Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [173]
Was there a national Mafia, connected by ties of blood and sacred oaths? The evidence was, in fact, rather slim (or at least controversial); but the media hardly cared. The Mafia made good reading—good fodder for movies, books, and magazine articles. The mystique of the gangster, a theme of the silver screen in the thirties and forties, was perhaps a throwback to the theme of the beloved outlaw and the western gun-fighter. Western movies were even more popular than gangster movies, in this period. Perhaps Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp paved the way for James Cagney and Scarface, and The Godfather. There is and has been a good deal of romance connected with the outlaw—at least with certain outlaws. Then, too, the twentieth century is the age of the celebrity and celebrity culture. It hardly mattered who the celebrities were: they could be boxers, presidents, rock-and-roll stars—or notorious criminals. John Gotti, on trial in New York in 1992 for racketeering and murder, had what amounted to an adoring claque at his trial. His autograph, after all, was as good as a movie star’s.
The notion of a vast, hydra-headed crime syndicate had other values, too. It was a simple and satisfying explanation for at least some of the crime that plagued the nation. It put the blame on a single monster, an identifiable presence, a defeatable enemy—and a foreign enemy, at that. This belief was much more comforting than the main competing theory: that crime was a diffuse, poisonous substance that came, as it were, from nowhere, an invisible enemy, subtle and mysterious. Or the idea that crime had deep, difficult social and economic roots. Moreover, if the Mafia was a reality, who better to fight this vast interstate octopus than the federal government, the only entity capable of fighting and winning the war against crime? Only national power had any hope of destroying organized crime.
Crime as a National Issue
Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln mentioned crime on the streets in their messages to Congress or in their inaugural addresses. President Herbert Hoover was the one to break the long silence, in 1929. “Crime is increasing,” he said in his inaugural address. He proposed a federal commission to study the problem. This became the famous Wickersham Commission, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. It was chaired by George W. Wickersham, who had been Taft’s attorney general.57
The commission did a massive job. It published fourteen reports in 1931, on a variety of issues: police behavior, penal institutions, the causes of crime.58 The reports were hardly a whitewash; the commission excoriated and threatened and pointed out and exposed; it accused the criminal justice system of brutality, corruption, and inefficiency. Morris Ploscowe, writing for the commission, asked whether the sorry state of crime and criminal justice did not suggest something fundamentally wrong in “the very heart of ... government and social policy in America.” 59 But in the end, the reports sat on the shelf; not much came of the commission’s many recommendations.
Crime popped out again as a major national issue after World War II, and nobody was able to put the jinni back in the bottle after that. Most presidential candidates did not try. In the campaign of 1964, the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, made a great fuss over law and order; when he accepted the nomination at the Republic convention, Goldwater spoke of “violence in the streets” and the “growing menace [of crime] to personal safety, to life, to limb and to property.”60 Presumably the federal government ought to do something about the problem. Goldwater lost the election; but the winner, Lyndon Johnson, picked up this issue, which was obviously