A certain morning last week brought three connected pieces of news:
Number One. At 2.30 the previous afternoon, Judge Elbert H. Gary of the U. S. Steel Corporation invited a number of distinguished persons to attend a meeting at his office in Manhattan. The guests included Richard Washburn Child, onetime (1921-24) Ambassador to Italy; Franklin D. Roosevelt; Mark O. Prentiss; William E. Knox, President of the American Bankers' Association; William B. Joyce, Chairman of the National Surety Co.; Governor Smith of New York, Assemblyman F. Trubee Davison and others.
They were called to meet because Mr. Child and Mr. Prentiss had a plan to present. Together they had recently made a survey of crime conditions in the U. S. They found that there is more crime in this country than in any other in the world. They thought that something ought to be done about it. Said Mr. Prentiss:
"Crime is organized to perfection and the only way to meet it is for citizens to organize behind officials charged with the duties of imposing punitive measures, and to close up the gaps through which criminals now regain their liberty on technicalities. There is no place in the world where crime is more rampant than it is in the United States. There are more murders and other crimes of violence committed here in a small town like Memphis, Tenn., for instance, than there are in all Turkey, and I've spent a lot of time in Turkey."
The upshot of the meeting was a plan for the formation of a National Crime Commission, to conduct a criminal laboratory, act as an educational bureau and serve between communities as a clearing house of information about effective means for dealing with crime. Governor Smith of New York announced a plan for formation of a crime commission to bring the methods of preventing and punishing crime up to date. But more than a local effort was the aim of the meeting. F. Trubee Davison, son of the late Henry P. Davison (Morgan partner and head of the American Red Cross during the War), was appointed to call another meeting to gather together prominent men from many states in order to start a National Commission. Thus was a movement initiated.
Number Two. The movement on its very first day received an astonishing amount of good and quite unintentional advertising.
It so happened that two Texas cowpunchers, one of them a full-blooded Cherokee Indian from Sweetwater named Ted Court or "Texas," were in Chicago for a rodeo. They fell in with three amiable young Chicagoans, and all five became intoxicated—the Texans most extraordinarily. That being the case, they decided to take an automobile ride. They piled into a light green automobile, drove north along Michigan Avenue, to the point where it merges into Lake Shore Drive. There they ran past the Drake Hotel, one of the most fashionable in Chicago, and turned east on Walton Place along the north side of the hotel. There they stopped and entered the great building evidently for an elite good time.
The five proceeded directly to the main clerical office of the hotel, the Texans swaggering. The lad from Sweetwater faced the affrighted clerks with a revolver in one hand and a sawed-off a shotgun in the other.
"Get up," he ordered some of the clerks, "we're from Texas. Stick up your hands."