One Summer: America, 1927 (57 page)

He held a group trial for 101 Wobblies who were collectively charged with 17,022 crimes. Despite the complexity of the case, under Landis’s expert guidance the jury took less than an hour to find every one of the defendants guilty. Landis dispensed total sentences of over eight hundred years and fines totaling $2.5 million—enough to finish the Industrial Workers of the World as a national force.

In the same period, Landis took charge of an antitrust case between the existing major leagues in baseball and the upstart Federal League. For years the American and National Leagues had enjoyed monopoly powers, which allowed them to impose a contractual submissiveness on players through the reserve clause, but the Federal League threatened all that by offering better pay and the chance of free agency. Landis permanently endeared himself to American and National League team owners by deferring a ruling for so long that the Federal League owners eventually ran out of money, gave up, and disbanded.

With the Federal League out of the way, the baseball owners were able to return to treating their players appallingly. They renounced all
agreements made during the Federal League’s existence, refused to deal further with a new players’ union, and cut salaries everywhere. All this created quite a lot of ill will among the players, and nowhere more so than among the Chicago White Sox, whose owner, Charles Comiskey, was famed for his miserly instincts. Comiskey charged players for laundering their uniforms. He promised an infielder named Bill Hunnefield a $1,000 bonus if Hunnefield stayed healthy enough to play in 100 games, then benched him for the remainder of the season when he got to 99.

In 1919, seven members of the White Sox, with names that could almost have been supplied by central casting—Chick Gandil, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, Lefty Williams, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin, and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson—agreed to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds for fairly modest payoffs. The conspirators were not, by and large, terribly bright. Risberg had just a third-grade education and was a borderline psychopath; he threatened to kill anyone who blew the whistle on the fix, and was deemed just about unbalanced enough to do so. Jackson had never been to school at all and couldn’t read or write. Several of the conspirators seemed not quite to understand what was expected of them. Jackson batted .375 in the series and had a record eight hits, one of them a surprise bunt in the tenth inning of a tied game that he beat out with great hustle. Gandil won a game with a walk-off hit. In the end, the White Sox did lose the series, 5 games to 3, but seemed to struggle to do so. One reason for this, it has been suggested, is that the Reds were in on a
separate
fix and were doing
their
utmost to lose, too.

Nearly every baseball insider, it seems, knew what was going on. When the scandal broke, the major league owners invited—in fact, all but beseeched—Landis to become baseball’s first commissioner. Landis agreed on the understanding that he be given dictatorial powers and a written undertaking from the owners that they would never question his judgments. He set up office in the People’s Gas Building in Chicago behind a door that had a single word on it: “Baseball.”

The seven conspirators plus another player, Buck Weaver, who didn’t take part in the fix but knew about it and didn’t report it, were put on trial in the summer of 1921. A fact not often remembered is that the jury
found all eight not guilty, then went out with them to a restaurant to celebrate. One reason the players were cleared was that it was not actually illegal to fix a baseball game, so they could only be charged with willfully defrauding the public and injuring Comiskey’s business, and the jurors decided that that case was not proved. The point was academic because Landis banned them for life anyway.

Commissioner Landis at first kept his federal judgeship, even though it was illegal for him to do so. For entirely understandable reasons, judges were not permitted to receive money from private interests. Eventually Landis was compelled to give up his role as judge, an outcome that may have affected history more than is appreciated because Landis was also a vigorous defender of Prohibition—a novel position to take in Chicago in the 1920s. He handed out prison sentences of up to two years to people found guilty of purveying even small amounts of liquor. On his very last day as a judge, in early 1922, he sentenced a small-time Chicago saloonkeeper to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine for selling two glasses of whiskey. Had Landis stayed on the bench, Chicago might not have remained the world’s most comfortable place to be a criminal. Whatever Kenesaw Mountain Landis did for baseball, he may actually, if inadvertently, have done even more for Al Capone.

Chicago in 1927 was both the second-largest city in America and the fourth-largest in the world. Outside America, only London and Paris were grander. But it was also famous, in the words of an editorial in the
Chicago Tribune
, for “moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship.”

What the
Tribune
editorialist didn’t say—obviously couldn’t say—was that a certain portion of that buffoonery resided with the paper’s own proprietor, Robert Rutherford McCormick.

McCormick was born, in 1880, into a family that was rich and unhappy in roughly equal measure. Through his father he was related to Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, which brought a lucrative connection to International Harvester, and on his mother’s
side he stood heir to the
Chicago Tribune
. His mother was so disappointed that Robert was a boy that she dressed him as a girl and called him Roberta until he was old enough to go to school. Whether for this reason or some other, McCormick didn’t discover sex until he was well into his thirties. Then he became something of a satyr and, among other transgressions, stole his first wife from a cousin.

He had a boyish enthusiasm for warfare and was delighted beyond words to be made a colonel in the Illinois National Guard without ever having done anything to merit it other than to exist as a rich person. For the rest of his life he insisted on being addressed as “Colonel.” When his wife died he had her buried with full military honors, a distinction to which she was not remotely entitled (or very probably desirous). When World War I broke out, McCormick served briefly in France. His one battlefield experience was at Cantigny, which so moved him that he made that the name of his estate at Wheaton, Illinois, upon his return to civilian life.

With another cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson, McCormick began to run the
Chicago Tribune
in 1910. Although Patterson was an avowed socialist and McCormick was just an inch or so to the left of fascism, they worked surprisingly well together, and the paper prospered, doubling its circulation in their first decade of management. In 1919, the cousins launched the tabloid
New York Daily News
. Remarkably, for the first six years of its existence, they ran it from Chicago. Eventually Patterson went off to New York to focus on the
Daily News
, leaving McCormick in sole charge of the
Tribune
.

Under McCormick, the
Tribune
achieved its era of greatest importance. By 1927, its circulation was 815,000, almost double what it is today. The company owned paper mills, ships, dams, docks, some seven thousand square miles of forests, and one of the country’s earliest and most successful radio stations, WGN (short for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”). It also had interests in real estate and banks.

As the years passed, McCormick became increasingly eccentric. When the president of the Lake Shore Bank, which he controlled, displeased him, McCormick demoted him to running a vegetable stand
outside his estate. He insisted that the
Tribune
always refer to Henry Luce, whom he loathed, as “Henry Luce, who was born in China but is not a Chinaman.” He developed a private theory that men at the University of Wisconsin wore lace underwear and dispatched a reporter to find out if that was true. (Coincidentally, this was just at the time that Charles Lindbergh was a student there.) For reasons never explained, McCormick kept eastern time at Cantigny, but didn’t tell guests, so first-time visitors often arrived at dinner to find the dishes being cleared away.
^*

In addition to Henry Luce, McCormick deeply detested Henry Ford, immigrants, and Prohibition. But above all else he hated Chicago’s mayor, William Hale Thompson.

Thompson was an oaf from head to toe and ear to ear, but his supporters never held that against him. “The worst you can say about Bill is that he’s stupid,” remarked one cheerfully. Thompson was supported because he never got in the way of corruption or the making of money. Born two years before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Thompson grew up rich. His father made a fortune buying property cheaply from distressed owners after the fire and selling it at a large profit as Chicago rebuilt. Young Thompson was a strapping lad—he was six feet four and so known to all as Big Bill—but not an especially promising one. He dropped out of school and went west, working as a ranch hand and cowboy, but in 1899, after the death of his father, he returned to Chicago and took over the family business. Despite a lack of brains or aptitude, he was elected mayor in 1915 and for the next eight years presided serenely as the city became the most resplendently corrupt and lawless in the nation.

Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment. When a mobster named Anthony D’Andrea was killed in 1921, eight thousand people attended the funeral. The cortege
was two and a half miles long. The honorary pallbearers included twenty-one judges, nine lawyers, and the Illinois state prosecutor.

Gangsters enjoyed almost total immunity in the city. When three men came to the home of an underworld figure named Patsy Lolordo and shot him dead on his own sofa, they left fingerprints all over the room. Mrs. Lolordo knew the men and said she was prepared to give evidence against them. Police investigated but decided, with regret, that they couldn’t find enough evidence to proceed. In 1927, the State of Illinois had never successfully prosecuted a single mobster for anything.

It was a city where the chief of police, George Shippey, could shoot and kill an innocent man who was trying to deliver a package to his house because the man looked Jewish and Shippey thought he might be delivering a bomb. The deceased, it turned out, was just an innocent deliveryman trying to do his job. Shippey was not charged.

Thompson, his work done, retired as mayor in 1923, but his admirers, fearful of the kinds of things Emory Buckner was doing in New York—padlockings and so on—persuaded Thompson to run again in 1927, just to be on the safe side. By Chicago standards the election was peaceful: there were just two bombings, two shootings, two election officials beaten and kidnapped, and twelve declared cases of intimidation of voters. Al Capone donated $260,000 to Thompson’s campaign. He or someone in his camp is believed to have coined the droll slogan “Vote early and vote often,” and it appears that many took him at his word. According to the official tally, slightly more than one million votes were cast in a city with almost exactly that number of registered voters.

Thompson had run on a novel platform. He had vowed to repeal Prohibition, keep America out of the League of Nations, and end crime in Chicago. The first two he had no power to do; the third he had no intention of doing. He also claimed, for reasons not easily discerned, that King George V of Britain was planning to annex Chicago, and promised that if elected he would find the king and “punch him in the snoot.” His first action on reelection was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theater owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the
city’s institutions of any works that were less than “100 percent American.” Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to decide which books were objectionable enough to be discarded, but he admitted when pressed that he had read none of the books that he was proposing to burn—it is entirely possible that he had never read a book of any kind—and further admitted that he couldn’t remember the names of any of the people advising him. Just to make sure that no possible element of self-inflicted risibility was overlooked, Hermann announced that the bonfire would be lit by the Cook County executioner.

Remarkably, all this got a lot of support. William Randolph Hearst’s
Herald and Examiner
backed Thompson’s campaign, saying it hoped that other cities would clear their library shelves, too. The Ku Klux Klan likewise saluted the clear-out and suggested that the city next turn its attention to any books that were favorably inclined toward Jews or Catholics. The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. “I now have an America First library,” he said proudly.

In such a world as this, Al Capone looked sane and practically respectable. He liked to insist that he was really just a businessman. “I make my money by supplying a public demand,” he said at a press conference in 1927. (And it is notable that Al Capone held press conferences.) “Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble, and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements. Whatever else they may say, my booze has been good and my games have been on the square.” He may have approached matters from a wayward angle, but Al Capone was one of America’s great success stories.

He was born Alphonse Capone in January 1899 in Brooklyn. His father had been a barber in Italy and eventually owned his own shop in America—a proud achievement for a poor immigrant. He never learned English but he was a conscientious citizen and never, as far as is known, broke the law.

Al was the Capones’ fourth son, and the first one born in America. His eldest brother, Vincenzo, ran away to the west in 1908 at the age of sixteen. The Capones got one letter from him the following year, from Kansas, and then heard nothing more from him ever again. In fact, Vincenzo had become a Prohibition agent known as Richard “Two Gun” Hart. He had named himself after the cowboy star William S. Hart, and dressed like him, too, in an outsized Stetson, with a tin star on his breast and a pair of loaded holsters around his waist. In the summer of 1927, extraordinarily enough, he was in South Dakota and working as a personal bodyguard to President Coolidge.