The Year of Fear by Joe Urschel

country, bank robbers and bootleggers enjoyed not only the popular support of the citizenry, but the tacit support of the local government and police forces, as well. In many cities and towns, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that the local mob not only ran the criminal activities, but the government and law enforcement, too.
    Closer in time to the Civil War than the present, the rural areas of the “criminal alley” that stretched from Texas to North Dakota had evolved only marginally in political and social attitudes. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was so enmeshed in parts of Oklahoma that the governor was forced to declare martial law to fight its influence. Race riots proliferated. Socialists and communists spread anti-government paranoia in their attempts to organize farmers. Anarchists spread terror in cities and towns with random bombings and assassination attempts.
    The gangland elements that worked the West were a breed apart from the organized mobs that built their empires in the big cities in the eastern states. Those rackets were built on an organized—though violent—business model. In the West, criminals largely mirrored the political attitudes of their environment—they were fiercely independent, roguish and tough. They were loosely organized when they had to be, but preferred the go-it-alone life of a freelancer whenever it was possible. They didn’t want to take orders from a boss—criminal or otherwise—just as the states they roamed through did not want to take direction from the federal government in Washington. The Western gangster had more in common with the outlaws of the Old West than he did with his modern big-city brethren back East.
    This was the enemy Cummings wanted to confront. He was well aware of how entrenched and protected the criminal empires were in Chicago and along the East Coast, his home. You would need an army and the authority of martial law to take them down. But with a few good men, the West might be tamed. It was the soft underbelly, and it was there that he would go first. Cummings and FDR believed the country needed its own national law enforcement agency, patterned after Britain’s skillful and sophisticated Scotland Yard. A force that could sidestep the local police forces with their political and criminal connections and obligations. A force with the legal ability to cross city, county and state lines in its pursuit of lawbreakers. Cummings was enough of a political operative to know he needed to move fast, lest his agency be left, as always, sitting on the sidelines. Could he count on this controversial autocrat who was running the Bureau of Investigation to bust some crooks, grab some headlines and move the Justice Department out front in the rush to nationalize police work? The odds didn’t favor it.
    Hoover was an entrenched Washington bureaucrat in an age when that was the last thing anyone with marketable skills wanted to be. He had no police or military experience. He had a law degree, but he had never prosecuted a case or assisted anyone who had. He dressed like a dandy, had an effeminate gait so extreme it had been mocked in the press and lived with his mother. Collier’s magazine had scoffed at his efforts to train his “college boy” gumshoes and noted with sarcasm that he was a stylish dresser who favored “Eleanor blue” socks and walked with “a mincing step.” Wags around town noted with raised eyebrows the handsome bachelor he dined with daily and traveled with frequently. To top it off, the President’s wife despised him for his “red-baiting” and obsession with smearing anyone he suspected of communist sympathies. (She would later accuse him of running an American Gestapo. They maintained a lifelong antipathy toward one another.) But Hoover had cleaned up the notoriously corrupt Bureau after his appointment as acting director during the Herbert Hoover administration and remade it with a bunch of guys in his mirror image: well-dressed,