"A Primitive Method of Enforcing the Law"
Vigilantism as a Response to Bank Crimes in Indiana, 1925–1933

PAUL MUSGRAVE

On May 29, 1933, hundreds of vigilantes captured three men in the woods just outside Culver, Indiana. Their quarry was the last of a gang who had stolen more than $12,000 from the State Exchange Bank in Culver that morning. Armed with shotguns, the robbers had entered the bank at 9:07; while some of them watched over the bank's customers and employees, their leader ordered the assistant cashier to open the vault, which the gang members then emptied. Alerted by a telephone call from a bank employee in an adjacent office, a group of local vigilantes (soon numbering five hundred, including ten officers from the Culver Military Academy) quickly mobilized and surrounded the bank. Using two captives as human shields, the bandits ran to their getaway car. As they sped away, the bank president's son, perched on a nearby building's roof, shot and killed the driver. The car overturned, but the surviving bandits stole another one, leaving their hostages in a ditch. After crashing into a tree ten miles out of town, they fled on foot into the woods, where the vigilantes apprehended them piecemeal over the next few hours.1	1
Three Tipton County, Indiana, bank vigilantes H. C. Watson, W. C. Hinkle, and D. E. Watson (l. to r.) are shown with their trophy from a state shooting competition. In the 1920s, these men, like hundreds of other Hoosiers, acted as civilian law enforcement in response to a growing number of state bank robberies. The Hoosier Banker, July 1927
Similar events took place in many communities in Indiana and the rest of the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s, at a time when many observers believed that crime had reached a new high. Banks were frequent targets of criminal activity; Indiana bankers lost about a million dollars (ten million in inflation-adjusted terms) to robbers during the 1920s.2 Facing revenue losses and increased insurance costs, as well as threats to the safety of their employees and customers, Indiana's bankers responded by lobbying for greater government action against crime and by organizing vigilance committees to defend their property and their communities. The Indiana Bankers Association (IBA) was the driving force behind both the lobbying and the vigilance efforts.	2
Because of the pivotal role the bankers played in the vigilance committee movement, I will refer to its participants as "bank vigilantes." Bankers, and the vigilantes they sponsored, were primarily concerned with order, not justice (except in the roughest sense). Examining their actions offers a window onto democratic norms in Indiana. A student of policing reforms in the United Kingdom writes, "decision-making power in policing ... exemplifies the fundamental conception of democracy present in that political system"; similarly, an expert on the French police hypothesizes that "[t]he way in which the state ensures public order in its national territory expresses the degree of development of democracy in that state, as much as does its respect for public freedoms or the freedom of the press."3 The issue of how policing power is exercised is especially meaningful when the "police" under scrutiny are fundamentally private agents funded primarily by private groups with private aims.	. . .