Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [168]
Leviathan grows especially fat during wartime. The First World War, no exception to this rule, stretched the powers and capacities of the federal government. The war brought with it still more federal crimes, though mostly temporary ones: evicting the family of a soldier or sailor, or repossessing goods sold to a serviceman on the installment plan.12 The war also revived treason and espionage as issues. The great Red Scare, right after the end of the war, plunged the federal government into the dirty and dubious business of sniffing out dissenters, squashing left-wing opinion, looking hysterically for wild-eyed anarchists and bushy Bolsheviks, and generally trampling on the right of free speech (see chapter 16.)
Probably nothing in the first half of the twentieth century matched Prohibition in expanding the federal crime effort. The Prohibition Amendment, which outlawed the liquor trade, was followed by the Volstead Act (1919), which provided the teeth and the mechanism for carrying this out (see also chapter 15.) Prohibition is often described as a dead letter, but it was an extremely lively corpse. The assistant attorney general in charge of Prohibition, Mabel Willebrandt, reported in 1924 that the federal courts were “staggering” under a load of liquor cases—over 22,000 cases were pending at the end of the fiscal year.13 The federal war against demon rum used some newfangled weapons, such as wiretapping; for this and other reasons, many important constitutional cases, on such issues as illegal searches and seizures, came out of a Prohibition background. br
Prohibition sputtered to an inglorious end at the beginning of the New Deal period in the thirties. In general, the New Deal sucked power away from the states and into the federal government, in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. The crime role of the central government also increased. In March 1932, a great crime horrified the country: the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Lindbergh was, of course, an American hero, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The Lindberghs paid the ransom, but the baby boy had, in fact, been murdered the day he was kidnapped. Bruno Hauptmann, an immigrant carpenter, was arrested, tried, and executed for the crime. Meanwhile, Congress reacted to the uproar by passing the so-called Lindbergh Act, which made it a federal crime to take across state lines anybody who had been “unlawfully seized, confined, inveigled, decoyed, kidnaped, abducted or carried away ... and held for ransom or reward.”16 Walter Weisenberger, president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, argued before the House Judiciary Committee that if federal force could follow prostitutes and stolen cars, why not the fiend who stole a child “from the mother’s breast.”17 In 1934, the Lindbergh Law was tightened: the death penalty was added. If the victim was missing for seven days, a presumption arose that some state line had been crossed and the FBI could enter the picture.18
Lindbergh Act cases were never much of a burden on the courts, of course. But the law reflected a national mood, a feeling that the federal government and its agencies had a role to play in crime-fighting. Crime had become interstate. Crime was not just a few evil men, skulking in local comers. Twentieth-century criminals had wheels and wings. Moreover, like big business, crime was no longer a mom-and-pop, small-time affair. Now there was organized crime as well. Organized crime was run along the lines of a business, with “capital investment, a regular payroll, and problems of manufacture, distribution, and retailing.” Some kinds of crime cried out for scale, for “coordination” or “consolidation.