The Evening Star (December 15, 1945)
Editorial: Post-war crime
As director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover is in the best possible position to evaluate the trend of American crime. Accordingly, when he says – as he did at the recent meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police – that we are threatened with a period as bad as the gangster era of the 1920s, every good citizen has reason to be concerned, and responsible authorities must feel duty bound to take whatever action they can in an effort to stop the thing before it gets worse than it is.
That the situation is already bad enough is clear from Mr. Hoover’s statement that the FBI’s fingerprint files reveal the existence of an army of 6,000,000 criminals throughout the country and that the spearhead of this army can be found in an almost frightening increase in the number of juvenile delinquents. In his judgment, these delinquents – boys and girls alike – are the most vicious of the lot. and they are graduating in to the ranks of seasoned lawbreakers.
The danger facing the country, according to Mr. Hoover, is heightened by the fact that returning veterans have brought home with them hundreds of thousands of lethal weapons as souvenirs. It is a mistake, he says, to imagine that much of the current crime stems from these veterans, but their “souvenirs” are finding their way into the hands of unscrupulous people who resell them to young thugs and hoodlums and older criminals. The stage thus has been set for real trouble unless there is an intelligent and well-organized preventive drive aimed particularly at juvenile delinquency – a drive advocated by President Truman in his message to the police chiefs.
It is historically true, of course, that one of war’s many evil byproducts is an increase in crime. War itself creates moral laxity and tends to inure the mind to violence and brutality. Indeed, even England, which traditionally has been ranked among the first of nations for domestic probity, is now experiencing a record-smashing outbreak of lawlessness. As after 1918, in short, the problem today seems more or less inevitable, but this does not mean that we can afford to be passive about it. On the contrary, as both the president and Mr. Hoover warn, we must take the fullest possible action to cope with it now. Otherwise, it may run wild and make the years immediately ahead a nightmare of gangsterism disgracing all of us.