Books

Dissertation Topic and Methodology

/ Lee Hutch / Leave a comment
Me in between classes at Alvin College.

Dear Readers,

I hope everyone is enjoying the World Cup. Alas, my team, Serbia, failed to qualify, so I am a neutral observer. However, after seeing so many videos of joyous Scottish fans enjoying their time in Boston, I am looking for someone to designate me as an honorary Scot. If anyone knows how to accomplish this, let me know. I have seen Braveheart and every episode of Outlander, if that boosts my chances.

For my longtime followers, you’ve probably been wondering why there’s been a distinct lack of posts of late. It is because I have been busy working on my PhD. As of this summer, I have completed all the coursework, and I am now taking the dissertation prep course in which I am drafting my dissertation prospectus. After that, I’ll start my comprehensive exams later this summer and wrap them up in the fall. Then, it’ll be time to dissertate! I’m not sure if dissertate is really a verb or not, but, if it isn’t, it should be. My dissertation preparation class requires me to write a blog aimed at the general public that outlines my dissertation topic, my research questions, and what I expect to find as I dive into the archival research.

The working title of my dissertation is “Crooked Coast: Organized Crime, Vice, and the Gulf Coast, 1940-1985.”  The title should give you a general idea of what the dissertation will be about, but I will explain it a bit further. Organized crime did not become a topic of serious academic study until the 1960s, which is something that I found quite remarkable when I set out to dive into the historiography. The early works on organized crime were written by criminologists/sociologists, rather than historians, as at the time of their work, it was more current event, or recent past than history. Also, these early works looked at organized crime as more of a Northeastern/Chicago/Philadelphia phenomenon, with the Gulf Coast either ignored or given scant attention.

This is where my dissertation fills in the gap. It will seek to situate organized crime along the Gulf Coast within the overall illicit vice/criminal enterprises in the country, while also explaining why and how organized crime on the Gulf Coast differed from syndicates in the rest of the country. I hope to show that rather than syndicates operating in isolation in Galveston, New Orleans, and Biloxi, the Gulf Coast really had one single vice network, made possible by the port economy. Port cities, segregation, and the political environment along the Gulf Coast combined to produce a criminal syndicate that, while clearly part of the broader “mafia” networks in the country, were, at the same time, a reflection of the unique nature of Gulf Coast society.

Though there has been some work on various aspects of coastal criminal syndicates in the South, they all have certain limitations. Some were written at a time in which the events were ongoing, and thus lacked access to released FBI files, while others were built primarily on newspaper reports, with all the accompanying issues that come from sensationalized news coverage. To avoid those pitfalls, this dissertation will be grounded in archival research, with newspaper accounts and oral histories subject to careful verification.

Broadly defined, my dissertation will be on 20th Century American crime history.  However, the history of crime in America intersects with urban, political, and racial history as well. Crime does not exist in a vacuum, and crimes are also a reflection of the society they spring from. As a central piece of my argument is that the unique history of the Gulf Coast gave rise to a unique type of organized crime, those other historical methodologies are important in my work as well. Likewise, my dissertation is not a recounting of tales of specific criminal acts, but rather it seeks to understand why and how things happened. As a retired detective, I always remember that juries wanted to know why the crimes happened, even though, contrary to what you see on TV, motive is not an element of a crime that must be proven in court. But, the why still matters. In the case of my work here, why organized crime functioned as it did, and how that had an impact on Gulf Coast politics and economics is more important than merely discussing what they did.

So how do I plan on going about researching this? As I mentioned earlier, this study will be grounded in archival research. One of the major sources is the 6,000 page FBI file on Carlos Marcello, the head of the New Orleans syndicate, which is now available. Also of interest are the investigative files of Texas Ranger Clint Peoples at the Dallas Public Library. Ranger Peoples help bring down the Maceo syndicate in Galveston, and his case files and notes will be particularly illuminating. The Society for Retired FBI Special Agents have an ongoing oral history project with transcribed interviews with dozens of former agents who speak on a variety of topics, including organized crime. These interviews give an inside account of the successes and frustrations of agents working on the Gulf Coast and serve to compliment the released material in Marcello’s file. The Rosenberg Library has a variety of material in their vertical files which touch on Galveston’s heyday in the 40s and 50s where the Maceo’s made sure that visitors had plenty of sun, sand, sex, and gambling. The New Orleans City Archives has a materials relating to the New Orleans Police Department during this era, a collection dedicated to the famed red-light district, Storyville, which, although it was shut down prior to the time period examined in my dissertation, is useful for backstory, and investigative files and testimony from the 1950s when New Orleans put together a commission to study vice in the French Quarter. Senator Kefauver led the first Congressional hearings on organized crime in the United States in the 1950s. His papers are located at the University of Tennessee, and, thankfully, digitized. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had an intense dislike of organized crime, and devoted much time to trying, unsuccessfully, to stamp it out. His papers, located at the JFK Presidential Library, are also valuable as they show the Federal Government’s game plan for trying to eradicate organized crime. They are largely digitized as well.   

One thing that my dissertation will (intentionally) not look at is what role, if any, Carlos Marcello had in the Kennedy Assassination. It has long been alleged by some that he orchestrated the events in Dallas in 1963. Whether he did or he didn’t is beyond the scope of my dissertation. I want to stick to what I can prove with the evidence that I find. Diving into that topic would send my entire dissertation off on a side quest that would yield nothing that could prove that Marcello called the shots, pun intended.

Like all dissertations, this is a work in progress, and I fully expect to uncover more leads and identify more sources as my work moves forward. I know my long-time readers have followed me through writing and publishing two novels, and now you are going to be dissertating along with me! But your patience will be rewarded. Once I have completed my dissertation, I will finally finish the sequel to Molly’s Song.

Until next time, take care of yourselves, and each other.

Regards,

L.H.

Blog Post Assignment One

/ Lee Hutch / Leave a comment

(For my usual readers, this post is being done as an assignment in one of my PhD courses, so it is not the standard fare.)

The three generations before me, my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all steelworkers. Had the American steel industry not collapsed in the decade I was born (1970s), I would have no doubt followed in their footsteps. Although I am not doing my seminar paper in this course on the steel industry, I decided, for this assignment, to look specifically at the state of American steel production at the end of the 19th Century, when the United States was in the process of becoming a major producer of steel. Of course, if the topic I selected goes down in flames, like the American steel industry did, I might switch over to steel as the topic of my final paper!

The dataset I looked at for this assignment is from the 23rd Statistical Abstract of the United States published in 1900. It contains a chart (included below), which illustrates the quantities and tonnage of iron and steel produced in the United States between 1895 and 1899 as reported by the American Iron and Steel Association. The chart has some interesting bits in it, from which, I think, we can draw a picture of what the country looked like and was experiencing during those four years from an economic standpoint. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/statistical-abstract-united-states-66/1900-21993?page=367

First of all, most of the tonnage produced at the time was pig iron. I am familiar with what this is, since I grew up hearing the term used frequently by my father and grandfather. When I was little, I thought it had something to do with pigs. It doesn’t. Basically, pig iron is heated in a blast furnace until it is sort of a molten liquid form, then transferred to a steel mill to be refined into actual steel. In other words, you need pig iron to produce the steel. As you can see from this dataset, the total tonnage of pig iron exceeds that of any other single item produced during all five of these years, but the total tonnage of all of the products produced exceeds the tonnage of pig iron. This would indicate that the pig iron produced in a year wasn’t necessarily being used to produce steel products in that same year, meaning steel production carried over from one year to another. One curious note is that pig iron production fell in 1896 and then increased again in 1897. The year 1899 shows a 35% increase in production over the base year of 1895.

Prior to really looking deeply at this dataset, I assumed, given that it was the late 19th Century, that the majority of steel production would have gone into making railroad ties. However, this dataset shows something different. The majority of steel was produced as rolled steel (used to make steel components of machinery) and steel ingot which is used in building construction. For a second dataset, I looked at immigration during this time period, to see if it was immigration driving the demand for steel to produce housing. The immigration report from the 23rd Statistical Abstract of the United States (1900) indicates that between 1895 and 1899, the United States absorbed 1.7 million immigrants. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/statistical-abstract-united-states-66/1900-21993?page=415

Immigration alone cannot account for the increase in steel production, or the mass production of building components. To use this as the simple explanation would be to attach the assumption that all immigrants were destined to live in buildings with steel frame construction. In his article “Statistical Models and Shoe Leather,” (1991), Freedman warns about the attachment of an assumption to data models which may then lead the investigator to build data around the assumption. In previous courses I have taken here, the need for solid empirical research was stressed by multiple faculty members. Keeping that in mind, when looking at these two datasets, I would state that the datasets prove two things empirically. One is that our steel production increased between 1895 and 1899, and that the majority of that steel was being used in either rolled steel or steel ingot. The second piece of empirical data is that immigration saw a modest increase during this same time period.

To take this study further and prove with solid empirical data that it was, in fact, immigration driving the boom in steel production, one would need to look specifically at immigrant housing. Where were these immigrants living? What construction records are there for buildings built during those same years and in the cities receiving the bulk of these immigrants. If such construction records exist, it might show that the boom in construction was actually in the realm of commercial properties, and thus totally unrelated to immigration. Conversely, it is possible that it was, in fact, residential structures driving the building boom, and thus the increase in steel production.

The use of raw data on things such as steel production, or immigration, is of use to historians as it can provide us with a basis with which to start our inquiries. It can even change the direction of our inquiries. As mentioned earlier, I incorrectly assumed that in the late 1890s, the railroads would be the largest consumer of steel. As it turns out, the builders were. Having lived through the collapse of the steel industry at the end of the 20th Century, and seeing my father lose his career, and my grandfather nearly lose his pension, it was bittersweet to look back at n era when American steel production was beginning to grow into the behemoth it would be by 1950. As the final piece of this post, we are to state what our major research topic will be this 8 week session. Pending instructor approval, of course, I will be examining the CB radio craze of the 1970s and early 1980s. I’m particularly interested in whether or not it was popular culture that created the CB craze, or if movies like Smoky and the Bandit, and songs like Convoy, reflected what was already happening in the country

BLH