One Summer: America, 1927

by Bryson, Bill

  As Lahr put it in 1993: “Nothing like it had ever been seen on the American stage.” It marked the birth of the integrated musical, by which is meant simply that all the elements of a musical—script, songs, dance, sets—contributed to a coherent whole, exactly what Kern had been calling for as far back as 1917.

  Show Boat was racy stuff in every sense of the word. It involved relations between blacks and whites, including miscegenation, and dealt sympathetically with the plight of black people in the South. It had a chorus of ninety-six singers, equally divided between blacks and whites, and was the first production in the history of American theater in which blacks and whites sang together on stage. Just three years earlier, when authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. So for that reason alone the play was tremendously exciting. For people inclined to be enlightened, this was a breakout moment.

  The play contained six songs that are still widely known today: “Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Bill,” “Make-Believe,” “Why Do I Love You,” and “You Are Love.” “Ol’ Man River” turned out to be uncannily like an existing song called “Long-Haired Mamma,” published earlier that year. The composer, Maury Madison, thought so, too, and sued Kern. They settled out of court.

  The substance of the play itself was anything but an automatic hit. As well as dealing with miscegenation, it looked seriously at gambling and broken marriages. It was also extremely long, not finishing until after 11:30 p.m. But people flocked to it. Several members of the audience were moved literally to tears. From the beginning Show Boat was a smash hit, grossing $50,000 a week during the course of its run.

  It was a memorable week for Edna Ferber. The night after Show Boat opened, a play she co-wrote with George S. Kaufman, The Royal Family, had its premiere. A comedy that deftly parodied the famously temperamental and self-important Barrymore acting clan, it was an immediate hit and ran for ten months. The Barrymores were eminently worthy of parody. John Barrymore once left a stage to punch an electrician who had not focused a light on him properly, and if someone coughed while he was emoting, he would stop and call out to the audience, “Would someone please throw that seal a fish?” Ethel Barrymore did her best to get The Royal Family stopped, but she failed.

  Although Ferber and Kaufman squabbled endlessly and often bitterly, they wrote three great comedies together—The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door—before breaking up in permanent rancor. When Kaufman was near death, Ferber came to visit him and thought they had made a reconciliation. As she left, Kaufman called her back and said, “Edna, are you going to the funeral?”

  “What funeral?” she asked.

  “Yours. You’re dead, Edna, dead!” he cried, and fell back on the pillows. He never spoke to her again.

  Altogether eighteen plays opened on Broadway in the week that Show Boat premiered—eleven of them on the day after Christmas, making it the busiest single night in the history of Broadway. Theater seemed to be enjoying its greatest triumph, but in fact this would turn out to be its last hurrah. Talking pictures were about to change the world of entertainment profoundly, not just by stealing audiences from live theater but also, even worse, by stealing talent. Talking pictures needed actors who were comfortable with the spoken word and writers who could create real dialogue. An enormous exodus was about to begin. Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Bette Davis, W. C. Fields, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson, Leslie Howard, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Cary Grant, Paul Muni, Paulette Goddard, and many more who could be seen in 1927 on Broadway would all shortly decamp to Hollywood. American theater would never be the same again.

  When Show Boat went on the road in 1929, it didn’t do very well at all. Everybody was at the talkies.

  * * *

  * Putting advanced societies on nearby planets wasn’t in itself a preposterous notion in 1927. The March issue of Scientific American, no less, contained an article solemnly speculating on whether Mars contained a civilization superior to our own. (It also had an article suggesting that humans might be evolving into a race of one-eyed Cyclopeans.) Other respectable publications posed similar questions about Venus, where it was supposed that the inhabitants lived in some kind of tropical paradise beneath thick Venusian clouds.

  29

  Of all the figures who rose to prominence in the 1920s in America, none had a more pugnacious manner, finer head of hair, or more memorable name than Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

  Landis was a slight figure—he weighed no more than 130 pounds and stood just five and a half feet tall—but a commanding presence. Sixty-one years old in the summer of 1927, he had a wizened face and parchment skin beneath a towering white mane. The radical journalist John Reed described Landis as having “the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.”

  Born and raised in Millville, Ohio, he owed his curious name to a bizarre circumstance. His father, a surgeon for the Union Army in the Civil War, lost his leg at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, and, oddly, decided to commemorate the event by naming his son after the site (but with a slight adjustment of spelling).

  Landis trained as a lawyer in Chicago, then by chance and good fortune landed a plum job as personal assistant to Walter Q. Gresham, U.S. secretary of state under President Grover Cleveland. As reward for diligent service to the nation, Landis was made a federal judge in Illinois in 1905. There he distinguished himself by his many rash and startling judgments.

  He gained national attention by charging Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany with murder after the sinking of the Lusitania (on the grounds that he had killed a resident of Illinois). In his most famous case, he fined Standard Oil $29 million—an audacious sum—for violating antitrust laws. Soon afterward, an appeals court threw Landis’s judgment out, which is what often happened with Landis decisions. According to one authority, Landis had more cases reversed on appeal than any other judge in the federal system.

  Wherever legal news was being made, Landis was uncannily present. He presided over the early stages of the famous libel suit between Henry Ford and the Chicago Tribune. (The trial was then moved to Michigan, outside his jurisdiction.) During and after World War I, Landis became particularly noted for prosecuting radicals. He sentenced Victor Berger, a socialist congressman from Wisconsin, to twenty years in prison for criticizing the war in a newspaper editorial. Later he said that he would far rather have stood Berger in front of a firing squad. That sentence was later overturned.

  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 launderi
ng 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 a
n 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.