Wickersham Commission

In May 1929, President Herbert Hoover appointed George W. Wickersham, who had been attorney general under President William Howard Taft, to chair the eleven-member National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (NCLOE). Hoover had first proposed the Wickersham Commission, as it was called, in his inaugural speech in 1929, and it was the first federal commission or task force to study crime and law enforcement issues.

President Hoover was concerned about an increasing level of disobedience of law, abuses in law enforcement practices, and the growth of organized crime. Although his primary concerns were linked to Prohibition, the commission eventually addressed broader issues. In addition to Wickersham, members of the commission included Henry W. Anderson, president of the Virginia Bar Association; Newton D. Baker, President Woodrow Wilson's secretary of war and a Cleveland attorney; Ada L. Comstock, the president of Radcliffe College; William S. Kenyon, a judge with the United States Circuit Court of Appeals; Monte M. Lemann, president of the Louisiana Bar Association; Frank J. Loesch, a Chicago judge who led antigang activities; Kenneth Mackintosh, a former chief justice of the Washington State Supreme Court; Paul J. McCormick, a federal judge from California; and Harvard Law School professor Roscoe Pound.

The Wickersham Commission officially released fourteen reports. An additional report was submitted to the commission, relating to the Mooney-Billings treason trial, but the report was never officially released. The fourteen initially released commission reports were made public in 1931 and were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office (NCLOE 1931a–o). The Mooney-Billings Report was eventually published privately in the fall of 1932 through the efforts of, among others, Roger Nash Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1968, the antiquarian book dealer and publisher Patterson Smith reprinted all fifteen volumes, including the Mooney-Billings volume (NCLOE 1968).