Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [35]
The next day, Miller returned with his girlfriend, Vi Mathias. They stayed in the Davis apartment for three days, then vanished.
With ten seconds of machine-gun fire and the deaths of five men, the Kansas City Massacre forever changed the American legal landscape. It put the FBI on a wartime footing that in coming months would transform it into the country’s first federal police force. It probably saved Hoover’s job; six weeks later, he was formally reappointed as the Bureau’s director. Most important, it led to the public declaration of an ambitious federal War on Crime that in time would thrust Hoover’s men into their first confrontations with real criminals.
None of this happened overnight. Contrary to myth, there was no morning-after press conference in which Hoover declared war on gangsters. He took calls from reporters in his office, but his answers were limited to the massacre itself. “We will never stop until we get our men,” he told the Kansas City Star hours after the shootings, “if it takes ages to accomplish it. There will be no letup in this case.”
In fact, the driving force behind the broader War on Crime was not Hoover but his new boss, the attorney general Homer Cummings, who had spent the spring studying the feasibility of some kind of federal drive on organized crime. The massacre gave the administration the pretext it needed to sell this idea to the public. On June 29, twelve days after the massacre, Cummings announced a series of measures that composed the new War on Crime: the hiring of a special prosecutor, Joseph Keenan; a legislative package that would, among other things, make it a federal crime to kill a federal agent; and the formation of “special squads” inside the Bureau to tackle major cases. Cummings suggested he would study the formation of a federal police force, built around the Bureau, augmented by agents from the soon-to-be disbanded Prohibition Bureau. The New York Times carried the story on Page 1.
“Racketeering has got to a point when the government as such must take a hand and try to stamp out this underworld army,” Cummings told reporters, in the first of a series of interviews and speeches he was to give that summer. “We are now engaged in a war,” he told the Daughters of the American Revolution in August, “that threatens the safety of our country—a war with the organized forces of crime.”
Public reaction to this new “war” was by turns encouraging and doubtful. “Defiance of law,” the Washington Post editorialized the same day, “has seldom been more flagrantly manifested than it was at Kansas City Saturday.” But government officials had called for wars against gangsters before, and many doubted whether the FBI or any other agency could make a difference. “Department of Justice officials are marvelous at finding and arresting counterfeiters,” one columnist wrote. “Perhaps they will do as well with highway murderers.”
The call for a War on Crime wasn’t without self-interest; Cummings badly wanted a way to focus and grow his shrinking Justice Department. Nor did it create any immediate groundswell of support for federal policing; that was yet to come. In fact, national interest surrounding the FBI’s new headline cases—the Kansas City Massacre and the Hamm kidnapping—paled before that of, say, the Lindbergh kidnapping; intensive coverage was limited to Midwestern newspapers.
But Cummings’s call dovetailed with the desires of New Dealers in Roosevelt’s cabinet, who picked up the attorney general’s cries and placed them in the context of the government’s fight to overcome the Depression. By that autumn the War on Crime would become a centerpiece of Roosevelt’s push to centralize many facets of American government. It would be a focal point of his State of the Union Address in January. Thus a little-known bureau of the Justice Department became a cutting edge of