Mass
Production and the Post-WWI Rise in Auto Theft
With Ford’s “democratization”
of the automobile and an explosion in the number of vehicles came an epidemic
of automobile theft. Machines produced in mass quantities made easy prey for
joy riders, common thieves, and skilled, organized professional criminals.
Moreover, the automobile was valuable, mobile, and its parts were often interchangeable.
Lucrative domestic and international markets for stolen automobiles and parts
yielded high profits and relatively low risk. Interchangeable parts also
enabled thieves to quickly reconstruct and disguise stolen automobiles. As
evinced by thieves’ ability to alter serial numbers, duplicate registration
papers, switch radiators, and replace entire engine blocks, Fordism’s inherent
uniformity welcomed theft. Moreover, thieves, with few exceptions, sought out
and stole the most ubiquitous automobiles; popular, middle-priced models were most likely
to be stolen, along with the easy to steal Model T.
Until
the introduction of the electric self-starter in 1912, automobiles employed a
battery/magneto switch along with a crank.[1] The automobilist turned the switch to B
(battery), got outside the car, cranked the engine, and then once it started,
moved the lever to M (magneto) and adjusted the carburetor. On early Ford Model T’s the battery/magneto
switch had a brass lever key, but there were only two types, with either a
round or square shank. Later, in 1919,
Ford offered an optional lockable electric starter, but only used twenty-four
key patterns. To make things easy for the thief, each code was stamped on both
the key and the starter plate.
Most
significantly, however, the very nature and scale of criminality was
transformed by automobility. Unlike
other stolen goods, the automobile enabled its own escape. One such real life episode happened in 1925,
when five men held up a cashier and timekeeper at a construction site in the
Bronx, took $2000, and then fled in the victim’s car. The New
York Times reported that the thugs, “as they fled … fired a shot from the
automobile at a number of workmen who had dropped their tools and were giving
chase. The robbers’ car was out of sight when they reached 165th
Street and Jerome Avenue."[2]
It
was obvious, then, when in 1916 a New York Police official commented that: “the
automobile is a very easy thing to steal and a hard thing to find.”[3] As early
as 1915, 401 automobiles were stolen in New York and only 338 were recovered.[4] By 1920, it was estimated that one-tenth of
cars manufactured annually were stolen.[5]
Astonishingly, in 1925 it was estimated that 200,000 to 250,000 cars were stolen
annually. The automobile age had ushered
in a new era of crime, and a new type of criminal, the “joy rider.” [6]
This
crime wave, however, could not be attributed to just one kind of criminal,
particularly one who took his or her act as a casual "borrowing" of a
vehicle. Automobile theft added new categories of crimes, and the motor vehicle
became a central part of burglary and housebreaking. In response, police began
to patrol with the automobile. In 1922, Chicago police complained that their
worn-out “tin lizzies” should be scrapped; they could not catch the high
powered hold-up car that traveled at sixty miles an hour.[7] Even
with the growth of government and the advent of patrolling, police forces were
outmaneuvered by mobile criminals. Contrary to the iconic prohibition image of
police forces that smashed barrels of alcohol, municipal police forces may have
dealt with stolen automobiles on a more regular basis. Automobile theft developed as a complex
phenomenon, one that was not easily characterized in terms of motives or
methods. Indeed it became as complex as
American life in the machine age. In
Philadelphia in 1926, 8,896 people were arrested for assault and battery by the
automobile, as it was also used as a weapon.[8]
George
C. Henderson, an expert on crime who had just authored his popular Keys to Crookdom (1924), placed car
thieves into five categories: commercial thieves and hardened criminals;
strippers; traveling crooks; robbers or bandits; and finally "Joy riders,
kids, imbeciles, dope fiends, incorrigibles, rough-necks and members of
youthful gangs [who]steal cars just to ride around town." [9] As to
the "why" of youthful offenders, W.S. Jennings, commenting on those
incarcerated in Indiana's Jeffersonville Reformatory, asserted that the reason
for adolescents breaking the law was due to "Divorces, broken homes,
children spoiled in raising by neglected parents, or by equally neglected
over-indulgent ones; the absence of rational home life to counteract city
temptations; failure to learn self control in early life."[10]
In reality, there were almost as many reasons for becoming an auto
thief as there were thieves. One purported auto thief, writing a confession in
a 1925 issue of Your Car: A Magazine of Romance, Fact and Fiction
explained that he "drifted into stealing automobiles, because it seemed
the easiest way to get what was to me a lot of money, quickly. I had a
champagne appetite and a dishwasher income."[11]
Beginning with the theft of automobile jacks, tire irons, and tires, this
repentant criminal organized a gang of three, including one skilled mechanic
who had "graduated from one of "Detroit's finest factories.'"
The trio, careful to study the daily habits of the owners of the cars under
consideration, concentrated on stealing Buicks in New York City and then moving
them to a shop in Westchester. In the end, and after a chance apprehension, the
writer was determined to go straight after a two year prison sentence. He cautioned owners with a strategy that
remains viable to this day:
The stories I read about automobile
thieves and how slick they are, opening any lock in fifteen minutes, installing
wiring systems of their own and all that sort of stuff, make me laugh. Why should a thief go to all that trouble
when right around the corner he can find another car without any locks on it,
except the ignition lock, which his
master key will open as quickly as the owners?[12]
In
sum, auto theft was often one of a number of interrelated crimes perpetrated by
law breakers. The automobile created new opportunities for criminals of all
persuasions, and consequently confronted legal authorities with a myriad of
problems. One author noted that, “asautomobile thefts increase burglaries and
robberies increase.”[13] The automobile itself was stolen, but the
automobile also played a central role in kidnapping, rum running, larceny,
burglary, traffic crimes, robberies, and deadly accidents of the “lawless
years.”[14]
[1]
For an excellent discussion on the history of car keys, see Michael Lamm, “Are
Car Keys Obsolete,” American Heritage
Invention & Technology, 23 (Summer 2008), 7.
[2]
“Get $2,000 Payroll, Flee in Victim’s Car,” New
York Times, September 27, 1925, 9.
[3]
Roy Lewis, “Watch Your Car,” Outing,
70(May 1917), 170.
[4]
Ibid., p. 168. “The All-Conquering
Auto Thief and a Proposed Quietus for Him,” Literary
Digest, 64(February 7, 1920), 111-115, with reference to Alexander C.
Johnston’s article in Munsey’s Magazine,
New York, 1920. “More Than a Quarter of a Million Cars Stolen Each Year,” Travel, (October 1929),46. See also,
William G. Shepard ,"I wonder who’s driving her now?,” Colliers, 80(July 23, 1927), 14.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "joy ride" was first used
in a 1909 article in the N.Y. Evening
Post reporting on a city ordinance that was passed to stop city officers
from taking "joy rides."
[5] For a comprehensive description of the auto theft problem in the
years immediately after WWI, see Automobile Protective and Information Bureau,
Annual Report (N.P.: n.p., 1921). Additionally, see the pamphlet “A Growing
Crime!,” (N.P.: n.p., 1923[?].
[6]
Joy rider as a term evoking irresponsibility and reckless disregard for others
is briefly discussed in Peter D. Norton, “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the
invention of the Motor Age Street,” Technology
and Culture, 48 (2007), 342. On juvenile delinquency in the period, see
Christopher Thale, "Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban
America, 1890-1940, Journal of Social
History, 40(Summer, 2007), 1024-6; D.J.S. Morris, "American Juvenile
Delinquency," Journal of American
Studies, 6 (December, 1972), 337-40; Bill Bush, "The Rediscovery of
Juvenile Delinquency," Journal of
the Gilded and Progressive Era, 5( October, 2006), 393-402.
[7]Henry
Barrett Chamberlain, “The Proposed Illinois Bureau of Criminal Records and
Statistics.” Journal of the American
Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 13(Feb., 1922), 522. Allegedly the police moved one-third as fast
as the criminals they chased.
[8]Ellen
C. Potter, “Spectacular Aspects of Crime in Relation to the Crime Wave,”Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, 125(May, 1926), 12. Potter noted, “…the automobile has
added its spectacular element to causes for arrest in Philadelphia by
approximately 10 percent. Assault and battery by the good old-fashioned human
fist lacks some of the elements which make the same offense by automobile a new
story and more than 8,800 arrests were made in 1925 out of a total of 137,263.”
[9]
George C. Henderson, Keys to Crookdom (New
York:. D. Appleton, 1924), pp. 28-9.
[10]
W.S. Jennings, Jeffersonville Reformatory, City of Renewed Hope," where
Indiana Keeps Some of her Misfits," Indiana Farmers' Guide, 33 (April 30,
1921), 4.
[11] "Confessions of An Auto Thief," Your Car: A Magazine of Romance, Fact and Fiction (June 1925), 34.
[12] Ibid., p.
36.
[13]
William J. Davis, “Stolen Automobile Investigations.” Journal of Automobile Investigations, 28 (Jan.-Feb. 1938), 721.
[14]
Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Lawless Years: 1921-1933,” http://www.fbi.gvov/libref/historic/history/lawless.htm,
accessed 17 May 2008.
[15] Johnson, “Stop Thief!,” 72.
[16]
Bennet Mead, “Police Statistics.” Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 146 (Nov. 1929),
94. Arthur Evans Wood, "A Study of Arrests in Detroit, 1913 to 1919,"
Journal of the American Institute of Criminal
Law and Criminology, 21 (August, 1930), 99.
[17]Wood,
p.94.
[18]
Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the
Automobile: The Making of a Modern City (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987),
p. 92.
[19]
J.B. Thomas, Conspicuous Depredation:
Automobile Theft in Los Angeles, 1904-1987 (N.P.: Office of the Attorney
General, California Department of Justice, Division of Law Enforcement,
Criminal Identification and Information Branch, Bureau of Criminal Statistics
and Special Services, March 1990).
[20]
US House of Representatives, 66th Congress, 1st session,
Report 312: Theft of Automobiles. (Washington: G.P.O, 1919), p. 1.
[21]
Johnson, “Stop Thief!” 72.
[22] "Car Insurance is Withheld from Chicago Negroes. Appaling
[sic] Auto Theft Rate Makes Negro Districts
Bigger Risks than more Refined Districts," Plaindealer (Kansas City, Kansas), July 7, 1933, pp. 1, 4.
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