One Summer: America, 1927 (48 page)

All of these problems were of course overcome, and talking pictures quickly enjoyed success beyond anyone’s wildest hopes. By 1930, virtually every theater in America had sound. Movie audiences jumped from 60 million in 1927 to 110 million in 1930. Warner Bros.’ worth shot up from $16 million to $200 million. The number of theaters the company owned or controlled went from one to seven hundred.

Talkies at first were often called “speakies,” though sometimes they were also called “dialogue pictures.” For some time, what exactly constituted sound movies was a matter of uncertainty. Eventually, a consensus arose. A picture that offered recorded music but no talking was said to be “with sound.” If it additionally had some sound effects, it was said to be “with sound and effects.” If it had any recorded speech at all, it was a “talking picture.” If it was a proper movie, with a full range of speech and sounds, it was an “all-talking picture.” The first true all-talking picture was
The Lights of New York
in 1928, but such was the sound quality still that it came with subtitles as well.

Variety
in the summer of 1927 noted that some four hundred aliens were working as actors or in other creative positions in Hollywood, and that more than half of all leading roles were taken by performers of foreign
birth. Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, Lya de Putti, Emil Jannings, Joseph Schildkraut, Conrad Veidt, and many others from Germany or central Europe were big stars, but only so long as the public couldn’t hear their accents. Universal and Paramount were both dominated by German stars and directors. Universal was said, only half in jest, to have German as its official language.

A few European actors—Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo—adjusted to or even thrived in the new sound regime, but most actors with foreign accents found themselves unemployable. Jannings, winner of the first Academy Award for acting, returned to Europe and spent the war years making propaganda films for the Nazis. Behind the scenes Europeans still thrived, but on-screen movies were now a thoroughly American product.

Though the significance of this wasn’t much noticed in America, globally the effect was profound. Moviegoers around the world suddenly found themselves exposed, often for the first time, to American voices, American vocabulary, American cadence and pronunciation and word order. Spanish conquistadores, Elizabethan courtiers, figures from the Bible were suddenly speaking in American voices—and not just occasionally but in film after film after film. The psychological effect of this, particularly on the young, can hardly be overstated. With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.

*
A little-noticed fact was that the Roxy was sold almost at once to the Fox film company for a whopping $15 million. The purchase contributed significantly to Fox’s bankruptcy in the following decade.

24

Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. A well-groomed, silver-haired man with a pipe and a thoughtful, learned air, he might in other circumstances have been a college professor. He certainly had the brains for it. Instead in 1926, at the age of fifty-three, he became America’s top executioner.

Elliott grew up in a prosperous family on a large farm in upstate New York. He studied mathematics and physics at Brockport Normal School (now the State University of New York at Brockport), but his passion was electricity and he decided as a young man to become an electrical engineer. This was at a time in the late nineteenth century when electrical transmission was an exciting new technology. Elliott was employed setting up municipal lighting plants across New York and New England when he was sidetracked into the challenge of electrocuting criminals. This, too, was a new thing, but it wasn’t going well.

Electrocution seemed, on the face of it, a quick, humane way of putting people to death, but in practice it proved to be neither neat nor straightforward. If the voltage was too low or not applied long enough, the victim was often dazed but not killed, and merely reduced to a gasping wreck. If a more ferocious jolt was given, the results tended to be
unpleasantly dramatic. Blood vessels sometimes burst and, in one gruesome instance, a victim’s eyeball exploded. At least once, the subject was slowly roasted alive. The smell of cooking flesh was “unbearable,” recalled one of those present. Electrocution, it became clear, was a science that required careful, professional management if it was to be done efficiently and relatively humanely. This is where Robert Elliott came in.

Called in as a consultant for an execution in New York State, and having read about the suffering and failures so far, Elliott realized that the trick of a successful execution was to adjust the application of electricity continuously and judiciously throughout the process, rather as an anesthesiologist controls the flow of gas to a surgical patient, so that the subject was rendered first unconscious and then lifeless in a progressive and comparatively peaceful manner.

He performed his first two executions in January 1926, and proved so adept at it that soon states all over the East were commissioning him. It wasn’t that Elliott found any satisfaction in killing people—quite the reverse—but that he had an ability, more or less unique, to dispatch them gently. In 1927, he was executing people at the rate of about three a month, at $150 a time, and was in all but name the official executioner for New York and New England.

Because of the lack of specialist equipment, Elliott had to make his own. Each victim was fitted with a piece of headgear that Elliott adapted from leather football helmets bought at his local sporting goods store. It is a macabre image, but an accurate one, to think of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti going to their deaths dressed in the style of Red Grange.

For all the fuss and heartfelt lamentations among protesters and editorial writers about the unfair trial and unjust fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, the evidence suggests that the majority of Americans thought the two men were probably guilty, and most of the rest didn’t really care. According to the author Francis Russell, by 1926 most people couldn’t have said whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive or not. The newspaperman
Heywood Broun was certain that the average man “cared nothing about the issue.” He despaired that his own newspaper, the
World
, carried more coverage of the Snyder-Gray case than it did of Sacco and Vanzetti. Even those who supported Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t always terribly sympathetic. Katherine Anne Porter was shocked at one protest when, in passing, she expressed hope to a Communist named Rosa Baron that a pardon would be granted, and Baron snapped back: “Alive—what for? They are no earthly use to us alive.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Sacco and Vanzetti were not the most notorious inmates in Charlestown Prison in the summer of 1927. That distinction belonged to a fellow immigrant who had rather faded from the news but whose name has, ironically, lived on more powerfully than those of Sacco and Vanzetti. He was Charles Ponzi, and eight years earlier he had attracted the world’s attention, and made himself an eponym, by devising a scheme designed to make people a lot of money very quickly.

Ponzi was a dapper and diminutive fellow, barely five feet tall. Originally from Parma, Italy, he came to the United States in 1903 at the age of twenty-one and worked at various jobs, from busboy to office clerk to vegetable wholesaler. But in 1919, while living in Boston, he concocted a scheme—in itself perfectly legal—to make a profit by trading in international postal reply coupons. These coupons were invented as a way to help people or businesses send or receive letters or parcels from abroad. The system was meant to facilitate small-scale exchanges between countries. Ponzi realized that he could buy coupons in Europe with depressed European currencies and then redeem them in America for booming U.S. greenbacks. For every $1.00 invested, he could get back up to $3.50.

Promising investors a 50 percent return on their investment every ninety days, Ponzi launched his scheme in the fall of 1919, and by the following spring—at exactly the time that Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli were being gunned down in South Braintree and Sacco and Vanzetti arrested in Brockton—Ponzi was being overwhelmed with eager clients. Thousands of people gathered daily outside his offices in Boston’s North End trying to thrust money into his care. Often it was their life savings. So much money flowed in that Ponzi literally couldn’t
bank it fast enough. It was packed into shoe boxes and stuffed in desk drawers. In April he took in $120,000, in May $440,000, in June $2.5 million, and in July over $6 million, mostly in bills of small denominations.

The problem with Ponzi’s system was that individual coupons were worth only very small sums—5 cents typically—so it would have been necessary to exchange truly monumental volumes of coupons to make a reasonable return. Ponzi didn’t even try. It was much simpler to pay off early investors with funds paid in by more recent ones. As long as money kept flowing in, the scheme worked fine, but you didn’t need to be a financial wizard to see that the arrangement couldn’t be infinitely sustained. Ponzi, alas, genuinely believed it could. He opened branch offices all around New England to take in yet more money, and embarked on an ambitious program of expansion and diversification. At the time of his downfall, he was negotiating to buy a steamship line, a bank, and a chain of movie theaters, all in the sweetly delusional belief that he was a legitimate business titan in the mold of John D. Rockefeller. Ponzi, it is worth noting, personally benefited little from his artful manipulations. He bought a nice house and a new car with his investors’ money, but otherwise his greatest financial indulgence was to donate $100,000 to an orphanage.

Ponzi’s grand plans began to unravel when a newspaperman asked the post office’s coupon redemption department how it was coping with such an influx of business, and learned that there was no influx of business. It turned out that Ponzi had cashed in only $30 worth of postal coupons. All the rest was money taken from one lot of investors and given to another. Altogether, it is thought, Ponzi ended up some $10 million in the hole, equivalent to more than $100 million today. About forty thousand people had invested with him.

From beginning to end, Ponzi’s scheme lasted just eight months. Ponzi was charged, convicted, and sent to a federal prison for three and a half years. Upon his release, he faced additional state charges in Massachusetts, but he absconded to Florida while out on bail. Florida was in the midst of its celebrated property boom, and Ponzi, irrepressible, very nearly succeeded in setting up a bogus real estate scheme there. He
offered real land but failed to tell investors that it was all deep seabed. In the summer of 1927, he was back in prison at Charlestown awaiting deportation.

If most Americans were indifferent to the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, a shadowy handful showed that they were not. On the evening of August 5, two New York subway stations, a church in Philadelphia, and the home of the mayor of Baltimore were noisily rent with bombs. One person was killed and several injured in the subway bombings. The Baltimore bombing puzzled many because Sacco and Vanzetti had no connection with that city, and the mayor, William F. Broening, had never expressed a view one way or another on the case.

As ever, police were clueless as to the perpetrators. For a time the chief suspect in New York was a man, identified only as a dental assistant, who was caught peering into St. Paul’s Cathedral in New York in what police thought was a suspicious manner. When searched he was found to be carrying an anarchist leaflet. He was arrested and held without bail. His fate beyond that is not known, but he was not charged with any of the bombings. No one was.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution was scheduled for the night of August 10, the day that President Coolidge dedicated Mount Rushmore. Outside, angry crowds thronged the streets, and mounted police strained to maintain order. “The air seemed charged with electricity,” Robert G. Elliott noticed as he arrived in the early evening. Machine guns had been placed along the prison walls, and those manning them were authorized, it seems, to fire into the crowd if things got ugly. Inside, Sacco, Vanzetti, and a third condemned inmate, Celestino Madeiros—the young man whose confession to the South Braintree robbery Judge Thayer had dismissed in 1925—were given their last meals and offered last rites. Madeiros had nothing to do with the Sacco and Vanzetti case. He was being put to death now for the murder of a bank clerk in another robbery.

At about eleven that night, the witnesses assembled and Elliott
readied his apparatus. But just thirty-six minutes before the scheduled execution a reprieve arrived from Massachusetts governor Alvan Fuller granting the condemned men’s defense team—which was essentially the lone, harried lawyer Fred Moore—twelve days to find a court prepared to grant a retrial or hear new evidence. Madeiros, though unconnected, got a stay, too, for convenience’s sake.

More bombs went off. The home of one of the jurors, in East Milton, Massachusetts, was blown up in the middle of the night on August 16. Happily, no one was killed. Across the country in Sacramento, California, a bomb blew the roof off a theater. Why Sacramento and why a theater were questions no authority could answer.

Fred Moore could find no one to come to Sacco and Vanzetti’s rescue. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, the most likely savior, had to recuse himself because of “personal relations with some of the people interested.” His wife had formed a sympathetic friendship with Sacco’s wife, Rose. Chief Justice William Howard Taft refused to cross the border from his summer home in Canada to make a ruling. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone likewise declined to come ashore from his cottage off the Maine coast.

On the evening of August 22, Sacco’s wife and Vanzetti’s sister went to the Massachusetts State House to plead with Governor Fuller. Fuller spent an hour and a half with the women but would not change his position. “My duties are outlined by law,” he said sadly. “I am sorry.” The executions would proceed, as required by law, from midnight.