enemy is an attempt to understand mass me­dia images and the culture that produced them. As such it is a study of values. Shortly after the First World War many Americans came to believe that rampant crime was a defining element of their society. Attention soon centered on the gangster, the paragon of mod­ ern criminality and eventually the subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels and plays, and more than a hundred Hollywood movies. The media gangster was an invention, much less an accurate reflection of reality than a projection created from various Americans’ beliefs, concerns, and ideas about what would sell. This study, concerned with the meanings rather than the facts of crime, addresses questions whose answers provide a fuller understanding of American culture in the interwar years. Why was the invented gangster such a compelling figure? What messages did he convey? What values did he promote?

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The rhetoric of crime gained a resonant new term in April 19 30 when the Chicago Crime Commission released a list of the city’s twenty-eight most dangerous “ public enemies.” Journalists across the country published the list, adopted the term, and dubbed the notori­ ous A 1 Capone “ Public Enemy Number One.” The next year Warner Brothers and James Cagney assured The Public Enemy's cultural lon­ gevity with an electrifying portrayal.1 Though the label was still new,

y C agney’s Tom Powers, like Capone, embodied a collection of attri­ butes that had coalesced in media portrayals of criminals since the end of the First World War. The public enemy, energetic and confi- dent, was successful in a competitive^ highly organized business. A model of stylish consumption, he wore fine clothes, rode in a gleam­ ing new automobile, and reveled in expensive nightlife. He rebelled not only against the law, but against established behavioral codes, especially involving gender, and his lovers flouted the conventions of female propriety. In all these characteristics he was resolutely urban, a product of the city and an enthusiastic participant in its culture.

So too was the gangster markedly urban in his most notorious activity: flaunting national prohibition. As saloon andj:abaret scenes in The Public Enemy suggest. Americans generally associated drink­ ing with two distinct urban groups: the ethnic working class and free- snending pleasure seekers. Among the strongest supporters of prohi­ bition were conservatives who cast the reform as a bolstering of so­ ber, small-town values against the encroachments of foreign, big-city decadence.2 In the vanguard of modern society’s perceived assault on traditional restraint. Tom Powers, A 1 Capone, and their underworld peers were men of the city.

This constellation of attributes made the gangster an emblem of changes affecting the lives of millions of Americans. Indeed, he was a “ public” enemy in two senses: a predator on the public, he was also part o f it. The underworld dramatized the development of an impersonaL_iughly_ organized. consumptlorFonented urban society. More and more AmericansThke’ tKe'gangster, worked out their daily lives in large cities or their suburbs. Even for those remote from the major centers, the consolidation of mass commercial culture in the 1 9 Z O S meant that urban images proliferated in daily news and en­ tertainment. Urbanization and modernization reoriented the indi­ vidual’s relationship to society. Especially in their work, millions of Americans, the gangster among them, faced the challenges and op-

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portunities of p ursuing' individual goals within and alongside the large organi/ations-oia-modern society. At the same time, twentieth- century commercial society, selling consumption and display, prom­ ised new opportunities for individual fulfillment. This array of changes in turn transformed older ethnic, gender, and class systems. The behavior of urban Americans, like that of the gangster and his associates, conformed less than ever before to the norms of inherited social typologies.

Inventing the Public Enemy^asgues thatLthe^gangster was a cen­ tral cultural figure because he(helped Am èrîtapi master this changing social world. T he study drawTlIrnhe“ anthropological notion that people develop cultures— shared systems of thinking, belief, and val­ ues— in order to make sense o f and control the social facts they en­ counter in their daily lives. The primary stuff of which cultures are màdéTs stories, repeated tales that carry moral truths, prescriptions for behavior, lessons about success and failure. Among the stories that play the most constructive cultural roles are those that fit into genres, whose evolving conventions of setting, character, iconogra­ phy, and plot offer highly compressed but accessible symbolic vocab­ ularies deeply relevant to the concerns of audience members. Story genres are not, of course, organic creations of “ the culture.” Instead they owe their promulgation to individuals and groups in positions of power, and, to some degree, they inevitably reflect the interests and biases of those groups. In early twentieth-century America it was the creators of nationally standardized news and entertainment, and the social groups they represented, who gained an unprecedented role in the production of cultural texts. With increasing success the common stories of the new commercial culture of mass-circulation magazines, movies, and radio vied for the allegiance of Americans also tied to cultures localized around such groupings as gender, ethnicity, class, and neighborhood. Nevertheless, even as audience participation in the production of cultural texts became more remote, consumers col­ lectively retained the power of veto, for the economic viability of this national storytelling depended on its resonance with millions of Americans. Image producers did their best to respond to public de­ sires and, often, to infuse their products with such a variety of mes­ sages that they might appeal to the widest possible audience. Partici­ pants in a commercial culture, they registered success or failure every day in the marketplace.3

T h e G a n g s t e r a n d U r b a n A m e r i c a

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

In the 19 20 s and early 19 30 s the gangster genre’s countless offer­ ings established the invented criminal as one o f the new mass culture’s preeminently powerful, easily recognizable symbols. The task to which his creatorsj>ut the gangster was to confront the urban society he epitomized. The genre’s symbolic vocabulary was a rich" cultural resource that journalists, filmmakers, and others used in efforts to explain and change the behavior o f urban Americans. The various composites of flashy clothes, gats, fast cars, and bad attitudes repre­ sented a compelling personalization of sweeping social change and carried a multitude of messages, some contradictory, for a public still adjusting to the city. Readers and moviegoers who examined the gangster saw complex social issues played out in simplified, manage­ able form. O ke any other successful invention, the gangster per­ formed a useful function. While it is impossible to gauge popular acceptance of specific messages, the essential fact is that millions of Americans literally bought what was being sold.

The criminal subject of the gangster genre made it a particularly capacious vessel for this kind of communication. Beginning with functionalist sociologists who suggested that groups foster and pub­ licize deviant activity to mark boundaries o f acceptable behavior,4 scholars have often noted the unique cultural utility of criminals. A growing body of historical research shows how men and women have constructed new understandings of the criminal to shape values about race, gender, class, responsibility, and sexual morality.5 Con­ temporary fascination with criminals confirms their special cultural utility. In his recent study of “ what makes crime ‘news,’ ” sociolo­ gist Jack Katz shows that news consumers recognize the consider­ able shortcomings o f journalistic accounts as credible guides to a threatening criminal world. Nevertheless, skeptical readers value this apparently flawed genre because each story speaks to problems en­ countered in daily life. Crime reports grapple with such issues as the limits of individual competence, the legitimacy of social and political claims of various groups, and the security o f revered institutions. “ The reading of crime news,” Katz concludes, “ is an eminently practi­ cal, future-oriented activity. In reading crime news, people recognize and use the moral tale within the story to orient themselves towards existential dilemmas they cannot help but confront.” Katz suggests, in other words, that the criminal is a rich cultural resource men and women use to understand and shape their social worlds.6 In his in-

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structive nonconformity, the invented gangster played a familiar and powerful cultural role.

To understand this role, I have examined gangster images in films, fiction, popular nonfiction books and pulps, and newspaper and magazine reporting. As Katz’s work suggests, to concentrate on whether a particular depiction is or is not factually accurate is to miss the point: that a large audience found it compelling. In a publicity piece for the 19 3 3 film Blondie Johnson, Warner Brothers studio pro­ vides further justification for discounting the conventional differenti­ ation between “ factual” and “ fictional” :

When serious historians begin to piece together the picture of our modern times they will give particular thanks to four people, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and Joan Blondell. These young players, more than any other, are supplying future generations with the true picture of our own hectic current problems by their work on the talking screen. Those future writers may call this the age of rackets, the years when the youth of the world went wild, revolted against law and discipline, or they may refer to it as the gangster era when law enforcement went under an eclipse. Whatever they name it, however they explain it, the truest pictures of all this strange interna­ tional phenomena will be provided by the then ancient rolls of film known now by such names as “ The Public Enemy,” “ Little Caesar,” “ Scarface” and “ Blondie Johnson.” The value of these films now is enter­ tainment. Their priceless ingredients for future historians is their truth.7

The publicity boilerplate— written by a studio employee about a pur­ portedly “ true” fictional account and intended for inclusion in local newspapers as a legitimate feature article— suggests the irrelevance of conventional literary categories. “ Factual” journalistic accounts relied on imaginative conjecture and regularly included material, from the dialogue at ultra-secret meetings to the unuttered thoughts of dying men, beyond the range of even the most capable reporter. “ Fictional” accounts, among them Blondie Johnson and the success­ ful films to which studio executives hoped to link it, invariably claimed authenticity, asserting the author’s intimate knowledge of gangland, highlighting the use of shady underworld consultants, or incorporating well-known real settings and events. Warner Brothers, Hollywood’s most prolific exploiter o f the underworld, declared its films “ Snatched from Today’s Headlines!” 8 Neither fact nor fiction,

these accounts are most reasonably aggregated as invention or even myth, forms in which other categories are irrelevant.

Whether packaged as news or storytelling, the central project of gang imagery was the exploration of a fascinating, troubling urban world. Many of those who invented the gangster brought special skills and a long interest to the task of explaining the city. This was especially true for those in the most important participating occupational group, writers for large metropolitan newspapers. As Gunther Barth has suggested, the big dailies thrived by feeding a steady stream of information about the mystifying realm of the city to virtually in­ satiable audiences.9 And it was not only through their newspaper writing that crime reporters explained the city, for many applied their journalistic skills of storytelling and interpretation to successful ven­ tures elsewhere in the new mass culture. Atypical only for his prom­ inence was Scarface screenwriter Ben Hecht, who came of age in Chicago newsrooms and gained national renown as a Daily News columnist. A large portion o f gang imagery, probably most of it, shared Scarface's provenance in the stories of reporters who moved easily from medium to medium, capitalizing on their ability to pre­ sent the city.10

The imagined gangster, o f course, fit into a long series of at­ tempts to come to grips with urban society. American distrust of the city dated at least from independence, and since the late nineteenth century the difficult transition o f a rural society into one predomi­ nantly urban had raptured the attention of millions o f Americans. The native-born middle class, reared to be suspicious of the city, drawn to it because o f economic change, and enjoying relatively easy access to political and cultural power, was the group most vocally preoccupied with the transition. Especially in the first two decades of the new century, middle-class men and women combined profes­ sional organization with political and social activism to impose their vision o f order on the apparent chaos of the new urban, industrial society. These progressives marshaled bureaucratic organization, ex­ pert management, and the creed o f efficiency to construct social insti­ tutions that would regulate otherwise dangerous urban phenomena: huge corporations, impersonal markets, and unprecedented concen­ trations of workers and immigrants. Issues that commanded middle- class attention— from public health, to the assimilation of immi­

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grants, to housing, labor, and civil-service reform— were pieces of the era’s most challenging puzzle: How to live with the city?

Many efforts to cope with urban society were, like the gangster image, cultural rather than explicitly political in nature. Some sought to provide the temporary, therapeutic respite believed necessary to those immersed in the jangling, competitive life of the modern city.11 Other responses, rejecting even that brief escapism, confronted the city more directly and attempted to take cultural possession of it. William Taylor has argued that many middle-class men and women became preoccupied with urban photography from the 1890s into the 1920s because visual representation helped them construct a reassur­ ing understanding. Portraits by Lewis Hine and others showed that human dignity was not incompatible with the giant new cities. Sky­ line views metamorphosed office towers— each built to project cor­ porate power and ambition— into quasi-mystical expressions of civic greatness.12 Equipped with the mental images inspired by these pho­ tographic ones, some Americans could now celebrate their new urban environments.

This acceptance of some elements of modern urbanism informed even the most aggressive middle-class and elite attempts to take cul­ tural control of the city. Social Gospel ministers, Richard Wightman Fox has shown, embraced urban commercial amusements by the early twentieth century. Discarding the conventional Protestant mis­ trust of theater and other commercial entertainment, they believed that urban amusements provided essential regeneration and could be a strong force for moral uplift.13 A similar confidence spurred city planners and others who sought to establish cultural authority by reconstructing the physical environment of the city. The creators of the grandiose neoclassical settings of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair did hope to reorder unruly urban society along the edifying lines of their architectural models. But, as James Gilbert demonstrates, a ma­ jor goal of that reordering was to make the modern city, with its di­ versity and exciting new pleasures, accessible to respectable folk.14 These men and women, and the generation of planners and reformers they inspired, strove not to repress the modern city but to make it their own.

That the long project of coming to grips with urban society was generally successful is suggested by the waning of some of these ef­ forts after the First World War. Progressive reform faded from public

T h e G a n g s t e r a n d U r b a n A m e r i c a

discussion and political significance, as did the city-planning move­ ment. Unlike his counterparts of an earlier decade, George Babbitt, the perceptive Sinclair Lewis’s middle-class composite, could ignore the blighted patches of his beloved hometown.15 When reform re­ turned, it was the New Deal blunderbuss aimed at the ills of an entire society in which cities seemed no sicker than small towns or the coun­ tryside. By the 1920 s the city had become the accepted, normal set­ ting in which all kinds of Americans might work out their lives.

Nevertheless, the acceptance of urbanism as a norm did not con­ stitute resolution of all the problems it entailed, and the gangster im­ ages of the twenties and early thirties belong to the long effort to devise solutions. The gangster represented a reformulation of long­ standing concerns for a new cultural context. As staged in the under­ world, the city was a disorderly place of dangerous strangers, of rapa­ cious capitalists, o f unmanly men and unwomanly women, of seekers of pleasure and shirkers of responsibility. In every scene, however, the drama played out by this familiar cast had been rewritten to meet the needs of a new audience. Gender, strangers, pleasure, and business were still problematic, but in new ways. At the same time, the inven­ tors of the gangster, like others who grappled with the meaning of urban society, found much to admire in their new surroundings. However troublesome, the underworld’s city was a place of exciting possibilities.

The gangster genre’s discussions of city life clustered around prob­ lems of social categorization. This common concern reflects the pow­ erful cultural role o f systems of classification in ordering the social world and the inadequacies of existing systems to structure urban experience. Boundaries between law-abiding and criminal, respect­ able and disreputable, male and female, moral and licentious, indi­ vidual and group: all seemed at the same time blurry and crucially important. The inventors of the gangster walked these boundaries, reported what they saw, and blazed new lines where the old ones had been trampled away or headed in dangerous directions. The commer­ cial success of the genre indicates that millions of Americans valued this guidance and joined in the expedition.

The following chapters of Inventing the Public Enemy examine this cultural mapping of new social territory. The first chapter ana­ lyzes crime writers’ efforts to survey the most fundamental cultural

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boundary and the one that had become most perplexing in the devel­ oping urban society: the line that defined the individual. In the early and mid 1920s a contentious media debate about an apparently ex­ plosive growth in lawlessness centered on the issue of the criminal’s responsibility. Some writers publicized “ scientific,” determinist views that seemed appropriate to an impersonal, interdependent urban so­ ciety. Distant, external forces overwhelmed the inconsequential hu­ man will. By the middle of the 19 20 s, a counterargument prevailed, contending that criminals were responsible for their actions and thus that individual agency remained undiminished even in the face of modernization’s assaults. The inventors of the gangster would build on this reinforced foundation of traditional moral values.

The second and third chapters study the gangster genre’s explora­ tion of the crucial boundary of respectability, and of several lesser territorial lines as well. Chapter 2 examines the portrayal of the gang­ ster as that paragon of middle-class occupational respectability, the businessman. Using the underworld to scrutinize the developing cor­ porate society, the inventors of the gangster at once celebrated the values of efficiency and warned of their potential dangers. The third chapter studies the ways Americans used the underworld to examine the developing urban mass-consumption society. The stylish gangster verified that consumption brought recognition and fulfillment, but, for some, he also served notice that the standards of style blurred supposedly more reliable categories of social classification, especially ethnicityjand class. Others, more comfortable with the new ethos of consumerism, smugly saw in the overdressed gangster buffoon re­ assurance that even in the modern city filled with strangers outward display broadcast inner character.

The fourth chapter examines the ways Americans used the under­ world to explore the shifting terrain of gender relations in urban soci­ ety. The gangster and his female associates experimented with a range of roles men and women might now play. On gender, as on business and consumption, the genre offered an alternately enthusiastic and critical evaluation of urban social change.

The final chapter studies accounts of the individual gangster Americans found most compelling, A 1 Capone of Chicago. Capone came to prominence in 19 26 , and from the St. Valentine’s Day M as­ sacre of 19 29 through his conviction on income tax violations in 19 3 1 , his career generated extraordinary attention. Countless newspaper

T h e G a n g s t e r a n d U r b a n A m e r i c a

articles, magazine features, books, and pulps constructed an elabo­ rate fable o f his rise to wealth, fame, and power. At once a responsible individual, an organized businessman, a hedonistic consumer, and a champion of traditional morality, Capone illuminated urban society’s problematic boundaries by his flagrant transgressions or ironic obser­ vance. His tale of success, as hortatory as it was cautionary, helped explain the possibilities and the dangers of the new urban society.

The epilogue considers the persistence o f gangster imagery after a fading o f media attention in 19 3 3 and 19 3 4 . In particular it exam­ ines an invention o f the mid and late 1930s: the gangster as a rural desperado. John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and their celluloid coun­ terparts suggested that the long accommodation to the city no longer ranked as the nation’s preeminent cultural challenge. Americans put the gangster, this rich resource, to other tasks.

i o I n t r o d u c t i o n

l The Individual, Society, and

the Uses o f Crime

In the apparent explosion of crime of the early 1920 s many saw the key to understanding a society in turmoil. That Americans mur­ dered, stole, and assaulted with unmatched regularity was the start­ ing point for endless searching of the national soul. “ The United States is the most lawless nation on the globe, barring only Russia under Bolshevist rule,” one typically grim observer concluded; “ No subject has attracted more attention and caused more serious discus­ sion.” 1 This discussion, aired in the mass media and capturing the attention of its huge audience, concerned much more than the causes of lawbreaking, for participants used the issue of criminality to grapple with some of the most troubling cultural dilemmas of their time. Most fundamentally, the criminal served as an important cul­ tural resource for men and women working to understand— and shape— the structure of their society and the place of the individual

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within it. Through him, Americans considered difficult problems, tested controversial ideas, and promoted basic values.

The criminal was a rich symbol, and Americans in the early 1920s struggled over who would use him. Observers divided most significantly, and mo$t contentiously, over whether the typical crimi­ nal was responsible for his actions and whether he resembled “ ordi­ nary” (native-born, middle-class) Americans. Answers had cultural significance far beyond the issue immediately at hand. Placing law­ breakers apart as a peculiar, distinctive class suggested that indelible lines of difference separated unequal groups in an inevitably hetero­ geneous society. But if the criminal and the noncriminal could be lumped into a coherent whole, then the lines of difference faded, and it was a largely homogeneous populace that faced the challenges and promises of modernity. In pronouncing the criminal’s irresponsibility, many determinists voiced broader concerns about the diminution of individual competence in a mass society. Moralists for their part evoked the culpable criminal to shore up eroding standards of indi­ vidual responsibility. It was their vision of the typical criminal, fraught with implications for other ordinary, responsible Americans, that prevailed in the early 19 20 s and spawned the gangster imagery soon to follow.

Many Americans argued that crime was the result of powerful forces external to the individual will. Popular accounts drew on recent sci­ entific ideas to trace criminality to defective breeding, racial proclivi­ ties, diseased teeth, over- and under-active glands, mental illness, low intelligence, and pernicious childhood environments, often in terrible combinations.2 “ Modern scientific investigation,” they typically ex­ plained, “ has shaken to its foundations” the assumption “ that crime is the voluntary choice of a free agent.” 3 These determinist explana­ tions diverged over whether the lawbreaker’s lack o f individual agency was unique or whether it was merely an extreme example of a general powerlessness.

The brand of determinism that most often pronounced the crimi­ nal’s essential differentness attributed crime to innate hereditary fac­ tors. Since the turn of the century the notion that behavioral traits passed from generation to generation had regularly captured public attention. Well publicized eugenicists argued that a host of social problems, from violent crime to pauperism and sexual promiscuity,

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were the inevitable consequences of the “ breeding” of “ defectives.” Though the eugenics vogue had peaked in the decade after 19 1 0 , it continued to receive favorable press coverage in the 1920s, especially early in the decade.4 As crime became an ever-greater matter of public concern, it regularly drew the attention of the eugenics popularizers. The eugenicists assured that lawbreakers had little in common with ordinary folk. In his contention that “ nature fashioned [the criminal] beyond the reach of his own will,” Collier’s contributor Wesley O. Howard typically offered an implicit contrast with law-abiding citi­ zens presumably well within the reach of their wills.5 “ The criminal,” another eugenicist explained, “ is a unique and highly differentiated individual, deviating sharply from the normal.” 6 Criminals were a dif­ ferent breed. A terrible national problem was best understood by di­ viding society into types, rigid natural categories o f ability, behavior, and worth.

The eugenicists’ message of difference was amplified by its incor­ poration of the markers o f important social divisions. The born crim­ inal validated existing ethnic and racial categories. The pickpocket described by Howard’s Collier’s account— a “ little, lithe, slender, peak-faced . . . cunning” man with “ keen, quick, narrow, shifty eyes” — conformed neatly to stereotypes about Jews, who were be­ lieved to have an affinity for that crime. Nature imprinted a typical “ thug” with troglodytic characteristics routinely ascribed to southern and eastern European immigrants: “ His face was unchangeable— the heavy, brutal jaw; the surly lowering brow; the dull, cruel eyes; the defiant, dishonest glance; the vulgar gluttonous mouth; the pimpled, pitted skin; the thick, bull-like neck; the guttural, unmannerly speech.” 7 Appearance distinguished the criminal from respectable folk and linked him to dangerous ethnic groups.

Occasionally the ethnic connection was more explicit. Most eu­ genicists fretted about Nordic “ race suicide” and pointed to crime as another reason to close the gates to immigrants. Scribner’s contribu­ tor Edwin Grant Conklin was one of many to match “ alien races” with their “ peculiar forms of lawlessness and crime” : Irish were drawn to crime by alcoholism resulting from an inherited “ unstable nervous organization” ; Italians, with their “ highly excitable and emotional disposition,” excelled at kidnapping, blackmailing, and crimes of violence; Russians and Poles, at “ gainful crimes such as robbery, larceny, and receiving stolen goods” ; Jews, at white slavery

T h e Us e s o f C r i m e

and prostitution.8 In an odd manifestation of nativist chauvinism, a Woman Citizen contributor warned that as Poles, Jew s, Slavs, Italians, and others made “ the American type . . . smaller and darker [and] more mercurial,” unsavory immigrant offenses would displace the old “Anglo-American crimes of burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy.” 9

The message o f difference also invoked economic divisions, as some observers employed the rhetoric of class to understand the crim­ inal. Though some writers, reflecting the scientific origins of deter- minist thought, referred to a criminal “ type,” “ class” offered richer associations. “ The ‘criminal class,’ ” one writer concluded, “ is practi­ cally a caste,” drawn from the same families “ generation after genera­ tion.” 10 The rhetoric of class was often coupled with nativism and buttressed by science. “ We are now admitting large numbers of per­ sons of low intelligence,” Conklin wrote, “ and it is this class which constitutes the greatest biological danger. . . . Any measure which would prevent the growth of this class of persons o f low intelligence would to a large extent reduce the immense amount of crime and lawlessness in this country.” 11 Warnings about the rapid growth of this deviant class reflected the fears of many native-born Americans that respectable society would be overrun by the rapidly multiplying immigrant laboring class. “ This class of defectives . . . from which nearly all our criminals come,” as one eugenicist warned, “ is giving American society five children for every one contributed by the class of highest intelligence.” 12 Decent society was under siege from a dan­ gerous lower class, and the criminal exemplified the threat.

Setting the problem of crime in the big-city slum cemented the association of criminals with the lower class. Many writers placed criminals in the teeming, decayed urban areas inhabited by immigrant and other laboring “ hordes,” and they imagined that the criminal class behaved much like other stereotypical slum dwellers. Repack­ aging standard conservative dogma about the lower class in general, eugenicists explained that even though criminals came from the slums, their behavior could not be attributed to that environment. Instead, members of the defective (lower) class would make a slum of any decent neighborhood into which misguided reformers placed them.13 Some eugenicists’ choices of offenses to highlight owed more to notions about slum behavior than to concerns about crimes that were particularly violent or resulted in large property losses. “ Explor­

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ing the Criminal Mind,” a Literary Digest report on the work of psy­ chologist and eugenicist William J. Hickson, featured a Chicago mother of seven children, two of whom had died. Her transgressions consisted of repeatedly deserting her husband and children by “ run­ ning away with drunken 'bums’ for four or five days at a time and consorting with the lowest class of men and women” and keeping her home “ in frightful condition; disorder everywhere, children and house neglected and filthy.” Fecundity, promiscuity, drunkenness, uncleanliness, sickness, chaos: this criminal’s life was a catalog of middle-class stereotypes about the slum and those who lived in it.14

The portrayal of the criminal as an exotic, biologically driven alien reflected some Americans’ basic values and promoted powerful cultural and political messages. Its conflation of crime and ethnicity argued for the restriction of immigration and for the vigilant over­ sight of “ foreigners” already here. The assertion that a lower deviant class inevitably produced its own environment cast any attempt at social amelioration as a misguided effort in futility: the lower orders lived as they were born to live. It was this division of society into higher and lower orders that was the most insistent message. Society did not conform to the classical liberal conception of an aggregation of rational, autonomous individuals. Instead, its lower reaches were filled with people whose actions were to a greater or lesser extent determined not by individual choice but by the awesome workings of nature. Categories of defect and criminality blurred into categories of economic class, race, and ethnicity. The eugenics popularizers as­ sured that respectable Americans, their presumed readers, were dif­ ferent: they possessed complete self-control. These good citizens were imperiled by the members of dangerous foreign classes so inferior that they could not control themselves. Respectable Americans need neither deny nor take responsibility for the disorder around them: it emanated from others.

Another group of observers used deterministic explanations to put forth a very different set of cultural messages. Many psychiatrists, academic social scientists, and their popularizers shared the belief of eugenicists that irresistible forces impelled the criminal, but they in­ sisted that ordinary, noncriminal individuals were subject to the same influences. In their view criminals were not exotic aliens governed by unique biological or psychological rules. Instead they believed that

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theater— “ to see which,” one critic noted, “ the unconvicted citizen has to pay five or six dollars a seat” — had robbed prisons of their terror. Restoring it would clean up the streets.116

Underlaying these calls for discipline was a moralistic notion of punishment aimed not at a select group of others but at the popula­ tion generally. While the determinists urged the treatment of patho­ logical victims or the segregation of alien others, moralists advocated punishment as a deterrent aimed at every person in society. The pros­ pect of unpleasant consequences of particular acts stood as a power­ ful incentive to acceptable behavior. “ We are all potential criminals,” restrained only by fallible consciences and social sanctions, the Out­ look explained.117 Certain punishment would be effective, Thomson wrote, because “ there is something of the schoolboy in all of us.” 118 Child concurred that punishment was understood by “ almost every human being, eugenically bred or not, psychoanalyzed or not, edu­ cated or not, rehabilitated or not.” 119 Another writer asked rhetori­ cally if his readers would violate the Volstead Act if they knew that inevitable punishment would follow.120 The criminal is one of us. In the face of appropriately unpleasant potential consequences, men and women would act with proper discipline. Individuals are responsible for their actions, they consider the consequences of their behavior, and they must be held accountable.

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The passion brought by the participants to the debates about crime suggests that they recognized the criminal’s broad cultural signifi­ cance. The debates constituted a struggle over who would exploit this rich cultural resource, and to what ends. By the m id-i9zos the moral­ ists emerged the clear victors. Their portrayals of the criminal pro­ moted a coherent set of values about the social order and the position of individuals within it. Individuals, they said, had not become in­ significant or powerless. Human behavior is a result of individual choices, not irresistible external forces. People control their own lives. They are responsible for what they do. “ Respectable” society faced serious threats, but not from the outsiders demonized by the eugenicists. An urban middle class, rebelling against authority and apparently seeking pleasure at any cost, now constituted the gravest danger. The examination of the new urban culture intensified in the mid-twenties and after, in a more vividly imagined version of the ordi­ nary criminal: the gangster.

Our crime wave coincides with an economic golden age which manifests itself otherwise in industrial expansion, crowding inventions, huge building programs, and in­ tense interest in material achievements. I argue that we have more crime per capita than the British for the same reason that we have more automobiles, more telephones, more ton-miles of freight moving, and more horse power of electrical energy per capita. In other words, a good deal of our crime . . . flows from our “ go-getting” spirit.1

Criminal

Businessmen

A mericans’ “ go-getting spirit” was the true subject of much of their discussion oFtfi5"CHfninal. For it was as a businessman that the stereotypical lawbreaker most uncannily reflected an ordinary, middle-class American. From the crime waves of the early 1920s through the gangster imagery of the mid-1 9 20s and after, crime was presented as an industry and its perpetrators as businessmen after the main chance. As Richard Washburn Child put it, “ The ignorant and vicious are becoming capitalists.” 2 Through these criminal capitalists, Americans examined the businessman, that most powerful and prob­ lematic of modern urban types.

The prevalence of these images in the mass media, graphic evi­ dence of how compelling Americans found them, suggests that the media’s predominantly middle-class audience and producers in the twenties did not adjust as easily to their business society as historians have conventionally assumed. For the inventors of the gangster of­ fered ambiguous and often disturbing revelations about the business­ men they exposed. At once marvelously capable and frighteningly

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dangerous, the gangster businessman cast a harsh light on his legi­ timate counterpart. Perhaps because this light of exposure was a re­ flection, a powerful but indirect illumination, it could convey critical messages normally absent from the generally conservative media of the twenties. Through the gangster genre, Hollywood, the New York Times, Collier’s, and even the Saturday Evening Post became the un­ likely vehicles o f subversion.

The incorporation of crime exemplified the vast expansion of the social and economic role of big business since the late nineteenth century. In that period business thrived on the enormous jumps in productivity made possible by new manufacturing techniques, econo­ mies of scale, and innovations in management and distribution. In the thirty years ending in 1929 manufacturing output increased 264 percent; in the twenties alone it nearly doubled. The corporations’ newly abundant consumer products profoundly affected daily life. The most visible product of the revolution of goods, the automobile, proliferated during the period when Americans began to envision the criminal as a businessman: from 1 9 1 0 to 1928 the ratio of automo­ biles to people in the United States grew from 1 in 265 to 1 in 6. So too, a myriad o f other products focused attention on their corporate creators. By the end of the twenties chain stores provided a physical reminder of the new ascendancy of the corporation, even in small towns and ethnic enclaves that had long resisted the large retailers’ enticements.3 The large corporation had assumed an ever greater role in Americans’ daily lives since the closing decades of the nineteenth century; by the 1920s its influence had reached recognizably mod­ ern levels.

The gangster’s apparent consolidation of the business of crime was, of course, paralleled in the larger consolidation of economic control. In 18 8 0 few firms other than the large railroads had assets of five million dollars or more. “ By 19 29 ,” Louis Galambos writes, “ a list of the five hundred or so largest industrial corporations—even if one left out the railroads— would include companies with assets ranging from around thirty-five million to almost two and a half bil­ lion dollars.” 4 That year two hundred companies possessed almost half the nation’s corporate wealth. Mergers with existing firms were the most important source of this growth. Though the greatest num­ ber of mergers occurred from 1898 to 19 0 2, more significant to the

C r i m i n a l B u s i n e s s m e n 39

twenties portrayal of the gang as an expanding corporation were the sizeable lesser peaks in merger activity during the Great War and again in the late twenties.5

The organizational revolution had profound consequences for Americans not only as consumers but also as members o f these large groups. For millions o f middle-class men, the corporation became the setting for career achievement and fostered new bureaucratic values. A (fertile turn of the century middle-class women encountered corpo­ rate values as employees in the mushrooming clerical workforce. Sim­ ilarly, professionals enthusiastically grasped the benefits of business­ like organization, joining with their peers to advance their economic position and social influence. For countless Americans individual identity had become intimately associated with membership in large organizations.6

The trend toward organization transformed not only the private economy but public life as well. Problems arising from industrial growth were, of course, the impetus behind many of the movements for progressive reform. But while many reformers hoped to rein in the “ trusts,” an ultimately more influential group envisioned reform as a means to enable businesses to operate smoothly and profitably. More generally, the reform movements gained their strongest support from middle-class professionals at the forefront of the organizational revolution. New regulatory and ameliorative agencies took the bu­ reaucratic organization and efficiency methods of the corporation as their guiding light. Government became suffused with the techniques of hierarchical organization, specialization, and scientific expertise developed by private corporations.7

The movement toward increasing organization extended beyond the progressive years. During the war, business and organizational values in the public sphere assumed new importance as government and industrial leaders attempted to meet the extraordinary demands for conservation, better information, and increased production. Pub­ lic groups like the War Industries Board furthered the expansion of business influence. Even the military borrowed from the model of the well-run corporation.8 The trend continued into the 1920 s, as the conservative Republican administrations were uncharacteristically activist in their promotion of business cooperation and association- alism.9

The social and political prominence of big business in the twenties

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was matched in the broader realm of popular culture. Commentators have long remarked upon the cultural elevation o f the businessman. According to the popular media, he was a visionary who would solve daunting social problems where reformers had failed. New corporate benefits programs would ameliorate the problems of poverty, and company unionism would dampen nagging class tensions. Universi­ ties aligned themselves with the heroes of harmonious prosperity by expanding offerings in management, advertising, and retailing. It was the equation of business and religion, however, that most loudly pro­ claimed the businessman’s exalted status. Bruce Barton’s The Man N obody Knows, the best-selling nonfiction book of 19 25 and 19 26 , cast Jesus as a go-getter young executive.10 As Frederick Lewis Allen quipped in 1 9 3 1 , “ So frequent was the use of the Bible to point the lessons of business and of business to point the lessons of the Bible that it was sometimes difficult to determine which was supposed to gain the most from the association.” 11

Through the gangster-businessman, writers, filmmakers, and others explored the meanings of this new corporate society. Audi­ ences were subtly encouraged to examine the businessman, to under­ stand what their urban society had produced, the organizational val­ ues it increasingly upheld, and what they themselves might be or soon become. The inventors of the gangster offered a simplified version of the businessman, a social phenomenon that was, because of its vari­ ety and profusion, otherwise inscrutably complex. Shorn of obscur­ ing detail, the gangster stood as an invitation to see the businessman as he really was.

The similarity of the gangster and the businessman began with ap­ pearance. In 19 2 5 Richard Washburn Child suggested that “ the lean business man” who headed a burglary ring might easily be mistaken for a realtor.12 A bootlegger in a 19 26 C ollier’s account was a “ well dressed young fellow” who looked like a life insurance agent or bond salesman.'f Clothing and appearance no longer seemed reliable

T» guides for differentiating between good and evikVThe bigger figures in the environs of the underworld,” a 1929 N ew York Times feature on racketeers explained, “ are not easily distinguishable from the broader business types.” 14

Editorial cartoons provide graphic evidence of the gangster’s new resemblance to the businessman. In the early 1920 s cartoons gener-

C r i m i n a l B u s i n e s s m e n 4 1

ally depicted criminals in one of two ways. Often they were creatures apart— undersized, grotesque, contorted, skulking figures in caps and

cartoons depicted the innocent youth, newly arrived from the coun-

Moreover, cartoonists increasingly imagined that underworld lead­ ers, like business movers and shakers, were not youths but middle- aged, fleshy men who strained the buttons of conservative vested suits. N o longer topped by a scruffy cap, the new criminal seemed perfectly attired in a stylish hat more appropriate to the business dis­ trict than to a taproom.15

Crime remained an urban problem, but Americans in the 1920s shifted its setting from ethnic ghettos to downtown business districts. Earlier notions of the urban criminal’s geographic remoteness had been manifested by magazine exposes of the nefarious crimes within sharply defined immigrant neighborhoods, occasionally illustrated by a street map of the exotic, unfamiliar territory.16 Now the pestilence had come to environs familiar to middle-class readers, as suggested by a 19 2 5 cartoon of huge rats labeled “ crime” overrunning a dense business district. Another cartoon, from 1 9 3 1 , featured a colossal racketeer surveying his realm from a throne of downtown building The gangster inhabited a world of office buildings and skyscraper the new shrines to business achievement.17 Within that world, his in mediate environment looked much like that of his legitimate counter parts. Child’s typical burglar planned his affairs from within “ a fairly

the name of a real estate company. He worked “ behind [a] large golden-oak desk with a telephone and a stenographer.” 18 Business of­ fices with expensive furniture, office equipment, filing cabinets, and large staffs of typists, stenographers, and other clerical workers were the routine settings for the businessman-gangster’s activities.19

Films of the late twenties and early thirties offered the most vivid portrayals of gangsters’ businesslike appearance and settings. Through the m id-i920s dishevelled members of celluloid gangs were usually attired in caps and drab or garish cheap clothes. They gath­ ered in rough subterranean rooms, drank in dirty, raucous saloons, and generally confined their prowling to such areas as dockyards and congested tenement districts.20 Reflecting both the changed notions

jackets that signified working-class status and ethnic origins. Other

tryside, drawn in by the lure of easy money. By the middle of the decade criminals often wore the attire of middle-class urbanites.

respectable office building,” perhaps behind a door emblazoned with

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about criminals elsewhere in American culture and Hollywood’s new commitment to “ realism,” movies in 19 28 abruptly began to depict gangsters as nattily dressed, office-using businessmen. Pleasant- featured, they wore three-piece suits, ties, hats, and watch-chains— a stylish version of standard middle-class business attire. Their offices covered the conventional range of business taste, from heavy Victo­ rian probity to sleek Art Deco modernism.

A 1 9 3 1 film, The Finger Points, typified the use o f physical ap­ pearance and settings to connect the businessman to the racketeer. The middle-level gangster boss operates out of an office with an exec­ utive’s impressive desk and an oil painting on the wall. His young associate, played by Clark Gable in a tasteful vested suit with silk handkerchief, pocket watch, tie-bar, and bowler hat, has his own office suite with all the standard accoutrements: a waiting room, bat­ teries of filing cabinets, and a busy typist. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases and carved paneling cover the walls of Gable’s private office, where he works intently at a large desk with an in-basket. Like any executive he conducts much of his business over the telephone, has a reception­ ist place his calls, and talks convivially to his colleagues. His language is appropriate to this sanctum of business. After proposing a joint venture he asks, “ Well, do we play ball?” “ Yep, we play ball,” is the reply. “All right,” he concludes, “ you’ll hear from me later.” Crime operated in business’s conventional, mundane metaphorical realm of sport.21

The criminal’s new businesslike exterior carried with it a number—, _of unsettling messages. While depictions of the criminal had once confirmed for middle-class AmericansTfie dangers of people who wore shabby clothes, spoke indecipherable languages, and dwelt in the wrong parts of town, by the middle of the twenties such reassur­ ing cultural and physicafdistance had collapsed. N o longer an abnor-

^ m a l outsider, the criminal had become the ultimate middle-class in­ sider in the years when, as Calvin Coolidge intoned, the business of America was business. Like everything else, the doing of evil seemed

\ to have been taken over by men in three-piece suits. For some Ameri­ cans, the message must have been: Here is what really happens inside those skyscrapers. Theft, violence, and other lawlessness symbolize their true influence. For others closer to the center of the business society, the message took the form of a series of questions: How dif­ ferent are the things you do inside your busy office? What are the

C r i m i n a l B u s i n e s s m e n 43 consequences of the way you play ball? In either case, businessmen merited the scrutiny once reserved for anarchists, immigrants, and beer-drinking unionists.

In telling the gangster’s story, Americans followed— and commented^ , on— the conventional-script of business-and success literature. The ' portrayers of the businessman gangster of the midtwenties and after devoted little attention to his motivation, saimportant to earlier ob­ servers, because theylm ew that the criminal, like any businessman, did what he did to make money and rise in the world. As something approaching a natural law, self-interest required no explanation. Of much greater concern were the gangster’s avenues to wealth. Intricate descriptions o f criminal enterprises attempted to answer the basic question asked about every successful man: How did he make his money? Portrayals of gangs and their leaders were thus, in large part, accounts of strategies, techniques, and guiding principles. In form and even substance, the accounts read very much like those of legiti­ mate business. Unlike most popular success accounts, however, sto -. ries o f the gangster suggested that lawless violence and defiance of U broadly espoused moral principles were the legacies of the success­ ful man.

The fundamental business strategies explored by the inventors of the gangster were growth, consolidation, and organization. Count­ less observers remarked that the scale of operations of the typical criminal enterprise had grown explosively. From its inception in 19 1 9 , the highly visible Chicago Crime Commission directed public attention to this growth. “ The business of crime,” its leaders preached at every opportunity, “ is being more expertly conducted. Modern crime, like modem business, is tending towards centralization, organ­ ization and commercialization. Ours is a business nation. Our crimi­ nals apply business methods.” “ No longer have we to deal with the individual alone,” commission director Henry Barrett Chamberlin warned. “ The men and women of evil have formed trusts.” 22 Crimi­ nals, concluded mystery writer and radio personality Arthur B. Reeve, exemplified the American “ genius for organization on a vast scale.” 23 As in legitimate business, growth was accompanied by suc­ cessful efforts to limit competition. “ The day of cutthroat competi­ tion between individual and irresponsible criminals is passing,” noted Richard Washburn Child, an admirer of the Chicago group; “ Just as