Transcripts For CSPAN3 Organized Crime In The South In The 1950s 20160822

The records of the u. S. Senate and the house of representatives and which sponsors the series. Researcher talks invites scholars to tell us about their projects and how the records support them. Since the highly visible senate and house investigations of the 1950s have received much researcher attention over the last few years we have invited historians to speak about the records. Weve asked them to talk about labor and management, better known as the mclellan committee, several have made presentations based on the research on the house unamerican activities committee. Historians have conducted Considerable Research in the Senate Special committee to investigate organized crime and interstate commerce better mean as the key fofr committee. We are pleased to have tammy ingram, associate professor of history at the college of charleston whose talk is titled dear senator,s us the key fofr and the anticrime crusade in the south. She has researched senator kefauvers records at and personal papers at the university of tennessee. This supports her project the wickedest city in america, sex, race, and organized crime in the jim crow south. With such a tantalizing title, we are also eager to hear tammy from tammy which city she considers the wickedest. Lau she earned a ph. D. In history and shes the author of the book dixie highway, road building and the remaking of the modern south 1900 to 1930 published by North Carolina University Press in 2014. Tammy haas jus just been named fellow at yale and will spend the next year writing the first draft of the wickedest city. Congratulations, tammy, on having been named a fellow and moving your project full steam ahead. As always well have time for q a after the presentation. Remember to raise your hands so we can pass the microphone and before you ask your questions. So thank you for joining us, tammy. Thank you for being here. Ill start my stopwatch and try not to go over. I want to start by giving you an overview of the Kefauver Committees origins, responsibilities and what i see as some of its limits. I assume some of you are familiar with it but for the benefit of anyone who might not be the Kefauver Committee, it was the Senate Special committee to investigate organized crime and interstate commerce, the Kefauver Committee was empowered to investigate the use of the facilities of interstate commerce by organized crime syndicates nationwide. They were especially interested in gambling operations. Thats what kefauver thought was the he called it the lifes blood of the mob. The resolution proposing the creation of the committee was introduced by senator kefauver of tennessee in january of 1950 and approved by the senate in may. Over the next 15 months a five man hearing hosted committees around the country. The public took a keen interest. Some hearings were televised. We were talking about that a few moments ago and an estimated audience of about 30 Million People tuned in to watch. Many not from their living rooms. The local movie theaters were showing the talks. So wonderful stories about women pushing their baby carriages around new york city and when the kid would fall asleep they would duck into the theater so they could watch a few minutes of it. And it was fascinating to suu kyi fau see kefauver and thei colleagues interviewing some prominent politicians whom they suspected of having ties to organized crime. The committees final report was issued in 1951 and it concluded that organized crime syndicates did exist, were not smiths and that they depended upon the support and cooperation of Public Officials around the country. Public interest in organized crime had deep roots already but at the end of the Second World War there was a great resurgence of interest in and deep concern about organized crime in the united states. The fbi had long down played the existence of the mop and the public and media hadnt ignored it but they had paid less substained attention to organized crime since the last of the highprofile prohibitionera gangsters either died or went to prison in the 1930s. There were a number of other reasons that scholars have bantered about. Ill run through a few of them briefly, these are the ones that have direct bearing on my research. There are four big ones that i think relate here. One is in some cities there certainly was the perceptions but that mob violence had increased. People sometimes mistakenly argued the Kefauver Committee came about in the first place because of a particular murder of a kingpin in kansas city. Inform the spring of 1950 the committee was in the works at that point but that was a timely event, came at a time when people were becoming more aware of and worried about organized crime and it certainly helped kefauver, it helped to underscore the need for federal action. Another reason is that labor racketeering was undermining some powerful unions in the country during and after the war when industrial out put was of paramount concern. But the two that have the most bearing on my project are one that it was becoming more clear to people that racketeers had corrupted the political process in cities where they had thrived more or less unchecked for decades. That lull between the 30s and 50s when we werent paying as close attention to what they were doing was a period of tremendous growth for organized crime operations, particularly in the south. And finally i think the on set of the cold war contributed as well. In an atmosphere of heightened anxiety about corrupt officials, espionage, black mail, any amoral or extra legal activities were subjected to greater scrutiny. And in this environment it makes sense that any perceptions of political corruption seemed especially dangerous. So thats the kind of whats happening on the national level. Im focusing on this story, the history of organized crime in a place called phoenix city. Thats the wickedest city in america. You probably never heard of it, some of you havent, the map here gives you an idea of roughly where it is. My book examines organized crime and government corruption between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the cold war. It tells a story of how phoenix city, alabama, the small city on the chattahoochee river just across the river from columbus, georgia, if you know where that is. You can literally walk across the bridge into phenix city. How it became the he headquarte of an organized crime ring. The racketeers add a steady stream of revenue from soldiers on payday. By the 1930s, the syndicate ran the city. It did so with the cooperation of the local officials. It was a dry community but they ran saloons, brothels, all kinds of gambling rackets from numerous lotteries and slot machines rigged to never pay out. Slot machines were in casinos and gambling halls and clubs but they were in the drugstore, there was a Grocery Store people joked that you could not find a loaf of bread anywhere in that Grocery Store but that was the front. There were milk crates set up. Ive talked to a couple people who remember going in and playing the penny slots when they were little. There were little milk crates so the kids could reach them and play if they wanted to. But they also ransom fancier establishments, big casinos for high rollers who came into phenix city specifically to visit those places. By the early 1950s when the Kefauver Committee was investigating the extent of organized crime nationwide. The mob in phenix city was running a pretty sophisticated enterprise. One that by some estimates generated 100 million a year and enabled racketeers to control local or state politics. But the mobs wealth and power also depended upon more nefarious businesses in phenix city. I wont talk about this too much today but just by way of explanation this is one of the things my larger project is looking at it was the growing power of the mob to grow, exchange and profit from the sale of womens and childrens bodies. Prostitution including involving women sometimes children sometimes as young as 12 or 13 years old was rampant, so were illegal adoptions. Especially involving the children of single or poor mothers. These were extensive operations that enrich it had racketeers in phenix city but also linked them to criminal networks outside of alabama and the south. The mob there exercised complete control over municipal government and local Law Enforcement but it also exercised tremendous influence in state politics. Local citizens made a few attempts to clean up the mob in the early part of the 20th century, they go nowhere with those efforts. That didnt change until the late 1940s when a stronger crimefighting organization, a group of local citizens was organized. It was called the Russell Betterment Association. Phenix city is in Russell County, alabama and its members became targets of mob violence right away. Thats a pretty good testament to how threatened they felt by this new organization, in 1952, they bombed the home of one of the leaders of the Russell Betterment Association. They set fire to the law office of another one and in june of 1954 when the mobs efforts to rig the democratic primary to prevent a local crimefighting attorney the same one whose office they burned his name was Albert Patterson, to prevent him from becoming the states new attorney general failed, he won the democratic primary in spite of their efforts, they assassinated him outside of his law office in downtown phenix city. Local officials and Law Enforcement were so corrupted that the governor had to declare martial law in order to sort out the mess and when the dust settled the next year, the nation was shocked to learn that the three people suspected of his murder were prominent Public Officials. The deputy sheriff, a man named albert fuller, the circuit solicitor, a man named arch farrell, and the sitting attorney general for the state of alabama whose name was sigh us will garrett. Shortly after the murder garrett checked himself into a Mental Hospital in texas and avoided being prosecuted. Only fuller and farrell stood trial and only fuller ever went to prison and not for very long. He got out, moved back to phenix city where he was taken care of by his former associates for the rest of his days. The story made national and international headlines. A local newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage of its case but it was no surprise to the people of phenix city who had been pleading with state and federal agencies for help for decades. They had appealed, in fact, to Estes Kefauver and his colleagues on the Senate Committee to investigate organized crime. The high point of tensions in phenix city overlapped with the work of the Kefauver Committee. Indeed, senator kefauver and Albert Patterson, the man who was murdered by the mob, were pretty good acquaintances and exchanged a lot of letters and backandforth advice about how best to deal with this problem. So i came here a couple of years ago for the first time looking at these collections in hopes of the learning more about that correspondence. Specifically about that relationship. Id seen a few letters in Albert Pattersons papers, the state archives in alabama and i wondered how much information he gave the Kefauver Committee. In looking through that correspondence i didnt find very much between those two here itch lea. My project is still very much a work in progress, as richard said, im starting to write it up next year when i finally mercifully have a little bit of leave time from teaching and Committee Work but so i cant outline precisely how all of this fits into the book but i want to focus on the most important things ive taken away from my research and explain what i think it these do with my larger problem. The first big take away from this work is that the kefauvekes Committee Work wasnt new. It mirrored and relied very heavily upon the work of existing antivice and local crime kmipgss. And evaluating the work of those committees, ive learned, as well as at aid they gave to the Kefauver Committee is essential in understanding the full scope of the Senate Committees work. And also the limits of that work. A lot of cities have had antivice commissions before, there were many back in the early 20th century during the progressive era but the ones that kefauver and his colleagues were communicating with in 1950 and 1951 were relatively new. Most were organized in the mid to late 1940s. So when the Kefauver Committee came around in 1950, dozens and dozens of local antiCrime Commissions were already engaged in the same work, collecting uptodate data on local criminal enterprises in order to measure the full scope of their activities and their influence, networking with other antivice groups to find better ways of addressing local problems, and perhaps most importantly a few years before the Kefauver Committee put the National Spotlight on organized crime by broadcasting to the entire nation what they were up to, these groups were publicizing the work of local criminal operations in an effort to paralyze them. One example i already mentioned was the Russell Betterment Association in phenix city founded in the late 1940s now one thing i learned from looking through the kefauver records is that the Russell Betterment Association was unusual in that it came out of a small town. Most of the ones that existed, perhaps not surprisingly, were in larger towns and cities or a couple of images of the kinds of literature they would put out. I know this is difficult to see back there, it looks kind of dark but miami had one called the greater Crime Commission or the Crime Commission of greater miami and it was founded in 1948 and one of the things that was interesting about the correspondence between some of the members of this committee and the Kefauver Committee is that i realized how much they were up against funding challenges, unlike the Kefauver Committee that had a grant from congress to do their work, these were locally organized, they didnt receive any public funding whatsoever. They may have had Public Officials on their members roster but they werent getting any funding and in factfunding. And in fact one of the things that they complained about most was how they spent most of their time, not actually doing data collection, not in the way they wanted to, or coming up with Real Solutions to the problems that the city was facing, but they spent a lot of time trying to raise money so that they could do those things. They also did collect a lot of data anyway, though, they communicated that to kefauver. Another example and i really like their literature was the commission in kansas city. They had a really good Graphic Design person. This i wont flip through all of it, they have a couple of images here, im sorry these are so small and difficult to see, i had them blown up, but their literature, as you can see here, tended to focus more on how crime cost the city money, they thought it was an effective way to get people to step in and do something about it, not to make arguments about morality and what is wrong with what theyre doing, but to say, you know, do you like it or not, were not, you know, asking who is participated in this, not interested in that, they were really concerned about how much money it was costing the city to deal with these problems created by organized crime. As i said, these are typical antiCrime Commissions that kefauver and his colleagues were corresponding with. And it would make sense that where there were bigger populations, and more money to support this work they would be more effective and thrive a little bit more. So it helps to explain why Something Like the russell betterman association was a little more unusual. Nevertheless, these commissions were absolutely instrumental in filling in kefauver and his colleagues on the full scope of organized crime activities in the united states. And while the committee correspondence suggests that commissions like the russell betterman association were really the exception, the committees correspondence does shed some light on the work of the russell betterman association. The files contained dozens of letters like this one from a man named john latrell in phoenix city, complaining about the pervasiveness of organized crime. He was a member of the russell betterman association, he calls it the Citizens Committee in this letter, but pretty clear thats who hes talking about. And he appeals to kefauver as many of his friends and colleagues on the russell betterman association did to understand that phoenix city racketeers were not just a local concern, they should not just be seen as a local concern. He alludes to the mobs ties to state government. And to its suspected involvement in criminal enterprises in florida. And he makes clear that he believes there is a connection between the cold war objectives of the federal government and those of the russell betterman association. Near the bottom of the letter, he says while were fighting for democracy in other countries of the world, help us root out those people who seek to buy our own government. And to document his claims, latrell included a local newspaper clipping, this one i found particularly interesting because it is about one of the mob guys was getting a divorce, and his wife just put him on blast to the local newspapers and just let them know everything that he was up to. So she was probably one of the better sources of information they could have had. Interestingly enough, i later figured out that she, her parents were the ones who were running the illegal adoption ring. He was her faern wasther was doctor and his mother was a nurse. I want to talk about that in the end had here. It is probably the most salacious bit of information i have about what the mob was doing and one i felt was not true until i found some documentation of it, i thought it was one of those legends that had been based on some grain of truth that had been grossly exaggerated but it is not. It was actually true. Now, he included the clippings with most of his letters, a lot of the correspondence did this. I think, you know, in an effort to convince him that this was well known, that theyre not just sort of spreading resuumor about their neighbors, this is a real problem and one the committee needed to needed to address. Kefauver wrote back to latrell, he tended to write back to the majority of people who were writing these letters, outlining the concerns, with a more brief response than this. I know it is difficult to read from back there. But this one is interesting because his reply say little less firm of a no than he would be giving to people later on. He simply tells them that time wont permit them to come to every place, but, you know, every small town where there might be some problems, but he indicates hes interested in learning more about what is going on in phoenix city. Unbeknownst to latrell, probably already corresponding with Albert Patterson and kefauver knew what was going on in the city. He took special interest in those letters. And elsewhere there is other correspondence like this, but little memos like this scattered throughout the papers, saying hugh bentley called or somebody called and mentioned hugh bentleys name, hes the guy whose house was fire bombed by the mob. Below it you see the name of hoyt shepard, hoyt shepard was the main kingpin in phoenix city. And the guy working for him who bombed the house, his name was tommy dynamite caps. Each person had a specialty. There was the safe cracker, didnt step on the safe crackers territory. Tommy dynamite caps, i wish i had his mug shot, it is interesting. And his long list of known activities, but he was their guy they called in to blow things up. But and there are a lot of snippets of information like this scattered throughout. Got the impression that a lot of people were corresponding with kefauver and he knew a great deal of what was going on in phoenix city. He often contacted the leaders of some of the Crime Commissions himself in order to solicit information. And when there were no commissions to turn to, he wrote instead to sometimes the local Law Enforcement, i think he figured out that wasnt going to get him very far in phoenix city. He would write to local journalists seeing if they would share any data they collected in working their stories. Had how the great one from birmingham reporter gene wartsman writing about birmingham and other problems in alabama, but wartsman knew a great deal about phoenix city, one of two or three journalists who wrote a number of stories about phoenix city and he and a man named Ed Strickland later wrote a book following the patterson murder about the years of activities in the mob in phoenix city. Now, im hoping to over the next few months to dig a little deeper into the work of some of these commissions. Now that i see how important their work was to kefauver, im interested in particular in whether or not they were also policing other quote unquote criminal behaviors, i think that the Kefauver Committee and this constellation of municipal antiCrime Commissions were responses to post war fears about crime and political corruption, then it stands to reason they may have supported other law and order initiatives not directly related to organized crime. It is impossible to fully disentangle genuine concerns about organized crime syndicates from cold war era fears about all kinds of other supposedly immoral behaviors. We know that kefauver had a keen interest in some of the other behaviors too. He was an Ardent Supporter of legislation to limit pornography, he headed another Committee Later on and even during this time was very interested in juvenile delinquency. And some of these commissions, these local commissions had initiatives and one of them, i cant remember kansas city or miami, they specifically mentioned theyre concerned with juvenile delinquency and how that might feed local organized crime activities. So they were doing things like trying to ban violent comic books or encourage parents to not let their kids see violent films and those kinds of things. Now, the details about this is something the Kefauver Committee records dont clarify for me, but what it has made me interested in looking at some of these local commissions to see if they were how much they were corresponding with smaller groups like the russell betterman association. And it is difficult to find the records of some of the local groups. So the Kefauver Committee records constitute some of the only documentation we have of some of these organizations. And they are theyre really fascinating. I also think that one of the things that has come out of my looking at the correspondence with the anticrime groups and their members is an awareness of the shortcomings of these anticrime campaigns because they dont really give the full measure of local involvement in and sometimes local support for or at least local tolerance for the rackets before things became openly violent or something happened that made people think, now, this really has to stop. It doesnt indicate anywhere in the records from listening to the committees talk that the men in these smaller towns and cities in particular were prominent local citizens. They were members of the jcs. The guy who shot Albert Patterson, a few years before that, he was up for jaycee of the year. Im told by somebody who knew him, didnt know him directly but knew somebody who knew him he was really embittered he didnt win. And they were Little League coaches. They were deacons in the local churches. They were donors to local organizations. The High School Band in phoenix city needed new band uniforms. The county needed a new hospital. One of the racketeers donated the land. And they said, well, wonderful, thank you, we dont have money to build the hospital, so they gave them money to build the hospital as well. Their full measure was as prominent citizens in the communities, not as embarrassments or criminals. I dont think there are a lot of devils or saints in this story. But to look at the anticrime campaign, sometimes thats what you would be led to believe. Just one more anecdote, ill move on to the next one, patterson, Albert Patterson himself, the man murdered by the mob, he was a local attorney, he had done work for them in the past. In fact, he defended one of the main kingpins in a murder trial a few years before his own murder. Now, he in no way was sympathetic to them. They tried to buy him off many times and he wouldnt do it. But it certainly suggests that for many years like most of his neighbors he was more tolerant of their behavior and he really only turned against them and they against him when he joined the russell betterman association and developed political aspirations of his own and wanted to run for office. And, of course, kefauver was politically ambitious as well. And they all revelled in this reputation for being tough on crime. Another my second sort of big take away from my work in these records and this one is pretty closely related to the first is that the kefauver investigation as we know revealed that organized crime was best known as an urban affliction. One concentrated in northern major cities in the north and the west. New york, chicago, los angeles, las vegas, the very places where the Kefauver Committee conducted hearings. If the Kefauver Committees public activities confirmed what most people already knew, that organized crime was real and that the syndicates were running loose in some of the nations biggest cities, the records of the Committee Show that organized crime flourished in smaller cities and towns across the country. Where racketeers and corrupted Public Officials exercised control over municipal politics, local Law Enforcement, local businesses, and sometimes state politics as well. Presumably the committee assumed when they received some of the letters from people complaining about local problems that crime syndicates in smaller towns and cities were not only less common, but they were smaller and probably less likely to be engaged in interstate business. But kefauvers correspondence told him otherwise. He certainly knew that phoenix city, sitting on a state boundary, was engaged in interstate commerce, but his correspondence told him time and again that this was this was so. This letter is very generic but i love it because this person is very passionate. Cut off her signature there, but this is wanda from alabama who wrote this pleading letter to kefauver saying that the south was in trouble, that this has been going on for a long time, the situation is dire, does not offer a lot of detail, but it is a very obviously very upset about whatever it is she knows. Most of the letters he received, though, were very specific. They named names. They had dates. They had specific information about what was going on and where and when. The correspondence files were organized by state. And you can just scan the boxes and look and see that the Southern States are full. Theyre thick files of letters from people, detailing these kinds of activities. And over and over again people are making the same kinds of complaints about their local problems. These are local problems, they would always say they are linked to problems in other cities, other states, other parts of the country. They know the Kefauver Committee is looking at interstate commerce, they know they got to get the attention too. They attended to highlight that and as i mentioned earlier, they would include newspaper clippings to document their claims to say im not just pulling this out of thin air, this is happening and we know it is happening around here. There were many, many people writing with complaints about phoenix city too. But there are also letters from places like birmingham, Muscle Shoals, gadsen, alabama, chattanooga, tennessee, port arthur, texas, galveston, texas, i could go on and on and on. And the queries were all very similar. Dear senator, they began, and then each letter outlined complaints about illegal gambling, prostitution, and intimidation, sometimes violent intimidation by a small group of racketeers and employees. But the men and women when wrote the letters also linked those activities to the things i mentioned earlier, to political corruption, to labor racketeering or to just meddling in local whatever the local business was. And to cold war security concerns. One person in Muscle Shoals wrote a letter to kefauver writing he was certain that communists were running the mob in Muscle Shoals. Another person, this person called himself or herself an american, wrote this rather odd and paranoid sounding note to the committee saying that communism was the brother of the black market. Another man wrote a letter to kefauver calling racketeers parasites, and saying that he thought they were an even bigger threat to democracy than communism was. A number of people in phoenix city were saying that to him as well. This is a huge problem. Were not really too concerned about what is going on in the cold war and we see that as a problem, but the real war is right here in phoenix city. The accusations as this one sort of indicates and i know probably is difficult to read it there, but ill leave it up so you can scan it for people with good eyesight, sometimes the accusations were so outrageous that kefauver and his colleagues didnt pay much attention to them. A few of them i thought i had an image of one, somebody had written in the margins, this is a crack pot. Some of them were. There were also letters from people who seemed to have personal vendettas against certain local officials. They would write to him and say, you know, john doe is into this and you need to come and get him. And hoping that kefauver would come and investigate him. So some of it, whether it was true or not, there was some other motive behind it. But i was struck by i thought there would be more of that in the papers. Certainly is a good deal of it. But it is obvious they were also receiving a lot of really good information detailed information, information as i said earlier that sometimes people volunteered and sometimes kefauver solicited from people that he trusted. Now, in terms of the outcome of this campaign and its bearing on my research into phoenix city, i think that certainly the committees conclusions and final report in 1951 were no surprise to those thousands of citizens writing him letters in 1950 and 1951. But the committees didnt lead to what they wanted, a serious crackdown on organized crime, either in the big cities where the hearings were held, or in the small towns like phoenix city, whose citizens pleaded mostly in vain for any kind of attention from the committee or any sort of help because they could not rely on corrupted officials at the local and state levels to help them out. In phoenix city, despite the work of the russell betterman association, the mob thrived in the early 1950s and for years after the Kefauver Committee suspended its investigation. Local elected officials, local Law Enforcement and the state attorney general facilitated the work of the racketeers there. It really didnt end until they overstepped in 1954 when they killed Albert Patterson and the governor declared martial law. That was the only way to root it out. Interestingly most of the people involved in the mob, the ones who didnt go to jail and most of them didnt serve any real time, they were from phoenix city. They stopped maybe operating their saloons and brothels, but they all stayed in phoenix city and continued serving as jaycees, continued coaching Little League and serving as deacons in the churches. This is what they always have been. Citizens well integrated into the local community and they stayed there afterwards. But, organize, organized crime didnt end there in the south. This is beyond the scope of my work, but most of you are probably familiar with some of the other more high profile cases in the 1960s like the murder of fuzzy hoard and jackson county, georgia. Bufords campaign in mcnair county, tennessee. And a lot of very high profile cases along the gulf coast from the 1960s, well into the 1980s. My big question, and the ones i still am working through, when i came here to start my research, my Big Questions were why havent we focused on the south. Why didnt kefauver Pay Attention to all these people. And what would a closer look at organized crime activities in the south really tell us . Why do we need to know . The records dont offer any easy answers to that first question. But they do show that there was overwhelming evidence that organized crime thrived in the south and had corrupted local and even state politics by 1950. And that everybody knew about this. This was no secret. The correspondence files also outlined the extensive diverse fide and sophisticated work before the 1950s. They provide some of the best documentation we have. City by city, and state by state of the full scope of organized crime in the south and the first half of the 20th century. As for the second question about what this can teach us about the south, i think a number of big things im still working through, but one thing that the Kefauver Committees response to some of the letters got me thinking more about is that like most citizens, they started their they had the assumption that this was an urban problem. And these preconceived ideas about what constitutes a real urban space too. It made me realize in some ways this project is engaging questions that i worked on a little bit in my first book. Did not have a sexy title as you heard earlier. It is about a highway. But about connections between urban and rural communities. Because it was an important market town for farmers. But it was also a weigh station for the same kinds of vice and danger and depravity that southerners in that Time Associated with bigger cities, more industrialized cities. And phoenix city, what is happening in phoenix city challenged ideas about the safety and the security of small town life, even as industry and big agribusiness took over as drivers of the national and regional economy. Anxieties about that transition along with challenges to the national to the racial and sexual status quo that were magnified by the mobs activities were projected on to attitudes about the states regulatory responsibilities, which they increasingly believed meant that they needed to define and punish criminal behavior. As phoenix city along with the rest of the south shifted away from an Agricultural Society to a more urban and industrial one, industrialized one, it embodied larger and increasingly fraught regional fluctuations and negotiations between citizens and the state. By the late 1940s, when the parents of cold war policymaking reshaped the ideas about safety and security in more global context, the heightened responses to the presence of organized crime reflected their growing anxieties about global and also local threats to their safety and to the economic order. Another sort of big take away from this, big question im thinking about in terms of what this tells us about the jim crow south is that the correspondence files for me really confirmed how common it was for citizens to link their fears about organized crime to their fears about safety and security after the war. As the phoenix city case played out, cold war paranoia was making its way into American Homes where people wanted to think they could still retain some measure of personal safety and control over their own lives. The patterson murder in phoenix city shattered these illusions for people for white southerners in particular. The more degradation of their communities by decades of vice had been bad enough, they thought, but the cold blooded murder of a prominent elected official prompted outrage. There is a wonderful quote from, i believe one of the local papers carried it, from someone near phoenix city shortly after the patterson murder who said, you know, political assassinations, those things are supposed to happen in latin american dictatorships and Eastern European provinces but not in alabama. That doesnt happen here. And i think it spoke volumes about how rattled people were that this was going on there. They knew it was going on, but just didnt think it was going to go quite that far. And at the heart of this book, ultimately, are a lot of long overlooked connections between white southerners resistance to civil rights, and the backlash against organized crime as the foundation of post war conservatism and im really interested in the ways in which a i can put criminal and a criminal subculture whose definition was constantly in flux, especially as ambitious politicians started to get involved in it and casting themselves as being tough on crime. That these ideas about a criminal subculture coexisted for so long alongside reactionary ideas about race and gender and the role of the state. And practice, the southern commitment to law and order, i think, masked widespread corruption for decades. In much the same way that myths about racial purity and sexual morality had for so long obscured a range of sex crimes including widespread prostitution of underage girls 12 and 13yearold girls in phoenix city. Those are documented cases. And the unprosecuted rapes and sexual assaults of black women by white men. Ill wrap up my sort of summation of the committee and what it teaches us here is that i think that most of our popular knowledge about organized crime comes from what we know thanks to the work of the Kefauver Committee. But i think the limits of the committees work shaped what we know as well. The correspondence files are incredibly extensive and rich sources of information that reveal that southerners were deeply interested in the work of the committee and they worked tirelessly to get the committees attention. And while the committee didnt conduct a Serious Investigation in any deep south city except for new orleans, its correspondence files document a very active and Extensive Network of organized crime activities in the post war south. Activities unchecked for decades and unfortunately for phoenix city, would continue far beyond the life span of the Kefauver Committee as well. Thank you. Thank you very much. Do you have a sense from your research of how independent kefauver could be as a senator in the senate that contained so many very powerful southern senators . Did they put up any pressure against exploring the links in the south . Thats beyond the scope of what im working on. I havent looked into it too much. But nothing that ive read and there is some correspondence in there back and forth between the colleagues, but it is nothing that ive seen there or in any personal papers would indicate that there was any serious pushback. In a way, you know, this is not a difficult thing to support either there was some wrangling over who would run the committee and where the funding was going to come from and ends up being a special committee and not tied to an existing committee because of that. But beyond that, i think everybody wanted a little credit for it probably. So beyond that, i think the work that the committee was doing was an easy thing to support. Not to say there wasnt any whatsoever. Im sure there was. But i havent come across anything that i can speak to specifically about that. If anybody knows if there is, i would love to know that, who was going after him. I think maybe i have a misconception when i hear the mob, i think mafia. So im wondering what you might comment on demographics of the mobs youve looked at. Thats a great question. Thank you. And people asked me that a number of times. I think thats it is not a misconception necessarily. Thats what we think of when we think about the mob and just as i said i think we organized crime, we think of the mafia, and the south as far as ive been able to tell, definitely not in phoenix city, but not in any other iterations of mob or racketeer activity in the south was there any particular ethnic orientation or there is not anything that ties people together other than the fact that theyre interested in these kinds of activities. It was a relatively the people who were running it were relatively small. But very well organized group of people. In phoenix city, there were there was he was really the sort of big kingpin. But there were a couple of other people who were considered kind of bosses or kingpins and they used that terminology to talk about them. But most of the people working for them were just, you know, sort of petty criminals who had, like tommy who had proven himself to be adept at dynamite. Another guy named clarence rebel, ran a safe cracking school in phoenix city. They had a building where they actually would bring people in who showed talent for safe cracking and they taught them how to do it. When i say it was a sophisticated organization, i sometimes jokingly call it disorganized crime in phoenix city, but it was quite organized and what they everybody was very specialized and it was very carefully set up. But it wasnt there were no nothing that i can figure out so well, have not found any credible links between the Italian Mafia and new york or group in chicago or something or the irish mob and the racketeers in phoenix city. So within the mob, in phoenix city, it was diverse demographically. All white men. I mean, yeah, but yeah. As far as ethnic background . No, they were most of them were from phoenix city or from nearby. So there were a few people who came in from the outside, there was well, actually, i was going to say one guy who was not born in the united states, but thats not true. His i think his parents were immigrants but they had come to alabama and he was born there. But they called him the englishman because they thought of him as being having this, like, you know, very different kind of background from them. But most of them were locals or had been there for a very long time. So people had forgotten where they moved there from. Phoenix city interestingly it had this reputation for a long time dating back to the early 19th century, even before alabama became a state people would run running from the law in georgia, before alabama did, they would run into alabama to get away and the area that became phoenix city had a number of different names but i was amused to learn that at some point in the early 19th century, formal name was saddam. That was the name of the community. So it had this reputation for a long time. But i think it would be unfair to say there was anything approaching a real organized racketeering operation until a little bit in the 19 teens and 20s when the state passed a prohibition law and they were flaunting it. The state attorney general came in, and put the sheriff on trial because he was refusing to enforce the law. And he was they replaced him and a couple of years later when election season came around, the people of phoenix city reelected that same guy. And in the 1930s, the city started selling licenses to raise revenues, the city was broke. So thats one of the reasons it really flourished there in the city. When i say they actively cooperated, they really did, they sold licenses and looked the other way at a lot of legal violations in order to keep revenues up. You reference the jim crow south, and i was wondering what was it about the fact that it was jim crow that and the relationship or was there an impact on the unorganized crime because it was jim crow . This is one of the big sort of questions that i alluded to at the top that im sorting through here. I can i dont have a clean answer to that, but i can tell you a few things about it. One of my overarching concerns about this going into the project was, you know, what did it mean or how did it affect Race Relations in phoenix city and alabama when you had this all powerful white mob, calling it the mob, they called themselves people called it the mob there, they didnt call themselves that. But what did that mean for Race Relations . From what i have learned about phoenix city, the way that race played into the mobs activities didnt quite work the way i thought its would. I thought there would be more tensions. There really werent more tensions necessarily. The mob had absolute control over the city and the city government. The gambling establishments were segregated like everything else, but a lot of africanamericans were employed by the mob in phoenix city. And even though the segregated the black establishments were white owned, they put africanamericans in charge of running those clubs. I also wondered about political involvement of the mob and who were they supporting and that kinds of things. From i cant as far as i have been able to tell, they were for Democratic Party was running the county and running the state, but they were for anybody they could buy. And it really didnt matter who they were, what they were. Hoyt shepard, the kingpin i mentioned is the only one that i found any really just from oral history, i dont have documentation of this, but that the only one that i have any indication was in the klan. And he made no secret about that. But people were more afraid of him because he was hoyt shepard the kingpin than because of his klan activities. And some of you may know this, but Albert Patterson, his son was john patterson, became the governor of alabama. I interviewed him a couple of times about this. Hell be 94, i believe, in september. And he says he has a vivid memory as a little boy of watching the klan parade and he said, you can tell who everybody was, a small town and you knew their shoes. So he said, you know, i would see him marching in the parades and everybody knew he that he was in the klan. But as far as this is my bigger question about what does it mean to have this white mob exercising this kind of local control . I dont think they were doing anything i havent been able to determine so far that theyre doing anything out of the ordinary or different than what was happening anywhere else. They would occasionally when they need to rig an election, they would try to exploit and manipulate the black vote in Russell County and pay people to come in and vote who otherwise would not have been allowed to vote in elections. There was some of that going on. I havent been able to determine that that was the way they got the elections fixed. I dont think they had to. The election that they almost stole away from Albert Patterson for the democratic primary to become the new attorney general, they just went in and erased the election returns and wrote in the numbers that they wanted. So they didnt even go so far as to try to pay people to vote. And when patterson, they already were upset with him because he had this Crime Fighting reputation, he was promising that one of the first things weighs going to do was clean up phoenix city. Theyre upset about that. The immediate thing that got him killed is that he knew they had changed the returns, had gotten his hands on some of them, and he was going to testify before the grand jury in montgomery the following week. And they knew it. And they had to stop him from doing that. So im from alabama. Where . Where from alabama . Where in alabama . Small town called perish, about 35 miles west. Okay. All right. Tammy, thank you very much. An extraordinarily interesting presentation and thank you for telling us so much about the kefauver investigation records and it is quite clear they are rewarding the project for your book and youre off to a wonderful start and were glad to hear about the next phase and we look forward to having you back some day. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. American history tv airs on cspan3 every weekend, telling the american story through events, interviews and visits to historic locations. This month American History tv is in primetime, to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on cspan3. Our features include lectures in history, visits to College Classrooms across the country to hear lectures by top history professors, american artifacts takes a look at the treasures at u. S. Historic sites, museums and archives, reel america, revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreels, the civil war, where you hear about the people who shape the civil war and reconstruction, and the presidency focuses on u. S. President s and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies and legacies. All this month in primetime and every weekend on American History tv on cspan3. Our look at American History tv programs normally seen weekends here on cspan3 will continue in a moment. Coming up, the history and research on the u. S. Capitol page project. And then historian and author David Mccullough receives the u. S. Capitol Historical Society freedom award, that will be followed by a look at congressional papers collection. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 1996 welfare law, passed by Republican Congress and signed by president bill clinton, our special program looks back at the Senate Debate over the 1996 law. The current welfare system has failed the very families it was intended to serve. I dont know many people who want to humiliate themselves standing on a line waiting for their welfare check. Yeah, there is some cheats out there and theyre druggies and drunks. Theyre out there. There is no question about it. But a lot of those people are simply people who have not yet discovered a way out of their misery and their poverty. We have decided that the states and the governors and legislatures out there in america are as concerned about the poor as we are, as concerned about their wellbeing and as concerned if not more so than we are about the status of welfare he