Gang Pulp

Racketeer Stories, June-July 1930

This is the day of progress. Progress in all ways, not the least of which is the ease of living. The small details that at one time kept us busy the better part of the day, can now be finished in a few minutes.

No more do we spend hours going about the house cleaning and filling oil lamps. No more do we take a whole day every week to drive Dobbin to the market to get the supplies for the week.

One might go on indefinitely, enumerating examples of the changes that have made the business of living a simple one.

But, unfortunately, the honest citizen, the man who represents the American public all over our country is not the only one who benefits by the great strides we have taken in science and invention.

The criminal has been turned from a large, beery, rough-neck, throwing bricks around aimlessly, breaking store windows and occasionally blackjacking some dandy behind the ear and removing his portables, into a menace that looms over our civilization like a cloud of doom. Machine guns, pineapples, poison gas, high powered cars, and all the newest chemicals have enabled the criminal to wipe out hundreds of not only his kind, but innocent people as well, and then vanish — so quickly that he eludes even the most cunning minds of the police.

Progress is for the greater comfort, the greater safety, the greater wellbeing of nations. Not for their destruction.

Let us see that the criminal, rather than using progress for his own diabolical ends, is eventually obliterated by it.

Faithfully yours,

Harold Hersey