BOOKS OF THE DAY

Persons in Hiding (Mark Benney) New Poetry (William Plomer) The Faithful Mohawks (D. W. Brogan) . The " Truth " of the Bible (Edwyn Bevan)

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PAGE 1063 1064 1064 1065 Abbe Dimnet Continues (Sylva Norman) ..

Country Life Under the Tsars (Igor Vinogradoff) The Education of a Diplomat ..

Fiction (Forrest Reid) ..

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PAGE 1066 1066 1068 1070

CHALLENGE TO CRIME

By MARK BENNEY MR. J. EDGAR HOOVER is the best-known policeman in the world. In five years he has risen from departmental obscurity to provide headlines for all nations, influence box-office receipts, and supplant Lindbergh and Capone in the wish-dreams of America's little boys. Sober sociologists discuss his spectac- ular crime-hunting achievements, and drunken revellers on Hampstead Heath last Monday were shouting his slogans. However we view it, then, the book in which the chief of the G-men describes his work and methods must be considered as important.

The rise of large-scale organised crime in the U.S.A. is intimately bound up with a larger social pathology. Social life in America is crippled in its beginnings by an eighteenth- century Constitution, designed to straddle as best it could the antagonisms between state and federation, agriculture and industry. This initial weakness has been exploited ever since by rival industrial interests, confining political power to two corrupt parties, and providing a judicial and administrative system which is noted for its inefficiency and malpractice. Add to these conditions the long and disintegrating period of Prohibition, and you have a social pabulum in which crime can flourish exceedingly and does.

By 1930 crime in the U.S.A. had come to the forefront of social problems. Well-armed gangs of desperate men, pro- tected by influential politicians, were terrorising the country. Fake-protection rackets were maiming commerce ; bank- robberies were a daily occurrence ; no wealthy man's life was safe from kidnapping. A million-dollar hold-up forced a State bank into liquidation. A car-theft ring forced up Brooklyn insurance-rates by 171 per cent. The Seabury Investigation disclosed an appalling ramification of graft and crime among highly placed office-holders. The State police, where they were not actively participating in this orgy of crime, were inadequate to suppress it. The Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion, which in some respects may be likened to our C.I.D., was hamstrung by narrowly-limited powers. A real fear and disgust began to replace the complacent tolerance with which America had hitherto regarded its gangsterism. The kid- napping of the Lindbergh baby roused the new sentiments into activity.

The first-fruits were seen in the Chicago Crime Commission, a private body of inquiry, initiated by the President of the United States Steel Corporation. When the Napoleons of Industry went into anything they meant business, and they spent much money and influence in propagating their views. Chief among the recommendations of this Commission was a wide extension of powers to the Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion. With the Presidential change-over two years later the opportunity came ; the U.S. Department of Justice presented a 12 point programme to Congress, and it was enacted without a dissident vote.

Mr. J. Edgar Hoover was selected to reorganise the F.B.I. to accord with its new powers. Hitherto an under-director of the Bureau, he was known as a man of great integrity and single, if narrow, purpose. In the old radical-baiting days of 1921 he had distinguished himself by the zeal he had shown in bringing to justice every not-too per cent. American he could clap his hands on. He took his work with great seriousness ; long before it was considered necessary he had instituted a crime-laboratory in a back ,room of his department, and he had made himself almost a nuisance by his clamouring for a compre- hensive finger-print file. He had the American hard head without the American soft heart : almost worse than the gangsters did he hate the " sob-sister " criminologists who botched his

PeisOns in Hiding. By J. Edgar Hoover. (Dent. 8s. 6d.) work with parole-systems and the like. He was energetic, devoted, ruthless. He was in fact the ideal General to lead the " war on organised crime " which the Chicago Com- mission advocated.

Promoted to director of his department, Hoover began his work by reorganising its personnel. Like most other depart- ments, the F.B.I. was ridden with political hangers-on, whose appointments were the reward for vote-catching services. Hoover made a clean sweep of these, and filled his ranks with athletic young college-men who had to pass an intelligence-test and a scrutiny of records. These recruits were taught scientific crime-detection, ju-jitsu and straight shooting. Above all, they were taught to approach their job with the same ruthless, crusading fervour as their director exuded. That done, he sent them out to hunt down gangsters in all the cities of America, with the command " Shoot straight and shoot to kill ! "

These clean-limbed determined young G-men caught the public imagination, and by cinema, radio and newspaper propaganda Hoover sedulously cultivated this impression. " Every good citizen is a G-man," he told the public, giving it a share in his drama, and alienating its sympathy from the quarry. A spectacular series of captures proved his methods. Dillinger, Machine-Gun Kelly, Baby-Face Nelson, Al Karpis, Ma Barker and her boys, were one after another arrested or shot down in their hide-outs. After four years of these theatrical achievements, gang-crime sensibly diminished. Mr. Hoover could find time to sit down and review the position in a book.

But Persons in Hiding is not the work of a man whose job is done ; it bears no relation at all to the reminiscences of retired detectives which have their own niche in our publishers' catalogues. Rather it is part of the work of public education which has always accompanied Hoover's policemanship. As such it gives scanty attention to the causes of crime ; it is fervent, vigorous and dramatic as his own fieldwork, and it is exhortatory. Whatever features of American life hamper his job of detection and prosecution arc decried ; if a lawyer helps a gangster to elude conviction, he would reorganise lawyers out of existence ; if a parole-board releases a dangerous criminal before the end of his sentence, he would reform parole-boards to the point where they become inoperative. He will tolerate no sort of sympathy with criminals. Again and again in his book he refers contemptuously to " sob-sister " criminologists who believe that slum-clearance and social reform will cure more criminals than police-methods.

Reflective Americans see a distant danger in his attitude. They remember that when Hoover's G-men shot down Dillinger outside a Chicago cinema, the man was not officially credited with murder, and had only a minor Federal offence of inter-state car-stealing against him. In waiting to shoot dawn Dillinger in the street, instead of arresting him quietly in the cinema, the Federal agents were exceeding the law, they say, and they can point to many other similar excesses. Hoover's , methods, many people think, arc unnecessarily spectacular. His attitudes, reinforced by popular idolatry, might easily lead to the police-state : and his past record of red-baiting gives no reassurance. And, indeed, when he says in his book that " the law is a stern thing, a mysteriously powerful force for good which will brook no interference," it is difficult to resist the conclusion that here is a potential dictator.

But meanwhile, a wit in the current New Yorker writes :

In Chicago, Ill., They used to kill, and the use of the past tense is to J. Edgar Hoover's credit. Englishmen, reflective and otherwise, will enjoy his terse and racy exposition of G-man methods, adorned with vigorous character-sketches of America's most publicised gunmen.