Al Capone's Soup Kitchen, Chicago

Chicago, February 1931. Unemployed men in overcoats and caps line up outside a soup kitchen opened by Al Capone, under a storefront sign offering free soup, coffee and doughnuts for the unemployed. The photographer is unrecorded; the print survives in the National Archives. Few pictures show so plainly how thin public relief was in the early years, when a gangster's charity could draw a queue down the block.