Kristofer Allerfeldt's Crime And The Rise Of Modern America

1865-1941: Crime in America Crime and the Rise of Modern America is a novel authored by Kristofer Allerfeldt. In this novel, Allerfeldt examines crime as a reflection of American culture and a key factor in shaping modern America. Allerfeldt’s narrative is an exploration of the high-profile crimes and celebrity criminals starting at the end of Civil War to America’s entry into World War II and how they formed the American culture. This is a time of war and uncertainty in America. The nation is growing and striving to establish its culture and “standing” in the world. According to Kristofer Allerfeldt, “it is perhaps fair to say that crime and criminals could make as good a definition of modern America and contemporary American-ness

Allerfeldt develops his argument in a series of topical chapters, each filled with crisp, colorful vignettes of larger-than-life criminals, “crimes of the century,” and high-profile scandals and swindles. He avers that greed, unbridled ambition, risk taking, and acquisitiveness shaped American culture during this period. Thus, robber barons command more attention than street criminals in his analysis, and the Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan and the New York City ward boss George Washington Plunkitt are portrayed as exemplars of the nation’s embrace of an avaricious, cut-throat, “corporate” mentality, one that blurred the boundary between business and crime. Many of Allerfeldt’s prominent “criminals,” such as John D. Rockefeller, were not convicted of committing any crimes, bolstering his argument that their unethical behavior during this “era of supreme venality” represented an endemic and perhaps defining component of American values (p. 65). Amoral, unscrupulous titans of industry symbolized the criminal class that shaped industrial America. Similarly, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 and the Black Sox scandal of 1919 epitomized the greed and corruption of the early twentieth century, just as Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks revealed the thrill-seeking ethos of the 1920s. While these were exceptional scandals, crimes, and criminals, the author argues that they personified the spirit and values of the