The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

And if they weren’t lucky? A Chicago detective testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in February 1932 let the lawmakers imagine what could happen if negotiations fell through. He told of a raid on a kidnapping ring’s lair that included a “torture chamber,” which apparently had been used frequently and which “hinted at almost unbelievable horrors,” as the Times put it.10

Items found in the lair included vats of lime, cans of gasoline, and diving suits.

Why diving suits? Apparently, a captive would be stuffed into one, then lowered to the bottom of the Chicago River and “only infrequently allowed to have air,” the Times reported. Upon being brought up from the cold and total darkness, the victim would presumably have been willing to do whatever his captors desired: agree to stay out of his captors’ territory, beg his employers to pay a big ransom, or both.

And here, the inescapable question: were some kidnappers mean-spirited enough to leave victims at the river bottom until the bubbles stopped?

Justice was more streamlined in the 1930s. The courts were far less cluttered by appeals; defendants’ rights that we take for granted today did not yet exist. And if numbers are any indication, there was far less ambivalence about capital punishment. In the 1930s, there were 167 executions a year on average, more than in any other decade before or since, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington nonprofit organization that collects and analyzes data on capital punishment.******

Here, some numbers are illuminating—and startling. In 1935, there were about 127 million Americans; in 2018, there were about 328 million. If executions were carried out nowadays at the same rate as they were in 1935, about 430 prisoners would have been put to death in 2018—roughly eight a week. But since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, after a four-year hiatus, the highest total of executions in a single year was “only” 98 in 1999, as the Death Penalty Information Center notes.*******

Why such a parade to the gallows, gas chamber, or electric chair at that point in history? Again, there were fewer grounds for appeals. Probably more important, some criminologists argued that the death penalty was necessary to prevent society from disintegrating.********

In the 1930s, the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, was fresh in the memories of Americans of middle age and beyond. In Europe, dynasties had been toppled and social norms shattered by the Great War. The Russian Revolution had enflamed fears that “radicals” and “Bolsheviks” were working their mischief within the United States. In fact, there were left-leaning Americans who wanted to bring about fundamental changes in government and society, although it is likely that few wanted to see blood running in the streets.

As a proud alumnus of the New York Times, I was struck by the tone of some of the newspaper’s coverage of events during the 1930s.*********

Riots in “Negro” neighborhoods stirred speculation that communists and other social agitators were responsible. The lynching of “a Negro” typically merited a few paragraphs, especially if it occurred in the South, where lynchings were too common to be newsworthy. If there was much reporting on whether racial unrest might be linked to the evils of segregation, bigotry, and poverty, I missed it. This was a time when the Ku Klux Klan was still thriving—and parading—and not just in the Old Confederacy.

Labor unrest was also blamed on communists rather than the desire of workers to have more job security and benefits, more food on the dinner table, and an extra sandwich in the lunch pail. Strikers and union organizers were beaten by company thugs who were euphemistically called “security guards.”

There was a man who both contributed to the harsh law-and-order atmosphere of the 1930s and fed off it. He was a dour Washington bachelor who had to overcome a childhood stutter and began his career as an obscure clerk. But he was anything but an unimaginative paper shuffler. He had a gift for organization. He also sensed that one could acquire power, sometimes great power, by filling a vacuum and by throwing himself into seemingly menial tasks that others avoided.

When he took a low-level job in the Department of Justice, he saw a need for reliable, centralized information on crime. He also saw a national leadership vacuum in law enforcement. He would move deftly to fill it and to compile statistics that would eventually be helpful to criminologists and lawmen across the country—and to himself as he massaged numbers to attest to the importance of his own job.

He would use his considerable talents to become one of the most famous law enforcement officials and arguably one of the most important public figures in American history.

*Originally, the law gave the FBI jurisdiction when a victim was missing for seven days on the presumption that the victim might have been taken across state lines. In 1956, the law was amended to shorten the FBI’s waiting period to twenty-four hours. If it is learned that the victim was never taken out of state, the FBI will defer to local authorities, although nothing prevents the FBI from offering its help. The law does not apply when a child is taken by a parent, as in a custody dispute, unless a child is taken abroad. The law has evolved in other ways that I shall touch upon.

**I can hear some lawyers clucking in disapproval, as though I don’t know what I’m talking about. I think I do.

***Prohibition, the law of the land from 1920 to 1933 after ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, was also driven by political and social factors, like prejudice against immigrants from countries where drinking was the norm. After World War One, this bias was especially pronounced against people of German descent. Prohibition’s enabling law forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States or importing and exporting them. But possession or consumption was not