Using every possible instance for the expansion of policing and the strengthening of the state’s repressive powers is a constant in the anti-democratic ruling class playbook; only tempered by a popular, working class democratic movement to limit or deny those powers. Here, the Lindbergh kidnapping was made use of to call for more cops to fight ‘crime,’ to which the Communist Party’s Daily Worker gave this editorial response.

‘Police Forces and Crime’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 56. March 7, 1932.

Some Conclusions from the Lindbergh Case

FROM the Lindbergh case one conclusion of basic importance for workers in this period of growing repression of working class organization can be drawn.

It is:

That the enormous police forces–city, county, state and national–do not prevent even the most atrocious crimes. Yet the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, like all other instances of this character, is being utilized to demand the enlarging of the police forces and to extend police powers to picture them as hardworking, heroic defenders of “the whole people.” To the unthinking this may sound well but the fact is that the underworld and its criminal have not and never will be curbed by the police forces of capitalism.

These forces are needed by capitalism, and used by it, in the suppression of the working class and its struggles. The police forces are simply the legal and organized connection between the outright criminal elements, the capitalist class, and its entire government machinery.

Only persons gulled by the capitalist press lip service given to “honest government,” only the socialist party elements and leaders like Norman Thomas who bolster up the fiction of democracy under capitalism by separating the question of crime and corruption from capitalism, can take seriously the lie that police are the enemies of criminals.

The gangsters of the underworld from time to time create embarrassment for their capitalist protectors by some flagrant outrage on capitalist “decency.” This is probably what happened in the Lindbergh case.

The ever-growing number of police and the present huge mobilization of police forces have not prevented the kidnapping nor have they laid the kidnappers by the heels.

But let a strike occur in New Jersey, let us say, against a wage cut in a Standard Oil plant. The workers begin picketing. These “criminals” will be clubbed, gassed and jailed by the score. Some will be shot–as happened in Bayonne. The criminal syndicalism law will be invoked against them.

There will be a special drive against the Communist Party and Communists. This has happened in New Jersey and in practically every other state (it is now happening in Kentucky). It occurs even in election campaigns.

The police never experience any difficulty in finding the names and addresses of the “criminals” whose expose the murderous role of American imperialism–as in the Far East today. They are never at a loss in locating the “criminals” who organize the workers against mass starvation and for unemployment insurance at the expense of the capitalists and their government.

The police forces have now been “strengthened” by the endorsement of the kidnapper hunt by the leadership of the American Federation of Labor, which called on all local unions and Central Labor Councils to help the police locate Lindbergh’s son and his kidnappers.

How wonderful! And how humane! The hearts of William Green and Matthew Woll are wrung by the danger to this one baby–but not yet have they said one word for government unemployment insurance which would ease a little the misery of the children of the more than 13,000,000 unemployed workers.

Sixty per cent of the 13,000,000 children (those of working class families) are undernourished in the United States today. What of them, Messrs. Green and Woll?

The only country in the world where the children are the special care of the government–where there is and could be no such thing as the kidnapping of a child–is the Soviet Union, a workers’ and farmers’ government. You aid the capitalists of America in their attempts to destroy the only working class government in the world.

Police preventing crime! Criminals hunting criminals! Any policeman who can track an elephant through four feet of snow, or locate a horseshoe in a plate of soup, can find the Lindbergh baby kidnappers.

It is a safe bet that their identity has been known for days. But the question is one of concealing police responsibility–and perhaps the actual physical and political connection with the kidnappers.

This is presidential election year–and the gangster elements are needed more than usual.

More wage cuts are coming and unemployment is increasing. The tide of working class struggle is rising.

Imperialist war has begun. Attacks on the Soviet Union are being prepared. World imperialism is determined to crush the Chinese Revolution, led by the Communist Party.

The gangsters and underworld elements must be handled carefully. Capitalism needs them badly to make war on the working class.

These are plain facts. They have been proved by the investigations and city government and police scandals in a half-hundred American cities.

Police do not prevent crime. They aid crime and criminals.

Their job is to keep down the masses–to defend capitalism, not from criminals, but from the hungry and jobless millions of workers and exploited farmers, to proceed with unrestrained brutality and vigor, not against gangsters and other criminals, but against workers and their revolutionary leadership–the Communist Party.

Workers! American capitalism and its government, which has complacently condemned millions of workers and their children to the utter misery of mass unemployment and a starvation level of living, American capitalism, which is preparing a war of conquest in which the lives of millions of workers are to be sacrificed, American capitalism which conspires against the Soviet Union–the only country where unemployment has been abolished and no worker’s child goes hungry, is not shocked by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

It is concerned only with the possibility that the working class will see in this case the beginning of a breakdown of “law and order,” that it will draw the correct conclusions from it in regard to the connection of the police forces with the underworld and their role as the military section of the capitalist dictatorship.

Gangsterism will be destroyed only by the might of the proletarian dictatorship.

While the working class trains itself for the struggle for power–the overthrow of capitalism–the Communist Party calls upon all workers to fight against growing repression, against all suppressive laws against workers and their organizations, to expose at every opportunity the close connection between the police forces of capitalism, the leadership of the A. F. of L., the vicious underworld gangster forces–all of which are the instruments of Wall Street government and are used continually against the working class.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n056b-NY-mar-07-1932-DW-LOC.pdf