One Summer: America, 1927 (64 page)

In the end, no one pursued the challenge and on November 4, 1928, on the first occasion in his life in which he ran for office, Hoover was elected president of the United States by a record margin. He received nearly two-thirds of the popular vote and over 80 percent of electoral votes. Among those endorsing him was Charles Lindbergh.

Hoover took office in March 1929, and in October the stock market crashed. Hoover never recovered from that blow. In the three years following the crash, America’s unemployment rate rose from 3 percent to 25 percent, while average household earnings fell by 33 percent, industrial production by almost 50 percent, and the stock market by 90 percent. Eleven thousand banks failed.

Hoover did quite a lot to try to stimulate the economy. He spent $3.5 billion on public works, including several projects for which we may thank him yet—notably the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. He even donated his own salary to charity. An aide to President Roosevelt once confessed, “Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” But nothing could overcome his absence of lovability. At the 1931 World Series, he was “lustily” booed—the first time that that had ever happened to a president at a World Series game.

Having won the 1928 election by a record margin, Hoover lost the 1932 race by another record margin. He continued to work as hard after his presidency as during it. At one point, he wrote four books simultaneously, keeping a separate desk for each. He died in 1964 at age ninety and was buried at West Branch, Iowa, even though he had not lived there for more than eighty years. Today the Hoover presidential library at West Branch includes an excellent museum that houses, among much else, the television equipment on which he made his famous broadcast in April 1927.

Upon completion of his term, Calvin Coolidge retired with Grace Coolidge to a rented house in Northampton, Massachusetts. He became a member of the board of the New York Life Insurance Company and faithfully attended the monthly board meetings in New York for a fee of $50 and reimbursement of his expenses. He also wrote his autobiography
and a syndicated newspaper column. One afternoon just after New Year’s 1933, he went upstairs to shave. Grace found him on the floor of their bathroom dead of a heart attack. He was sixty years old. Most of his papers were destroyed soon after his death at his own request.

Benjamin Strong, the man who arguably gave the world the stock market crash and all the economic chaos that followed, didn’t live to see any of it. He died in October 1928 at the age of fifty-five, overwhelmed by his tuberculosis. Also not long surviving the summer of 1927 was Myron Herrick. He caught a chill while standing in the rain during the funeral of the French war hero Marshal Ferdinand Foch in March 1929, and died a few days later. He was seventy-four.

Six months after Herrick died, Miller Huggins, the Yankees manager, developed a blotch under his eye and began to feel feverish. He went to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, and almost at once his condition grew critical. He was suffering from a skin infection called erysipelas (more commonly known as St. Anthony’s fire), which nowadays can be treated with antibiotics. In 1929, there were no effective treatments. Huggins died on September 25, 1929, at age fifty.

Dwight Morrow stepped down as ambassador to Mexico after three years in the job and came home to run for the Senate as a Republican from New Jersey. He stood on a platform opposing Prohibition and won by a landslide, but he died suddenly in his sleep from a stroke on October 5, 1931, soon after taking office. He was fifty-eight years old. Five months later, his grandson was kidnapped.

Six months after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Judge Webster Thayer returned briefly to the news when his home was bombed, presumably by Sacco and Vanzetti supporters. Thayer spent the rest of his life living under police guard at his Boston club, though in fact he didn’t have a great deal of life left. He died a little over six months later at age seventy-five. Alvan Fuller, the other principal figure in the Sacco and Vanzetti case,
retired as governor of Massachusetts in 1929 but lived under police guard for some years. After Myron Herrick’s death, Fuller was considered for the position of ambassador to France, but the appointment was effectively vetoed by the French, who said they couldn’t guarantee his safety. Instead he devoted the remaining twenty-nine years of his life to business and philanthropy. He died of a heart attack at a Boston movie theater in 1958.

Jack Dempsey lost most of his fortune in the Wall Street crash. In 1935 he opened a restaurant on Broadway that was a New York institution for almost forty years before closing in 1974. Dempsey himself lived until 1983, when he died at the age of eighty-seven.

Gene Tunney married an heiress from the Carnegie family, Polly Lauder, in 1929. She had never seen him fight. They honeymooned on the Adriatic island of Brioni, where Tunney “walked, swam and talked” with George Bernard Shaw. Presumably he spent a little time with his bride as well. Tunney wrote some reminiscences, served on the boards of several large companies, and became “a speaker of overwhelming authority and composure on any subject at all,” as John Lardner recorded just a touch acidly in a
New Yorker
profile in 1950. His son John served as U.S. senator from California from 1965 to 1971. Tunney died in 1978 at age eighty-one. The most successful of the 1920s boxers, however, was the wild bull Luis Firpo. Having arrived in America penniless, Firpo went home $1 million richer after six years in the ring. He invested his fortune wisely and built up a business and ranching empire that eventually extended to an estate of over two hundred thousand acres. He was worth about $5 million when he died in 1960 at age sixty-five.

The tennis star Bill Tilden won his third Wimbledon title in 1930 at the age of thirty-seven. He would finish his career with a record of 907–62, a winning percentage of 93.6 percent. After retiring from tennis, he pursued an acting career and toured successfully in the lead role in a revival of
Dracula
, the hit production of 1927. He also developed a tragic weakness
for slim young boys. In 1947, he was sentenced to one year in jail in Los Angeles for interfering with a minor. Soon after his release, he was caught doing the same thing again and imprisoned a second time. He lost his few remaining friends and declined into a shabby, malodorous poverty. When he died in 1953 of a heart attack at the age of sixty, he had a net worth of $80.

Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson turned on Al Capone shortly after the Tunney-Dempsey fight in the belief—clearly delusional—that Capone was hurting his prospects for national political success, possibly as a presidential candidate for the Republicans. Shorn of protection, Capone moved to Florida in early 1928 and took up residence in Miami Beach. The next year he was arrested while changing trains in Philadelphia and sentenced to a year in prison for carrying a concealed weapon. In 1931, he was convicted of income tax evasion and given eleven years in prison.

Prison was not too tough for Capone. He had a bed with a spring mattress and had homemade meals delivered to his cell. At Thanksgiving he was served a turkey dinner by a butler hired for the day. He was allowed to keep a stock of liquor and to use the warden’s office to receive guests. The warden vehemently denied that Capone received preferential treatment, then was caught using Capone’s car. In 1934, Capone’s situation became considerably less attractive when Alcatraz opened in San Francisco Bay, and he became part of its first intake. Capone was released in late 1939, by which point he was suffering acutely from late-onset syphilis. He died, demented, in Florida in 1947.

At just the time that Al Capone was entering Alcatraz, on the other side of the country Charles Ponzi was being deported to Italy. He moved to Brazil and died in poverty on a charity ward of a hospital in Buenos Aires in 1949.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the lawyer who devised the idea of going after criminals like Al Capone on the grounds of tax evasion, lived until 1963, dying in California just before her seventy-fourth birthday. After leaving
government in 1929, she took a high-paying job as chief counsel for Fruit Industries Limited, a California company that grew grapes and was well known for helping people make wine at home. This made Willebrandt look like a hypocrite (which indeed she was), and contributed in a small but psychologically significant way to expediting the end of Prohibition.

A motion to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment came before Congress in early 1933. The House debated the bill for just forty minutes. In the Senate, as Daniel Okrent notes in his history of Prohibition, “Of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work.” In December 1933, Prohibition officially ended.

Also coming back into the news in 1933 was the all-but-forgotten aviator Francesco de Pinedo. After his return to Italy in 1927, Pinedo had resumed his career in Italy’s air force, the Regia Aeronautica, and there imprudently plotted to depose the air minister, Italo Balbo. Learning of this, Balbo posted Pinedo to the farthest and most pointless outpost it was in his power to send him—Buenos Aires. Pinedo languished in obscurity until September 1933, when he turned up unexpectedly at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn with a plan to fly solo to Baghdad, a distance of 6,300 miles.

Although this would be the farthest that anyone had ever flown, on the day of departure Pinedo arrived at the airfield dressed as if going out for a little light shopping—in blue serge suit, a gray fedora hat, and a light sweater. On his feet, it was noticed, he wore carpet slippers. The entire enterprise was patently misguided, but no one tried to stop him. As Pinedo’s plane hurtled down the runway, it began to weave from side to side, then veered toward an administration building where a small crowd had gathered. It missed the crowd but clipped a wing on some obstruction, tipped up on its nose, and crashed into a parked car. Pinedo was thrown clear. According to some accounts, he rose from the tarmac and tried to get back into the plane—presumably in a state of confusion. Other witnesses said he remained motionless on the ground. At all events, before anyone could get to him the plane exploded. Pinedo
perished in a giant fireball. What was going through his mind that morning and why he didn’t abandon the takeoff when it was so clearly going wrong are questions that can of course now never be answered.

For the motion picture industry, the transition from silent to talking pictures was faster than anyone ever thought possible. In June 1929, barely a year and a half after the debut of
The Jazz Singer
, of the seventeen motion picture theaters on Broadway, just three were still showing silents. The Great Depression, however, hit the industry hard. By 1933, nearly one-third of movie theaters in America were shut and many of the studios were in trouble. Paramount was bankrupt; RKO and Universal were nearly so. Fox was struggling to reorganize and eventually would have to be rescued by a much smaller studio, Twentieth Century.

In New York in 1932, Roxy Rothafel opened Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center. (The famous Rockettes were originally the Roxyettes.) But his time was running out, too. In May, the Roxy Theatre went into receivership. Two years later, Rothafel was put in charge of the failing Mastbaum Theater in Philadelphia. He reportedly spent $200,000 in ten weeks, but to no avail. The heyday of the great picture palaces was at an end. Rothafel died of a heart attack in a New York hotel in 1936. He was fifty-three years old. The Roxy Theatre was torn down in 1960.

Clara Bow, star of
Wings
, retired from acting in 1933 and became increasingly reclusive. She died in 1965 at age sixty. William Wellman, the director, made another sixty-five films before retiring in 1958. Many of his films were turkeys, but some were notable, among them
The Public Enemy
(1931),
The Ox-Bow Incident
(1943), and
The High and the Mighty
(1954). He died in 1975 at age seventy-nine. John Monk Saunders, the writer who conceived of
Wings
, didn’t fare so well. He married the actress Fay Wray, but the marriage failed and his career went downhill because of drinking and drugs. He hanged himself in Florida in 1940.

Jerome Kern never had another hit on Broadway after
Show Boat
, though he tried several times. Eventually, like so many others, he moved to Hollywood. He died in 1945. Oscar Hammerstein II also seemed to have come to the end of his road with
Show Boat
. He went a dozen years without
a hit, but then he teamed up with Richard Rodgers and between them they put together the greatest run of successes in the history of musicals:
Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song
, and
The Sound of Music
. Hammerstein died in 1960.

Jacob Ruppert, owner of the New York Yankees, suffered a heart attack in early 1939 and died nine days later at the age of sixty-nine. The world was astonished to find that he had left much of his estate, initially valued at between $40 million and $70 million, to a former showgirl named Helen W. Weyant, who confessed to reporters that she and Ruppert had had a secret friendship for many years, but insisted that it was no more than friendship. In the end, Ruppert’s estate turned out to be worth just $6.5 million—the Depression had severely hit his real estate holdings—and he had personal debts of $1 million on top. To pay the debts and his estate taxes, it was necessary to sell both the Yankees and the Ruppert brewery.

Also dying in 1939, following a long illness, was Raymond Orteig, the amiable hotelier who launched the Orteig Prize.

Gutzon Borglum didn’t quite live to see Mount Rushmore completed. He died in March 1941, of complications following prostate surgery, just a few months before it was finished. He was seventy-three.

Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England and close friend of Benjamin Strong, suffered a bizarre accident in 1944 that brought his career to a close. While visiting his brother on his country estate in Hertfordshire, Norman went for a walk in fading light and apparently tripped over a cow that was resting on the ground. The startled cow may have kicked Norman in the head in scrambling to its feet. Norman never fully recovered and died in 1950 at age seventy-eight.