One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  In Washington, he carefully went over the repairs done to the Spirit of St. Louis, climbed into the familiar cockpit, and returned with the plane to New York. At seven thirty in the morning he landed at Mitchel Field in New York, content that he was at last reunited with his beloved ship. After a quick shower and a change of clothes back at the Frazee apartment, he resumed his public engagements on no sleep.

  As it turned out, the plans for Lindbergh for that day were wildly and unrealistically ambitious. He was sent on a long parade through Brooklyn, which included a speech to two hundred thousand people in Prospect Park, followed by a formal luncheon with a branch of the Knights of Columbus. Then he was to go to Yankee Stadium to meet the Yankees and watch them play the St. Louis Browns before speeding back into Manhattan for the presentation of the Orteig Prize at the Hotel Brevoort, followed by yet another formal dinner.

  At Yankee Stadium, three sections of box seats had been freshly painted to receive Lindbergh and his party, and twenty thousand fans turned out to cheer him. Babe Ruth had promised to hit a home run in his honor, but the great aviator was nowhere to be seen at game time. The teams and spectators waited nearly half an hour for Lindbergh to get there, but when word arrived that he was still in Manhattan the umpires started the game without him.

  Baseball seasons unwind slowly, and at this stage of proceedings no one had any inkling that this season would prove unusually productive for Ruth or any other Yankees. Just before the season started, Ruth himself told a reporter that he didn’t expect ever to break his 1921 home run record. “To do that, you’ve got to start early, and the pitchers have got to pitch to you,” he said. “I don’t start early, and the pitchers haven’t really pitched to me in four seasons.” As if to prove his point, he left the first game complaining of dizziness and failed to hit with vigor through the first month of the season. By May 21, the day Lindbergh landed in Paris, Ruth had just 9 home runs in 32 games.

  Then two things happened: Babe Comes Home went on general release, and Ruth suddenly came to life. Goodness knows exactly how the movie galvanized him, but its release coincided exactly and peculiarly with his hitting a lot of home runs—5 in two days, one of which, in Philadelphia, was hit so far that it left the park and cleared a two-story house across the street. By June 7, Ruth’s total had jumped to 18—a much more respectable and promising number. Two days later against Chicago at Yankee Stadium, Ruth stole home plate—something that thirty-two-year-old men with paunches didn’t normally do. The season was suddenly getting interesting.

  True to his word, Ruth hit a home run for Lindbergh on Lindbergh Day. It came in the bottom of the first against Tom Zachary, who would yield a rather more momentous home run to Ruth at the end of the season. Lou Gehrig followed Ruth to the plate and hit a home run to almost exactly the same spot. Lindbergh, alas, never arrived to see either. “I’d been saving that homer for him, and then he doesn’t show up,” Ruth said afterward. “I guess he thinks this is a twilight league.”

  Lindbergh, through no fault of his own, simply couldn’t get there. Delayed at every turn by people wanting to speak to him, shake his hand, have a moment of his time, he didn’t reach Yankee Stadium until well after five, when the game was nearly finished, at which point it was decided that he didn’t have time to go in anyway, so his motorcade turned around and went back to town for him to collect the Orteig Prize from Raymond Orteig at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. There, as everywhere, he was met by a mob and had to be bundled into the building through a sea of straining hands.

  Lindbergh was beginning to look distinctly shell-shocked. The historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon met him in the midst of all this and reported with genuine concern: “Never have I seen anyone as hopelessly tired, as courageously tired, as that boy whose brain was still doing a duty which the rest of his body could no longer follow up. Another three days of this and the reflected-glory hounds will chase him to his death.” In fact, Lindbergh had much more than three days of it to get through, and it would only get worse.

  He must at least have been glad to meet Raymond Orteig, for Orteig was a delightful and likable man with a knack for putting people at their ease. He had started life humbly as a shepherd boy in the French Pyrenees, but in 1882, at just twelve, he had followed an uncle to America. There he taught himself English, got a job as a hotel waiter, and worked his way up the ladder of opportunity until he was first the maître d’, then the manager, and finally the owner of two of Manhattan’s smartest hotels, the Lafayette and the Brevoort, both in Greenwich Village. For Orteig, Lindbergh was a savior. The Orteig Prize, offered in a moment of impetuous magnanimity, had become something of a nightmare for the Frenchman. Six men had lost their lives trying to win the prize, and until Lindbergh’s triumph it had seemed likely that that number would just keep rising. Critics had begun to observe that Orteig, however well meaning, was a murderer—a thought that was understandably painful for him to bear.

  So it was with relief and pleasure that he handed Lindbergh his check—though he must also have felt a stab of unease at parting with such a hefty sum, for $25,000 was a great deal of money in 1927 and rather more than he could comfortably afford.

  The unfortunate fact of the matter was that Orteig was going slowly out of business, and he was being killed by the same thing that was killing lots of other people, sometimes all too literally: Prohibition.

  * * *

  * New York’s Woolworth Building, 792 feet high, built in 1913, was still the tallest in the world. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, which would both overtake the Woolworth, would not be built until 1930 and 1931, respectively.

  12

  Sometime on the night of June 23, 1927, Wilson B. Hickox, age forty-three, a wealthy businessman from Cleveland, Ohio (and, coincidentally, a neighbor of Myron Herrick’s in the suburb of Cleveland Heights), returned from an evening out in New York City and poured himself a nightcap in his room in the Roosevelt Hotel.

  Shortly thereafter, Hickox began to feel some peculiar and unpleasant sensations—a tightening of the throat and chest, a kind of bitter pain spreading through his body. We may reasonably imagine the glass slipping from his hand and Hickox rising with difficulty and stumbling toward the door to summon help as his symptoms swiftly worsened. One by one his body systems were collapsing into paralysis as the toxic effects of strychnine swept through him. Mr. Hickox never made it to the door, but died slowly and wretchedly on the floor of his room, bewildered, frightened, and unable to move a muscle.

  What was most notable about Hickox’s death was not that he had been poisoned but that it was his own government that had killed him. The 1920s was in many ways the most strange and wondrous decade in American history, and nothing made it more so than Prohibition. It was easily the most extreme, ill-judged, costly, and ignored experiment in social engineering ever conducted by an otherwise rational nation. At a stroke it shut down the fifth-largest industry in America. It took some $2 billion a year out of the hands of legitimate interests and put it in the hands of murderous thugs. It made criminals of honest people and actually led to an increase in the amount of drinking in the country.

  Nothing, however, was stranger than that it became the avowed policy of the United States government to poison a random assortment of citizens in an attempt to keep the rest of them sober. Wilson Hickox was unusual only in that well-off people generally weren’t the victims, since they were careful to get their booze from reliable suppliers. That was why people like Al Capone did so well out of Prohibition: they didn’t kill their customers.

  Hickox died because of a problem that hadn’t been fully thought through when Prohibition was introduced—namely, that alcohol is used for all kinds of things besides drinking. It was (and in many cases still remains) an essential ingredient in paint thinners, antifreezes, lotions, antiseptics, embalming fluid, and much more. Thus, it was necessary to allow its continued production for legitimate purposes. Inevitably, some of that still-legal alcohol (act
ually a great deal: sixty million gallons a year, by one estimate) was diverted into the bootleg trade. To render industrial alcohol disagreeable for drinking, the government took to denaturing it—that is, dosing it with poisons such as strychnine and mercury, which had the power to blind, cripple, or kill those who drank it. Denatured alcohol became “America’s new national beverage,” in the cheerful words of one Prohibition official.

  Figures vary wildly on just how many people died wretchedly from drinking denatured alcohol. Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont in their authoritative book Eating in America report that 11,700 people died in 1927 alone from imbibing drink poisoned by the government. Other sources put the number much lower. However small or large the total, it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizens an agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until recently been an accepted part of civilized life, was still legal nearly everywhere else in the world, and was patently harmless in moderation.

  Almost everything about Prohibition was either inept or farcical. The U.S. Department of the Treasury was charged with enforcing the new laws, but it wholly lacked the necessary qualifications, funding, or zeal for the job. Starved of resources by Congress, the Prohibition Department hired just 1,520 agents and gave them the impossible task of trying to stop the production and consumption of alcohol among 100 million citizens (or about 75,000 people per agent) within an area of 3.5 million square miles while simultaneously policing 18,700 miles of coastline and border from smugglers.* The federal government expected the states to take up the slack and enforce the laws, but the states were almost everywhere severely disinclined to do so. By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition.

  The economic cost to the nation was enormous. The federal government lost $500 million a year in liquor taxes—nearly a tenth of national income. At state level the pain was often even greater. New York before Prohibition relied on liquor taxes for half its income. It is little wonder that states were reluctant to find the money in their reduced budgets to prosecute a law that was impoverishing them.

  Speakeasies proliferated wildly. One block in midtown Manhattan was found to contain thirty-two places where one could get a drink. Liquor was so freely available, and often so little hidden, that Prohibition seemed sometimes barely to exist. In Chicago, where some twenty thousand saloons remained in business, bars in some neighborhoods operated openly and didn’t pretend to be anything else. In New York, the number of drinking establishments was put at thirty-two thousand, double the pre-Prohibition total.

  And of course the stuff that was sold in these new establishments was entirely unregulated. In Chicago, a municipal chemist tipped some bootleg whiskey down a sink and watched in astonishment as it sizzlingly ate through the porcelain. Curious to know what exactly was in bootleg whiskey, the New York Telegram employed a chemist to test 341 samples brought from city speakeasies. Among the ingredients he isolated were kerosene, nicotine, benzene, benzol, formaldehyde, iodine, sulphuric acid, and soap. About one in six samples, he found, posed a serious threat to health.

  A reasonable question is how all this came to be. The answer resided, to an exceptional degree, in a mousy little man with a neat mustache and pince-nez spectacles. Despite his manifestly unthreatening appearance, Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was for a time the most feared and powerful man in America, and—unless you believe that people should die in agony for having a drink—possibly the most misguidedly evil as well.

  Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was born in 1869 and grew up on a farm in eastern Ohio. There one day he was carelessly speared in the leg with a pitchfork by an inebriated farm employee. Though he seems not to have been otherwise directly inconvenienced by insobriety, Wheeler developed an almost evangelical zeal to drive drinking out of American life.

  After qualifying as a lawyer, he became superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) in Ohio and there quickly showed a flair for political manipulation. In 1905 he took on the popular governor of Ohio, a man who had been elected two years earlier by the widest margin in that state’s history and was often mentioned as a future presidential candidate—but who, unfortunately, did not support the ASL’s wish to make Ohio dry. The man in question was Myron T. Herrick, who was about to learn that it never paid to oppose Wayne Bidwell Wheeler. A master propagandist, Wheeler never deviated from a single purpose, which was to drive from office any politician who didn’t wholeheartedly support Prohibition, and he would use any means necessary to get his way. Often he employed private eyes to dig up dirt on politicians who failed to support him with sufficient enthusiasm, and he viewed blackmail as an entirely legitimate means to achieve his desired ends.

  Nothing mattered to him but making America dry. Where other temperance groups involved themselves in all kinds of side issues—tobacco, short skirts, jazz, even post office policy and government ownership of utilities—Wheeler never strayed from his single monotonous message: that drinking was responsible for poverty, broken marriages, lost earnings, and all the other evils of modern society.

  By opposing Wheeler’s call for state prohibition, Herrick made himself look out of touch and uncompassionate. He was overwhelmingly defeated and never held elective office again. Instead, the rising star of Ohio politics became Herrick’s spectacularly undistinguished lieutenant governor, Warren G. Harding. Across America, politicians quickly learned either to support Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon League or to give up any hope of being reelected.

  Under Wheelerism, as the ASL’s strategy became known, much of America was dry long before Prohibition was enacted. By 1917, twenty-seven states were completely dry and several more were preponderantly dry. It was possible to travel across much of the country—from Texas to the Dakotas, from Utah to the Eastern Seaboard—without passing through a single area where a drink could be had. Only in a few scattered outposts, mostly cities and industrial areas where immigrants congregated in large, thirsty numbers, was it still legally possible to get a drink. These, however, were the places where drinking was most stubbornly ingrained and where the ASL stood little chance of changing local or state laws. But then Wheeler got what was for him a lucky break: World War I.

  When the First World War broke out, most Americans were content for it to remain a distant, European conflict. But then Germany made some tactical blunders that wholly changed that sentiment. First, it began bombing civilian targets. We have grown used to wars that target civilians, but in the 1910s killing innocent people by intent was widely seen as a barbarity. When the Germans began, as a kind of experiment, sending a plane to Paris each afternoon at about five o’clock to drop a single bomb on the city, President Woodrow Wilson was so incensed that he sent a personal letter of protest to the German authorities.

  Then, worse, Germany announced that it would target passenger ships at sea. In May 1915, a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania as it sailed in neutral waters off the Irish coast near Kinsale. The ship sank in just eighteen minutes, taking with it 1,200 people. A third of the victims were women and children; 128 of the dead were Americans whose country was not even at war. Outrage was immediate, but Germany made matters infinitely worse by declaring—almost unbelievably—a national holiday to celebrate the slaughter. Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, head of the German Red Cross in the United States, said that those aboard the Lusitania got no more than they deserved. He was expelled from America and was lucky to get away with his life.

  Others did not fare so well. A German man in St. Louis who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag, and hanged. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a “patriotic murder.” German businesses were boycotted or had bricks hurled through their windows. People with German names frequently decided for safety’s sake to change them to something less obviously Teutonic. One such
was Albert Schneider, who became better known the following decade as the murder victim Albert Snyder. Restaurants stopped serving German food or gave it non-German names; sauerkraut famously became liberty cabbage. Some communities made it illegal to play music by German composers. Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.”

  It escaped no one’s attention that American breweries were nearly all owned by men of German extraction and presumed German sympathies. Temperance advocates seized on this to make beer drinking seem an all but treasonous act. “We are fighting three enemies—Germany, Austria and Drink,” asserted Kellogg’s, the cornflakes company, in a patriotic ad that ran just after America joined the war. In point of fact, the claim had substance. The National German-American Alliance, an organization largely funded by the breweries, turned out to have lobbied not only against Prohibition but also, and more deviously, on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm. It was not a combination that won it many friends.

  The rise in anti-German sentiment gave a huge boost to the temperance movement. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the production and consumption of alcohol, swept toward ratification, guided expertly through one state legislature after another by a freshly energized ASL. On January 16, 1919, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, giving the three-quarters majority necessary for the law to be enacted and to go into effect one year later.