The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  The short, 105-pound Zangara—“a swarthy Italian, typical of his breed,” said the Miami Herald—was immediately portrayed as an unhinged anarchist with a perverse obsession with regicide. Indeed, Joe—as his few friends called him—had tried to assassinate King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy eleven years earlier, but the Royal Guards and an impenetrable crowd thwarted him. He, like droves of anti-Fascist Italians, had emigrated to the United States in 1923 after the king handed over power to Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. Once he’d arrived, he’d contemplated shooting President Calvin Coolidge but never had the opportunity, and before he knew it, Herbert Hoover had become president. He apparently cooled to the idea of assassination for a decade, manifesting his anti-capitalist, anti-Fascist proclivities by joining groups of Italo-American radicals in the labor movement bent on keeping Fascism from gaining a foothold in the United States.

  Then, while living in Miami in the winter of 1933 he decided to assassinate President Hoover and made plans to travel to Washington to do the deed. He blamed Hoover for the Depression and had absorbed the anti-Hoover rhetoric permeating the nation. “I was figuring to go to Washington—straight to Washington—to kill Hoover before Hoover go out,” he said. He kept delaying his trip because he preferred the balmy weather in Miami to the freezing temperatures farther north. Sitting on a pier one morning, he heard a newsboy shout that President-elect Roosevelt was going to make an appearance at Bayfront Park on February 15, and he decided Roosevelt would be a more convenient target. Zangara drew no distinction between Hoover and Roosevelt. In his mind, Roosevelt was just another exploitative bourgeois politician who, like Hoover, was a rich man simpatico with the oppressive Mussolini regime. “I want to keel all presidents,” he said in one of his many rants. “I see Mr. Hoover, I kill him first. Make no difference. President just the same bunch. All same. Run by big money,” he testified.

  Born September 7, 1900, to Rose and Salvatore Zangara in Ferruzzano—a farming village in the dirt-poor hill country of Calabria—Zangara had an inauspicious beginning. As an infant, he required surgery for an inner-ear defect, which convinced his mother that he brought bad luck to the family. When she died in childbirth two years later, the tragedy was attributed to his curse. His father quickly married a widow who had six daughters, and Zangara’s status changed overnight from only child to the only boy in a brood of girls. He habitually fell as a toddler, once breaking his wrist when he tumbled down a flight of stairs and another time becoming burned when he fell into a fire.

  His father was a brutal abuser who refused to let him attend school, forcing him to work in the fields instead. “You don’t need no school. You need work,” Zangara recalled his father telling him. He instilled in the young boy a deep-seated resentment of authority and an absolute loathing of the wealthy “capitalists.” Zangara began to “hate very violently” while he was just “a little boy,” he said. At the age of seven, he worked with his father’s livestock, and when he once lost a cow, his father beat and kicked him “like a dog.” “From that day on,” he said, “he worked me so hard I became sick. I was beaten and starved and overworked when I should have been going to school, and eat and sleep like other children. That was when my stomach trouble started.”

  He yearned to escape from his father’s tyranny and developed fantasies about traveling the world. He became an apprentice bricklayer and mason, and at the age of eighteen, near the end of World War I, he joined the Italian army as a laborer. He was dispatched to the Austrian front to build trenches. When the war ended, he left the army, but after a minor brush with the law in 1921, he was drafted as a soldier and referred to the Seventieth Infantry Regiment. Zangara hated military life, and while at basic training in Tuscany, he began suffering from what he called “the stomachache”—chronic pain he ascribed to his forced labor as a child. He attended the Italian Military College in Rome and was assigned to be an orderly for a captain and his wife, who were members of the privileged class he had learned to despise.

  After an uncomfortable period during which he was expected to attend to the couple’s every need—and received severe punishment when he failed to meet their expectations—Zangara repeatedly requested a transfer. Eventually he was appointed as a gardener at the college, and then as a guard for the paymaster’s office, where he plotted to steal the payroll. “I needed it,” he wrote in his memoir, “for my suffering.” It was during this stint that he took a pistol to a railroad depot with the intention of killing the king. But, as in his ill-fated attempt on Roosevelt, his short stature and inability to navigate a crowd deterred him. “The guards got in front of me and I could not get a shot at him because the guards are over six foot tall and I could not even see the king.”

  Once discharged, Zangara applied for a visa at the U.S. consulate in Sicily, and on August 16, 1923, he embarked on the S.S. Martha Washington, sailing from Naples to Philadelphia. There he met up with his maternal uncle, thirty-five-year-old Vincent Carfaro. The two men moved to New Jersey, where Zangara quickly found work as a bricklayer during Bayonne’s building boom. When it became clear that the most lucrative jobs were controlled by the Bricklayers, Masons, and Plasterers trade union—an American Federation of Labor affiliate that required its members to be U.S. citizens—Zangara underwent the rigorous examinations in English and American history then required to obtain citizenship. Motivated solely by the union prerequisite, and not out of any desire to become an American, Zangara was finally naturalized on September 11, 1929. He swiftly joined the union and the Republican Party.

  As it turned out, the long citizenship process did him little good. A month after his naturalization came the market crash and then the Great Depression, which stymied the New Jersey construction industry. But his previous six years of solid employment—including stints as an independent contractor of small houses and as a laborer on commercial projects like the Alexander Hamilton Hotel and Fabian Theater in Paterson, New Jersey—during which he earned an average of twelve dollars a day, enabled him to buy fine clothes, drive a new Chevrolet, and maintain as much as three thousand dollars in a savings account. He had once checked himself into a hospital in Paterson complaining of sharp pains and no appetite. Doctors were unable to diagnose the problem, but they removed his appendix for good measure. In a short period of time, the pain returned, further fueling his distrust of authority figures.

  Most of his neighbors and acquaintances thought him quiet, subdued, unremarkable, passive, and nonthreatening. He was described as a loner who had little or no interest in women and whose only pastime was an occasional game of checkers. He hated cold weather, never went outside after dark, and compulsively sought out remedies for his ongoing abdominal pain and flatulence.

  Some, however, said his benign demeanor belied a virulent radicalism and violent underpinnings. A Hackensack contractor who had hired Zangara for numerous jobs over a nine-year period called him “an anarchist, socialist and Communist … an inflammatory character” and “lunch-hour orator” who would animatedly denounce “governments and men in power, preach radical doctrines and advocate the killing of government leaders.” Likewise, Los Angeles police captain William F. Hynes, an infamous subversive-hunter, claimed that Zangara “fostered and founded” a group of bomb-making anarchists who operated throughout the country and that he was planning to assassinate Mussolini. Hynes told the Los Angeles Times that his agency’s Red Squad had conducted a lengthy undercover investigation of the group and that Zangara had fled California when he got wind of the probe. Hynes’s account was undermined when he told the Associated Press that he had no information in his files on Zangara. That did not prevent Hynes from later contending that he had evidence that Zangara was an organizer for L’Era Nuova (the New Age), an Italian anarchist organization that had recruited operatives planning to kill Herbert Hoover when he attended the opening ceremonies of the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. (That attempt was ostensibly spoiled when Hoover dispatched his vice president instead, according to Hynes.)


  The day after the shooting, W. H. Moran, the director of the Secret Service, announced that his agency had concluded that Zangara was “not a maniac, but a member of a recognized anarchist group making its headquarters in Paterson, New Jersey.” But only twenty-four hours later, that agency was backpedaling, downplaying any political motivation and depicting him instead as “a lonesome, morose character, sorely beset by a chronic stomach ailment since 1923, but with no particular grudge against the government.”

  The most substantive allegations tying Zangara to a violent anti-Fascist organization headquartered in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and Newark, New Jersey, were the FBI reports relating to a 1931 bombing of a post office in Easton, Pennsylvania, and 1932 bombings in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Youngstown and at the Vatican in Rome. This same group was responsible for the bombing of the Philadelphia home of John Di Silvestro, a prominent attorney and banker and the pro-Mussolini head of the Sons of Italy. Occurring just two weeks before the assault on Roosevelt, the prodigious explosion, in which more than ten sticks of dynamite were used, captured national headlines. Di Silvestro was not home at the time, but his wife, Elizabeth, died instantly. Four of his children and their governess fell from the third story to the first, and were all wounded, as were eleven neighbors. A close friend of Mussolini’s and active supporter of promoting Fascism in America, Di Silvestro was a lightning rod for American anti-Fascists.

  The day after the assassination attempt on Roosevelt, Di Silvestro told the Bureau of Investigation that not only was Zangara a primary suspect in the bombing of his home but that he also possessed information indicating Zangara had “associates” in his attempt on the life of Roosevelt. Di Silvestro had also made sufficient inquiries in Italy to become convinced that the name “Zangara” was an alias.

  On February 17, five unemployed New Jersey bricklayers were arrested in connection with plots “against the lives of President-elect Roosevelt, President Hoover and other high government officials.” The arrests came after a letter written by one of the suspects was found lying randomly in a Newark street gutter. “With my most sincere regrets,” the letter read, “am forced to tell you of my brother bricklayer’s unsuccessful attempt on the life of our President-elect, and am also forced to say that everything here is in order. If I were the one who had the honor of shooting at our present President, I assure you that I would take a week to practice and make a good job of it. It seems a shame that we have in our midst a man with such poor aim. I do believe we should have a place where we could all go and practice up on our shooting, as it looks like an open season on Presidents and politicians.”

  That same day, a fifteen-year-old American-born son of Italian parents sent a crude bomb made of a gun shell to Roosevelt’s New York address. “I am friend of Zangara,” said the letter accompanying the explosive, which was defused. “I want to take up work that he fail to do. I kill all Presidents, Governors, and millionaires. I am calabrian same as Zan. I hate policemen and kill all your officers who I see on street at midnight. I am one who killed Kansas City millionaire so I kill police.” It was signed, “Paul Antonelli of Italy.” Two weeks later, postal authorities intercepted another letter bomb addressed to Roosevelt.

  Meanwhile, C. James Todaro, a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia, believed that Zangara was a member of a “wide-spread group of Anarchistic and Anti-social individuals who are responsible for a long series of bombings in this state.” In a February 21, 1933, letter to the U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania, Todaro wrote that “Zangara must have had associates and the attempt upon the President-elect was an effort on the part of these Anarchists to throw the country into turmoil as a prelude to a possible revolt.” Todaro also claimed to have information tying Zangara to famous Trotskyite Carlo Tresca. Hero to thousands of anti-Fascist Italian immigrants, notorious radical to J. Edgar Hoover, outspoken adversary of Mussolini, and mentor to American intellectuals and labor leaders, Tresca was rumored to be living in Los Angeles “under the protection of a high-ranking Sicilian Mafia chief.”

  In 1933, Mussolini was considered to be an über-capitalist by Leftists who saw Fascism as the “natural political mode of class rule if the class is too weak to maintain its profits and position through democracy,” as the scholar Nancy Bancroft wrote. “The ruling class in a modern capitalist country consists of owners of the largest banks, corporations and real estate, along with closely allied public officials and intellectuals.” That Calvin Coolidge’s administration had granted Italy a lenient debt settlement, and that J. P. Morgan had secured a hundred-million-dollar loan to the Fascist Italian government, convinced American anti-Fascists that there was an alliance between Italy and America that undermined democracy. Most of the anti-Mussolini sentiment in America was fostered by the labor movement, which saw Fascism as an attempt to sabotage the union movement and which was ever watchful of Fascist organizations cropping up in the United States. Because of Zangara’s long-standing ties to the bricklayers’ union, federal investigators scrutinized his political activities, including allegations that he had planned to assassinate Mussolini.

  Zangara consistently denied that he was part of any organization or that he was accompanied to Bayfront Park by anyone. “I do not belong to any society. I am not an anarchist. Sometime I get big pain in my stomach too, then I want to kill these presidents who oppress the working men.”

  Even before a background investigation of Zangara had been conducted, government officials immediately assumed that he was an anarchist like President McKinley’s assassin—the Polish immigrant Leon Czolgosz. In such a moment of incipient revolution throughout the world, the possibility of a conspiracy, from either the Right or the Left, was both real and alarming. “This is the United States, not Russia,” U.S. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson remarked. “No fanatic, crank or revolutionist, or any number of them will be permitted to prevent the orderly transfer of power in the government of the United States.”

  Moley played a crucial role in the containment of conspiracy theories; he was concerned that the violent act would incite further political instability at a moment of already heightened tension. With the economy struggling for survival, democracy under attack, a long and leaderless interregnum, and the very fabric of American society frayed, it was in the interest of Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, and Congress to rapidly paint Zangara’s act as an isolated eruption by a deranged man. Moley thought it imperative to downplay Zangara’s political connections, telling the New York Times that Zangara was neither “socialistic” nor “anarchistic” but that he had a “fixed idea of opposition to all heads of government.” Privately, Moley admitted that he believed Zangara to be sane and a man of considerable intelligence and that he “felt it was desirable to avoid, so far as possible, any hysteria on the subject of radicalism.”

  When police officers went to Zangara’s austere Miami boardinghouse they found all of his belongings, including expensive clothing, packed in a cheap suitcase. Three books were placed carefully in the luggage: Wehman Bros.’ Easy Method for Learning Spanish Quickly, Italian Self-Taught, and an Italian-English grammar. On top of those were newspaper clippings about Roosevelt’s visit to Miami, about Roosevelt’s half-million-dollar life insurance policy, which named the Warm Springs rehabilitation retreat in Georgia as the beneficiary, and about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

  Zangara and his intended victim were polar opposites: Zangara was the clichéd immigrant and Roosevelt the blue-blooded American. Zangara impoverished and Roosevelt a millionaire several times over. Zangara tiny and insecure, Roosevelt larger-than-life and brimming with confidence. Zangara uneducated and barely articulate, Roosevelt a product of America’s best academies and an eloquent speaker. Zangara a zealous anti-capitalist and Roosevelt an avid defender of capitalism. Above all, Zangara was one of life’s losers, while Roosevelt had triumphed over polio and won the nation’s highest office.

  Whether he was part of a larger conspiracy or a crackpot loner, Giusep
pe Zangara’s brief appearance on the national stage revealed the country’s fragility, the breadth of the Depression, and the perilous limbo of the long interregnum. He did not act in a vacuum, but rather in an atmosphere of class resentment, want, hatred, and fear. “For even if he had remained passive in his misery upon a park bench, utterly alone in the crowd,” historian Kenneth S. Davis wrote, “this unemployed little man with a bellyache would have been both symbolic and representative of the depression’s human waste.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Bony Hand of Death

  The events in Miami shook the nation and ushered in a groundswell of enthusiasm for the president-elect. Roosevelt had literally dodged a bullet and exhibited the kind of courage that Americans were desperately seeking. His own life had been spared, and he had valiantly saved a dying man. Maybe he could save the country itself from its terminal illness. The press reported his every utterance to an engrossed audience, and when he attributed his good fortune to “Divine Providence,” Americans believed their prayers for a leader had been answered. In those dark days of the Depression, as banks were teetering and people were terrified of what the future might hold, Roosevelt had become the embodiment of hope and courage.

  Paralyzed and immobile, Roosevelt had sat fixed atop his car, more defenseless than any other president had ever been. Yet, through a series of chance occurrences—a shaky chair, a cheap gun, an alert witness, a rude reporter, a stunted assailant—destiny took a sharp turn. “To a man, his country rose to applaud his cool courage in the face of death,” wrote Time magazine. “He is a martyr president at the start of his term.”

  The attack on Roosevelt was a stark reminder of the violence of American society, and though few journalists or observers noted it, the statistics were shocking. Since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, one out of every ten presidents had been shot and killed, and one out of every five had been fired upon. In fact, from 1865 to 1901, the United States was the world front-runner in “killing its elected leaders,” according to the Secret Service. “The average was one killing every twelve years and all three of the targets died from bullets fired at point-blank range.” Given the indicators and the recent episode, the federal bodyguards were on high alert. Roosevelt’s paralysis, coupled with his gregariousness, made the task of protecting him all the more challenging. “Guarding any President is difficult,” wrote his chief Secret Service agent, Michael F. Reilly. “Guarding Franklin D. Roosevelt, a crippled man who refused to allow his infirmities or their pain to keep him from traveling whenever and wherever he felt he should, was considerably more difficult.”