Thursday, December 17, 2009
Bad News From the Past Murder, Inc.
Posted by Cliff Doerksen on Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 9:30 AM
Courtesy of cartoonist John McCutcheon, here's a lighthearted look at homicide as practiced in Progressive-era Chicago.
"Black Hand" was the contemporary term for mafia, though it didn't have the modern connotation of a national criminal conspiracy. All that came about later as a consequence of Prohibition, which was just getting under way at the time (and which a lot of people mistakenly hoped would lower the homicide rate). Those floppy hats on the Black Handers were standard cartoonist shorthand for fresh-off-the-boat Italian immigrants (aka "Mustache Petes"), so we're talking about intra-ethnic feuding here. The right-hand panel refers to the fact that white women were at the time virtually immune to prosecution for killing their husbands and/or lovers. (We'll come back to that point later.)
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