One Summer: America, 1927

by Bryson, Bill

  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.

  Once again, the crowds assembled—though this time they were noticeably smaller and more subdued. The familiar steps were repeated. The witnesses gathered anew. Elliott laid out his equipment. The clock was watched as the minutes slowly ticked by. At last the time came. Madeiros, selected to go first, came into the execution chamber in a semi-stupor—a consequence, bizarrely, of overeating. Charlestown solemnly observed the tradition of giving a condemned prisoner whatever he wanted for his last meal, and Madeiros had evidently gone to town. Elliott worked with brisk efficiency. Madeiros was strapped in the electric chair at 12:02 and declared dead seven minutes later.

  Sacco was next. He refused last rites and walked the seventeen steps from his cell to the execution chamber unaided, but was noticeably pale. As he was being strapped into the chair, he cried out in Italian, “Long live anarchy!” then added in English, “Farewell, my wife and child, and all my friends!” (In fact, Sacco had two children; the error was attributed to nerves.) An unfortunate delay arose at this point because the head covering he was to wear could not be found. As Elliott and other officials searched for it, Sacco continued jabbering nervous farewells to friends and relatives. The headgear was found wedged under Madeiros’s body on a stretcher in a corridor and was hastily retrieved and plonked on Sacco’s head.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” Sacco called in a slightly startled tone at this. Finally, and quietly, he uttered the words “Farewell, Mother,” and the switch was thrown. He was pronounced dead at 12:19:02.

  Vanzetti, the final victim, also refused last rites. He had four more steps to traverse and proceeded with calmness and dignity. He shook hands with his guards, then turned to the warden, William Hendry, and shook his hand, too. “I want to thank you for everything you have done for me, Warden,” Vanzetti said. Hendry was too overcome to reply. Then Vanzetti turned to the witnesses and in a clear voice and in good English said: “I wish to tell you that I am innocent, and that I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I
thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all. I am an innocent man.” As an afterthought he added, “I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.” He took the chair and sat calmly and silently as he was strapped in and his head was covered. A moment later the switch was thrown. “There was complete silence in the room, except for the crackling, sputtering sound of the current,” Elliott wrote in his 1940 memoir, Agent of Death. Vanzetti was declared dead at 12:26:55, less than eight minutes after Sacco.

  In America, reaction to the executions was surprisingly muted. In New York, crowds received the news in “mournful silence,” according to the Times. In Boston, all was eerily subdued. People waited for official confirmation, then quietly dispersed into the night. To most people, further protests seemed pointless. Troops and police stood down. By the next day, city life had returned to normal.

  Elsewhere it was a different story. Protests broke out across the world—in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sydney, Berlin, Hamburg, Geneva, Leipzig, and Copenhagen. Many demonstrations turned violent. Nine people were killed in Germany. In London, protesters and police clashed in Hyde Park. Forty people were injured, some requiring hospitalization. In Havana, the U.S. embassy was bombed. In Geneva, rioters attacked the Palace of the League of Nations even though the United States was not a member, and broke windows in shops and hotels. In the confusion, shots were fired and one man was killed. In Berlin, New York mayor Jimmy Walker, on a goodwill tour of Europe, was threatened with physical violence by the city’s Communists. For several days, nowhere was it safe outside America to be an American.

  The French were particularly impassioned. Parisians, who until recently had been turning out in joyous droves to greet Lindbergh, Byrd, Chamberlin, and Levine, now poured through the streets of the city looking for Americans to beat up. Where Americans were scarce, the mobs turned on prosperous-looking natives. Patrons of many sidewalk cafés were assaulted and in some cases savagely beaten just for looking intolerably bourgeois. Several cafés were wrecked in pitched battles between customers and rioters. Elsewhere in the city, the roaming mobs turned on anything with an American theme—movie theaters showing American films, American hotels, stores that sold American goods. According to the London Times correspondent, the rioters particularly targeted American shoe stores for some reason. To the disgust of many, the mobs also desecrated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In trying to restore order, some two hundred policemen were injured. Several were stabbed.

  Time magazine took the opportunity to indulge in a little anthropological bigotry. “In South America,” it noted, “the volatile—and indolent—inhabitants of Paraguay and Argentina were easily persuaded to stop all work.… Swiss radicals were comically violent; Britons vaguely, Germans stupidly; Frenchmen hysterically violent.”

  On the day of the executions, the Coolidges traveled by train west to Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park, where they spent several days enjoying the scenery, watching geysers, and being entertained by bears, which in those days were encouraged to beg at the roadside. The president managed to fit in a little fishing, too. He issued no opinions about the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, or anything else.

  Were Sacco and Vanzetti innocent? Across such a distance of time, it is impossible to say anything with certainty, but there are grounds for suspecting that they were not perhaps as innocent as they made themselves out. There was for a start their close friendship with Carlo Valdinoci, the most notorious of bombers. They were also self-declared disciples of Luigi Galleani, the most militant and implacable of anti-American radicals. Galleani was a swashbuckling figure. He had been jailed in Italy for radical activities but escaped—reportedly after seducing the warden’s wife—and settled in America, where he immediately began calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Galleani published a radical journal called Cronaca Sovversiva (Chronicle of Subversion), which had a small but devoted readership of about four or five thousand. A regular contributor was Bart Vanzetti. Galleanists are thought to have been behind most or all of the notable bombings in this period. Vanzetti was widely rumored to be a maker of bombs, if not necessarily a deliverer of them. The historian Paul Avrich states that Vanzetti was “probably involved” in the 1917 bombing at Youngstown, Ohio, that killed ten policemen, and was certainly part of the small cell responsible for it.

  Many people closely involved in the case, then and later, concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were certainly guilty of something. The novelist Upton Sinclair, who was wholly sympathetic to both men, came to believe that they had been involved in bombmaking at the very least. Katherine Anne Porter was forced to a similar conclusion after long discussions with people inside the anarchist movement. According to several accounts, Vanzetti’s own lawyer, Fred Moore, believed that Sacco was guilty of the South Braintree killings and Vanzetti probably so. That view was shared by their fellow anarchist Carlo Tresca, who knew both men well. Francis Russell, author of two books on the case, long believed in their innocence, but eventually he concluded that they were guilty. The private papers of Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, opened in 1977, showed that he, too, had hoped to find the men innocent but had been persuaded of their guilt by the evidence. A dispassionate examination of the records indicates that the jurors in both trials were not obviously bigoted and that Justice Thayer, whatever his beliefs outside the court, conducted a fair trial.

  In his 1991 book, historian Paul Avrich asked rhetorically whether Vanzetti could have been involved in the South Braintree holdup, and wrote: “Though the evidence is far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes. The same holds true for Sacco.” Even if innocent of that crime, Avrich believed, they were almost certainly guilty of other murderous acts, including the bombings that led to the Palmer raids of 1919. That, he said, was “a virtual certainty.”

  Ballistics tests in the 1920s were basic and fairly easy to disbelieve, but more scrupulous tests in the modern era showed that the bullet that killed Alessandro Berardelli was indeed fired from Sacco’s gun—or else the evidence had been tampered with in a way that requires a substantial edifice of conspiracy.

  The last word on the matter should perhaps be left with Avrich. “It is frustrating to ponder,” he wrote in 1991, “that there are still people alive—the widow of Sacco among them—who might, if they chose, reveal at least part of the truth.” None ever did. They are all dead now.

  25

  As he became famous, Babe Ruth discovered that celebrity had a distinct downside, notably that he couldn’t go into many public places without being bothered, occasionally dangerously so. In 1921 he was drinking in a speakeasy in New Jersey when a drunken customer started to harass him. They exchanged words and stepped outside. Harry Hooper, a fellow ballplayer who was drinking with Ruth that night, emerged from the men’s room to find Ruth gone. Looking outside, he discovered Ruth standing stiffly with a gun held to his head. Luckily Hooper’s timely arrival frightened Ruth’s harasser, who fled into the night. After that, Ruth limited his drinking to the safety of his residence.

  By 1927, that residence was the Ansonia Hotel, a wonderfully vast and eccentric beaux arts palace on Broadway between Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Streets. The Ansonia was an apartment hotel—a popular new concept in the twenties—which meant that it combined the spaciousness and permanence of an apartment with the conveniences of a hotel: maid service, concierge desk, daily replenishment of towels, and so on. According to various accounts, the Ansonia featured a lobby fountain with a live seal and a “roof farm” where the management kept cows and chickens to provide milk and eggs for favored residents. It had three restaurants, including one that could seat 550, and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool in the basement. Pneumatic tubes shot messages from the front desk to any desired residence.

  The Ansonia’s thick walls provided superlative soundproofing, which made it attractive to musicians—Enrico Caruso and Arturo Toscanini were among its disti
nguished residents—but it was also popular with writers, theatrical people, ballplayers, and others of a slightly vagabond nature. The novelist Theodore Dreiser lived there for some time. The impresario Florenz Ziegfeld had a thirteen-room suite on one floor where he lived with his wife and a smaller suite one floor above where he kept his mistress.

  The Ansonia also featured in baseball’s darkest episode. It was there on September 21, 1919, that a group of gamblers ostensibly led by the mobster Arnold Rothstein (though he always vehemently denied it) met with some underpaid members of the Chicago White Sox and agreed to fix the World Series. Ruth was not living there at that time. He moved in only in 1926, into an apartment that was eight, eleven, or twelve rooms in size, depending on which of his biographers you decide to credit. Whatever its dimensions, it was an exceptionally comfortable place.

  Ruth in 1927 was the best-paid player in baseball and proud of the fact. Before the season he had held out for a more generous contract, which Jacob Ruppert was loath to grant given Ruth’s advancing age and abdomen, and Ruppert’s own financial setbacks in Florida from the previous autumn’s hurricane. Eventually, Ruppert caved in and gave Ruth a three-year contract at $70,000 a year, and acted as if he had been almost mortally wounded by it. The newspapers made great play of how enormous Ruth’s salary was. On his pay, newsmen calculated, Ruth could buy a new car every week or a new house every month. By baseball standards, Ruth’s salary was enormous—nearly half the Yankees total payroll and more than the totals earned by the next five best-paid players on the club combined. This, however, was more a reflection of how modestly compensated baseball players were in the 1920s than of how fabulously rich Ruth had become.