Reaping the Whirlwind of Crime
Who Sowed to the Wind?
HE youthfulness of many
of the criminals in the
United States, especially
in our cities, is becom-
ing a commonplace in
American society. Hick-
man, Loeb, Leopold, Rice, Harsh,
and many others are familiar
names in the annals of American
criminology. ‘Youthful killer,”
“girl bandit,” ‘‘student suicide,”
“outlaw,” and other such strik-
ing expressions, which a few years
ago were almost unknown in
American journalism, are today
common terms in the columns of
our daily papers. Floods of ora-
tory have been loosed from the
pulpit, the lecture platform, and
through the press, in explanation
of the reasons for these condi-
tions; and scores of remedies have
been suggested, looking to the
reclamation of this vast army of
wayward youth. But the candid
student of social conditions is
forced to acknowledge that up
to the present time there is not
the slightest indication of escape
from the awful calamity facing
the American people as a result
of the recklessness of large num-
bers of its young men and women.
The following quotation taken
from the Outlook and Independent
of January 2 sums up the situa-
tion in the words of Dr. Max
Schlapp, “the most noted of the
endocrinologists and for years a
clinical student of the delin-
quent’:
“Any man moderately familiar
with the indicia of mental and
nervous disorders will find play-
ing at every street corner in the
modern city the ultimate tragedy
of the race. He has but to stand
and watch the passing crowd. In
the gait and posture of his mortal
brothers, in the eccentricities of carriage, the shapes
of faces, the gape of mouths, the faulty play of
muscles, the empty merriment or dull imperturba-
bility of countenances, he will read the ruin of stocks
MAY, 1929
‘By Guy Herbert Winslow
“The most malign of all these
dangers (which confront this
nation) today is disregard and
disobedience of law.” — Herbert
Hoover in his inaugural address,
March 4, 1929.
Herbert Photos, Inc.
The criminals of Europe are better
trained than our own, and have driven
the police, as this Paris plain-clothes
man, to wear bullet-proof vests, and
carry helmets and shields of sheet steel
for protection in skirmishes with des-
perate bandits
and sense the sundown of peoples.
“Few can watch this promen-
ade of specters with composure.
Indeed, only the ignorant can
survey the modern crowd with
equanimity, for he who sees what
passes today and knows what was
yesterday also understands that
this thing before him is a growing
disaster.”
With these facts before us,
one is more and more convinced
that the problem itself is too little
understood; hence the remedies
suggested and attempted fail. It
is the conviction of the writer, as
a student of history and sociology,
that so long as we place the
primary blame for present condi-
tions on the youth of our day,
we are decidedly on the wrong
track, and all attempts to find a
solution for the problem in that
direction can end only in failure
and ultimate disaster.
One of the basic facts of social
science is that the individual is at
any time in his experience the
sum total of hereditary and
environmental factors. As to
the relative importance of each
we are not here concerned; but
we will agree that the individual
has no control over physical and
mental characteristics that he
has inherited from his parents.
We might even go so far as to
assume that, in general, during
the first fifteen to eighteen years
of his life he has but little more
control over the environmental
factors with which he comes in
contact. Again, the student of
heredity denies the possibility
of radical changes in basic charac-
teristics from one generation to
another; but the student of
psychology knows that out of
the environment that surrounds
him, the individual selects, through attention and
sensation directed more or less by choice, which in
turn is largely controlled by desire, those things
which enter into the development of his body, mind,
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