that all of the crime in America was caused by immigrants, making the emergence of bank robbers with Anglo-Saxon or German surnames from families long resident in American problematic for those of an xenophobic outlook. One critic in the Communist newspaper The New Masses mocking wrote in 1934: "It must be a point of some concern to the professional patriots to realize that the crooks of the Midwest are not Wops, Pollacks or Jews. There are Barrows and Barkers and Pretty Boy Floyds of Texas and Oklahoma, the Twohys of Minnesota, the Dillingers and Pierpoints of Indiana, all native-born". In part because most American audiences preferred "evil foreigners" as villains, there was tendency of the part of Hollywood productions to focus on the urban gangsters, who were usually so-called hyphenated-Americans who were "ethnic" in contrast to Hollywood's ideal WASP Americans. For an example, in the 1931 film The Star Witness, a middle-class WASP family witnesses a murder committed by Italian-American gangsters who kidnap their child to prevent them from testifying. In response, the Leeds family patriarch, the crotchety Grandpa, warns against the "yellow-bellied, back-stabbing foreigners" presumably causing all the crime in America and in the climax of the film delivers an xenophobic speech in a courtroom where he says "I'll tell you, a danged, dirty foreigner can crowd an American just so far-just so far!", leading the courtroom to erupt in applause. Perhaps the most extreme anti-gangster film was Gabriel Over The White House (1933) concerning a corrupt politician named Jud Hammond who is elected president and after encountering the Archangel Gabriel becomes a drastically changed man. Hammond suspends the constitution, disbands Congress, declares martial law and orders all criminals to be shot, saying that crime has reached such a point that America has to do away with the rule of law. The film's principle villain, the Al Capone-like gangster Nick Diamond and his entire gang are all lined up and summarily shot under the Statue of Liberty. Afterwards, their corpses are dumped into the Atlantic Ocean to symbolize that America has rejected them. The film was largely a reflection of the ideas of the media magnate William Randolph Hearst who financed it and worked uncredited on the script. Even in the years 1930-32 when gangster films were at the height of their popularity in the United States, such films usually did better at the box office overseas than within