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Fingerprinting, civil codes, and the origins of surveillance culture in the United States

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Abstract

“Surveillance culture,” according to an influential body of scholarly work, is characterized by the habitual use of surveillance technologies that connect people and machines in webs or assemblages. The origin of this culture is pinned to the political and economic interests of private tech and the security state. This understanding of surveillance culture, however, leaves unanswered important questions about social relations, collective norms, and the broader interpretive space in which surveillance practices are located. To address them, I use civil sphere theory to explain the popularization and dissemination of mass surveillance techniques in the early-twentieth century United States. I draw on two specific popularization efforts: identity deceptions unmasked by the Chicago Police Department’s fingerprint experts; and private sector surveillance entrepreneurs, self-styled as “Fingerprint Men.” Linking these domains were surveillance narratives, stories about intimate crime that threatened the civil sphere. Surveillance narratives were effective not because they were factually accurate (they often weren’t) but because they offered riveting accounts of urban life that drew on cultural scripts concerning race, risk, and morality. Historical and cultural analyses of these narratives shed new light on surveillance culture as a space of semantic relationships among discourse and symbols.

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Fig. 1

Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum

Fig. 2

Chicago Public Library Digital Collections

Fig. 3

Chicago Public Library Digital Collections

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Notes

  1. People v. Jennings, 252 Ill. 534 (1911): sec. 537–538. My summary of the incident is taken from the court transcript.

  2. Mrs. Hiller’s first name is not given in the court records or newspaper stories. As was the convention of the era, she is referred to consistently as “Mrs. Clarence Hiller” or simply “Mrs. Hiller.” For ease of reference, I adopt the latter.

  3. The events are reconstructed from the case file materials and courtroom testimony as given in People v. Jennings, 252 Ill. 534 (1911).

  4. People v. Jennings, 252 Ill. 534 (1911): sec. 539–540.

  5. People v. Jennings, 252 Ill. 534 (1911).

  6. There are strong precedents for this approach in sociology. As Fred Block and Margaret Somers demonstrate in their study of the assault on poor people in nineteenth century Britain and twentieth century United States, particular individuals—Thomas Malthus and Charles Murray, respectively—used their clout to confer “epistemic privilege” on new ideas that were previously heretical (Somers and Block 2005). Following their lead, the payoff in following the twists and turns in the road of a particular person, rather than sticking with the same institution through time, is the ability to discern which actors are crossing fields and institutions, why, and with what effects.

  7. Chicago Police Department Annual Report for 1955, p. 7.

  8. Chicago Police Department Annual Report for 1942, p. 23: “Number of fingerprints on file: 1072574.” National superiority claim: Report of the General Superintendent of Police for 1904, City of Chicago, p. 12.

  9. “2,050,558 fingerprints now on file in the Bureau of Identification.” Chicago Police Department Annual Report for 1955, p. 13.

  10. “Biographical sketch of Matthew Wilson McClaughry, Superintendent of Identification, Illinois State Penitentiary, Joliet, Illinois,” page 3. Undated, unpublished manuscript notes. Chicago History Museum Box Misc.Pamph. McClaughry/F37DA/M121Z.

  11. “Biographical sketch of Matthew Wilson McClaughry, Superintendent of Identification, Illinois State Penitentiary, Joliet, Illinois,” page 4. Undated, unpublished manuscript notes. Chicago History Museum Box Misc.Pamph. McClaughry/F37DA/M121Z.

  12. General Superintendent’s Report for the Year 1904, Chicago Department of Police. Report of Bureau of Identification, Jan. 1, 1905. Pages 109–111.

  13. This claim continues to be reported in stories about the Hiller-Jennings case: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-case-where-fingerprints-were-used-evidence-180970883/.

  14. People v. Jennings, 252 Ill. 534 (1911): sec. 538.

  15. People v. Jennings, 252 Ill. 534 (1911): sec. 550.

  16. “Salaries of Officers and Members of Police Force and Fire Department, District of Columbia.” Subcommittee of the Committee on the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, United States Congress, pages 1–2. January 14, 1924. In Washington, DC in 1924, entry-level police officers were paid on a fixed salary grade of $1800 per annum. Chicago salaries were similar (“Salary Trends, Firemen and Policemen, 1924–1964,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 1445, April 1965, pp. 1–3. United States Department of Labor.

  17. Archivists from the Kansas Historical Society were unable to locate records from Ark City lending institutions attesting to Le Brown’s direct involvement with them, though it is clear that some nearby businesses adopted fingerprint procedures around the time. (Pers. comm. Lou Tharp, June 2020).

  18. I am grateful to Anne Marie Champagne for this insight.

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Acknowledgements

Research for this project was generously funded by the Teaching Race initiative in the Office of the Provost at the University of Virginia. I thank Madeleine Peterson for her stellar work as undergraduate Research Assistant, and the archivists in the Chicago History Museum, the Kansas Historical Society, and the Regenstein Library’s Rare Books collection at the University of Chicago for their unfailing help in locating obscure documents. For their close reading of and generous comments on the paper, I thank Jeff Alexander, Anne Marie Champagne, David Cunningham, Laura Goldblatt, William Greenland, Richard Handler, Isaac Ariail Reed, Phil Smith, Alex Sutton, Amy Whitaker, and three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of the paper were shared with audiences at the University of Virginia’s SWAMP workshop and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology seminar series. I am grateful to participants in both settings for helpful comments and questions.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, 222 Randall Hall, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA

    Fiona Greenland

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Greenland, F. Fingerprinting, civil codes, and the origins of surveillance culture in the United States. Am J Cult Sociol 11, 137–161 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-022-00153-6

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