Cold War Offenses and Cold-Hearted Crimes Crime and Punishment in Erie, Pennsylvania, 1946-1960

Abstract

Americans have often feared radicals, foreigners, and other groups that seemed to be conspiring to undermine the American way of life. In the 1950s, Americans identified two distinct groups that they perceived as a threat to their postwar prosperity and liberty: Communists and the Mob. Both groups, it was believed, sought to steal the riches of the American people and replace the existing American System with an inefficient foreign organization. When Senator Estes Kefauver reported in 1951 that “behind the local mobs lay a shadowy international organization,” many Americans were not only willing to believe it, but assumed the “shadowy organization” was the Soviet Union. Over the course of fourteen public hearings in fourteen different cities across the United States, Kefauver outlined the known details of the national crime syndicate and, what he termed, the “alien conspiracy.”