‘To Wage a War’: Crime and State-Making in the 1930s

• In Event: Social Policies and Problems in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Scholars have ably articulated significant development in American criminal justice in the 1950s (Murakawa 2014), 1960s (Weaver 2007; Hinton 2016), and the decades that followed (Alexander 2010; Forman 2017). These projects identify crucial moments in punitive policy. But all of these developments take for granted certain modes of policing and political infrastructure that originated in the 1930s. In order to understand race and policing as we know it, we must understand how FDR, Attorney General Homer Cummings, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Department of Justice forged modern law enforcement and its training apparatus in the1930s.
The FDR administration waged a “war on crime” against a series of high-profile criminals, leveraging these events to expand jurisdiction, build new institutions, and induce an issue realignment. In the course of these efforts, their greatest asset was a twist on Tilly’s famous dictum: “wars make states” (Tilly 1990). By building a state by means of the war on crime, these leaders constructed a criminal justice system built to make war: to villainize criminals as public enemies, to mobilize public opinion against them, to nationalize crime enforcement, and to respond with more guns, scientific advancement, and professionalism. And this process tabled the question of restorative approaches to policing, perpetuated the surveillance of Black leaders, and eschewed cries from Black civil rights organizations for protection from widespread racial violence. By the 1940s and 1950s, modern law enforcement had already locked in a set of state organizations, procedures, and intellectual dispositions forged in the furnace of the war on crime (see Skowronek 1982, 19-34).
Civil rights leaders advocated for a more radical approach: one that redressed the legacies of racial violence, gave blacks a seat at the table, and policed in ways that gave more democratic participation to those facing the most significant threats of violence. But FDR, Cummings, and Hoover actively avoided heeding the pleas of black leaders. Instead, they viewed them as a threat to the administration’s tenuous coalition, “the incompatibility of forces,” made up of northern blacks and southern whites (McMahon 2004). More insidiously, the FBI increased surveillance of black leaders, and this decade entrenched the conflation of civil rights and communism—a suspicion that systematically shaped the priorities and actions of law enforcement through the 1960s. This fomented the alienation of blacks towards law enforcement, further pushing them away from having a voice in the design of modern policing in the United States.
In this article, I will argue that social liberals like FDR and Homer Cummings and hardline conservatives like J. Edgar Hoover formed a coalition that overlapped in their belief in an activist government to bring about law and order. These coalition partners agreed on the state-making power of a “war on crime,” and this coalition required a de-emphasis of community-level responses and the social causes of crime. Their campaign against crime resulted in unprecedented state-building success in the areas of criminal justice, and this selective success reinforced a neglect of racial justice—a neglect exacerbated by the pattern of suspicion and surveillance of civil rights leaders. The resulting institution became the system of modern law enforcement, composed of a set of methods designed to pursue gangsters like John Dillinger, to avoid stopping racialized violence, and to surveil Civil Rights leaders. This article identifies a series of events that occurred at a critical juncture and shaped criminal justice in indelible ways, but it also describes a pattern that has recurred consistently since the New Deal era, continuing into today.
No project has comprehensively addressed the politics of race and criminal justice in the era of FDR—a time period that saw continued racialized violence, a nascent racial realignment (Schickler 2016), the surge of the FBI (and its dissemination of methods to local and state police), and the birth of modern policing. This article addresses this gap, and it provides insights important to understanding the institutional developments since then.
With research begun in fall 2017, this article relies on tens of thousands of pages of FBI archives, Justice Department memos, files from the archives of Attorney General Homer Cummings and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and contemporaneous newspaper articles from Black and White newspapers. Utilizing both deep qualitative research and quantitative data, this article offers the most comprehensive study to-date of race and criminal justice in the New Deal era—with both evidence and theory that reinforce and reshape our understanding of FDR’s Department of Justice and the racial politics of criminal justice more generally.

Author

• Matthew Denney, Yale University