American Legal History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by G. Edward White

Author:G. Edward White [White, G. Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

The twentieth century

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the federal government became more involved in the enforcement of criminal law. One reason for its increased presence was an altered attitude toward the causes of crime and the treatment of criminals. Rehabilitative theories of punishment became dominant as scholarship in the social sciences suggested that the causes of criminal activity were societal and could be identified and remedied, and commissions were created to make national recommendations. These studies revealed that local police forces regularly resorted to physical abuse to secure convictions and the decisions of law enforcement officials were regularly influenced by politics. Academics called for the imposition of national standards of criminal procedure.

Two other early twentieth-century developments increased the federal government’s involvement in law enforcement. One was the emergence, in the wake of World War I, of federal legislation directed at “subversive” activity. Although statutes such as the Sedition and Espionage Acts of 1917 were products of the war, they remained in place after its end. In response to the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, brought about by fears that newly arrived immigrants from Europe had brought collectivist ideologies with them, the Justice Department made an effort to identify, detain, and deport suspected subversives. That department’s Bureau of Investigation (subsequently known as the FBI) spearheaded the effort, and in the 1930s the FBI significantly expanded its presence and transferred its attention to domestic organized crime. States also responded to the Red Scare by passing legislation outlawing various collectivist ideologies, such as syndicalism, anarchism, and communism, and constitutional challenges to this legislation were advanced.

Between 1900 and 1916, twenty-one states, responding to a wave of prohibitionist sentiment, banned saloons, and others sought to restrict the sale of alcoholic beverages. The prohibition movement eventually resulted in the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919) and its implementing federal legislation, the Volstead Act. These two measures outlawed the manufacture, sale, or interstate transportation of beverages that contained more than 0.5 percent alcohol and established the federal Bureau of Internal Revenue as enforcement agent. An unanticipated consequence of national prohibition was the emergence of organized crime. Although prohibition served to reduce the public consumption of alcohol throughout the 1920s, it also created a thriving bootleg market for the manufacture and interstate transportation of alcoholic beverages. When the Eighteenth Amendment closed down establishments associated with the liquor business, those entrepreneurs turned to illicit operations. The organized crime syndicates that emerged in the nation’s large cities in the 1920s were initially centered on the liquor trade. They formed associations with politicians and transportation companies and soon controlled the manufacture, sale, and transportation of bootleg liquor.

The Volstead Act made the distribution of alcoholic beverages across state lines a federal crime. Since bootleggers typically received higher profits from the interstate transportation of alcoholic beverages, it increased significantly, and so did the law enforcement apparatus of the federal government. By 1930, more than a third of the inmates in the nation’s federal prison system were persons convicted of violating the Volstead Act.

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