Progressivism: Perspectives in Print

Two Factions in Fracas was a newspaper article in the Aberdeen Daily News that started about Frank Herbert, who was believed to be killed by gang members. It goes on when members of a gang wait outside the police station, armed, ready to take down some arrested rival leaders. It’s crazy to think how devoted they are to their gangs, but it is basically their family, they were all mostly poor Jewish-Americans.

In the next section, two famous gangsters line up, Al Capone and Tony Lombardo, against their rival gang, the North Side Gang. The lead detective told a group of about 100 officers to kill any known gang leaders, on sight. O’Conner, the lead detective, said “beat them down if the murmured and kill them without mercy if they showed armed resistance.” The Chicago police department even had cars with machine guns, to match the power of the mafias.

Just on a side note, when we did research on the 1880s-1920s in the past I did it on organized crime and found that Monk Eastman, leader of the Eastman Gang, served in WWI starting at 42, he came back to the states in 1919 and had his citizenship renewed for his honorable service in the war. From reading this newspaper I didn’t find a ton that surprised me because I had basically already researched this before, but I did get to look more into Al Capone and Luciano’s time which I have interest in.

All of this new violence and such really started with the Whyos and then just grew and grew, mostly because of the development of cities and of course prohibition. Prohibition basically gave gangs a foothold, these poor Jewish-Americans all lived in ghettos together and crime was their way to make a living. The gangs of the early 20th century were fascinating because although obviously crime wasn’t new, they made all new kinds of crime popular. Some of mobs, gangs, and mafia’s biggest sources of income were murder-for-hire, and bootlegging. To clearly link this to Progressivism, the rise of cities, the banning of alcohol, and the rise in poverty in big cities, all product of progressivism, were just a melting pot, waiting to spit out gangsters and mob bosses.

The idea of Social Darwinism also comes into play here, these poor Jewish-Americans were the prey, then some turned into the predators, fight or flight and the gangsters chose to fight and then eventually when their organizations grew they began to find ways to come out on top. Making fake money, selling alcohol, and even murdering for money, all ways the gangsters got ahead, sure it might not have been legal or moral, but it did work.