• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Still, it’s baseless to argue that the War on Crime was some kind of ploy. Though he reaped its benefits, Hoover didn’t create the war. It sprang from real events. Its immediate cause was the Kansas City Massacre; few would question the FBI’s decision to pursue the killers of its own men, never mind that it technically had no jurisdiction. The underlying cause was the Lindbergh Law, which made it the FBI’s job to track down kidnappers. For the Bureau, the only “elective” segment of the War on Crime was the decision to pursue Dillinger. Here Hoover was indeed hemmed in by his own ambitions. But Hoover didn’t “create” Dillinger, as some have argued; Dillinger was already a national figure when the FBI entered the case. He was precisely the type of interstate criminal a national police force should attempt to apprehend.

No one involved in the War on Crime believed it would end criminality or capture every major criminal. It didn’t. More than anything, the War on Crime was a war on the idea of crime, the idea that too many Americans had come to tolerate crime. When judged on this basis, it’s difficult to say it wasn’t a success. Once the FBI became involved, kidnapping rates fell immediately and precipitously. Hoover’s emphasis on indicting those who harbored criminals gradually eliminated safe havens such as St. Paul and Hot Springs. (The FBI helped clean up Hot Springs itself; the detective Dutch Akers and several other corrupt city officials served jail terms after trials in 1938.)

The War on Crime’s legacy was deep and enduring. In the short term, it served as powerful evidence of the effectiveness of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies, boosting faith in the very idea of an activist central government. On a broader scale, it reassured a demoralized populace that American values could overcome anything, even the Depression. Despite the crowds of theatergoers who applauded them in life, in death John Dillinger and his peers were seen as symbols of all that was wrong in America. Coming as the worst of the Depression was passing, their defeat was the Depression’s symbolic defeat; overnight their pedestals were reoccupied by clean, upstanding symbols of moral rectitude, the first being Melvin Purvis.

“The country seized on Melvin Purvis,” the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, “with his squeaky voice and diminutive build as a kind of Frank Capra hero, proof that ordinary citizens, provided they stuck together, could lick anything and anybody, even John Dillinger, the age’s chosen symbol of social disintegration.”

In short order Purvis was replaced in the pantheon of American heroism by the Bureau itself. Indeed, the most important legacy of the War on Crime is the modern FBI. Everything the Bureau has achieved since, every crime it has solved, every abuse its overzealous agents committed, sprang from the powers it accrued during the War on Crime. The manhunts for Dillinger and his peers introduced America to an idea that we take for granted today: that the federal government bears the ultimate responsibility for the nation’s law and order.

The War on Crime not only enshrined Hoover’s FBI as the bearer of this responsibility, it made Americans comfortable with its existence. It created a public trust so enduring that the Bureau’s later abuses were only belatedly questioned. As Claire Bond Potter notes, “[T]he War on Crime produced lasting changes in the ways Americans would come to understand crime as a national problem, police power as socially positive, and crime control as a federal responsibility.”1

But while the FBI’s “socially positive” role was on public display during 1933 and 1934, so too can the seeds of the FBI’s later abuses be seen: the beating of suspects; the “kidnapping” of Verne Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias; the conviction of Adam Richetti on perjured FBI testimony; and the arrest and trial of Roger Touhy for the Hamm kidnapping. The War on Crime bestowed upon Hoover’s FBI