1. Seelye, Katherine Q., “Accord Reached on Sweeping Crime Bill to Battle Crime,” New York Times, 29 July 1994Google Scholar.

2. “Predatory Crime,” 11 September 1933, NBC Radio speech, Series 4, Box 212, Papers of Homer Stille Cummings, Alderman Library, the University of Virginia, hereafter cited as Cummings Papers.

3. The Progressive Era and the New Deal have generated a massive amount of literature. Standard synthetic works on the Progressives include Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, and Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. For purposes of this article, I agree with Hofstadter's definition of Progressivism as a “vague” reform movement, aimed at restoring a lost “kind of morality and civic purity.” In contrast to the New Deal, which emphasized government intervention, Progressivism rested on changing government machinery in order to “restore government to the people” (Hofstadter, 5–6, 310). I disagree with Hofstadter's contention that World War I ended Progressivism; its tenets continued to permeate the approach of criminal reformers throughout the 1920s.

Three standard works on the New Deal include Conklin, Paul K., The New Deal (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Leuchtenberg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; and Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1959)Google Scholar. O'Reilly, Kenneth discusses one unintended result of New Deal efforts to bolster the FBI in “Crime Control and National Security,” Journal of American History 69 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. In his seminal work, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, Samuel Walker discusses the psychological and sociological theories of crime that gained ground during the 1920s. He argues that the Wickersham Commission's reports of 1931 provided the capstone to sociological theories. It is difficult to determine to what extent criminological theories affected public opinion.

5. Much has been written about J. Edgar Hoover, but the best biographies include Lowenthal, Max, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (New York, 1950)Google Scholar; Gid, Richard Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Theoharis, Athan G. and Cox, John Stuart, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar; and Gentry, Curt, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Of these, Theoharis and Cox give the most balanced view of Hoover's relationship with other New Deal policymakers, especially Cummings.

6. Cummings, Homer and McFarland, Carl, Federal Justice: Chapters in the History of Justice and the Federal Executive (New York, 1937), chap, xi, 371, 464–69, 473–74, 480–81Google Scholar. Friedman, Lawrence M., Crime and Punishment in American History (New York, 1993), 273Google Scholar, says crime did not become a national issue until the Wickersham Commission. For a discussion of federal justice during the Gilded Age, see Stolberg, Mary M., “The Evolution of Frontier Justice: The Case of Judge Isaac Parker,” Prologue (Spring 1988): 7–23.Google Scholar

7. Adamson quote in Lowenthal, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 14. Details about the early Bureau of Investigation in Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 367, 369–71, 375–78, 382–83, 474, 480–81; Wright, Kevin N., The Great American Crime Myth (Westport, Conn., 1985), 85–86Google Scholar; Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 42–44; and Gatewood, Willard B., Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy: Episodes of the White House Years (Baton Rouge, 1970), 242, 252–54, 260, 266, 283–85.Google Scholar

8. Wright, The Great American Crime Myth, 86; Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 382–83. Lowenthal, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 368–87, provides a history and description of the issues involved in FBI cataloging of fingerprints.

9. Mitchell quote in Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 478. Prohibition figures in Cashman, Sean Dennis, America in the Twenties and Thirties: The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York, 1989), 71.Google Scholar

10. New York City provides a good example of how Prohibition undermined local law enforcement. See Stolberg, Mary M., Fighting Organized Crime: Politics, Justice, and the Legacy of Thomas Dewey (Boston, 1995), chap. 1.Google Scholar

11. Moley, Raymond describes crime commissions in Our Criminal Courts (New York, 1930), 220–22Google Scholar; Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 475; Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Report of the Cleveland Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Ohio, Raymond Fosdick and others, directed and edited by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter (Montclair, N.J., 1968; reprint Cleveland Foundation, 1922), vi, 4–5, 31, 49, 114, 117–19, 132–34, 162–63, 167, 192, 208–10, 214–15, 230, 253, 259–60, 263, 276–77, 354, 362–64; see Roscoe Pound and Criminal Justice, ed. Glueck, Sheldon (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 1965), 18, 23–24, 73Google Scholar. Washburn, Richard Child describes the crime wave in Battling the Criminal (Garden City, 1925), 2Google Scholar. Given the unreliability of crime statistics, it is impossible to prove the existence of a crime wave. For a discussion of this problem, see Scheingold, Stanley A., The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy (New York, 1984), 54–55Google Scholar, 203, 226, and Crime and City Politics, ed. Heinz, Anne, Jacob, Herbert, and Lineberry, Robert L. (New York, 1983), 4–5, 281–82.Google Scholar

12. Haller, Mark H., “Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case,” Journal of American History 57 (December 1970): 619CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haller, , “Police Reform in Chicago,” American Behavioral Scientist 13 (May–August 1970): 649–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Criminal Justice in Cleveland, quote 191, 188–90, 611; Child, Battling the Criminal, 290.

14. Walker, Popular Justice, 173–77; Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 273–74. For another interpretation, see Calder, James D., Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy: Herbert Hoover's Initiatives (Westport, Conn., 1993)Google Scholar.

15. Contemporaries recognized the galvanizing effect of the Lindbergh case; Cummings claimed it dissipated one hundred years of policy against federal intervention, Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 478–79. There was no shortage of spectacular crimes and criminals during the 1930s. William E. Leuchtenburg, for example, argues that it was John Dillinger's crime spree in late 1933 and 1934 that prompted calls for federal intervention. There is no doubt that the killing of Dillinger by FBI agents in July, Pretty Boy Floyd in October, and Baby Face Nelson in November of 1934 promoted federal intervention. But the Lindbergh case came first. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 334.

16. The original kidnapping statute had been introduced at the behest of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce in 1931. Because of the city's location on a state border, police had stood by helplessly during a number of kidnappings in which the victims were taken across the Mississippi River. The bill had little chance of passage until the Lindbergh case. See Bomar, Horace L. Jr., “The Lindbergh Law,” Law and Contemporary Problems 1 (October 1934): 435–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mitchell is quoted in Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 479. Kavanagh, Marcus discusses jurisdictional problems in The Criminal and His Allies (Indianapolis, 1928), xiGoogle Scholar; Child, Battling the Criminal, 10, 167–68.

17. Justin Miller, dean of Duke Law School and future special assistant U.S. attorney general, to Louis Howe, 19 September 1933, OF 117, Box 3, File “Crime 1933,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, hereafter cited as FDR Papers. Plank fifteen does not specify criminal law, but given Roosevelt's long-standing interests in the subject, it can be read as applying to both civil and criminal law. See “Democratic National Committee,” Box 831, File “Special Files, Platform.” Thomas S. Rice of the Brooklyn Eagle believed the plank referred to criminal justice, Rice to Howe, 2 December 1934, OF 117, Box 1, File “Crime 1934,” FDR Papers.

18. Brooklyn Eagle editor Thomas S. Rice remembered Roosevelt's involvement in the NCC, Rice to Howe, 10 August 1933, Box 72, File “Crime,” Papers of Louis McHenry Howe (hereafter cited as Howe Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library). F. Trubee Davison to FDR, 6 November 1925; FDR to Roscoe Pound, 19 December 1925, PPF, Box 30, File “National Crime Commission,” FDR Papers.

19. La Guardia to Howe, 28 February 1933, OF 117, Box 3, File “Crime 1933,” FDR Papers. This file contains many letters about crime. Howe mentioned the “crusade against crime” in a memo to Mrs. Malvina Scheider, signed by M. A. Durand, 27 June 1933, and in correspondence with O. W. Kane of the Stenographic and Translation Bureau of Law Reporters, Kane to Howe, 27 September 1932, and Howe to Kane, 29 September 1932, all in Box 72, File “Crime,” Howe Papers. Rollins, Alfred B. Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (New York, 1962), 368, 412–13Google Scholar, and Stiles, Lela, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe (Cleveland and New York, 1954), 95–96.Google Scholar

20. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, 390. Moley relied heavily on existing data and talked to only a handful of experts, including Earl Warren, who was then district attorney of Alameda County, California; Colonel Henry Barrett Chamberlain, the founder and director of the Chicago Crime Commission; officers of the International Association of Chiefs of Police; J. Edgar Hoover; and Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan, who would become the primary architect of the federal attack on crime. See “Moley's Report to Roosevelt on Law Enforcement Measures” and “Moley Asks ‘Army’ to War on Crime,” New York Times, 24 May 1934, 2.

21. Cummings's diary entries between 8 December 1932 and 3 March 1933 and letters from Cummings to Col. Edward M. House between November 1933 and February 1934, Series 3, Box 114, File “Col. E. M. House,” Cummings Papers.

22. Information about Cummings's early career in an article from Collier's, 4 January 1936, 23, Series 3, Box 89, File “George Creel”; Speech by Cummings over NBC National Radio Forum, 24 April 1933, Series 3, Box 185, File “Department of Justice Press Releases March 1932–June 1938,” both in Cummings Papers. Entries 5 March–1 April 1933, August 1933, Cummings Diaries.

23. Hoover quoted in Hall, Jerome, “Federal Anti-Theft Legislation,” Law and Contemporary Problems 1 (October 1934): 424CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Liberty magazine said Hoover had little recognition outside Washington in his early years, Will Irwin, “Are They Putting J. Edgar Hoover on the Spot?” Liberty 13:42 (17 October 1936): 24. Eleven articles by or about Hoover appeared between 1927 and 1931 compared to more than fifty between 1932 and 1937. See Bibliography of Crime and Criminal Justice, 1927–1931 (New York, 1934)Google Scholar and Bibliography of Crime and Criminal Justice, 1932–1937, compiled by Culver, Dorothy (New York, 1939)Google Scholar. Theoharis and Cox argue that Hoover did not start stealing the limelight from Cummings until 1935 (The Boss, 129–30).

24. Hoover, J. Edgar, “The U.S. Bureau of Investigation in Relation to Law Enforcement,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 23 (September–October 1932): 439–40.Google Scholar

25. Hoover's political drawbacks are assessed in a memo, 14 December 1932, OF 10b, Box 10, File “Justice Dept, FBI, 1933–34,” FDR Papers. The file also contains letters from Hoover's backers urging his retention. Roosevelt, through an executive order issued on 10 June 1933, combined the Prohibition Bureau, the Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau of Identification. Gentry describes Hoover's feud with Walsh (119–22, 153–58).

26. Cummings to Guy T. Helvering of the U.S. Treasury Department, 30 September 1933; Memo, Hoover to Cummings, 13 September 1933; Memo, Hoover to Cummings, 19 September 1934; Memo, Hoover to Cummings, 4 October 1934, Series 3, Box 134, File “Lindbergh Kidnapping,” Cummings Papers. Memo, Howe to Cummings, 19 June 1934, in which the President wanted to know the status of the files in the case, 19 June 1934, OF 92, Box 1, File “Charles Lindbergh, 1933–41,” FDR Papers. When Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested by New York City police for the Lindbergh kidnapping, Hoover rushed to the scene to pose for pictures with the police commissioner. His headline grabbing was audacious. The arrest had been made by local police, and other federal agents already had developed the leads that would resolve the case by the time Hoover's bureau was given control of it on 19 October 1933.

27. Quote from a 30 October 1934 speech by Cummings in Stamford, Connecticut, in Selected Papers of Homer Cummings, ed. Swisher, Carl Brent (New York, 1972), 46Google Scholar. In entries for 30 August and 5 September 1933, Cummings described the ABA meeting as “tense” and said “reactionary” speeches predicted that New Deal measures would “destroy” the Constitution, Cummings Diaries.

28. Neither Howe nor Moley played a major role in drafting the crime program. Moley's report was issued after the President signed the bills in May 1934, and Howe testified in favor of them before Congress. Cummings's speech, “Predatory Crime,” NBC Radio Speech, 11 September 1933, Series 4, Box 212, Cummings Papers. Information about Keenan's political connections in Of 10, Box 3, File “Justice Department, Jan.–Mar. 1936,” and Box 1, File “Justice Dept, Sept.–Dec. 1933,” FDR Papers. Keenan described his early role in a speech, “Suppressing Racketeering and Allied Crimes,” to the Cleveland Bar Association, 9 January 1934, in Papers of the Attorney General, Box ACC 1197, #5, KM, Department of Justice Records, RG-60, E-132, The National Archives (hereafter cited as AG Papers).

29. Keenan to Howe, 1 August 1933, OF 10, Box 1, File “Justice Dept, Jun–Aug. 1933,” FDR Papers.

30. “Predatory Crime,” 11 September 1933, NBC Radio speech, Series 4, Box 212, Cummings Papers. Although the Lindbergh case remained unsolved, federal agents had used the Lindbergh Law in fifteen kidnapping cases and thirteen threatened abductions between the law's passage in June 1932 and Cummings's war on crime in the summer of 1933. See also Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 482. In November, Keenan wrote Howe that the last major kidnapping case, involving the abduction of William Hamm Jr., president of the Hamm Brewing Co., was scheduled to go to trial in St. Paul, Minnesota. After the case ended, Keenan predicted, federal agents could turn their attention to more important crimes, such as commercial and labor racketeering. Memo Keenan to Howe, 3 November 1933, OF 10, Box 1, File “Justice Dept, Jun–Aug. 1933,” FDR Papers. The Hamm case proved to be a public relations fiasco when the defendants were acquitted. Cummings to Roosevelt, 20 March 1935, Series 3, Box 174, File “Correspondence with White House,” Cummings Papers.

31. “The Campaign Against Crime,” Columbia Broadcast Company, 22 November 1933; see also “The Recurring Problem of Crime,” 12 October 1933; “The Campaign Against Crime,” 10 January 1934, all in Series 4, Box 212, Cummings Papers. “Suppressing Crime and Allied Crimes,” speech by Keenan, 9 January 1934, AG Papers. Roosevelt's reaction to Cummings's November speech in M. A. Le Hand to Cummings, 12 January 1934, OF 10, Box 2, File “Justice Department, Jan.-Apr. 1934,” FDR Papers. Specific proposals in “How the Government Battles Organized Lawlessness,” 12 May 1934, Series 4, Box 213, Cummings Papers.

32. Speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, 19 April 1934, Swisher, 37–38.

33. Louis Howe described public demands in an Untitled Draft of Speech, Box 72, File “Crime,” Howe Papers. For contemporary analyses of the constitutionality of the crime bills, see “Legislation: Criminal Law—Federal Statutes of 1934 Extending Jurisdiction to the Acts Beyond State Control,” University of Virginia Law Review 22 (December 1935): 568–72Google Scholar, and “Legislation: Federal Cooperation in Criminal Law Enforcement,” Harvard Law Review 48 (January 1935): 489–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Sumners quoted in Powers, The Boss, 190. Dillinger was gunned down in the lobby of the Biograph Theater in Chicago after a prostitute, the “Woman in Red,” tipped off federal agents. Hoover played down the tip, and publicized his agents use of “scientific” methods, Powers, Secrecy and Power, 189–93.

35. Memo Early to Cummings, 18 May 1934, OF 10, Box 2, File “Department of Justice, May–June 1934,” FDR Papers. Cummings's lobbying efforts described in Collier's, 4 January 1936, 23; Series 3, Box 89, File “George Creel,” Cummings Papers. The file also contains Cummings's letters to thirty-six senators. He urged Roosevelt to talk with Sumners personally; see entries for 19 and 23 March, Cummings Diaries. Roosevelt's comments in “Press Release,” 18 May 1934, PSF, Box 55, “Department File, Justice 1933–37,” FDR Papers.

36. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 180; O'Reilly, “Crime Control and National Security,” 652; proposed Letter to President, November 1934, Series 3, Box 82, File “Budget and Appropriation Matters,” Cummings Papers; Annual Report of the Attorney General, 1937, 30 June 1937, U.S. Government Printing Office, 6.

37. Baker, Newman F., Editorial, Journal of Law and Criminology 28 (January–February 1938): 627–29.Google Scholar

38. Series 3, Box 134, File “Lindbergh kidnapping”, Memo, Bates to Cummings, 24 September 1936, Series 3, Box 77, File “Sanford Bates,” Cummings Papers. The disagreements were described in Will Irwin, “Are they Putting J. Edgar Hoover on the Spot?,” Liberty, 13:42 (17 October 1936), 25. Cummings to Fulton Oursler, editor of Liberty, 23 September 1936, Series 3, Box 122, Cummings Papers. Other indications of rifts between Hoover and the Secret Service and Postal Inspectors can be found in entries for 22 May 1936 and 5 August 1936, Cummings Diaries.

39. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 195–97; Lowenthal, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 413; Hoover to Cummings, 18 December 1936, Series 3, Box 82, File “Harry Brunette,” Cummings Papers.

40. McKellar quote in Lowenthal, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 46. Concerns about Hoover by other New Dealers can be found in column, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 29 July 1938, and George Creel article in Collier's, copies of which are in Series 3, Boxes 88–89, Files “John R. Covert and George Creel,” Cummings Papers. Hoover's ability to curry favor with those in power is amply demonstrated by his early letters in 1933 to Louis Howe and Cummings in OF 10b, Box 10, File “Justice Department, FBI, 1933–34,” FDR Papers.

41. The impact of new statutes on prosecution levels can be found in the Annual Report of the Attorney General, 1937,” 30 June 1937, U.S. Government Printing Office, 73–93, 129, 137–40. Figures on prison population in Cummings to Roosevelt, 26 October 1935, Series 3, Box 174, File “Correspondence with White House, 1935 Jan–Dec”; Draft of an article that subsequently appeared in Collier's, 29 July 1939, Series 3, Box 70, File “Alcatraz 1933–39,” Cummings Papers. Cummings described his ideas in a memo to Keenan in August 1933. In an October 1933 radio address, he first outlined his plan publicly, Swisher, Selected Papers of Homer Cummings, 29, 31. The War Department constructed an army prison on Alcatraz in 1909.

42. Cummings to Henry Suydam, his former press agent who later wrote for the Newark Evening News, 14 June 1939; Bates to William Stanley, assistant attorney general, 8 January 1934; information about the prisoners' life in “Twenty Months in Alcatraz,” As Told by Bryan Conway to T. H. Alexander, Saturday Evening Post, 12 June 1939, 8, 31; Murphy quote in editorial from Newark Evening News, 12 June 1939, which criticized his remarks. All of these, including Rochester editorial, can be found in Series 3, Box 70, File “Alcatraz 1933–39,” Cummings Papers.

43. More than eighty newspaper correspondents from around the country were invited to the Department of Justice opening reception, see Series 3, Box 137, File “Newspaper Reception,” Cummings Papers and entry for 25 October 1934, Cummings Diary. Justin Miller to Howe, 19 September 1933; Howe to Miller, 10 October 1933; Miller to Howe, 19 October 1933, OF 117, Box 3, File “Crime, 1933”; Telegram, Stephen Early to McIntyre (no first name), 13 September 1934, OF 117, Box 1, File “Crime 1934,” FDR Papers. Memo, Howe to Margaret A. Durand, undated; Durand to James M. Hepbron, 26 January 1935, Box 72, File “Crime,” Howe Papers.

44. Proceedings of the Attorney General's Conference on Crime (no publisher listed), 1931, 17–18; telegram, White House, undated, file “Justice Department, July–Oct, 1934”; Howe to William Stanley, assistant attorney general, 2 November 1934, File “Justice Department, Nov–Dec 1934”; Cummings to Roosevelt, File “Justice Department, Jan–Feb 1935,” all in OF 10, Box 2, FDR Papers.

45. “The Federal Government and the Crime Problem,” Miller, Justin, speech reprinted in Oregon Law Review 14 (April 1935): 1158–60Google Scholar. Eugene Meyer to Stephen Early, 15 January 1936; Roosevelt to Meyer, 16 January 1936, PPF, File 711, FDR Papers. Perhaps the best-known state crime conference was held in New York under the auspices of Governor Herbert Lehman. See State of New York: Proceedings of the Governor's Conference on Crime, the Criminal and Society, September 30 to October 3, 1935 (Albany, 1936)Google Scholar. Memo Cummings to Special Assistant Gordon Dean, 8 November 1934, Swisher, Selected Papers of Homer Cummings, 50. “The Lessons of the Crime Conference,” Cummings's closing speech at conference, 13 December 1934, Swisher, ibid., 53.

46. Miller, Justin, “Plans for a National Institute of Criminology,” Oregon Law Review 119 (April 1935): 459–64Google Scholar; Memo, Cummings to Justin Miller, 3 February 1936, Series 3, Box 190, File “Memoranda Criminal Division,” Cummings Papers.

47. Ashurst speech, 10 June 1938, Series 3, Box 76, File “Correspondence with Sen. Henry Ashurst of Arizona,” Cummings Papers; Roosevelt to Cummings, 31 December 1938, PPF, File 270, FDR Papers. One indication of lagging concern about crime is the decreasing amount of correspondence about it in Roosevelt's files; see OF 117, Box 2, Files for 1933–45, FDR Papers.

48. Alcatraz was closed in the 1960s because of its undue expense–keeping prisoners there cost $8 per day, more than three times the cost at other maximum-security federal prisons. Bureau of Prisons Director James V. Bennett to Cummings, 23 March 1953, Series 3, Box 70, File “Alcatraz 1945–55,” Cummings Papers. One example of the many letters received came from Merle E. Rudy, a lawyer from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Cummings, 22 November 1937, Series 3, Box 88, File “Congratulation Letters.” A similar file is contained in Box 98, Cummings Papers.

49. Wechsler, Herbert, “A Caveat on Crime Control,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 27 (1937): 629, 637.Google Scholar