Panic (Bloodlands collection)

by Harold Schechter

For much of the summer of 1937, the sex crime panic raged mostly in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago (where the preferred term for the perpetrators was not “sex fiends” or “sex maniacs” but “sex morons”).

In a widely syndicated newspaper piece called “War on the Sex Criminal!,” FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover issued a similar alarm, proclaiming, “The sex fiend, most loathsome of all the vast army of crime, has become a threat to the safety of American childhood and womanhood.”