PUBLIC
MEMBER
By William E. Barnhart
Delivered to
The
March 22, 1999
Copyright 1999 by William E. Barnhart
Church
bells rang out in towns from New England to
Frank Joseph Loesch, a seven-year-old boy in
Less than six years later, with the southern slaves freed much more rapidly
than Frank's father had imagined, Frank, then thirteen years old, watched and
listened as the nation mourned again, this time for the Great Emancipator,
Abraham Lincoln. Loesch had seen
Of course, any young person who saw John Brown or Abraham Lincoln or
participated in the public grieving at their deaths was unlikely to forget the
experience or tire of recalling such a brush with history. But Loesch took more
from these encounters than his peers. He became a student of public behavior,
which was a subject he would observe for many years before making his own
contribution to the moral crusade of another era.
* * * *
In
the years after the Civil War,
In 1871, Loesch was living with thirty other young men in a boarding house in
what is now the 500 block of
It had been an exceptionally hot and dry summer in
"From one of the cottages," he wrote, "a mother had carried into
the street, of all things, a bed tick (a mattress) filled with straw, where
burning brands were everywhere falling in increasing numbers, and rushing back
brought out and dumped a pair of twin infants upon the straw tick and hastened
back into her home...." Loesch and his friend saw a fiery cinder fall onto
the mattress. His friend grabbed up one child and he took the other. "We
gave the babes to their frantic mother, urging her to run with them for their lives.
As we started to run we noticed the straw tick ablaze." Running to Monroe
and Wells, Loesch encountered another curious reaction to the fire. Men with
sticks were breaking apart barrels of whisky that they had just rolled from
liquor wholesalers' shops. "As soon as part of the head had been driven in
and the liquor was gushing out," Loesch wrote, "the men would throw
themselves flat into the street to gulp the whisky as it poured over them. Not
one interfered with their amusement. It was very likely that some of those men
were among those reported 'missing' later on." These were urban
experiences the young man from upstate
Loesch ran to his telegraph office and helped with salvage operations until the
flames hit the building. As he fled he heard the bell ringing atop the city's
limestone court house. Heat rising from the burning interior of the building
was moving the bell, even as watchmen in the bell tour tried to douse flames.
Loesch recalled later: "Above all the sounds of the roaring fire, the wind
and the excited shouts of a moving mass of people, the bell whirled on its
frame and over its stanchions, ringing out with a weirdness and a despairing
clangorous volume, as though it were possessed of sense and were agonizing in
its struggle against destruction." The bell crashed to earth at about
twenty minutes after 2 a.m., releasing a final peal heard miles away.
The Great Fire literally forced Loesch out of his promising but thus far
mundane existence. Like other survivors, he felt a sudden realization of things
larger than himself and a kinship with the devastated city. He lost his
belongings when his boarding house burned and had just $2 in his pocket. But
his job at Western Union was secure, as demand for telegraph services exploded
in the days after the fire. After his shift at the company's office on South
State Street, which was untouched by the fire, Loesch walked through the ruins
of Chicago to see rebuilding efforts immediately underway. Old Chicago was a
memory, but there were "high hopes," he wrote, "for a new and
greater Chicago which every ambitious young man was already convinced would
surely rise out of the ashes of the old one."
* * * *
Loesch
remembered the years immediately after the fire as a brief uplifting period in
the city's history. People seemed willing to set aside their personal interests
for the sake of rebuilding a community. Charitable organizations run by the
city's elite stepped in to provide services to the needy. The city's already
infamous politicians stood aside. Chicago's economic boom resumed the following
summer, as a new generation of entrepreneurs inserted themselves in place of
those who had built the old Chicago. For his part, Loesch pushed his own life
forward during these years. In his off-hours, he studied at the Union College
of Law, a prominent law school in the city that later was absorbed by
Northwestern University. Two years after the fire, he married Lydia Richards.
The following year he received his law degree and was admitted to the Illinois
bar. Ordered by the Cook County Circuit Court to handle a share of criminal
cases, the young lawyer quickly realized he had little sympathy for criminal
defendants and no ambition to be a criminal lawyer. Instead, he developed a
successful corporate law practice.
At age twenty eight, Loesch got a taste of public affairs as a participant in
the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Amid a bitter division
between political machine leaders from New York and dissidents from the Midwest,
the convention voted thirty-five times before nominating a dark-horse
presidential candidate, James A. Garfield, a personable Civil War hero and GOP
congressman from Ohio. Tall, thin Frank Loesch, with his prominent nose and
firm chin, developed public speaking skills as a stump speaker in Garfield's
campaign. Any hopes of a political reward for his efforts ended when Garfield
was assassinated by a disgruntled job-seeker after just four months in office.
But Loesch had distinguished himself in powerful circles. In 1886, the
Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the giant railroad corporations that helped
remake Chicago after the fire, hired Loesch to represent its interests in
Chicago. There were few richer clients for a lawyer in Chicago than the
Pennsylvania Railroad, which in addition to freight hauling operated the
luxurious Chicago Limited Express from Jersey City. Railroads were the city's
lifeline. Railroad interests dominated the city's development, leaving Chicago
entangled by unsightly networks of dangerous surface rail lines and grade
crossings that tied up vehicular and pedestrian traffic, caused hundreds of
deaths a year and forced the erection of high-rise office buildings in the
small central business district that the railroads left immune from their
tentacles. But Chicagoans learned to cope with the presence of railroads, and
the process created a lot of work for a railroad lawyer.
The civic pride and spirit Loesch observed in the aftermath of the Great Fire
soon degenerated, in his view, into a new and more pernicious state of public
immorality and corruption. British writer William Stead, who visited Chicago's
Columbian Exposition in 1893, produced an abiding moralistic portrait of
turn-of-the-century Chicago in his book, If Christ Came to Chicago! "You
are gigantic in your virtues and gigantic in your vices," Stead wrote.
"I don't know in which your glory the most." This imagery of a
two-faced Chicago, sometimes called an upper-world and an under-world,
persisted for most of the next century. Civic reformers rallied to Stead's
battle cry. The Christian Right of our generation is a pale imitation of the
religious fervor that propelled many of the reform movements at the turn of the
last century. "Before we can make men divine, we must cast out the devils
who are brutalizing them out of even human semblance," Stead told
Chicago's Commercial Club in 1894. "But this cannot be accomplished,"
he continued, "excepting by the use of means, which can only be wielded by
the City Council." In the midst of a post-fair outpouring of reform
energy, Loesch became a disciple of Stead's vision and began to develop his own
doctrinaire views as a member of the Chicago School Board from 1898 to 1902. He
urged the teaching of Americanism and said that boys determined to be
"fitted," for life as tradesmen should be released from school well
before age eighteen to find jobs.
In 1908, Loesch was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate vote fraud
in the city. Vote fraud investigations had little if any impact on the trend in
Cook County voting. But periodic campaigns against vote fraud were considered
by reformers as one way to bring the power of the law to bear on political
corruption and, at least, allow the losers of elections to portray themselves
as victims. Chicago's Union League Club, to which Loesch belonged, was a
leading advocate of reforming the voting process. Loesch was beginning to
emerge as an energetic public citizen. In 1909 he joined The Chicago Literary
Club, where he became steady writer of papers on topics that included the Great
Chicago Fire -- the paper from which I quoted his recollections tonight -- and
the Republican Convention of 1880, two formative experiences in his life as a
Chicagoan.
For Frank Loesch and his peers among the rich and powerful of Chicago, the
moral antithesis of the city's post-fire rebirth was the decline of virtue that
seemed to afflict the city as well as much of the western world after the end
of the Great War, which we know today as World War I. Stead's vision of a Chicago
molded in the image of Christ was not realized, to say the least. In 1943, as
America fought a second world war, Loesch recalled, "There was a let-down
in morals after the last war, as everybody knows."
In his early days in Chicago, criminals seemed more colorful than dangerous. He
reminisced: "There were plenty of gamblers, but not syndicated gambling.
Many of the gamblers were gentlemanly black-legs who had come up from the South
during the Civil War. They were a picturesque lot in their frock coats and silk
hats, and they played for high stakes." Loesch's quaint image of vice in
early Chicago reflected a more socially and racially homogeneous community. The
flood of immigrants into Chicago in the years before the Great War resumed
after the war ended, brought Italians, Jews and Eastern Europeans. African
Americans began to migrate to Chicago from the South. These individuals were
neither picturesque nor gentlemanly in the eyes of Chicago's establishment.
Moreover, many soldiers returning from the hellish battlefields of Europe
seemed to have cast off the moral grounding that older men like Loesch
associated with Midwestern Christian values. In an enormous over-reaction to
the perceived crisis, America in 1920 enacted Prohibition as the Eighteenth Amendment
to the Constitution. The amendment, overwhelmingly opposed by most Chicagoans,
eroded public respect for law and created a vast, lucrative venue for organized
crime.
It's important to pause briefly at this point in our story to note that when Chicagoans
were beginning to face the task of enforcing or at least coping with
Prohibition, Frank Loesch was turning sixty-eight years old, a time when most
financially successful men would be enjoying retirement and not looking for
difficult new challenges. Yet the Prohibition Era was the setting of the Frank
Loesch story, as far as Chicago historians are concerned. Until then, he had
accomplished much as a private individual. He and his wife, who died in 1924,
had raised four children. He remarried the following year and lived comfortably
in the Drake Hotel. He was an elder of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, where he
taught Bible school classes regularly on Sunday mornings. He was president of
the Chicago Bar Association from 1905 to 1907 and president of the Union League
Club from 1916 to 1917. In short, he had made a meaningful contribution to
civic affairs, enough to earn himself a reasonably prominent obituary in the
Chicago newspapers. But the man who had seen the public outpourings for John
Brown and Abraham Lincoln had much more to give and intended to make a bigger
mark. Chicago early in the century was well accustomed to moralistic reformers
who campaigned noisily against a variety of generic wrongs, such as
cigarette-smoking, drinking and cruelty to animals. What Chicagoans, and indeed
Americans generally, had not yet seen was a crusader against particular
individuals.
* * * *
On
the recommendation of the Chicago Association of Commerce, business leaders in
1919 established the Chicago Crime Commission as a vaguely defined response to
the wave of vice that swept into Chicago in the post-war years. Frank Loesch
was a founding member. The commission described itself as a crime watchdog,
which meant that its paid staff clipped newspaper articles and compiled records
of court proceedings to document trends in crime and law enforcement. Crime
reporting by Chicago's fiercely competing newspapers was in its heyday during
this period, so there was no shortage of articles for the commission staff to
clip. Eventually, reporters came to rely on the commission's files as an
important supplement to their own morgues -- a function the commission still
serves today. The commission's first executive director was a former police
reporter named Henry Barrett Chamberlain, who knew how to feed the insatiable
appetites of journalists. But the watchdog role did little but chronicle
Chicago's ambivalent response to urban crime -- which amounted to a fascination
with colorful bootleggers on the one hand and, on the other, a revulsion at the
occasional outbursts of street violence and what the mayhem was doing to harm
the city's reputation and business interests.
In 1928, with Prohibition gang wars intensifying and the bombastic Republican
mayor Big Bill Thompson back in office, civic leaders were anxious as they
began to plan the Century of Progress Exposition, which they hoped would
establish Chicago as a world-class city. Humorist Will Rogers wrote in January
of that year: "You can kid about Chicago and its crooks, but they have the
smartest way of handling their crooks of any city. They get the rival gangs to
kill each other and all the police have to do is just referee and count up the
bodies. They won't have a crook in Chicago unless he will agree to shoot
another crook." This was not the reputation Chicago's elite wanted to
promote. But the city seemed helpless as the number of murders rose to one a
day in 1928, a rate 80 percent higher than New York City. The federal
government had just begun to investigate Prohibition gangsters using a potent
1927 Supreme Court ruling that illegal income was subject to the federal income
tax, just as legal income. A principal target was twenty-eight-year old
Alphonse Capone of Chicago, who despite having no reported income had managed to
purchase a mansion in Miami built by a member of the Busch brewing dynasty of
St. Louis. But it would take the Bureau of Internal Revenue three years to
bring an indictment for tax evasion against Capone. Chicago's business leaders
did not have three years to wait, and they grew more outraged with each new
headline that enlarged Capone's celebrity status.
Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., and other financial
backers of the Chicago Crime Commission declared they would withdraw their
support unless the commission took a more militant stance. They installed Frank
Loesch as president with a clear mandate to get Capone. At the time, Loesch was
president of The Chicago Literary Club for the 1927-1928 season. His friends in
the city's business establishment marveled at the willingness of one of their
own to take on the city's Prohibition gangsters. Criminal justice historian
Dennis Hoffman wrote, "In the minds of most of Loesch's contemporaries,
any businessman who would do that must be one of three things: a crazy man, a
crank reformer, or a publicity seeker." Loesch, who had virtually no
experience in criminal law, probably was all three to some extent, but events
of 1928 overshadowed any public examination of his qualifications. The April
primary election in Chicago became known as the Pineapple Primary because of
the number of bombs thrown by antagonists within the Republican Party. The
homes of U.S. Senator Charles Deneen and his choice for Cook County State's
Attorney, John Swanson, were bombed, presumably by backers of fellow Republican
State's Attorney Robert Crowe. On the day of the primary, Octavious Granady, an
African American candidate who dared to run against Mayor Thompson's candidate
for city collector, was slain in a hail of machine gun fire.
Many Chicagoans feared that they had lost control of their city to gangsters
and their political stooges. When Loesch accepted the post of president of the
Chicago Crime Commission, he immediately realized the city needed a hero,
someone who would represent the force of good against evil, someone who could
break "the panic which paralyses human faculties," which he had
witnessed during the Great Chicago Fire. He determined to be that person.
Charles Merriam, a professor at the University of Chicago and one of the few
genuine reformers ever to sit in the Chicago City Council, praised Loesch as
what he called "a Cincinnatus type called from the plow to save the
state." Here is how Merriam described Loesch in his classic 1929 book,
Chicago: A More Intimate View of Urban Politics: "Not a man of magnetism,
or of wide group contacts, nor an organizer of political forces, he has the
qualities of high intelligence, courage and an unconscious sense of the
dramatic in public appearances. There is a simplicity and directness in his
courage and in his behavior that reflect a widespread general attitude toward a
perfectly obvious situation. The masses speak frankly of crooks and thieves,
and so does he; have their opinion of feeble prosecutors and judges and so does
he; and thus Loesch is their voice -- a voice their ears have been waiting to
hear for many years."
Newspapers called him the "Spirit of 76," because Loesch was seventy
six years old when he took control of the crime commission. The Chicago Herald
and Examiner called him the "septuagenarian battler for civic
righteousness." Emboldened by public acclaim, Loesch secretly embarked on
a mission he did not reveal for many months. In the hot summer of 1928, Loesch
entered the Lexington Hotel on Chicago's South side. He glanced around the
lobby at the rough-looking men watching him and stepped into an iron-grille
elevator. At the fourth floor, he came to Room 430. He opened the door and met
Al Capone in his headquarters. Later, in a statement to federal tax investigators,
Loesch recalled: "I found him in an office-like room with a half dozen of
his non-English-speaking guards standing with their hands on their guns. Over
Capone's desk, hung three oil portraits. They represented George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln and 'Big Bill' Thompson. That alone was enough to flabbergast
me." Loesch was seventy-six and a pillar of the community; Capone was
twenty-nine and a violent gangster. Yet Loesch had come to ask Capone (Loesch
pronounced the name Capone-e) to permit the November election to proceed
without violence. Capone agreed.
Loesch kept the meeting a secret probably because it represented a staggering
admission that Capone did, indeed, run Chicago. Capone told Loesch he would
order the city's police to round-up trouble-makers on election day, which is
exactly what happened. Capone proved his power. Loesch merely demonstrated the
weakness of the upper-world of respectable Chicagoans. A few months later the
St. Valentine's Day massacre increased Capone's power in Chicago's underworld.
The machine gun, shotgun and pistol slaying of seven of George "Bugs"
Moran's gang against a wall of a North Side garage established Chicago's tawdry
reputation worldwide and stimulated a wave of public fascination. Capone's
picture made the cover of Time magazine. A new generation of crime movies
emerged from Hollywood, films that for the first time portrayed the gangster as
a businessman and organizational master, not merely a lone criminal. Capone
skillfully manipulated public perceptions of himself during his brief but
intense years in the limelight. Historian David Ruth in a recent book argues
that journalists and movie producers largely invented the Capone image. He
became a uniquely Chicago version of a perverse Horatio Alger story, a young
man confronting and conquering the challenges of urban life. Fifty-one gangster
movies were produced in 1931.
Against the groundswell of misguided public enchantment, the normal process of
the law seemed woefully inadequate. Not only did the public perceive the
police, prosecutors and judges as corrupt, but Capone carefully avoided
exposing himself to criminal charges. When authorities managed to jail Capone a
few months after the St. Valentine's Day massacre, it was only because Capone
had arranged for his arrest and incarceration on a minor charge to obtain
temporary sanctuary from rival gangsters. Taking his cue from earlier Chicago
civic reformers, Frank Loesch realized that changing public attitudes was
essential to the ultimate goal of neutralizing Prohibition-era gangsters. He
needed to create an alternative to the glamour Capone and those like him
enjoyed. Success required unconventional tactics. Despite his age and his
association in many Chicagoans' minds with what one historian called "a
bunch of rich gin-swilling hypocrites" among Chicago's elite, Loesch set
about to transform the public perception of Chicago's gangsters. In doing so,
he held little more faith in the established legal process than Capone.
* * * *
Loesch's
effort to tarnish Capone extended public relations tactics he used in the
spring of 1928, shortly after he was named to head the Crime Commission.
Drawing on records compiled by the commission, Loesch announced in the
newspapers that three criminal court judges had coddled criminals by reducing
or waiving felony charges developed by the police and state's attorney. He
called it "paltering with crime," thereby injecting into public
discourse a word that captured the public's attitude towards the Cook County Criminal
Courts. The three judges had one thing in common. They had not been endorsed in
the 1927 judicial election by the Chicago Bar Association, which at the time
was engaged in a brief effort to put its stamp on the Cook County Circuit
Court, even though one of the three accused men -- Otto Kerner Sr. -- was an
active and respected member of the bar association. In making his allegations,
Loesch spared none of his rhetorical skills: "Have the judges named and
other complaisant ones no regard for the victims of the murderous criminals to
whom they tender such mercy?" he demanded. "Have they no regard for
the decent public opinion? Have they no regard to the laws which they were
sworn to uphold in protection of the peaceable and law-abiding citizens. The record
indicates that they have not. They ought not to sit another day in the Criminal
Court. Common decency on their part should make them retire."
But a formal hearing conducted by six judges and covered intensively in the
newspapers found no pattern of wrongdoing. Almost none of the cases cited by
Crime Commission investigators had anything to do with organized crime or
Prohibition-related violence. In most cases reviewed, judges had followed a
centuries-old procedure of honoring recommendations by the state's attorney
designed to expedite the court's crowded calendar in handling routine street
crimes. With respect the Kerner, the review panel concluded, "We are of
the opinion that the charge against Judge Kerner that he paltered with crime,
in other words was guilty of judicial misconduct, was in no way proved; that on
the contrary, the evidence discloses not only a record of painstaking,
industrious judicial service, but absolute integrity." Afterwards, Kerner
was elected Illinois Attorney General twice and later served without blemish as
a member of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago. Loesch refused to
concede error, much less apologize. Instead, the Crime Commission issued a
statement that "it is satisfied that much public good has been accomplished
as a result of the inquiry and that the public has been educated to a knowledge
of the practice and meaning of felony waivers."
Later that year, the Illinois Attorney General appointed Loesch as a special
prosecutor to investigate the violence of the Pineapple Primary. He lacked
experience in criminal law and had been a highly partisan opponent within the
Republican Party of States Attorney Robert Crowe, whose supporters were
believed responsible for many of the crimes. Despite these potential
disqualifications, Loesch convened seven grand juries and brought many
headline-grabbing indictments. Several trials provided high drama for the
newspapers. At one point, courtroom tension nearly erupted in a fist fight
between Loesch and defense attorney Michael Ahern. Pointing to Loesch, Ahern
shouted, "We want no Messiah talk from a self-righteous Bible-thumper
here." Ahern's colleague George Guenther continued the verbal assault:
"All that Loesch craves is his name in the newspaper every day." In
the end, Loesch failed to win a conviction in the Granady murder or convict any
major target of his probe. His only convictions involved seventeen minor
figures in the investigation accused of intimidating voters in the 20th Ward.
Yet Loesch believed he had succeeded in raising public consciousness about the
link between gangsters and corrupt politicians.
In targeting Capone, Loesch sidestepped the criminal courts and went directly
to the court of public opinion. Capone's success as a criminal entrepreneur
relied on widespread understanding of his violent tendencies. There was no
doubt that Capone was a lawbreaker of the most vicious kind. But convicting
Capone was clearly a task beyond Loesch's abilities. Loesch believed he had a
better idea. As he explained later: "I had the operating director [of the
Crime Commission] bring before me a list of the outstanding hoodlums, known
murderers, murderers which you and I know but can't prove, and there were about
one hundred of them, and out of that I selected twenty-eight men. I put Al
Capone at the head and his brother [Ralph] next, and I ran down the
twenty-eight, every man being really an outlaw. I called them Public
Enemies." Crime historians criticized the composition of the list, saying
several men named were smaller fry than others who were not listed. But Loesch
insisted, "The purpose is to keep the light of publicity shining on
Chicago's most prominent, well-known, and notorious gangsters to the end that
they may be under constant observation by the law enforcing authorities and
law-abiding citizens."
The Public Enemies list, published in April, 1930, succeeded beyond Loesch's
hopes. The popular image of Capone as merely a symbol of the public disdain
towards Prohibition and, in some quarters, a Robin Hood-like criminal began to
erode. With the on-set of the Depression, fewer Americans were inclined to
celebrate a man who lived lavishly on human weakness, such as drinking and
prostitution. The campaign to indict Capone on tax charges intensified, urged
on by President Herbert Hoover after Hoover met with Loesch and other Chicago
civic leaders in Washington. In Chicago, the men on the Public Enemies list
found themselves shunned. Climbing on the bandwagon, bank presidents declared
they would not accept deposits from the Public Enemies. Insurance executives
announced they would not issue policies to cover them. Cook County Judge John
Lyle carved his place in Chicago history by invoking a little used Vagabond Act
of 1874 as a weapon against gangsters. The law allowed persons found not to
have lawful employment to be declared vagrants and sentenced to hard labor for
ten days to six months. In September, 1930, Lyle, with Loesch's blessing,
issued vagrancy warrants for the men on the Public Enemies list. The strategy
was intended to force gangsters to declare the illegal sources of their income,
and thereby face other prosecutions, or do time for vagrancy. It had little
practical effect but the publicity value was enormous for Chicago's crime
fighters.
The Crime Commission's crusade to ostracize criminals attracted few critics at
the time. There were some practical objections. however. One newspaper in
Wisconsin lamented the prospect of making Chicago too hot for hoodlums. In an
editorial, the Milwaukee Sentinel wrote: "Driving the thugs, bandits,
hijackers and other undesirables out of Chicago means they will alight
somewhere else. Chicago's job is not to run them out to become a nuisance and a
menace to other cities but to bring them into court and administer short, sharp
justice of the Milwaukee brand."
A similar but more serious criticism was offered James Aldrich, a long-time
friend of Loesch, who wrote a paper criticizing Loesch's approach to
crime-fighting. Rather than maximizing publicity and harassing reputed
gangsters with minor charges, Aldrich argued, justice is best served when
prosecutors carefully bring substantial charges and win long prison terms for
offenders. "It's one thing for a public prosecutor to be of good intent
and another that he shall be equipped for the job he undertakes," Aldrich
wrote. "A good criminal lawyer may make a poor corporation lawyer and vice
versa.... Of what use is 'reform' if the prosecuting officers of a municipality
are content with indictments and fail to secure convictions -- and particularly
convictions that carry with them prison sentences?" Aldrich, a student of
Chicago reform efforts going back to 1876, presented an important rebuttal to
the Enemies List approach to criminal justice.
His critique exposed a major flaw in Loesch's crusade. Another flaw emerged in
the 1960s, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy vowed to harass leaders of
organized crime and, in particular, to "get" Teamsters boss Jimmy
Hoffa. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Robert Kennedy, cited the
crusade against Capone led by Loesch and other Chicago leaders as the
cornerstone of Robert Kennedy's zealous style of prosecution against what
Kennedy called "the enemy within." Schlesinger wrote, "He was
deciding that people were guilty and then looking for something they could be
found guilty of." Like Illinois' Vagabond Act, used in the 1930s to harass
members of Loesch's Public Enemies list, such incidental federal statutes as
the Migratory Bird Act and laws governing applications for radio licenses and
federally guaranteed mortgages were used in the Kennedy era to indict men
believed to be part of organized crime. One federal investigator was quoted at
the time as saying he would not hesitate to indict one of his targets for
spitting on the sidewalk, if that was the best he could get. Robert Kennedy was
dismayed by criticism of his methods based on standards of civil liberties. But
Schlesinger noted that the criticism was vital the ensure that the methods
pioneered by Loesch were not abused.
More recently, we saw the legacy of Frank Loesch in the tactics of independent
prosecutors pursuing charges against high officials of the Clinton
administration and the president himself. After a jury last year acquitted
former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy of corruption charges, Independent
Counsel Donald Smaltz said that his sweeping indictment nonetheless
accomplished its purpose. "The actual indictment of a public official may
in fact be as great a deterrent as the conviction of that official,"
Smaltz said. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, accused of improper leaks to
the news media in his investigation President Clinton, insisted part of the
duties of his office was explaining the role of his office to the public, not
just developing cases quietly. There's no doubt who would be at the top of
Starr's Public Enemies list.
* * * *
When
Frank Loesch left the Chicago Crime Commission in 1938, the Prohibition Era and
the Capone Era were over. Loesch was eighty-four years old, but he remained in
the public eye. On his birthdays each April, reporters would gather in his
Drake Hotel apartment to hear his versions of Chicago's lore as well as his
strident opposition to the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt. He
never achieved the lasting fame of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness, who crime
historians now believe was more skilled at generating publicity for himself
than solving Chicago's crime problem. Loesch's contribution was far more
significant and no less controversial. He demonstrated convincingly the power of
a private individual in rallying public opinion against intolerable conditions
and in challenging the corruption and incompetence of democratically
established government. But he never subjected himself to the test of seeking
public office and he almost completely avoided public scrutiny of his
prejudices and abilities.
Like many critics of Chicago's social upheavals in the years after World War I,
Loesch spoke from the viewpoint of the rich elite discomforted by the city's
burgeoning ethnic and racial diversity. His views on restricting schooling for
boys echoed the selfish desire of industrialists for cheap, malleable workers.
In speeches delivered outside Chicago, Loesch blamed recent immigrants,
especially Italians and Jews, for the city's crime problem. He repeated the
canard that Italians were the brawn and Jews the brains behind crime
syndicates. In 1930, he told an audience in Tennessee that
"disenfranchisement of the illiterate voter should be accomplished even at
the cost of revising every state constitution. One of the basic troubles we
have is illiteracy in the large proportion of foreign element in Chicago as
well as among Negroes." Failure to disenfranchise the illiterate would
lead to social revolution, he warned. Loesch also favored repeal of
constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination and the right of a
defendant to refuse to testify. "If a defendant refuses to testify, it
should be considered an implied admission of guilt," he said in 1930. He
favored abolishing the rule of unanimous verdicts in criminal trials, an
essential protection of civil liberties.
Loesch's methods and motives as a champion of what one newspaper called
"civic righteousness" deserve exposure and criticism by historians
because they are very much a part of politics and criminal justice today.
Critical analysis, however, must not minimize the selfless contribution Loesch
made as a private citizen to improve the city he saw emerge from the Great
Fire. Loesch was a complex, energetic man of many talents. He presented fifteen
papers to The Chicago Literary Club, including in 1937 a richly detailed and
loving portrayal of Cooperstown, New York, his second wife's family home where
they maintained a summer home. Loesch died in Cooperstown on July 31, 1944, at
age ninety-two.
The Chicago Tribune, in an editorial marking Loesch's death, wrote in part:
"Frank J. Loesch did more to break the hold of gang criminals on the
people and government of Chicago than any man of this generation. But strangely
enough, if memory serves, not one of the hard fought prosecutions he undertook
at the height of that drive was successful.... The list of public enemies ...
stripped the glamor off the hoodlums. They no longer strutted in tuxedos at
first nights. They were recognized for what they were, killers, panders and
cowards. Never was there a greater example of losing the battles and winning
the wars. Mr. Loesch gave the people a catalyst -- the catalyst of
courage."
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