Organized Crime and the Prohibition photo

Organized Crime and the Prohibition

par · Lecture: 6 minutes
  1. Organized Crime in America
  2. Evolution of Organized Crime
  3. Organized Crime : Expression and Repression
  4. Organized Crime and the Prohibition
  5. Organized Crime: Repression and Censorship

Introduction

You cannot rely on newspaper articles. Recently, it featured the confessions of repenting organized crime members, i.e. the distorted truth for their interests. The police distorted the figures to get credit and money from the Federal Government.

Organized crime was considered a kind of un-American activity. Since more gangsters were ethnic (Jews, Russians, etc), calling them « un-American » was a way of dismissing American roots.

In Scarface, the motto « the world is yours » highlights the ironic vision between the American Dream and the gangsters.

The structure of organized crime is that of a bureaucratic and corporate model. It looks like a company organic line, with a complex hierarchy and a division of labour.

Responsibilities are carried out in an impersonal manner and the function is more important than the person.

Organized crime is a mirror of monopoly capitalism and from earlier gangster movies, it is considered as a business.

In Asphalt Jungle, « crime is just a left-handed form of human endeavour ».

The difference between organized crime and any corporation is that you cannot use written support: it relies on secrecy and personal networks.

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Organized Crime in America photo

Organized Crime in America

par · Lecture: 5 minutes
  1. Organized Crime in America
  2. Evolution of Organized Crime
  3. Organized Crime : Expression and Repression
  4. Organized Crime and the Prohibition
  5. Organized Crime: Repression and Censorship

Organized Crime in America (1929 – 1951)

1929: Wall Street crash, which forced gangsters to find a new way of making money in a time of recession. 1951: middle of the Cold War.

Kefauver hearings started the huge mystification of the Mafia, discovering that organized crime was still on in the U.S. First TV debates on organized crime.

In history, gangsters and Organized Crime did exist. Between history and culture, there are matters of ideology: in what way does that interact with what was seen on screen?

Presence of censorship and self-regulation for films. Sometimes people wanted to ban or censor gangster films: interactions between politics, culture and crime. Movies influenced the war against crime.

The history of Hollywood is that of people for and against those movies. Creation of compromises: « production code » (not censorship) to see what people disliked and to escape post-censorship.

But how censorship is possible in the US? (c.f. the first Americans and the liberty of expression). It was considered as a commercial venture. A way of skirting the censorship was to show 2 shots to see a person killed instead of one (the latter was prohibited).

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O'Sullivan's Manifest Destiny photo

O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny: Meaning and Legacy

par · Lecture: 15 minutes
  1. Puritanism and Expansionism in Early America
  2. The New American Nation: Constitution and Early Republic
  3. America’s Years of Growth: From Monroe to Jackson
  4. American Society in the Early Nineteenth Century
  5. Antebellum South: Society, Slavery and Secession
  6. Life on Southern Plantations: Slavery and Resistance
  7. North and South Before the American Civil War
  8. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny: Meaning and Legacy
  9. Westward Expansion: America’s Road to the Pacific
  10. The Road to the American Civil War, 1850–1861 Scheduled for 4 juillet 2026
  11. The American Civil War: Causes, Battles and Consequences
  12. Reconstruction After the American Civil War
  13. Jeffersonian America: Expansion, Embargo and the Road to War Scheduled for 11 juillet 2026
  14. Reform Movements in Antebellum America Scheduled for 12 juillet 2026
  15. African American Life and Resistance Before the Civil War Scheduled for 18 juillet 2026
  16. The American Revolution: Causes, Independence and Legacy Scheduled for 5 juillet 2026

John L. O’Sullivan used the expression “Manifest Destiny” in 1845 to describe the supposed providential mission of the United States to expand across North America. His language presented territorial growth as natural and inevitable, while obscuring its consequences: Indigenous dispossession, war with Mexico and an escalating struggle over the expansion of slavery.

The idea of Manifest Destiny occupies a central place in the history of nineteenth-century American expansion.

It expressed the belief that the United States possessed a special mission to extend its institutions, population and territory across the North American continent.

Supporters described that expansion as the advance of liberty, republican government, Christianity and civilisation. Yet the lands they coveted were not empty. Indigenous nations governed much of the continent, while Mexico claimed Texas, California and the Southwest.

Manifest Destiny therefore did more than celebrate migration. It offered a moral and religious vocabulary that could turn political choices, settlement and military conquest into the apparent fulfilment of history.

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