The demand for universal fingerprinting, reiterated yesterday by Senator Copeland, chairman of the special Senate committee to investigate racketeering, might seem to be too preposterous to be taken very seriously, but we are living in a time when almost anything that anybody is willing to declare solemnly to be “necessary” is received with a favor which in normal times it could never possibly obtain.
The objection to universal fingerprinting is often represented as being merely a sentimental one. Well, even if it were purely sentimental, we should still not be inclined to regard it as unimportant. There is such a thing as decent, normal feeling; and such decent, normal feeling is quite opposed to the forced fingerprinting of all the men and women in the United States.
But as a matter of fact the objection is not purely sentimental. It holds not merely against this peculiarly degrading form of identification, but against any form of police control of the movements of innocent people.
What Senator Copeland’s proposal really means is that in order to put the racketeers in jail we shall in one sense all be put in jail. We shall not, indeed, be subjected to actual incarceration unless we venture out into the street without our identification cards—but we shall be placed very much in the position of paroled prisoners, forced to appear at stated intervals and establish our identity and our whereabouts to the satisfaction of the police.
Senator Copeland argues that fingerprinting was practiced in the citizen army during the war. But so were many other things practiced. Private letters of the soldiers, for example, were censored. Yet to carry over such a practice into the time of peace would be outrageous tyranny. Indeed, the central reason for the existence of that American citizen army was that after the war both the soldiers in that army and all other American citizens should be free from anything in the remotest degree like military supervision or control.
We are well aware that racketeering and kidnapping are serious evils; but we do not think that we ought to be so completely in a blue funk in the presence of them as to abandon the entire American ideal of life, in which ideal a life free from red tape and from bureaucratic control is the most distinctive feature. No doubt the racketeers ought to be put in jail; but in order that they may be put in jail we do not think that all America ought to be made into a penal institution.
Please submit corrections, feedback, or information as to where the text of this article can be found.