Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [167]
In the nineteenth century, there was less traffic across the lines; and it was slower. We have stressed American mobility in the nineteenth century. Still, there were physical limits. It took months to get from Missouri to Oregon in, say, 1850; the trip was grueling and dangerous. Eventually, the railroad cut the trip to about a week. Cars were soon as fast, and more convenient. Then the airplane made distance meaningless. Jet travel eliminated, for all practical purposes, the places in between. When you fly from coast to coast, you don’t go through the midwest; you just fly over it.
This is physical travel. Ideas and pictures travel even faster. The whole country watches the president on TV—simultaneously. This is new. Technology makes this one country, with one capital, one primary center of power.
Federal Crimes
These facts of twentieth-century life do not automatically translate into changes in criminal justice. But if the central government swells and bloats, that must have consequences. In our century, federal laws have piled one on top of the other, and then some: laws about taxation, welfare, business regulation, and the like. The Internal Revenue Code is perhaps the most awesome and convoluted of all federal statutes. The income tax dates from 1913.6 The tax code is not, of course, a criminal code, but cheating on taxes is most definitely a crime, including failure to file a return or filing a “false or fraudulent return.”7 The Internal Revenue Service makes some startling arrests of prominent people; countless millions were and are aware of the shadow of the IRS, looking over their shoulders.
The federal leviathan grew and grew in the twentieth century, and this expanded the sheer number of federal crimes, big and small. In the same session that enacted the income-tax law, Congress made it a crime to take commercial sponges “measuring when wet less than five inches in their maximum diameter” from the Gulf of Mexico or the Straits of Florida; it became a crime also to violate the Cotton Futures Act.8 Each session of Congress peppered the statute books with regulatory crimes. The New Deal accelerated the process; and there was no letup in the post-New Deal world.
In the nineteenth century, Congress was a caged tiger. But the tiger burst out of its cage in the twentieth century. The Mann Act (the so-called White Slave Law), passed in 1911, was a remarkable instance of the tiger on the loose.9 This law put the federal government squarely into a life-area (sex), which had been as purely state and local a concern as anything in the whole legal system. And this was only the beginning; next came tougher drug laws—the start of a long, unhappy marriage—and then Prohibition, which came and went.
Congress took another giant step in 1919, when it passed the so-called Dyer Act, the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act. This law, in essence, made it a crime to drive a stolen car across state lines, or to deal in stolen cars that had moved across state lines.10 In Brooks v. United States (1925), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law, even though it seemed to stretch the power of Congress under the “interstate commerce” clause of the Constitution. Chief Justice Taft cited the Mann Act, “the radical change in transportation” brought about by the automobile, and “the ease with which evil-minded persons can avoid capture.” The Chief Justice spoke darkly, too, of “elaborately organized