The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  The wheels of justice in Miami gave new meaning to the term “speedy trial,” as the criminal process against Zangara proceeded with uncharacteristic dispatch. Even Cermak commented on Florida’s unique legal system. “They certainly mete out justice pretty fast in this state,” he said. “If the law could be enforced this swiftly in other states … it would have a great tendency to check crime.” At ten A.M. on February 20—a mere four days after the shooting—Zangara’s trial began. The Miami Herald editorialized that morning that the United States should “round up” people of the “Zangara class” and send them back to their country of origin—“any with radical opinions must be barred.”

  Reporters, photographers, and newsreel operators swarmed the courtroom and corridors. Zangara appeared composed and alert, as if his steady jailhouse diet of milk and eggs was agreeable with his stomach condition. “The people could not understand how I could take things so calm and contented,” he wrote in his memoir. “They marveled at the way I took it. I was not worried.”

  Judge Collins asked Zangara how he wanted to plead to the charges against him. “Your Honor,” one of his lawyers said, standing to address the court. “My client has insisted on his guilt. He has one gruesome regret. He is sorry he did not succeed in his attempt on the life of President-elect Roosevelt. He scoffs at the idea he may be insane. After talking with the doctors and Zangara, we came to the conclusion he could be nothing but sane.”

  Before sentencing Zangara, the judge briefly questioned him, hoping to determine some semblance of motive. Zangara, rambling and overwrought, summarized his incentive for killing Roosevelt: Capitalists were responsible for his father’s poverty and oppression. His father reacted by abusing Zangara, which caused Zangara’s physical problems. Hence, capitalists caused his stomach pain, and Roosevelt was the supreme capitalist. “You see I suffer all the time and I suffer because my father send me to work when I was a little boy—spoil my life … If I was well I no bother the president.” As he told his story, newspaper photographers and newsreel cameras captured his words and images and flashed them throughout the world.

  Collins brought the tirade to a halt and directed Zangara to leave the witness box and approach the bench for sentencing. The prisoner had pleaded guilty to four counts of attempted murder, each one punishable by up to twenty years in prison. Dispensing the maximum sentence, Collins ordered him remanded to eighty years of hard labor in the state penitentiary.

  Laughing out loud, Zangara shouted insolently: “Oh judge, don’t be stingy. Give me hundred years!”

  “Perhaps you’ll get more later,” Judge Collins replied.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Old Sparky

  At six fifty-seven A.M. on Monday, March 6—nineteen days after the attempted assassination—Cermak was pronounced dead. Just hours later, Giuseppe Zangara was indicted on charges of first-degree murder.

  “Not my fault. Woman move my hand,” Zangara said when informed that Cermak had died. When asked whether he was sorry, he replied: “Sure I sorry, like when die bird, or horse, or cow, I sorry.”

  Thousands of Miamians turned out to watch the funeral cortege that took Cermak’s body from the Philbrick Funeral Home to the railroad depot. American Legion pallbearers carried the bronze, flag-draped coffin as a band played “Nearer My God to Thee” and church bells pealed in the early evening air of March 6. A special seven-car train, swathed in black and purple, would take the martyred mayor back to his beloved Chicago.

  When the train arrived two days later at Chicago’s Twelfth Street Station, it was met by the city council and swarms of bereaved citizens. Flags were at half-mast, and the open casket was taken to Cermak’s home in the Chicago neighborhood of Lawndale, where nearly fifty thousand came to view the body. It then lay in state at City Hall for twenty-four hours, attracting another seventy-five thousand spectators. At Chicago Stadium—where, ironically, Roosevelt had been nominated over Cermak’s opposition less than a year earlier—the floor became a “sea of lawn and flowers in the form of a great cross,” according to one account. More than half a million souls lined the procession of what was the largest funeral in Chicago history. The fifty-nine-year-old Czechoslovakian immigrant had risen to power in one of America’s toughest cities, fighting organized crime and a longtime Irish American stranglehold on the city. He was eulogized as a symbol of patriotism—the man who gave his life for Franklin Roosevelt—but the cause of his death was shrouded in controversy.

  Zangara could be charged with murder only if his bullet had directly resulted in Cermak’s death. But medical evidence indicated that if surgeons had removed the bullet the night of the incident, Cermak probably would have survived, raising the specter of malpractice. Still, all nine of his physicians signed the autopsy report stating that death culminated “as a result of the bullet causing cardiac failure, gangrene of the lung and peritonitis.”

  After a Florida grand jury indicted Zangara on charges of first-degree murder, he was rushed before Miami Circuit Court Judge Uly O. Thompson three days later for sentencing. His previous three defense attorneys were reappointed. “These ones take care of me,” Zangara said facetiously, apparently referring to their facilitation of his previous maximum sentence. Again he pleaded guilty, and again the judge questioned him perfunctorily, and again Zangara insisted that he did not mean to kill Cermak or anyone else except Roosevelt. “Supposed to kill the chief,” he said. “The chief is the boss.”

  Zangara had remained incarcerated at the Dade County Jail for the intervening three weeks since the shooting, in anticipation of murder charges in the event either Cermak or Gill expired. During that time he began his memoir, which plainly and unrepentantly recorded his hatred for capitalists and desire to kill Roosevelt.

  In staccato shouts from the witness stand that were reminiscent of his earlier hearing, Zangara reiterated his intentions. “I want to kill all capitalists. Because of capitalists, people get no bread … I feel I have a right to kill him [Roosevelt] … It was right. I know they give me electric chair, but I don’t care—I’m right.”

  Judge Thompson used the opportunity to advocate for gun-control legislation. “Assassins roaming at will through the land—and they have killed three of our Presidents—are permitted to have pistols. And a pistol in the hands of the ordinary person is a most useless weapon of defense. No one can foresee what might have happened had Zangara been successful in his attempt.”

  When Thompson asked him whether he had any final words, the moment at which most capital suspects express remorse and plead for leniency, Zangara was resolute. “I want to kill the president because I no like the government. Because I think it is run by the capitalists, all crooks, and a lot of people make a lot of money. Things run for the money.”

  Thompson sentenced him to death by electric chair.

  “You is crook man too,” Zangara yelled at the judge. “I no afraid. You one of the capitalists.”

  A squad of National Guardsmen armed with machine guns transported him from Miami to the Florida State Prison farm, four hundred miles north at Raiford. His execution was set for Monday, March 20—a mere ten days after his sentencing. He was placed in a tiny steel cell in the “death house,” a concrete building adjacent to the execution chamber. Once he was issued his striped prison uniform, he posed for the dozens of press photographers. The Florida governor had ordered that no one could interview the prisoner, but the prison warden, Leonard F. Chapman, was so intrigued by Zangara that he spent hours in conversation with him. Guarded twenty-four hours a day in his metal cage, Zangara worked busily to complete his memoir, which he then gave to the warden.

  Chapman had become unusually fond of Zangara in the short time that the prisoner was housed at Raiford. He came to the conclusion that Zangara was sane and was a member of a secret Italian terrorist organization, similar to the Mafia, called Camorra. Chapman described Zangara as “a being utterly unassimilated, a foreigner wandering in a strange land and making no effort to understand that
land; practicing the hatreds which came natural to him; bent on the ancient wheel; bringing to flower the code of the Camorra; attempting to correct a fancied wrong by wreaking personal vengeance.”

  Lashing rains poured from the sky on Monday morning as prison guards retrieved Zangara for his death march to “Old Sparky,” as Florida’s electric chair was affectionately called by avid proponents of capital punishment. Though more solemn than usual, he went willingly. “I am not making a hero out of Zangara,” recalled a psychiatrist who was among the forty witnesses, but he “had more nerve than any man I ever saw.”

  Chapman had supervised more than 135 executions, but he had never seen such bravery as that exhibited by this little Italian, whom Chapman described as dapper in his striped prison outfit. As he walked to the electric chair, Zangara paused next to Chapman and handed him the three notebooks that contained his thirty-four-chapter autobiography, written in Italian, in longhand. “With a courtly bow, reminiscent of the days of old Italy, even with an almost ironical grace, he handed me these books, making the calm and confident announcement as if he were leaving for the ages a legacy of priceless value: ‘This is the book.’ ”

  Having been pronounced sane but “perverse,” Zangara would be executed in the swiftest capital punishment in twentieth-century America. His head had been shaved for placement of the fatal electrode, a black hood was tied over his head, and his arms were strapped to the chair. Zangara then spoke his last words, powerfully and defiantly.

  “Viva Italia! Viva Camorra! Goodbye to all poor people everywhere!”

  Then, as if surprised that he was still alive, he said: “Push the button. Go ahead and push the button!”

  “The execution of a man is unbelievably simple,” Chapman later wrote. “No smoke, no burning flesh, no odor. Just a rigid body and shortly death. Witnesses quiet. Newsmen taking notes.”

  An autopsy on Zangara’s body revealed a normal brain and a chronically diseased gallbladder. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the prison grounds at Raiford.

  J. Edgar Hoover apparently never investigated any of the alleged ties between Zangara and either a national group of anarchists or Chicago organized crime figures. Characteristically, the nation’s grandstanding top cop used the event to incite fear and thereby elevate his own stature and build power for his agency. As for the probe itself, Hoover showed no interest in determining whether Zangara acted alone, had accomplices, or was part of a larger conspiracy.

  Had Zangara’s bullet found its intended target—had Roosevelt been killed and Cermak lived—John Nance Garner would have become president, and there never would have been the New Deal that would revolutionize American government, business, culture, and society. Cermak, the boss of Chicago, was poised to dominate the political scene in that city for years to come. If he had survived, the powerful Richard Daley machine that would shape Illinois politics into the twenty-first century might never have risen.

  “Had Giuseppe Zangara had steadier aim and a clearer shot in February of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt would be remembered now as a footnote to history instead of as the greatest President of the twentieth century,” historian Geoffrey C. Ward wrote.

  Part Two

  To Kill the New Deal

  Fascism always comes through a vast pretense of socialism backed by Wall Street money.

  —WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A Good Beginning

  On Monday, March 6, Roosevelt’s first weekday in office, he learned of Cermak’s death. That morning he attended the funeral of his attorney general–designate, the elderly Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, who had died suddenly of a heart attack on the way to the inauguration. A widower, the seventy-two-year-old Walsh had traveled surreptitiously to Havana to marry a beautiful young Cuban woman and had been stricken while returning from Florida to Washington by rail. The deaths of both men came as a shock to Roosevelt at a moment when he needed to focus his full attention on the economic and social crisis at hand. Walsh, a distinguished statesman and brilliant attorney, had been instrumental in convincing the president to invoke the Trading with the Enemy Act, and Roosevelt felt the loss sorely.

  That afternoon he hosted a governors’ conference in the East Room of the White House, at which eighteen of the attendees signed a pledge expressing their “confidence in the leadership of the President” and beseeching Congress and all Americans to cooperate with the new administration. The body as a whole then adopted a resolution expressing its desire that Congress immediately grant him “such broad powers as may be necessary to enable the Executive to meet the present challenging emergency.” In his meeting with the governors, Roosevelt obfuscated about his strategies for solving the bank emergency because he really did not yet know how the proposed legislation was going to shape up. While his advisers worked feverishly behind the scenes to create a banking bill, Roosevelt acted as a clearinghouse for all their ideas. Most of the bankers who had descended on Washington were sequestered with the shy and slight treasury secretary, William Woodin. Many were calling for the nationalization of the banking system, in which all the assets would be assembled into one central, government-owned national bank that would have branches throughout the country. The self-effacing Woodin, who was the former president of the American Car and Foundry Company and had switched parties in order to support Roosevelt, reached out across the aisle to high-level Republicans, former Hoover officials, and Wall Street financiers. He realized that the catastrophe required the best minds and ideas the country had to offer, and in that vein he sought urgent bipartisan cooperation, while keeping Roosevelt’s left-leaning advisers “well in the background.” Moley later said that they “were just a bunch of men trying to save the banking system,” putting party politics on the back burner in favor of the common good. Moley’s machinations in the process elicited acrimony among liberal members of the Brain Trust, who accused him of covertly grasping at power within the administration.

  Woodin recognized that the underpinnings of the solvency crisis were, as President Hoover had repeatedly contended, a question of confidence. Still, the government couldn’t simply issue scrip and expect that to reassure the public. To Woodin, the very concept of state and municipal scrips floating across the country was abysmal. A talented musician who had composed the “Franklin Delano Roosevelt March” for the previous Saturday’s inauguration, Woodin quietly plucked his guitar while listening for hours to the proposals put forth by the steady stream of bankers.

  By Tuesday morning, Woodin had settled on a plan that, ironically, was based on a draft prepared by Hoover’s secretary of the treasury, Ogden Mills, on the last day of the Hoover presidency. In accordance with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the government would not simply print more money, but would produce Federal Reserve banknotes that were collateralized by bank assets rather than gold. “It won’t frighten people,” Woodin told Moley over breakfast. “It won’t look like stage money. It will be money that looks like money.”

  During the frantic days of creating the Emergency Banking Act, which would “rescue the moribund corpse of American finance,” as New Deal historian David Kennedy put it, the Roosevelt team worked around the clock, unable to sleep with such a daunting task at hand. “Only Roosevelt,” Moley recalled, “preserved the air of a man who’d found a happy way of life.” The rest of them had frayed nerves and short tempers, and had reached a level of exhaustion that obstructed clear thinking. “Confusion, haste, the dread of making mistakes, the consciousness of responsibility for the economic well-being of millions of people, made mortal inroads on the health of some of us … and left the rest of us ready to snap at our own images in the mirror,” Moley wrote. But Roosevelt, with his placid temperament and optimistic fatalism, seemed not to have a care in the world. To him, things were going splendidly.

  On Wednesday morning, March 8, Roosevelt held the first of what would be nearly a thousand press conferences, winning over the 125 rep
orters who made their way to the Oval Office. During the course of the Hoover administration, the relationship between the White House and the press corps had become a chilly standoff. Now, Roosevelt set out to create a lively give-and-take session of conviviality that would serve his political agenda, Americans’ right to transparency, and journalists’ need for riveting copy. As the newspapermen crowded in, the president greeted them individually, shaking hands and beaming his infectious smile. Seated at his desk, which was adorned with a bouquet of flowers, Roosevelt wore an elegant navy blue suit and stark white shirt. After a series of jokes and banter to lighten the mood, he got down to business and set the ground rules.

  “I am told that what I am about to do will become impossible, but I am going to try it,” he began, and then revealed his plan to hold twice-weekly press conferences to accommodate the newspapers’ deadlines. Following a model he had devised as governor of New York, he set forth the guidelines: No radio coverage was allowed. His comments would be “on background” and reporters could not quote him directly unless they acquired verbal consent. He would not entertain any hypothetical questions. From time to time he would reveal information meant to be totally “off the record.” As it turned out, Roosevelt was inadvertently setting journalistic precedents that would shape professional standards for the future, as well as creating the prototype for the modern presidential press conference—“the most amazing performance of its kind the White House has ever seen,” enthused a Baltimore Sun reporter.