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2 books match the query 'United States. Department of Justice'

cover of Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW

Keep the Wretches in Order

America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW

Dean A. Strang

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Before World War I, the government reaction to labor dissent had been local, ad hoc, and quasi-military. Sheriffs, mayors, or governors would deputize strikebreakers or call out the state militia, usually at the bidding of employers. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, government and industry feared that strikes would endanger war production; a more coordinated, national strategy would be necessary. To prevent stoppages, the Department of Justice embarked on a sweeping new effort—replacing gunmen with lawyers. The department systematically targeted the nation’s most radical and innovative union, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, resulting in the largest mass trial in U.S. history.
In the first legal history of this federal trial, Dean Strang shows how the case laid the groundwork for a fundamentally different strategy to stifle radical threats, and had a major role in shaping the modern Justice Department. As the trial unfolded, it became an exercise of raw force, raising serious questions about its legitimacy and revealing the fragility of a criminal justice system under great external pressure.
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cover of Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman: Federal Law Enforcement in the South and West, 1870-1893

Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman

Federal Law Enforcement in the South and West, 1870-1893

Stephen Cresswell

University of Alabama Press, 1991

A critical study of the expansion of federal law enforcement across the post-Civil War American South and frontier West.

In the decades immediately following the Civil War, the United States expanded rapidly. As the nation grew, so too did federal law, moving into areas of citizens’ lives previously regulated by local custom and state and territorial statutes.

Drawing on contemporary accounts and the letters that flowed between the Washington office of the Justice Department and its attorneys and marshals throughout the states and territories, Cresswell uses a case-study approach to explore the enforcement of federal law in four regions. In northern Mississippi, the rights of freedmen to vote clashed with established rules of relations between blacks and whites. In Utah Territory, Mormon polygamy and economic dominance challenged the aspirations of non-Mormon settlers. In eastern Tennessee, desperate poverty lent enchantment to the easy money of moonshining. In Arizona Territory, frontier greed and violence threatened the lives of people and the chances of early admission to the Union of states.

Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansmen moves beyond these local case studies to illuminate larger questions, including the evolution of the American criminal justice system, the relationship of the South and the West to the rest of the nation, the workings of the 19th-century American bureaucracy, and conflict of the local, state, and federal governments.

Out of the efforts of these early federal marshals came the modern federal justice system, with its firm policy guidelines, its Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its broader powers over the country as a whole.

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