Transcripts For CSPAN3 Organized Crime In The South In The 1950s 20160731

1950s have received much researcher attention over the last two years, we have invited historians to speak about their work in these records. Several historians have spoken to us about the Senate Select committee on improper activities in labor and management. Better known as the mcclellan committee. Several have made presentations based on the hearings of the house unamerican activities committee. Historians have conducted Considerable Research on the Senate Special committee to investigate crime in interstate commerce, better known as the Kefauver Committee. For that reason we are pleased to have our guest today, tammy ingram, estes talk is titled kefauver and the anticrime crusade in the south. Tammy has researched at the center of the records of Estes Kefauvers famous investigation. She has also researched senator kefauvers personal papers at the university of tennessee. This Research Supports her book project, the wickedest city in america. Such a tantalizing title. Frome also eager to hear tammy which city she considers the wickedest. [laughter] she earned a phd in history at yale university. She is the author of an published by book North Carolina University Press in 2014. Tammy has just been named a Gilder Lehrman fellow at yale and will spend next year writing the first draft of the wickedest city. Congratulations, tammy. As always, we will have time for q a after the presentation. Remember to raise your hand. Read 10 pass the microphone before you ask your question so we can pass you the microphone before yesterday question you asked your question. Thank you for joining us, tammy. Tammy thank you all for being here. I will start my stopwatch here so ill try not to go over. I want to give you a brief overview of the Kefauver Committees origins. Its responsibilities, what i see limits, as some of its to set up the rest of our talk. I suspect you are familiar already but for the benefit of anyone who might not be thinly with it already, the Estes Kefauver committee had the formal title of the special Senate Committee to investigate organized crime in interstate commerce. It was empowered to investigate the use of the facilities in interstate commerce by organized crime syndicates nationwide. They were especially interested in gambling operations. Thoughtwhat kefauver was the lifeblood of the mob. The resolution proposing the creation of this committee was introduced by senator kefauver in 1950 and approved by the senate in may. Over the next 15 months of a fiveman Committee Conducted hearings and 14 major cities around the country. The couple took a very keen interest in the work of this particular committee. Some of the hearings were televised we were talking about this a few moments ago and an estimated audience of about 30 Million People tuned in to watch. Many of them not from their living rooms. Most people do not have televisions in those days. But the local movie theaters were showing the talks. Women were pushing their baby carriages around new york city and when the kid would fall asleep they would duck into the theater to watch a few minutes of it. It was fascinating to see the and his colleagues modeloning my bosses bosses and their associates and also some very prominent politicians whom they suspected of having ties to organized crime. The committees final report was issued in 1951. It concluded that organized crime syndicates really did exist. They depended upon the support and the cooperation of Public Officials around the country. Public interest in organized crime had peaked already. Had a deep roots already. At the end of the Second World War there was a great resurgence of interest in and concern about organized crime. The fbi had long downplayed the existence of the mob. The public and the media had they hadnt ignored it, exactly, but they certainly paid paid less sustained attention to organized crime. Last highprofile gangsters had died or gone to prison in the 1930s. There are a number of reasons why scholars have given for this review interest. I will run you dust through a few of them but these are the ones that have bearing on my research. There are four big ones that i think relate here. One is that in some cities there was the perception that mob violence had increased. People sometimes mistakenly argue that the Kefauver Committee came about in the first place because of a particular murder of the kingpin in kansas city. The committee was actually already in the works at that point. But that was a very timely event. People were becoming more aware of organized crime, and it certainly helped kefauver, it helped to underscore the need for federal action. Another reason was labor racketeering was undermining powerful unions in the country during and after the war, and industrial output was obviously of paramount concern. But the two that have the most bearing on my project are that it was becoming more clear to people that racketeers corrupted the Legal Process in the cities where they had thrived more or less unchecked for decades. Lull between the 1930s and the 1950s when we werent paying close attention to what they were doing was a time of tremendous growth for organized crime. Especially in the south. The outset of the cold war contributed as well. In an atmosphere of heightened anxiety and corrupt officials espionage, blackmail, any immoral activities were subjected to greater scrutiny. Any perceptions of political corruption seemed especially dangerous. So that is kind of what is happening on the national level. Im focusing on this story, the history of organized crime come in a place called phoenix city. That is the wickedest city in america. You probably never heard of it. The map here gives you an idea roughly of where it is. My book examines organized crime from the end of the civil war to the beginning of the cold war. It tells the story of how phoenix city, alabama, a small city on the chattahoochee river, how it became the headquarters of the civil war. Headquarters of an organized crime ring following the civil war. After fort benning was established across the river in 1918, the racketeers had a steady stream of revenue from soldiers on payday. They really constituted the most reliable source of income for the rackets. By the 1930s, the syndicate ran the city. And it did so with the cooperation and the blessing of local officials. It was a dry county but they ran saloons. They ran brothels. All kinds of gambling rackets, from numerous lotteries and slot machines that were rigged to never play payout. The slot machines were in casinos and gambling halls and clubs. They were also in grocery stores. They joked you cannot find a loaf of bread. Milk crates i talked to slots inout the penny the middle. Kids could play if they wanted to. They also ran some fancier establishments. Highrollers from big cities came to visit those places. By the early 1950s, 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. It enabled racketeers to control local and state politics. The mobs wealth and power also depended upon more nefarious businesses. I wont talk about this too much today but one of the things that my larger project is looking at is central to the rising organized crime was the growing power of the mob to control, exchange, and profit from the sale of womens and childrens bodies. Prostitution, including or children asn wer young as 13 years old, was rampant. Also illegal adoptions, especially involving the children of single or poor mothers. It enriched the racketeers and phenix city but also linked them to criminal networks outside of alabama and the south. The most striking thing that the phenix city mob is the extent of its political connections. The mob there exercised complete control over municipal government. It also exercise tremendous influence in state politics. They made a few efforts to clean up the mob in the early 20th century. They got 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. Its members became targets of mob violence right away. That is a testament to how threatened they felt by the 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. In june of 1954, when the mobs efforts to rigged the democratic preventto crimefighting attorney from becoming the new attorney general failed, they assassinated him outside of his law office. Local officials and Law Enforcement were so corrupted that the governor had to declare martial law in order to sort out the mess. When the dust settled, the nation was shocked to learn that the three people suspected of his murder were prominent Public Officials. The deputy sheriff, the circuit solicitor, and the sitting attorney general of the state of alabama. Whose name was silas garrett. Shortly after the murder, garrett checked himself into a Mental Hospital and avoided the being prosecuted. The other two stood trial and only fuller ever went to prison. He ended up getting out and moving back to phenix city where he was taking care of by former associates for the rest of his days. The story made national and international headlines. A local newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the case. But it was no surprise for the people of phenix city, whod been pleading with federal and state agencies for help for decades. They had appealed 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, were pretty good acquaintances and exchanged letters about how to deal with this problem. I came here couple of years ago for the first time looking at these collections in the hopes of learning more about that correspondence, specifically about that relationship. Id seen a few letters and Albert Pattersons papers at the state archives of alabama. I wondered how much information he had given the Kefauver Committee. I didnt find very much between those two. In fact, i learned a lot more about the national dimensions of my study organized crime and political corruption in the jim crow south. My project is still very much a work in progress. As richard said, im starting to write it up next year. When i finally have a merciful bit of leave time from teaching. So i cant outline precisely how it will all come together. But i do want to focus on some of the most important things in my research and try to explain what it has to do with my larger project. The first big takeaway from this work is that the Kefauver Committees work wasnt entirely new. It was the first effort by congress to investigate organized crime. But it mirrored and relied upon the work of existing antivice and crime commissions. Evaluating the work of those committees, the aid that they gave to the Kefauver Committee is absolutely essential for understanding the fullscope of the Senate Committees work, and also the limits of that work. A lot of cities have had antivice committees before. But the one that kefauver had and his colleagues were in 1950 andg with 1951 were relatively new. Most were organized in the mid to late 1940s. 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 their way into addressing local problems. These groups were publicizing the work of local criminal operations in an effort to paralyze them. One example i have already mentioned. The russell Betterment Society phenix city, founded in the late 1940s. One thing i found looking through the kefauver records is that the Russell Betterment Association was a little bit unusual. It came out of a small town. Most of the ones that existed were in larger towns and cities. A couple of images of the kind of literature that they would put out. It looks kind of dark. Miami had one called the greater crime commission. Or the crime commission, rather, of greater miami. It was founded in 1948. One of the things that was interesting about the correspondence between members of this committee and the Kefauver Committee is i realize how much they were up against funding challenges, unlike the Kefauver Committee. It had a grant from congress to do their work. These were locally organized and did not receive any public funding whatsoever. They may have had Public Officials on their members rosters but they werent getting any funding. One of the things they complained about to kefauver 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 they can do those things. They also did collect a lot of data, anyway, and they communicated that to kefauver. Another example, and i like the literature, is the commission in kansas city. They had a really good Graphic Design person. Wont flip through all of them but i have a couple of images here. Im sorry these are so small. Their literature tended to focus more on how crime cost the city money. Not to make arguments about morality and what is wrong with what they are doing, but to say, whether you like it or not were , not asking who is participating in this, not interested in that. They were really concerned about how much money was costing the city to deal with these problems created by organized crime. 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 money to make this work, they would thrive a little bit more. It helps to explain why the Russell Betterment Association was 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. While committee correspondence suggests that commissions like the Russell Betterment Association were really the exception, the committees respond committees correspondence does shed some light on the work of the Russell Betterment Association. The files contained dozens of letters like this one from a man named john from phenix city complaining about the pervasiveness of organized crime. He calls it a citizens letter but it is clear who he is talking about. , as manys to kefauver of his friends and colleagues on the Russell Betterment Association bid, to understand that phenix city racketeers were not just a local concern. They should not 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 Betterment Association. Near the bottom of the letter, he says, while we are fighting for democracy in other countries of the world please help us root out those people who seek to buy our own government. To document his claims he 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 newspaper. She was probably one of the better sources of information they could have had. Interestingly enough, i later figured out that her parents were the ones who were running the illegal adoption ring. Her father was a doctor and her mother was his nurse. I will talk about that at the end. It is probably the most salacious information. Until i found documentation of it, i thought it was just one of those legends that have been based on some grain of truth and greatly exaggerated. But its not. It was actually true. Including the clippings with most of his letters, and a lot of the correspondence did this, i think, in an effort to convince him that this was well known. Theyre not just spreading rumors about the neighbors. This was a real problem. And it is one of the committee needed to address. Him. Ver wrote back to he tended to write back to the majority of the people writing these letters outlining concerns , usually with a more brief response than this. This one is interesting because his reply is little bit less firm of a no then he would be giving to people later on. He sadly tells him that time wont he simply tells him that time wont permit him to come to every place or every small town where there might be some problem. But he indicates he is interested in learning more about what is going on in phenix city. He was already corresponding with Albert Patterson and kefauver knew very well what was going on in phenix city. I do think he took a special interest in those letters. There are some other correspondence like this. Memos scattered throughout the papers. Saying that somebody had called and mentioned bentleys name. Hes the guy whose house was firebombed by the mob. Shepperd was the main kingpin in phenix city. Guy working for him who , his name wasse tommy dynamite caps. Each person had a specialty. There was a safecracker, and a long list of known activities. I wish i had his mug shot i have a copy of it from the state archives. His long list of known activities. But he was their guy they called in to blow things up. There are a lot of snippets of information like this scattered throughout. A lot of people were corresponding with kefauver and he knew a great deal of what was going on in phenix city. People writing these letters and members were some of kefauvers best sources of information. He often contacted the leaders of these commissions himself in order to solicit information. When there were no commissions to turn to come he wrote instead sometimes to local Law Enforcement. I think he realized that was not going to get him very far in. Henix city instead he writes to local journalists. I found a great one from a birmingham reporter. He was writing about birmingham and problems in alabama but he was one of two or three journalists who wrote a number of stories about phenix city. They wrote a book following the patterson murder about the years of activities of the mob in phenix city. Im hoping to over the next few months dig a little deeper into the work of these commissions, now that ive seen how important their work was to kefauver. Im interested in particular whether or not they were also policing other criminal behavior. I think that the Kefauver Committee and this constellation of municipal anticrime commissions were responses to postwar 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 syndicatesized crime from cold war era fears about all kinds of other supposedly immoral behaviors. We know that kefauver had a keen interest in some of these behaviors, too. He was an Ardent Supporter of legislation to limit pornography. He headed another Committee Later on and even at this time was very interested in juvenile delinquency. Some of these local commissions had initiatives that in one of them, i cant remember if it is kansas city or miami they specifically mentioned that they are concerned with juvenile delinquency and how that might feed organized crime activities. They were doing things like trying to ban violent comic books or encourage parents to not let the kids go see violent films. The details are something that the Kefauver Committee records dont clarify for me. It made me interested in looking at the local commission to see how much they were corresponding with smaller activities. It is very difficult to find the records of these local groups. Committee records constitute some of the only documentation that we have of some of these organization, and they are really fascinating. I think that one of the things that has come out of my looking at the correspondence with the anticrime groups and an awareness of the shortcomings of these anticrime campaigns. They dont really give the full measure of the local involvement in and sometimes local support four or at least local tolerance for the rackets. Before things became openly violent or just something happened that made people think this really has to stop. It doesnt indicate anywhere in these records from listening to some of these committees talk that the men in these smaller towns and cities in particular were prominent local citizens. They were members of the jaycees. The guy who shot patterson, a few years before that he had been up for jc of the year. He was very embittered that he didnt win. They were Little League coaches, they were deacons in the local churches. In phenix city needed new band uniforms. They needed a new hospital and one of the racketeers donated the land. They gave the money to build the hospital as well. Their full measure was prominent citizens in the communities, not as criminals. And dont think there are a lot of devils or saints in the story but looking at the anticrime campaign that is what you are led to believe. Albert patterson himself, the man who was murdered by the mob, he was a local attorney and he had done work for them in the past. He defended one of the maintained kingpins in a murder trial a few years before his own murder. He in no way was sympathetic to them. They tried to buy him off. But it certainly suggests that for many years he was tolerant of their behavior and he really only turned against them and they against him when he joined the Russell Betterment Association. Kefauver was very politically ambitious as well. They all reveled in this reputation for being tough on crime. My second big takeaway from my work in these records, and this one is closely related to the first, is that the kefauver investigation as we know revealed organized crime was most known as an urban affliction. New york, chicago, los angeles, las vegas. If the Kefauver Committees public activities confirmed what most people already knew, that organized crime was real and running loose in the biggest cities, the records of the Committee Show that organized crime flourished in smaller cities and towns. Where racketeers and corrupt Public Officials exercise control of local Law Enforcement, local businesses, and sometimes state politics as well. The committee assumes when they received some these letters from people complaining about local problems that the crime syndicates in smaller towns and cities were not only less common but they were smaller and probably less likely to engage in interstate business. But kefauvers correspondence taught him otherwise. Nowhim otherwise. , he certainly knew that phenix city, sitting on a state boundary, was engaged in interstate commerce. His correspondents told him time and again that this was so. This letter is very generic. A lady named wanda from alabama. She wrote this pleading letter to kefauver saying that the south was in trouble and the situation is dire. She doesnt offer a lot of detail but she is obviously very upset about what is happening. Most of the letters were very specific, they named names and had dates and specific information about was going on and where and when. The correspondence files are organized by state. You can just stand the boxes and see scan the boxes and see that the Southern States are full, they are fit files. Thick files. Letters detailing these kinds of activities. People keep making the same kinds of complaints about their local problems. They say they are linked to problems in other cities and other parts of the country. They know that the Kefauver Committee is looking at interstate commerce. They highlight that and would tolude newspaper clippings say that i am not pulling this out of thin air, as is really happening. There were many, many people writing with complaints about phenix city. But there also letters from places like birmingham and Muscle Shoals. Savannah, georgia. Seneca, south carolina. Chattanooga, tennessee. Galveston, texas. I could go on and on. The queries were all very similar. Andr senator, they began, each letter outlined complaints about gambling, prostitution, and intimidation. Sometimes violent intimidation by a small group of racketeers and their employees. The men and women who wrote these letters also links to these activities to the things i mentioned earlier. Political corruption and labor racketeering. And to cold war security concerns. One person in Muscle Shoals wrote a letter to kefauver saying he was certain the communists were running the mob in Muscle Shoals. Another person called himself or herself an american. Wrote this rather odd and paranoidsounding note to the committee that said 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 phenix city were saying that to him as well. We are not too concerned about what is going on into the cold war. That is a problem, but the real war is right here. The accusations as this one indicates were so outrageous that kefauver and his colleagues didnt pay much attention to them. A few of them i thought i had. N image of one someone had written in the margins, this is a crackpot. Some of them were. There are also letters from people who seemed to have personal vendettas against specific individuals. I thought there would be more of those. Whether it was true or not, there was some other motive behind it. There certainly is a good deal of it. It is obvious they were also receiving a lot of good information. Detailed information. Information that sometimes people volunteered, and sometimes kefauver solicited from people he trusted. In terms of the outcome of this campaign and its bearing on my research in phenix city, i think that certainly, the committees conclusion in their final report in 1951 was no surprise to those citizens who were writing him letters in 1951. But it didnt lead to what they wanted, which was a serious crackdown on organized crime is or smallercities towns, 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 corrupt local officials to help them out. In phenix city, despite the work of the Russell Betterment Association, the mob thrived in the early 1950s. Local Law Enforcement and the state attorney general facilitated the work of the racketeers there. It really did not end until they overstepped in 1954 when they killed Albert Patterson and then the State Government declared martial law. That was the only way to root it out. Most of the people involved did not go to jail. They were from phenix city and maybe operating saloons and brothels, but when the dust settled they all stayed in phenix city. They continued coaching little going to local political banquets. This is what theyd always been. They were integrated into their community. Of course organized crime did not end there. This is beyond the scope of my work, but most of you are far probably familiar with some of our high profile cases. Such is the murder of fuzzy horde in jackson county, georgia. Buford pussers campaign in tennessee. And cases all along because from the 1960s to the 1980s. My big question, which im still working through, when i came here to start my research, my big question was 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 . The records dont offer any easy answer to that first question. There was overwhelming evidence that organized crime thrived in the south and it had corrupted local and even state politics by 1950. And that everybody knew about this. This was no secret. The rich correspondence files also outlines the extent of sophisticated and diversified work of crime syndicates in the south for decades before the 1950s. They provide some of the best documentation we have. City by city and state by state, the full scope of organized crime in the south in 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. One of the things that the Kefauver Committees response to some these letters got me thinking more about was like most citizens they had the assumption that this was an urban problem. On the preconceived ideas about what constitutes a real urban space. It made me realize that in some ways this project is engaging questions i worked on in my first book that did not have as sexy title as you heard earlier. It is about a highway. And connections between urban and rural communities. Phenix city was a very important market town for farmers. But it was also a way station for the very same kinds of vice and danger and depravity that Southerners Associated with bigger cities, more industrialized cities. What is happening in phenix city challenged ideas about the safety and security of smalltown life. Even as industry and big agribusiness took over as drivers of the national and regional economy. Anxiety about that transition as well as challenges to the racial and sexual status quo were magnified by the mobs activities was projected onto attitudes about the states regulatory responsibilities. They increasingly believed they define and punish criminal behavior. As phenix city shifted away from an agriculturals system to a more industrial one it embodied more fraught regional fluctuations between citizens and the state. By the late 1940s, when the of cold war policymaking reshaped ideas about safety and security in more global context. Citizens heightened responses to the presence of organized crime reflected their growing anxiety about global and local threats to their safety and economic order. Another big takeaway from this 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 phenix city case played out, cold war paranoia was making its way into homes, where people wanted to think they could still maintain some measure of personal safety and control over their lives. The pattison murder shouted the solution for people for white southerners in particular. The moral degradation of their communities by decades of vice had been bad enough. But the coldblooded murder of a prominent elected official prompted outrage. There is a wonderful quote from i believe one of the local papers carried it but from someone in phenix city shortly after the pattison murder. Political assassinations only in latin american dictatorships. But not in alabama. It spoke volumes about how rattled ople were that this was going on there. They knew it was going on but they just didnt think it was going to go quite that far. At the heart of this book are a lot of long overlooked connections between white Southern Resistance the civil rights and the backlash against organized crime as a foundation of postwar conservatism. Im interested in the ways in which a criminal subculture especially as ambitious politicians started getting involved in it and sort of casting themselves as being tough on crime. These ideas about criminal subculture coexisted for so long alongside reactionary ideas about race and gender in the role of the state. The commitment to law and order masked these issues for decades. In the same way that ideas about purity and sexual morality had fueled a range of sex crimes, including widespread prostitution of underage girls 12yearold girls in phenix city, augmented cases, and the unprosecuted rapes and sexual assaults of black women by white men. To wrap up my summation of the committee and what it teaches us here, i think 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 have shaped what we know as well. The correspondence files in the committees records are incredibly extensive and rich. Southerners were deeply interested in the work of the committee and worked tirelessly to get the committees attention. While the committee didnt conduct a Serious Investigation except for the ones in new s correspondence files document an Extensive Network of organized crime activities of the cold war south. Activities that had gone unchecked for decades. Unfortunately for phenix city, they would continue far down the for beyond of the lifespan of the Kefauver Committee as well. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much. Do you have a sense of how independent kefauver could be as senator in this senate that contain so many very powerful southern senators . Did they put any pressure against his exploring these links in the south . Tammy not from what ive seen. Certainly not in the research in my records. That is beyond the scope of what im working on. Nothing that ive read it there is some correspondence back and forth with his colleagues but nothing in there would indicate there was a serious pushback. In a way, this is not an easy not a difficult thing to support, either. I know there was some wrangling over who was going to run the committee and where funding was going to come from and being a special committee not tied to an existing committee. Everybody wanted some credit for it. Beyond that, the work of the committee was doing was an easy thing to support. Not that there wasnt any whatsoever, but i havent come across anything i could speak to specifically about that. If anybody knows that 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. Im wondering if you might comment of the demographics of the mob . Tammy thats a great question. People have asked me that a number of times. Not a misconception necessarily. That is what we think of anything about the mob. We think about organized crime, the mob, we think about urban areas, the mafia. In the south, as far as ive been able to tell, definitely , was thereix city any particular ethnic orientation. There is nothing tying people together other than they are interested in these kinds of activities. It was a relatively the people running it were relatively small but very well organized group of people. In phenix city, sheppard was the big kingpin. But there were a couple of other people who were considered kind of bosses working pins. They used or kingpins. They used that terminology. Most of people working for them were just petty criminals like tommy who had proven himself to be adept at placing dynamite. Who are useful to them. Clarence rebeled who ran a safe cracking school in phenix city. They had a building where they would bring people in and teach them about safe cracking. When i say that it was a Sophisticated Organization i sometimes jokingly call it disorganized crime. It was really very organized. Everybody was very specialized and carefully set up. But it wasnt there were no, none that i can figure out so far, any credible link between the Italian Mafia in new chicago or group in something with the irish mob and the rackets in phenix city. So within the mob in phenix city it was diverse demographically . Tammy it was all white men. But yes. . As far as ethnic background tammy most of them are from phenix city or nearby. A few people came in from the outside. There was one guy who was not born in the united states, but thats not true. I think his parents were immigrants but theyd come to alabama and he was born there. They called him the englishman. They thought of him as having this, like, very different kind of background from them. But most of them were locals or had been there for very long time. Phoenix city had this reputation for a very long time dating back to the early 19th century. Even before alabama became a state. People running from the law in georgia, they would run into alabama to get away. The area that became phenix city had a number of different names, but i was amused to learn that at some point in the early 19th century the formal name was sodom. [laughter] that was the name of the community. It had this reputation for some time but it is unfair to say there was anything approaching a real organized racketeering operation until the 1920s when the state passed a prohibition law and they were openly flouting it. The state attorney general came the on trial for but the sheriff on trial for refusing to enforce the law. When the election season came around, the people of phenix city reelected that same guy. And then they started selling licenses to raise revenue. The city was broke. That is one of the reasons it really flourished there. When i say they actively cooperated, they really did. They saw licenses and looked the other way at a lot of legal violations in order to keep revenues up. You referenced the jim crow south. And i was wondering, what was it about the fact that it was jim crow, and the relationship, and the impact on organized crime because it was jim crow . Tammy this is one of the big 4 questions im sorting through. I dont have a clean answer to that. One of my overarching concerns about this was what did it mean or how did it affect Race Relations in phenix city in alabama when you have this allpowerful white mob . Im calling it the mob. People call them the mob there. They did it call it they didnt call themselves that . What did that mean for Race Relations . From what ive learned about phenix city, the way that race played into the mobs activities didnt quite work the way i thought it would. I thought there would be more tensions. The mob had absolute control of the city and city government. The gambling establishments city were segregated like everything else. But a lot of black americans were employed. Even though the black establishments were whiteowned, they put African Americans in charge of running those clubs. I also wondered about political involvements of the mob and who were they supporting and those kinds of things. As far as ive been able to tell they were for obviously the Democratic Party was running the county and the state. But they were for anybody they can buy. Sheppard, the kingpin i mentioned, was the one that i couldnt find any really just from oral histories, i dont have documentation of this the only one 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 the kingpin than the klan activities. Albert patterson, who was murdered from his son was john patterson, who became the governor of alabama. I interviewed him couple times. 94 in september. He says he has a vivid memory of watching the klan parade and he knew who they were because it was a small town and you knew their shoes. Saw him marching in the parade everybody knew that he was in the klan. My bigger question was which is what does it mean to have the white mob exercising this kind of control . I have not been able to determine anything out of the ordinary or anything different. They would occasionally when they needed to rig an election try to exploit and manipulate the black vote in russell county. They would pay people to come in and vote who otherwise would not have been allowed to vote in elections. Determinebeen able to that that was the way they got elected. I dont think they had to. The one they almost stole away from Albert Patterson to become the new attorney general, they just went in and erased the election returns and wrote in numbers they wanted. They didnt even go as far as having to pay for the votes. Patterson had his crimefighting reputation and was promising that one of the first things he would do when elected was clean up phenix city. They were upset about that. But the immediate thing that got him killed was that he knew they had changed the election returns and he was going to testify before a grand jury in montgomery about that they knew it and they had to stop it. Im from alabama. Tammy where . I grew up right on the alabama line. Small town called parrish about 35 miles away. Tammy, thank you very much. Interestingily presentation. Thank you for telling us so much about the kefauver investigation records. It is quite clear that it was a rewarding project for your book. You are off to a wonderful start and we are glad to hear about the next phase and we look forward to having you back someday. Tammy thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. [applause] starting monday, august 1, at 8 00 p. M. Eastern time, the contenders, the 14 part series that puts the 2016 president ial campaign in historical perspective. Reaching across time, political parties, and, the contenders presents key figures who changed political history. Each night we feature a different candidate, beginning with henry clay and ending with ross perot. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern time august 1 through 14, here on American History tv, only on cspan 3. This weekend on the presidency, historians jon meacham, Annette Gordon reed, and ron chernow on the process of writing a president ial biography. Here is a preview. Information or you feel you can do a fresh portrait of a person. I had this epiphany when i was working on hamilton. The moment during the hamiltonnary war went and washingtons aidedecamp had a few and hamilton realized he had to justify this decision, had to justify this decision to his fatherinlaw, who was a very close friend of washington. He wrote a letter to his fatherinlaw that said, the great man and i have come to an open rupture. He will for once at least repent of his guilt humor. That line, he will for once at humor,pent of his ill kept reverberating in my mind. I had this image of the saintly George Washington and hamilton gave me this volatile power take boss. Powder take boss. Hamilton tended to portray accurate portraits of people. Washington, myself, seemingly the most familiar person in our history, could it be that he was the most unfamiliar in some way . That was my opening wedge, and it pried open a whole world of his inner emotions, which were very intense and volatile. He was seen as this man of marble, he wasnt at all. Watch the entire Program Sunday at 8 00 p. M. And midnight eastern here on American History tv on cspan 3. Journaliston q a, and author Joshua Kendall discusses his book first dad. Looking at fathering is trying to capture the complexity of human beings. Tohering is away in character and we tend to think that this is a bad guy or a good guy. But to see that a lot of these men who had been president had different parts they were compartmentalized, and some of them could be very laudable and do amazing things, and some could be really disappointing and horrify us. Tonight at 8 00 eastern and pacific on q a. A panel of historians talks about Race Relations in posts for memphis postcivil war memphis and looks at the lives of blacks in the seed before and after the 1866 rights that resulted in the massacre of dozens of africanamericans. They discussed testimonies that freed women assaulted during the melee and the role this event was hosted by the university of memphis and is a little bit over two hours. First, let us thank all of the organizers of this conference. It is a great conference, something that really needed to be done in the country. I just said to a couple of people that the best memory is to write it down. So, this important history, the people on this panel have been writing it down so that it will be preserved, not just for us, but for the next generation and the next generation