THE 1920s: LAW AND JUSTICE: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

In October 1924 Roger Baldwin, president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), assured President Calvin Coolidge that J. Edgar Hoover would be a good choice for the post of permanent director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Hoover's predecessor, William J. Burns, had been fired for political corruption.

On 23 November 1922 Pierce Butler of Minnesota was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Warren G. Harding. Because of Butler's record as a reactionary "railroad lawyer," a coalition of Democratic and liberal Republican senators managed to block a confirmation vote during the Congressional session that concluded in December 1922, but by the time the next session convened in January 1923, Butler's supporters in the Senate had gained the additional eight votes they needed to confirm his appointment.

In Anniston, Alabama, on 30 July 1920 Sgt. Eugene Caldwell, a black soldier, was hanged by civil authorities for the murder of a white man. Caldwell claimed that he had acted in self-defense, and his attorneys argued that civil authorities had no legal right to try a soldier accused of committing a crime while on active duty. Despite repeated defense appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case.

In May 1929 prominent mobsters such as Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Frank Costello held a summit meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to discuss the possibility of forming a national crime syndicate.

On 22 March 1922 Charles Garland, a Harvard graduate and heir to a Boston retail-store fortune, established the American Fund for Public Services (often called the Garland Fund) to underwrite various liberal causes, including activities of the ACLU and the National Association of Colored People (NAACP); over the next three decades the fund provided $800,000 for a series of major civil rights litigations.

Although sometimes upstaged by Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays was a formidable trial lawyer in his own right. He served with Darrow on the defense in both the Scopes and Sweet cases. He was also on the legal team that defended Sacco and Vanzetti, and throughout the 1920s he was chief legal counsel for the ACLU.

Charles Hamilton Houston was appointed to the deanship of the Howard University Law School in May 1929. An African American attorney, Houston went on to train a cadre of young black law students—including Edward P. Lovett and Thurgood Marshall—who later argued landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In October 1929 Nathan Margold, a white New York attorney with expertise in constitutional law, was hired by the NAACP as its first permanent national legal counsel. With his salary paid out by the Garland Fund, he remained at this post for five years.

In March 1928 Eliot Ness, a Chicago agent for the Prohibition Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department, was appointed to head an elite squad to go after racketeers in the illegal liquor trade. Over the next several years Ness and his "Untouchables" greatly damaged the operations of Al Capone and other Illinois bootleggers.

In March 1921, at a special hearing of the University Board of Overseers, Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School prevented the efforts of an influential group of alumni to "purge" several members of the law faculty—including Felix Frankfurter and Zechariah Chafee—for alleged "academic radicalism." The leader of this campaign was Austin G. Fox, a prominent corporate attorney in New York City. This episode became known as the "Harvard Heresy Trial."

In July 1925 evangelist Billy Sunday, angered that several Protestant clergymen had offered to testify on the defendant's behalf at the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, proclaimed, "If a minister believes in and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar."

On 11 October 1926 gangster Hymie Weiss—whom Al Capone had long considered his most persistent, deadly enemy—was murdered on North Street, Chicago, in an ambush organized by Jake McGurn, a Capone lieutenant. Some weeks earlier Capone had barely escaped Weiss's gunmen in Cicero, Illinois.

In March 1929 George Wickersham, a prominent New York attorney, was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to head the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. Wickersham and his associates were asked to determine if Prohibition enforcement procedures were effective and to review the entire system of American jurisprudence. Despite fourteen separate reports issued over the next two years, Wickersham's panel was unable to reach conclusive answers to either question.

Throughout the 1920s Sgt. Alvin York of Tennessee, a battlefield hero of World War I, was a popular public lecturer for the Anti-Saloon League. By October 1929 he was speaking against the growing national campaign to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.