One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  From the jail, the procession drove at high speed (which in 1927 was about 40 miles per hour) over the Queensboro Bridge, then across Manhattan by way of Central Park, but it constantly got bogged down in traffic.

  No place in the world was less hospitable to a speeding convoy than New York in the 1920s. It was the most congested city on earth. It contained more cars than the whole of Germany, but it also still had fifty thousand horses. The combination of hurrying motorized vehicles, plodding carts and horses, and lunging pedestrians made New York’s streets wildly dangerous. Over a thousand people were killed in traffic accidents in New York in 1927—four times the number killed there annually in traffic accidents today. Taxicabs alone were responsible for seventy-five deaths in Manhattan that year.

  In an effort to improve things, traffic lights had been introduced to Manhattan three years earlier, but so far they had little detectable effect. Elsewhere traffic improvements were being implemented where they could be, but in the short term these just added to the chaos. Along Park Avenue, the leafy central esplanade was in the process of having eighteen feet sliced off each side to add extra lanes between Forty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Streets, thus taking most of the park out of Park Avenue. Along the west side of Manhattan, noise and congestion were further aggravated by the construction of the Holland Tunnel, which would open that fall. It was a wonder of the age—the longest underwater tunnel in the world—but the challenge of boring and ventilating a tube a mile and a half long a hundred feet beneath the earth was so formidable that the tunnel’s designer and chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, dropped dead from the stress before it was finished. He was only forty-one, but at least he had the honor of having the tunnel named for him. His successor, Milton H. Freeman, keeled over just four months into the job himself, dead of a heart attack of his own, but received no commemoration. Thirteen other workers died in the course of construction. To most New Yorkers in the summer of 1927, however, the Holland Tunnel was just a mighty disruption to traffic.

  So it was optimistic of the Gray-Snyder motorcade to hope that it could somehow clear a way through the chaotic streets. Worse, because it was so instantly recognizable, whenever the motorcade stopped or slowed, people crowded around to peer through the windows in hopes of spying the murderers within, slowing its progress even more. News of the convoy’s arrival on a street spread like wildfire. “Occupants of street cars deserted their seats to rush out into the roadway,” noted the Times reporter in a tone of some amazement.

  Matters actually worsened when the motorcade got moving. Many onlookers excitedly stepped into the road to try to get a better view, forcing the motorcycles to swerve dangerously. Several cars in the motorcade were involved in minor accidents, some repeatedly, often with each other, and the head of the motorcycle squadron, Sergeant William Cassidy, was thrown from his bike and into the side of the car carrying Ruth Snyder, causing her to shriek, but he suffered only minor injuries. Alderman Murtha’s car overheated and failed to make it out of the city, to the presumed disappointment of his wife and children. At length, Snyder and Gray arrived at Sing Sing, where they vanished through the gates and off the nation’s front pages. They would not be big news again until the following January, when their execution was set.

  Then came the most shocking story of the summer.

  On the morning of May 19, readers of the New York Times woke up to this headline:

  MANIAC BLOWS UP SCHOOL,

  KILLS 42, MOSTLY CHILDREN;

  HAD PROTESTED HIGH TAXES

  The maniac in question was one Andrew Kehoe, who until that day had been regarded by everyone who knew him in his hometown of Bath, Michigan, as a sane and pleasant man. A graduate of Michigan State University, down the road in Lansing, Kehoe farmed just outside town and was part-time treasurer of the local school board. He was so little suspected of anything untoward that a teacher from the school the previous day had phoned and asked if they could hold a school picnic on his land. What the teacher didn’t know at the time of the call was that Kehoe either had or was just about to slaughter his poor wife. What is certain now is that Andrew Kehoe had grown severely unhinged. A bank was about to foreclose on his farm, an act he blamed on local school taxes, and he had decided to respond in the most chilling manner imaginable.

  In the early hours of May 18, while the rest of Bath slept, Andrew Kehoe made repeated trips into the basement of the school carrying boxes of dynamite and pyrotol, a military explosive. Altogether he stacked five hundred pounds of explosives throughout the basement. Then he wired them all together and ran a master line out to his car, parked out front. The following morning children arrived at school as on any normal day. Bath’s school educated children from every level, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. On this day, attendance was slightly reduced because it was commencement week and seniors had been given the day off.

  At 9:40 a.m., a sudden and tremendous explosion blew apart the building’s north wing, which housed third, fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. “Witnesses say that Kehoe sat in his automobile in front of the school and gloated as he watched the bodies of the children hurled into the air by his diabolical plot,” the New York Times reported in horrified tones. Ninety children were trapped in the wreckage, many seriously injured.

  As the whole town rushed to the scene, Kehoe tried to detonate a second cache of explosives in the trunk of his car, but it failed to go off. Emory Huyck, the school superintendent, struggled with Kehoe to stop him from doing any more damage, but Kehoe managed to pull out a pistol and fire it into the trunk, setting off another blast that killed him, Huyck, and a bystander. Many others were injured. Altogether, forty-four people died that day: thirty-seven children and seven adults. Three families lost two children each. When firemen and policemen went through the building afterward, they were astonished to find that several stacks of explosives under the building’s other wings hadn’t detonated. Had they done so, the death toll would have been in the hundreds.

  By coincidence, just across the fields from Bath was Round Lake, site of a summer cottage where Al Capone was often to be found, particularly when he needed to lie low because of police investigations. Capone had spent the whole of the previous summer there. At the time of the school massacre, however, he was in Chicago, representing the Italian American community for the visit of the aviator Francesco de Pinedo. Another celebrity familiar with the locality was Babe Ruth, who had been arrested the previous June just down the road in the town of Howell for fishing illegally before the start of the season.

  After the massacre, it emerged that these may not have been Kehoe’s first murders. Years earlier, Kehoe may very possibly have murdered his stepmother. This unfortunate woman, his father’s second wife, died in hideous pain when an oil stove she was lighting exploded in her face, covering her in burning oil. Investigations showed that the stove had been tampered with. Andrew Kehoe, still just a boy, was the only person who could have done it, but nothing could be proved and no charges were brought.

  The Bath massacre was the largest and most cold-blooded slaughter of children in the history of the United States, yet it was quickly forgotten by the wider world. Within two days, the New York Times had almost completely stopped covering it. Instead, like nearly everyone else in the world, it became consumed with the story of a young man from Minnesota and his heroic flight to Paris. For the next six weeks on every day but two the lead story in the New York Times was about aviation.

  6

  On the last night of his life that he could move about freely in the world, like a normal person, Charles Lindbergh agreed to a suggestion by Richard Blythe, the Wright Corporation’s PR man, that they go into the city and attend a show.

  It was a great year for playgoing—the best ever on Broadway in terms of choice, if not quality. Two hundred sixty-four productions opened that year, more than at any time before or since. Lindbergh and Blythe had about seventy-five plays, musicals, and revues to choose from. They decided on Rio Rita, a musica
l comedy in two acts—a good choice since it was not only a smash hit but also in the lavish new Ziegfeld Theatre at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, which was itself an attraction.

  The theater, which had opened in March, was an extravaganza of architectural opulence. Among much else, it boasted the largest oil painting in the world. Depicting great lovers in history, the painting was larger than the ceiling mural in the Sistine Chapel and more agreeable to contemplate, as a reporter for The New Yorker drily observed, because you didn’t have to lie on your back to enjoy it. The new theater was so plush, many observers noted, that the seats were upholstered on the backs as well as the fronts.

  The plot of Rio Rita was interestingly improbable. Set in Mexico and Texas, it involved an Irish American singer named Rio Rita, a Texas Ranger traveling incognito while looking for a bandit named Kinkajou (who may or may not have been Rita’s brother), a bigamous soap salesman named Chick Bean, and a character identified only as Montezuma’s Daughter. These characters and some others of equal implausibility engaged in a series of amusing misunderstandings interrupted at intervals by songs that had little or nothing to do with the actions that preceded or followed. A cast of 131 and a full orchestra provided a great deal of happy noise and spectacle, if not always an abundance of sense.*

  Plausibility, it seems, was not something that audiences insisted on in the 1920s. Katy Did, which had opened the previous week at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre, involved a waitress who, according to the plot summary, falls for “a dishwasher and parttime bootlegger who turns out to be the exiled King of Suavia.” Stigma, by Dorothy Manley and Donald Duff, concerned a lonely professor’s wife who falls for a handsome boarder (played by Duff), but loses her mind when she discovers that he has impregnated their black maid. Spellbound, by Walter Elwood, centered on a mother who poisons her two sons’ coffee in the curious belief that it will discourage them from drinking alcohol, but with the unfortunate consequence that one son is rendered paraplegic and the other left brain-damaged. The poor mother in despair runs off to do missionary work. Even by the forgiving standards of 1927, that play was so bad that it closed after three days.

  It wasn’t all froth and melodrama, however. Eugene O’Neill produced his longest and densest play in 1927, Strange Interlude, which took five hours to perform and gave audiences an expansive, not to say exhausting, look at insanity, abortion, heartbreak, illegitimacy, and death. Audiences watched the first part of the play from 5:15 to 7:00 p.m., had a break for dinner, and then returned at 8:30 for a further three and a half hours of punishing gloom.

  In the event, Lindbergh’s party (one or two others from the airfield had joined him and Blythe) never got to the theater that evening. As they arrived in Manhattan, Lindbergh decided to check the weather forecasts for one last time that day. A light rain was falling and the tops of the skyscrapers around him were lost in drifting murk, so the phone call was really a formality, but to his astonishment Lindbergh learned that conditions at sea were clearing and that reasonably good weather was expected. At once, he and his party returned to Long Island to prepare for a morning flight.

  They had much to do, including getting his plane towed from Curtiss Field to Roosevelt. Lindbergh fussed over the plane for a few hours, but late in the evening his mechanics ordered him to go back to the Garden City Hotel and get some sleep. There Lindbergh was met in the lobby by reporters who had learned of his planned departure and wanted information for the morning editions. They detained him for half an hour with their questions. By the time Lindbergh finally got to bed it was after midnight. He was just dropping off when the door flew open and George Stumpf—who had been posted outside to see that no one disturbed him—came in. “Slim, what am I going to do when you’re gone?” he asked plaintively—a strange question since the two men had known each other for only a week. Lindbergh spoke patiently to Stumpf for a minute or two, then sent him away, but it was too late and he was too keyed up. In the end, he got no sleep that night.

  Lindbergh returned to Roosevelt Field a little before three in the morning. A light drizzle hung in the air, but the weather reports promised clearer weather by daybreak. Fueling the plane took most of the night—it was a fussy process because the fuel had to be filtered through cheesecloth to remove any impurities—and all the systems had to be checked. If Lindbergh was nervous, he gave no hint of it. His manner was calm and cheerful throughout the final preparations. He packed five ham and chicken sandwiches, though he would eat only one, when he was already over France. He took one quart of water.

  At some time after seven in the morning, Lindbergh folded his lanky frame into the cockpit. The plane started up with a throaty rumble and coughed out a cloud of blue smoke before it settled into a rhythmic roar—intensely loud but reassuringly steady. After a few moments Lindbergh gave a nod and the plane began to creep forward.

  After weeks of rain, the runway was soft and strewn with puddles. The Spirit of St. Louis moved as if rolling over a mattress. Almost all the other airmen and crews had arrived to watch. Fokker drove his big Lancia sedan, loaded with fire extinguishers, to the far end of the runway. Just beyond him, the spot where Fonck had crashed nine months earlier still bore scorch marks.

  Lindbergh’s plane slowly gained speed, but seemed “glued to the earth,” as Fokker recalled later. The propeller had been set at an angle to provide maximum fuel efficiency in flight, but that meant a sacrifice in power at liftoff—and that deficiency was worryingly evident as the plane used up more and more runway without showing any sign of rising. Lindbergh in his cockpit had another concern to deal with. His lack of forward visibility, he now realized, made it impossible for him to be certain that he was moving in a completely straight line—something he very much needed to do. The plane had never been this loaded before—indeed, no Wright Whirlwind engine had ever tried to lift this much.

  “Five hundred feet from the end, it still hugged the earth,” Fokker wrote in his memoirs. “In front of him was a tractor; telephone wires bordered the field. My heart stood still.” As with Nungesser and Coli at Le Bourget, Lindbergh’s plane rose tentatively and came back to earth with a clumsy bump, then rose and fell again. Finally on the third try it lifted. It was, some spectators reported, as if Lindbergh had willed it into the air. Even Lindbergh viewed it as a kind of miracle—“5,000 pounds balanced on a blast of air,” he wrote in Spirit of St. Louis.

  The plane rose so ponderously that it seemed to have little chance of clearing the telephone wires straight ahead—wires that Lindbergh could not himself see. He would learn his failure from the sudden twang of snagged cables, followed an instant later by a crash no human could survive. Bernt Balchen, watching from halfway along the runway, was certain that Lindbergh could not make it, and he cried out with relief when the plane just cleared the wires. He called it a masterly takeoff. Chamberlin declared: “My heart was in my throat. It seemed impossible. It took guts.” Fokker predicted that Lindbergh would reach Europe but would come nowhere near Paris because of the impossibility of navigating while flying solo. Byrd was especially gracious. “His takeoff was the most skilful thing I have ever seen on the part of any aviator,” he told reporters. “He is a wonderful boy.”

  What most spectators remarked on afterward was the silence. As the Spirit of St. Louis took to the sky, there was no cheering—just an uneasy quiet at how close Lindbergh had come to those wires and how alone he now was in that small fabric-covered plane. The time of takeoff was officially recorded as 7:52 a.m. The spectators watched until the plane was no longer visible, then quietly dispersed in a contemplative frame of mind.

  From Roosevelt Field, Lindbergh turned north, passing over the great estates of Long Island’s North Shore before heading out over the misty gray waters of Long Island Sound at Port Jefferson. Across the sound lay the Connecticut shore, thirty-five miles away. Perhaps nothing speaks more powerfully of the challenge that faced him than that that was more water than he had ever crossed by plane before.

  Th
rough most of that Friday Lindbergh’s progress could be followed fairly closely. As the Spirit of St. Louis sailed over Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts reports came in more or less constantly confirming his position and that he seemed to be doing fine. By noon he was over Nova Scotia, and at mid-afternoon over Cape Breton Island. In Washington, Congress interrupted its proceedings for regular announcements of his progress. Everywhere people gathered outside newspaper offices for updates. In Detroit, Charles’s mother taught chemistry at Cass Technical High as on any other day. She wanted to keep the flight out of her mind, but students and colleagues constantly brought her the latest news. Shortly after 6:00 p.m. eastern time Lindbergh passed over the last rocky extremity of North America on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland and headed out over open ocean.

  Now he would be out of touch completely for sixteen hours if all went well; forever if it didn’t.

  At Yankee Stadium that night, an audience of twenty-three thousand people attending a fight between Jack Sharkey and Jim Maloney bowed their heads in a minute of silent prayer before Sharkey beat Maloney senseless. All across America wherever people gathered, prayers were said. No one could do anything now but wait. For many the tension was too much. Ten thousand people called the New York Times asking for news even though everyone knew there couldn’t be any.

  In Paris the possibility of Lindbergh’s arrival stirred little sense of anticipation at first. Myron Herrick, America’s ambassador to France, had no idea at all when he awoke on Saturday, May 21, what excitements the weekend had in store for him. He planned to spend that Saturday at the Stade Français at Saint-Cloud watching his fellow Americans Bill Tilden and Francis T. Hunter compete against Jean Borotra and Jacques Brugnon in Franco-American team tennis matches, a kind of warm-up for the coming Davis Cup tournament.