NCJ Number
178387
Date Published
1998
Length
261 pages
Annotation
This study of the creation of G-men and gangsters as cultural heroes in the period of the "war on crime" (1924-36) not only explores the Depression-era obsession with crime and celebrity, but it also provides insight about how citizens understood a Nation undergoing significant political and social changes.
Abstract
The first chapter explores the failure of national enforcement during Prohibition and the critiques of feminized anticrime efforts that preceded the "war on crime." Chapter 2 explores the fusion of social reform and scientific management ideologies that produced police professionalization; it profiles new government careers in law enforcement. Chapter 3 describes the emergence of "new criminals" and documents the emergence of a crime wave in the Midwest and Southwest that provoked both popular resistance and demands for Federal aid against property crime. The next chapter argues that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow's rampage across the Southwest set the terms for the war on crime; producing themselves as celebrities and committing ordinary crimes in spectacular ways, they revived popular fascination with bandits. Chapter 5 discusses the launching of the Department of Justice's war on crime, as it examines the crime of kidnapping as a necessary precondition to the transformation of Federal enforcement into a New Deal initiative. The next chapter analyzes the "war's" first success, the campaign against John Dillinger; it explores the cultural and strategic work necessary to "produce" a bandit. The concluding chapter uses the campaign against the Barker-Karpis gang, which ended the war on crime, to address the suppression of social reform initiatives at the Department of Justice by enforcement experts and the revival of surveillance as a respectable component of the scientific policing model. Extensive chapter notes and a subject index