Rat-A-Tat-Tat!

When the Thompson submachine gun was introduced in 1921, military-weapons experts acclaimed it as a triumph of American ordnance technology. Police officials marveled at its size and firepower and predicted that it would either kill or cure the country's gunmen, rioters and "motorized bandits." Five years later, a Collier's writer described it less approvingly: "This Thompson submachine gun is nothing less than a diabolical engine of death ... the paramount example of peacetime barbarism ... the diabolical acme of human ingenuity in man's effort to devise a mechanical contrivance with which to murder his neighbor." Over the next ten years, the "tommy gun" became synonymous with crime and violence and earned itself an enduring place in the national folklore as the gangster equivalent of the cowboy's six-shooter.

This was hardly the future that General John Taliaferro Thompson had envisioned for the invention that bore his name. An aristocratic old-line Army officer, Thompson conceived the original "submachine" gun during World War One in the belief that a small, handheld, fully automatic weapon would enable Allied infantrymen to break the stalemate on the Western Front. But the first successful model of the gun was not completed until the fall of 1918--too late for the war but just in time to play a bloody role in two of the country's most lawless decades.

With a small fortune already invested in arms development, Thompson's company, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation of New York, put its faith in the police and military markets and contracted with the venerable Colt's Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company to build 15,000 submachine guns, model of 1921. The Thompson was, after all, a unique and revolutionary weapon: a machine gun weighing only ten pounds and firing .45-caliber pistol cartridges at a rate of about 800 rounds per minute. It used either a straight magazine carrying 20 rounds or drum magazines holding 50 or 100. It had the careful workmanship, the blued finish and the graceful walnut stocks of a sporting firearm, which made it all the more sleek and menacing. Auto-Ordnance billed it as "a combination machine gun and semi-automatic shoulder rifle in the form of a pistol"--an "anti-bandit" gun that could either cut a fleeing bank robber's car to pieces with copper-jacketed slugs or "humanely" disperse labor rioters with special bird-shot cartridges. In short, anything a rifle, pistol or shotgun could do, the Thompson could do better.

Despite extravagant claims and promotion, the submachine gun was a commercial flop. The military decided it was wonderfully conceived but tactically useless, and police had sober second thoughts on the wisdom of sweeping city streets with machine-gun fire, bandits or no. At this point, the Thompson might quietly have joined the ranks of other inventions whose time had not yet come. It was saved from obscurity mainly by the outbreak of Chicago's gangland "beer wars" in 1925-1926, which called for a weapon combining portability, concealability and firepower. These happened to be the cardinal virtues of the tommy gun, which also had the coincidental virtue of being completely legal: Ironically, the laws that many cities had enacted to control handguns did not apply to machine guns, which traditionally were heavy, cumbersome devices of interest only to the military. This meant that a Chicagoan, for example, could not legally buy or carry a pistol without a police permit, but for $175 he could walk into any well-stocked gunshop and walk out with a submachine gun, no questions asked.

If the "chopper" was discovered and popularized by big-city bootleggers who routinely riddled one another in ambushes and massacres, it acquired even greater notoriety in the hands of John Dillinger. Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd and other Depression desperadoes who terrorized and titillated the country with sensational bank robberies and main-street gun battles. This kind of violence was more disturbing than gangland assassinations and, by the late Thirties, strict state and Federal laws were gradually taking the Thompson out of general circulation.

Despite widespread rumors that the tommy-gun company was getting rich and even supplying big-name gangsters with free samples for promotional purposes, by the late Thirties the Auto-Ordnance Corporation was moribund, and had been for several years. More than a third of the original 15,000 guns still languished in a Colt's warehouse and John Thompson, retired and in failing health, was sorely regretting that he'd ever conceived such a weapon. He took little comfort in the fact that the country's police departments and the FBI had adopted the gun--they had done so mainly in self-defense. Nor was he consoled that the Marines had bought a few hundred for use in Nicaragua, that the Navy was placing it on gunboats or that the Army, at long last, had adopted it as a special-purpose weapon. Shortly before he died in 1940, at the age of 79, Thompson wrote a melancholy letter to Theodore Eickhoff, one of the three young men who had built the first working model of the gun in 1918:

I have given my valedictory to arms, as I want to pay more attention now to saving human life than destroying it. May the deadly T. S. M. G. always "speak for" God and Country. It has worried me that the gun has been so stolen by evil men and used for purposes outside our motto, "On the side of law and order."

A few months earlier, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation had fallen into the hands of Russell Maguire, a shady Connecticut financier who had persuaded the estate of Thomas Fortune Ryan, the deceased majority stockholder, to sell him the controlling interest for $529,000--less than half the retail value of the unsold guns and accessories. To Maguire's credit, he foresaw--as the U. S., British and French armies had not--the value of the submachine-type weapons that were already proving so effective in the hands of German blitzkrieg troops. He contracted with the Savage Arms Corporation to put the Thompson back into production and began building his own factory. By the end of 1940, every Allied army was clamoring for submachine guns and Maguire's long-obsolete Thompson was the only one in town. During World War Two, he sold almost 2,000,000 guns for $130,000,000, becoming a multimillionaire and a wartime celebrity as America's farsighted and patriotic "Tommy Gun Tycoon."