One Summer: America, 1927 (58 page)

Young Al, needless to say, followed a rather different career path. Expelled from school for striking a teacher (she hit him first, he always carefully explained), he became a protégé of a Brooklyn racketeer named Johnny Torrio. A mild, delicate man, Torrio put the
organized
into organized crime. He was especially adept at gaining control of particular trades or businesses. All the ice deliverymen in a borough, say, would pay a commission to Torrio and in return would be granted a monopoly in a particular district, allowing them to raise their prices. Anyone who challenged their monopoly was likely to find his office dynamited, his legs broken, his building condemned by the city, or any of a number of other undesirable outcomes. Torrio at his peak controlled two hundred separate associations, from the Soda Dispensers and Table Girl Brotherhood to the Bread, Cracker, Yeast and Pie Wagon Drivers’ Union. Even shoeshine boys paid him $15 up front and $2 a month thereafter.

In 1920, for reasons that have never been convincingly explained, Torrio decided to leave Brooklyn and start all over again in Chicago. As a first move, he knocked off a mobster there named Big Jim Colosimo (who in some accounts is described as Torrio’s uncle and in others simply as an associate) and took over his operations. Things went well for some time, but then territorial tensions arose. On a cold afternoon in January 1925, Torrio was helping his wife carry bags of shopping from their car into their house when two men from a rival gang approached and shot him five times at close range. Torrio survived but decided he
had had enough. He turned all the Chicago operations over to Al Capone. And so began America’s most famous era in lawlessness.

The two most striking features of Capone’s reign were how youthful he was and how short it was. Capone was just twenty-five—Lindbergh’s age at the time of his Paris flight—when he took over from Torrio, and his career as a top mobster really only lasted from the spring of 1925 to the end of 1927. Even in early 1926, newspapers in Chicago were giving Capone’s name as Caponi or Caproni. A
Chicago Tribune
reporter dubbed him “Scarface” in the summer of 1926, and it was then that the legends began.

A reporter for
Time
magazine colorfully and imaginatively claimed that Capone had been “branded on one swart cheek”—
Time
really couldn’t get enough of that word
swart
—“by the razor memento of the Neapolitan Camorra.” In fact, Capone got his scars one evening at a Coney Island bar when, drunk, he leaned across to a girl and said, “Honey, you have a nice ass, and I mean that as a compliment.” Unfortunately, the young woman was with her brother, who felt honorbound to do something emotional, and he slashed Capone across the face with a knife, leaving him with two livid scars on his left cheek and a fainter one along the neck. Capone was always self-conscious about the scars and did all he could to disguise them, including coating his face in talcum powder.

Capone was no doubt capable of violence, but it is perhaps worth noting that the well-remembered scene in which he beats to death two dinner guests with a baseball bat was entirely made up. It appeared in a 1975 book called
The Legacy of Al Capone
by a writer named George Murray. In half a century, no one else had ever mentioned it—and beating guests to death at a dinner table is not something other guests would forget to mention. Capone has also many times been credited with the line “You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can get with just a smile,” but it appears he probably never said that either.

Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal than New York, with 6.1, Los Angeles, with 4.7, or Boston, with just 3.9—but it was less dangerous than Detroit, at 16.8, or almost any city in the South. New
Orleans had a murder rate of 25.9 per 100,000, while Little Rock had a rate of 37.9, Miami 40, Atlanta 43.4, and Charlotte 55.5. Memphis was miles ahead of all other cities, with a truly whopping rate of 69.3. The average in America today, you may be surprised and comforted to hear, is 6 murders per 100,000 people.

One thing Chicago did have was a special attachment among its gangsters for the Thompson submachine gun, or tommy gun, as it was more affectionately known. The gun was named for General John Taliaferro Thompson, director of U.S. arsenals, who spent much of World War I developing it. His idea was to make a portable machine gun light enough to be carried by a single soldier. Thompson’s gun was wondrously lethal. It could fire up to a thousand rounds a minute and drill holes through armored vehicles. In one demonstration, it cut through quarter-inch steel plate and felled a tree almost two feet thick. Unfortunately, by the time Thompson had the gun ready for production, the war was over and the army didn’t want it. Police forces didn’t want it either because it was so lively that it was impossible to aim accurately. Fire from a tommy gun was all but randomly distributed, which made it ideal for hoodlums—and made hoodlums very scary people once they started pulling the trigger. Illinois imposed no restrictions on the sale of tommy guns, so they were available to the general public in hardware stores, sporting goods stores, and even drugstores. The wonder is that the death tolls in Chicago weren’t higher.

What Chicago also had in unusual abundance throughout Prohibition was beer. Most cities didn’t. Beer required corruption on an epic scale. You can’t hide a brewery, so to produce and distribute beer without attracting legal inquiries required the disbursement of a great deal of hush money, and there was hardly a uniformed city employee who didn’t share in the benefits. A steady stream of police and officials visited Capone’s headquarters at the Metropole Hotel each day to pick up their payoffs and instructions. The police force of Chicago became in effect his private army. Goodness knows what Kenesaw Mountain Landis would have made of that if he had been left in his position as a federal judge.

Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its
citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spirituous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90—and all this without taxes. By 1927, Capone’s organization—which, interestingly, had no name—had estimated receipts of $105 million. The scale of his operations unquestionably makes him one of the most successful businessmen in American history.

Many people, it seems, were very happy to look at it that way. When students at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago (named for Robert McCormick’s grandfather) were asked in 1927 to name the ten most outstanding people in the world, they chose Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, the golfer Bobby Jones, and Al Capone.

For Capone, 1927 was an exceptionally good year. Profits were flowing in, Chicago’s gangs were mostly at peace, and Capone increasingly found himself a person of importance. When newspaper deliverymen threatened a crippling strike in Chicago, it was Capone, not Big Bill Thompson, to whom the proprietors turned for help. After Capone got the strike called off, he was invited to a meeting of the owners, chaired by Robert McCormick, so that they could express their gratitude.

“McCormick wanted to pay me afterward,” Capone said later, “but I told him to give the money to a hospital.” McCormick’s version of the story was rather different. “I arrived late at a publishers’ meeting,” he recorded briskly in a memoir. “Capone walked in with some of his hoodlums. I threw him out.” Whatever exactly transpired, there was no strike, and the newspapers of Chicago forever after went easy on Capone.

As the summer of 1927 wound to an end, Al Capone was the world’s favorite gangster. In a couple of weeks 150,000 people would pack into Soldier Field in Chicago to watch the Dempsey-Tunney rematch. The place would be full of celebrities, but it would be Al Capone that everyone in the stadium would crane to see. At the age of twenty-eight, he appeared to be on top of the world. In fact, time was about to run out for him. Within months he would be gone from Chicago and his empire would be crumbling around him.

*
In 1927, McCormick had not yet settled on his most celebrated idiosyncrasy—namely, a devotion to simplified spelling. That would begin in 1934, when he would introduce to the
Tribune
such novel spellings as
frate, burocracy, iland
, and
lam
, among a large and ever-changing corpus. The
Tribune
maintained the practice for forty-one years.

30

Lou Gehrig, in his quiet, methodical, all but invisible way, was having a fantastic year. As the second week of September began, he had 45 home runs, 161 runs batted in, and a .389 batting average. As his biographer Jonathan Eig notes in
Luckiest Man
, Gehrig could have stopped there, with almost a month of the season still to play, and had one of the best seasons ever. In fact, he did essentially stop there.

His mother was unwell with a goiter and needed surgery. Gehrig was beside himself with anxiety. “I’m so worried about Mom that I can’t see straight,” he confided to a teammate.

“All his thoughts were on Mom,” the sportswriter Fred Lieb wrote later. “As soon as he finished the game, he would rush to the hospital and stay with her until her bedtime.” Gehrig hit just two more home runs the rest of the season. His heart wasn’t in the game. All he could think about was his beloved momma.

Babe Ruth, meanwhile, began knocking balls out of parks as if hitting tee shots at a driving range. Between September 2 and 29, he hit 17 home runs. No one had ever done anything like that in a single month.

The Yankees seemed incapable of doing anything wrong. On September 10, they beat St. Louis for the twenty-first time in a row—the most consecutive victories by one team over another during a season.
On September 16, Wilcy Moore, who was such a bad batter that players would come out of the locker room and vendors would pause in their transactions to watch the extraordinary sight of him flailing at empty air with a piece of wood, miraculously connected with a ball and sent it over the right field wall for a home run, an event that nearly gave Babe Ruth a heart attack. On the mound, Moore scattered 7 hits to push his record to 18 and 7 as the Yanks beat the White Sox 7–2.

In the midst of this, almost unnoticed, the Yankees clinched the pennant. They had been in first place every day of the season—the first time that had ever happened. Their position was so commanding that they could lose all 15 of their remaining games and the second-place A’s could win all 17 of theirs, and the Yankees would still come out on top. In point of fact, the Yankees won 12 of their last 15 games even though they didn’t need to. They couldn’t help themselves.

Ruth was majestically imperturbable. On September 16 he was called into court in Manhattan, charged with the alarming crime of punching a cripple. The reputed victim, Bernard Neimeyer, claimed that on the evening of July 4 he had been walking near the Ansonia Hotel when a man accompanied by two women accused him of making an inappropriate remark and punched him hard in the face. Neimeyer said he didn’t recognize his assailant, but was told by onlookers that it was Babe Ruth. Ruth, in his defense, said that he had been having dinner with friends at the time, and produced two witnesses in corroboration. In court, Neimeyer seemed to be a little crazy. The
Times
reported that he frequently “rose excitedly to his feet, waving a book of notes which he added to from time to time as the hearing proceeded. He was often cautioned by the clerk of the court not to talk so loudly.” The judge dismissed the case to general applause. Ruth signed a bunch of autographs, then went to the ballpark and hit a home run, his 53rd.

Two days later, in a doubleheader against the White Sox, he socked his 54th, a two-run shot in the fifth inning. Three days after that, on September 21, Ruth came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning against Detroit. The bases were empty and the Tigers were up 6–0, so Sam Gibson, the Tigers’ pitcher, didn’t need to throw him anything good,
and dutifully endeavored not to. Ruth caught one anyway, and hefted it deep into the right field stands for his 55th homer. A new record was beginning to seem entirely possible.

The next day Ruth hit one of his most splendid home runs of the season. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with Mark Koenig on third and the Yankees trailing 7–6, Ruth came to the plate and lofted his 56th home run high into the right field bleachers for a walk-off 8–7 victory. As Ruth trotted around the bases—carrying his bat with him, as he often did, to make sure nobody ran off with it—a boy of about ten rushed in from right field and joined him on the base paths. The boy grabbed onto the bat with both hands and was essentially carried around the bases and into the dugout, where Ruth quickly vanished down the runway, pursued by yet more jubilant fans. The game was the Yankees 105th victory of the season, tying the American League record for season victories.

Beyond Yankee Stadium, the world hardly noticed. Halfway across the continent in Chicago, something much more exciting was about to happen.

It was the Dempsey-Tunney fight. Chicago was even more abuzz than it had been for Lindbergh’s recent visit. People poured into the city in numbers never before seen. It was impossible to find a hotel bed, hard enough to get a seat in a restaurant. Chartered trains streamed in from every point of the compass—from Akron, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, the distant West. In three days, more than a hundred extra trains arrived in the city. Scheduled trains were made longer—in some cases much longer. The Twentieth Century Limited that pulled in on fight day was three times its normal length. Among the arriving multitudes were Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Florenz Ziegfeld, Gloria Swanson, Walter Chrysler, Ty Cobb, nine U.S. senators, ten state governors, mayors beyond counting, and business potentates from all over. David Sarnoff was there to make sure the radio hookups were all in order. The Marquis of Douglas and Clydesdale, a British adventurer who would shortly become the first man to fly over Mount Everest, attended as the guest of Gene Tunney, as did the British writer Somerset Maugham.