Blog Entry: April 19: Eliot Ness and the Untouchables

Over the years he has become a name recognized by the group of incorruptible Federal agents he managed during a time of intense political corruption – the Untouchables. A book, television series, and – more recently a movie - have all documented the courageous acts of this group of men against one of the most renown of all gangsters during an era of gangsters: Al Capone. Yet, he also was a businessman, and an (unsuccessful) candidate for mayor of a major city.

Eliot Ness was the youngest of five children born to Norwegian immigrants Peter and Emma King Ness. Born on April 19, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois, Ness would attend public school - graduating from Christian Fenger High School. He would show an early dedication to the work ethic – maintaining his grades at school, a paper route, and working at his father’s bakery. He then attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and political science.

After a brief career as an investigator of the Retail Credit Company of Atlanta, Georgia – where he was assigned to work in Chicago conducting background investigations gathering credit information – Ness returned to the University of Chicago, earning a Master’s Degree in criminology.

In 1927 Ness joined the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of the Bureau of Prohibition. The Bureau had been created as an enforcement arm for the 18th Amendment – which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol, and ushered in an era known as Prohibition. Ness was encouraged to enter Federal law enforcement by his brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie – who was a Federal agent himself.

Prohibition encouraged the rise of organizations to illegally produce and sell the illicit alcohol. Because of the profit involved, this became the era of gangsters – who made big money in booze, illegal gambling, and more. At the top of the criminal food chain in Chicago was Al Capone.

Starting in 1929, the Federal government decided to make a concerted effort to bring down Capone – whose tentacles of influence included ‘bought’ politicians, police, and civic leaders. Ness was chosen to head the operations that targeted the illegal breweries and the supply routes of Capone’s business empire. Ness’s goal was to reduced Capone’s ability to pay bribe money to public officials by eliminating his main source of income – bootlegged alcohol.

Chicago’s law-enforcement agencies – city, state, and federal representatives – were rife with corruption, and Ness searched through the records of hundreds of Prohibition agents to create a reliable team of eleven men that could not be bought or bribed – the famous “Untouchables”.

"When they were settled, and while the newsreels were setting up their cameras, I told them of the attempted briberies. I related in detail how an emissary of Capone'shad tried to buy me off for two thousand dollars a week and how Marty and Sam had thrown back their flying bribe. [...] It was a long, wearisome process but well worth the effort. Possibly it wasn't too important for the world to know that we couldn't be bought, but I did want Al Capone and every gangster in the city to realize there were still a few law enforcement agents who couldn't be swerved from their duty." --from The Untouchables by Eliot Ness

Within six months Ness had seized breweries worth over a million dollars, which put a crimp in Capone’s operations. After bribery attempts failed, several assassination attempts were made by the Capone organization against Ness – all of which failed.

While Ness was keeping Capone’s attention focused on the loss of income through raids on the breweries, other Treasury Department agents were focusing on Capone’s tax evasion. In 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of income tax evasion and 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. As a result of this, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison, winding up at Alcatraz.

Soon after the end of Capone came the end of Prohibition. The 1933 passage of the 21st Amendment provided an end of a great social experiment – and a revamping of Ness’s career.

After Prohibition, Ness was reassigned to the “Moonshine Mountains” in Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio. A year later he was transferred to Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1935 – at the age of 32 - was hired by the mayor Cleveland, Harold Burton, as Cleveland’s Safety Director. Ness campaigned to clean out corruption in the police department and to modernize the fire department. He formed a new “Untouchable” unit of six men, who took on gambling, racketeers, and organized crime in Cleveland in an attempt to clean up the city. Two hundred Cleveland officers were forced to resign from the force, and over a dozen police officials went on trial for various criminal acts. His concentration on his work was one of the reasons he was divorced by his first wife, Edna Staley Ness, in 1938. He would marry Evaline Michelow, and illustrator of children’s books, in 1939.

Ness showed his far-reaching vision while in Cleveland. He created the Emergency Patrol, which was a special unit of vehicles manned by police officers with first aid training. He also established a central communications center to take and dispatch all emergency calls. Ness also established a juvenile crime unit, and obtained city funds for gyms, bowling alleys, and playgrounds in areas where gangs were prevalent. He also worked with the Works Program Administration to provide employment for the youths of Cleveland’s inner city. Juvenile crime dropped 80% while Ness was Safety Director in Cleveland.

Ness had a number of accomplishments as the Safety Director of Cleveland, but he had one significant failure that would give his critics ammunition against him. Ness was unsuccessful in solving a series of twelve murders were known as the “Torso Murders”, and occurred between 1935 and 1938. These serial murders, committed by the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” were never solved. This - combined with his extensive ‘social’ drinking and a scandal involved when he drove away after car accident in 1942 - would create the conditions for Ness to leave Cleveland in 1942.

America entered World War II in December 1941. In 1942 Ness left Cleveland and moved to Washington, D.C., again in the employ of the Federal government to control prostitution and the spread of venereal disease at the military bases in the area.

In 1944 he left his job and moved back to Ohio to become the chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company. A year later he would be divorced by his second wife, Evaline, and in 1946 he married artist Elisabeth Anderson Seaver. It was in this third and final marriage that Ness adopted his only child, Robert.

In 1947 he would campaign unsuccessfully for the position of mayor of Cleveland – losing by what one source called an ‘embarrassingly large margin’. He was also removed as the CEO of Diebold after the election. Ness would become involved with several other businesses, but had difficulty providing for his family – until he met Oscar Fraley, an author who worked with Ness and ultimately published a book chronicling Ness’s Chicago years. The “Untouchables” would be published in 1957, just six months after Ness’s May 16th death from a heart attack.

Ness’s remains were cremated and kept by family members until 1997. Then his ashes – along with those of his last wife and his son - were scattered on the waters of Wade Lake in the Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. A marker was erected to honor the man who revolutionized and revitalized Cleveland’s police force, and had captured America's imagination with his honesty and his war against crime.

WEB RESOURCES:

About Cleveland
Crime Library
FBI Files
FBI Freedom of Information Act Records
Find A Grave
Finding Dulcinea
Google Books: Eliot Ness and the Untouchables
Historical Biographies
Ness Returns to Cleveland
NNDB
Ohio History Central
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Eliot Ness, Wikipedia
Ness as a Child, Cleveland Memory
Cleveland Safety Director, Cleveland Memory
Campaign poster for Mayor of Cleveland, Photo collection (Cleveland years)
Elisabeth and Bobby Ness, Cleveland Memory
Ness’s burial marker, Find-a-Grave
-

June 15: "...I found I could do anything I turned my hand to..."

Do you know who this is?
-He is known as “Chicago’s Founder”.
-He successfully managed a lumber mill when he was sixteen.
-He was Chicago’s first mayor.

William Butler Ogden was born in the village of Walton, located in western New York, on June 15, 1805, to a pioneer family that had migrated from New Jersey. He attended the country schools that dotted the counties of the early 19th century, and had plans on becoming a lawyer. Those plans, however, where put aside when his father became ill and Ogden, at the age of sixteen, took over his family’s property and logging interests. His father soon died, but Ogden proved that he was a successful businessman, and would prosper. He later wrote:

"I was born close to a sawmill, was cradled in a sugar trough, christened in a mill pond, early left an orphan, graduated from a log schoolhouse and, at 14, found I could do anything I turned my hand to and that nothing was impossible..."

He would briefly attend law school, but business interests overrode educational interests. He assisted his brother-in-law, Charles Butler, in a number of business ventures. While business interests was his forte’, Ogden briefly entered the political arena in 1834, when he was elected to the New York State legislature, where he voted to finance the Erie Railroad - promoting business and commercial interests.

Ogden travelled west to the village of Chicago in 1835 on behalf of his brother-in-law’s business interests. Butler had invested $100,000 in land in and around Chicago in anticipation of profits to be gained during a land rush that was occurring in the Midwest. Ogden investigated, and – standing ankle-deep in mud - was not impressed with the purchase, writing to Butler that he had been “guilty of the grossest folly. There is no such value in the land and won't be for a generation." Ogden then used his business acumen to drain the land, and then set up streets and lots. He would sell of a third of the property to regain Butler’s investment, in the process placing a higher value on his opinion of the town. He moved to set up a permanent home in Chicago in 1836.

Seeing the future for Chicago, Ogden became busy as a businessman in the budding community. He became well known as an industrious visionary, and many identified him with growth because of a variety of business enterprises created by him around Chicago. His focus was on speculative investments in real estate, but he always kept transportation in his mind. He used his contacts in New York to establish a link between the East and the West that benefited Chicago. When Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837, Ogden was elected as its first mayor and served a two-year term. Ogden, running as a Democrat, would defeat the Whig candidate, John Kinzie. After his term was over, he would become an alderman for the city. In his political positions he taxed the citizens for streets, sidewalks, and bridges. When the building projects outran the funds available from taxes, Ogden and his land speculation partners in New York would pay for the improvements from their own pockets.

The primary means of mass transportation in the early 19th century was the development of the railroad, and Ogden was one of the originators of a movement that led to the building of the Chicago and Galena Railroad - the city's first. It would be Ogden's money and financial promises that financed the construction of the railroad as it stretched westward toward Elgin, Illinois. He would become president of the railroad in 1847.

He also provided funds and support for the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and served on the Chicago Board of Sewage, and designed the first drawbridge over the Chicago River. He was a major investor in the Chicago Canal and Dock Company, and at one point hired a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to help him gain clear title to property bordering the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.

Over time, Ogden became one of Chicago's wealthiest citizens. When his secretary told him he was worth more than a million dollars, Ogden exclaimed: "By God.... that's a lot of money!" Then he proceeded to make more money by developing land that he owned, or having city projects buy that land.

He was involved, however, not only in the politics and the business interests of the growing city, but also influenced the various aspects of living in a growing city by being involved in the development of Chicago's charities, it's cultural centers, and it's educational institutions, including funding the first medical center in the city.

In 1862 the visionary Ogden was picked as the first president of the Union Pacific Railroad. His vision of a transcontinental railroad linking the two oceans bordering the United States was close to being a reality. At the age of fifty-seven Ogden took on the raising of funds, using political connections to secure right-of-way, and personal supervision of the laying of track to complete this huge project. He also made Chicago the hub of east-west rail traffic.

The Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of his possessions - and on the same day (October 8th), a lumber mill he owned in Wisconsin burned down. The lumber mill was a part of a huge lumber empire that Ogden had been building in Wisconsin.

Ogden would move back to New York after the fire, and would marry late in his life. He was sixty-nine years old when he married Marinna Arnot of Elmira, New York, on February 9, 1875, and would have two sons – John and Hiram. Ogden would die on August 3, 1877, and was buried in Woodland Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

Ogden altered the American Midwest in a tremendous way. His vision of what could be done in the swampland that made up early Chicago created an industrial center and transportation hub that served a growing nation.

A biography of Ogden will be released this fall. The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago, by Jack Harpster, will be released in September 2009.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

There are no biographies of William Ogden available at our local library at this time.

WEB RESOURCES:

Encyclopedia of Chicago
Famous Americans
Genealogy Trails
Ogden books
PBS
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Portrait of William Ogden: Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-37333)
02. Map of 1835 Chicago: Encyclopedia of Chicago
03. Galena & Chicago Union Railroad Depot: Chicago Historical Society

-