Uncle Sam’s Policemen

In the first half of the twentieth century, international policing involved a degree of improvisation. In the early 1890s, for instance, William Schreiber absconded to Canada after robbing the US bank at which he worked. He could only be arrested on US soil, so detectives employed an erstwhile love-interest to lure him to Detroit. Dealing with a criminal in Mexico several decades later, police resorted to abduction, towing the fugitive across the Rio Grande in a bathtub. In Uncle Sam’s Policemen, Katherine Unterman uses these and similar cases to explore the little-known, but fascinating, history of American cross-border policing from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. Unterman’s approach to this history is, broadly speaking, that of a cultural historian. She is interested in using the problems of international policing to reconstruct American attitudes to the world and does so by combining legal history, political history, the colorful details of the cases, and analysis of contemporary press commentary. While Unterman does not ignore institutional and legal developments in telling her story, her approach is to see them primarily as expressions of cultural attitudes to American internationalism, identity, and social order.

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