One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  On May 14, Charles’s mother arrived from Detroit to wish him a safe journey. Reluctantly they posed for pictures, standing stiffly side by side like two people who had only just been introduced. Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from “an undemonstrative Nordic race,” which in her case was wholly untrue. Instead, she patted her son lightly on the back and said, “Good luck, Charles,” then added as an ominous afterthought: “And goodbye.” The Evening Graphic, undeterred by their shyness, created a touching composograph for its readers in which Charles’s and his mother’s heads were pasted onto the bodies of more demonstrative models—though no art director could do anything about the strange, flat absence of emotion in mother’s and son’s eyes.

  All three American competitors—Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis, Byrd with the America, Chamberlin and Acosta in Bellanca’s Columbia—were reported as ready to go, so it was widely assumed that they would leave together the moment the weather cleared and that the Atlantic crossing would now be an exciting three-way race. In fact, unbeknownst to Lindbergh and the rest of the world, things were not going well in the other two camps. Byrd seemed strangely reluctant to commit to the Paris flight. He endlessly tested and retested every system of the plane, to the mystification of his crew and the hair-rending exasperation of Tony Fokker, the plane’s volatile designer. “It seemed to me that every possible excuse for delay was seized on,” Fokker recalled in his autobiography four years later. “I began to wonder whether Byrd really wanted to make the transatlantic flight.” To everyone’s surprise, Byrd set the plane’s formal dedication—with droning speeches and the plane draped in bunting—for Saturday, May 21, which meant that he couldn’t go before the weekend even if the weather allowed.

  In the Columbia camp, matters were even more unhappy, and all because of the odd and truculent nature of Charles A. Levine. The son of a scrap merchant, Levine had made his own fortune after the Great War by buying and selling surplus shell casings, which could be recycled for their brass. After developing an interest in aviation, he became known, all but inevitably, as the Flying Junkman. By 1927 he claimed to be worth $5 million, though many who had seen his modest frame home in the Belle Harbor section of Rockaway, at the less genteel end of Long Island real estate, suspected that was an exaggeration.

  Levine was bald, pugnacious, stockily built, and about five feet six. He dressed like a gangster in heavily pinstriped double-breasted suits and broad-brimmed hats. He had the quick mind and alert, roving gaze of a man always on the lookout for an opportunity. His smile was a grimace. He had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

  Levine’s two greatest personality faults were a pathological inability to be square with anyone—he seemed sometimes to be lying simply for the sake of it—and an equal difficulty in distinguishing legal activities from illegal ones. He had a fatal tendency to alienate and often cheat his business associates. In consequence he constantly ended up in court. It was legal problems that would prove his undoing now.

  Levine’s immediate problem was that he couldn’t stand his chief pilot, Clarence Chamberlin. This was a rather odd sentiment since Chamberlin was a decent, amiable fellow and a first-rate flier. He just lacked sparkle. The liveliest thing about him was his dress sense. He favored snappy bow ties and intensely patterned argyle socks paired with capacious knickerbockers, but in all other respects he was almost painfully retiring.

  Levine was endlessly exasperated by Chamberlin’s lack of dynamism, and openly maneuvered to replace him as chief pilot. “He wanted to eliminate me because I was not a ‘movie type’ and would not film well after the big adventure,” Chamberlin recalled cheerfully in his autobiography.

  Over the objections of Giuseppe Bellanca, who liked and admired Chamberlin very much, Levine chose Lloyd Bertaud, a burly, more outgoing type, to be chief pilot. Bertaud was unquestionably a good pilot and a fearless one. As a boy in California he had built his own glider and tested it—successfully, though none too prudently—by jumping off a high sea cliff. He was also a great publicity hound. His most inspired stunt was to get married while piloting a plane, a pastor crouched between him and his obliging bride. These impulses naturally endeared him to Levine.

  So Bertaud now joined the Columbia team. Since Bert Acosta was also on the team, this meant that Levine had more pilots than he had space in his airplane. Levine called Acosta and Chamberlin together and informed them that he hadn’t made up his mind which of them would fly to Paris as Bertaud’s copilot. He would decide with a toss of a coin on the morning of the flight. Acosta stared at him in disbelief for a long moment, then crossed the airfield and joined the Byrd team. Bertaud thereupon declared that he didn’t want Chamberlin with him in any case, and endeavored to have his own copilot appointed. Bellanca said he would not let his plane take off without Chamberlin aboard.

  Giuseppe Bellanca was forty-one years old in 1927, which made him considerably senior to nearly everyone else involved in the Atlantic flights. Small (just five feet one), reserved, and kindly, he had grown up in Sicily, the son of a flour mill owner, and studied engineering at the Technical Institute in Milan, where he developed an interest in aviation. In 1911, Bellanca emigrated with his large family—parents and eight brothers and sisters—to Brooklyn. In the basement of their new house, he built a plane. His mother sewed the linen fabric; his father helped with the carpentry. He then took it to a field and taught himself to fly, taking short, cautious hops at first, then gradually increasing them in distance and duration until he was actually, properly airborne.

  Bellanca was a brilliant and innovative designer. His planes were among the first in the world to use air-cooled engines, to enclose the cockpit (for aerodynamic purposes, not the comfort of the occupants), and to incorporate streamlining into every possible aspect of the plane’s exterior design. A strut on a Bellanca plane didn’t just hold up the wing; it added lift or, at the very least, minimized drag. In consequence, Bellanca’s plane was probably, for its size, the best in the world.

  Unfortunately, Bellanca was a hopeless businessman and always struggled for funds. For a time, he designed for the Wright Corporation, but then Wright decided to get out of plane building and concentrate on engines, so, to Bellanca’s presumed horror, it sold his beloved plane to Charles Levine. Since the plane was the only Bellanca demonstrator model in existence, Bellanca the man had little choice but to go along with Bellanca the plane. And so began his brief, unhappy connection to Charles Levine.

  All the parties on the Levine team now squabbled endlessly. Levine insisted that the plane should carry a radio, not for safety, but so that the fliers could send reports to passing ships, which he could then sell profitably to newspapers. To make such contact easier, Levine wanted the Columbia to follow the principal shipping lanes rather than the great circle route, adding distance as well as danger to the enterprise. Bellanca, normally a mild man, responded furiously. A radio, he argued, would add weight that they could ill afford, presented a fire hazard, and had great potential to interfere with the plane’s compasses. In any case the men aboard the plane would be too busy flying the plane to write jolly accounts of their adventures for newspapers. On at least four occasions, Levine ordered the ground crew to install a radio, and on each occasion Bellanca had it taken out again—an operation that cost Levine $75 a time and left him in sputtering rage.

  Shortly before the planned day of departure, Levine made matters infinitely worse by presenting Bertaud and Chamberlin with contracts to sign. For weeks he had been promising to give them half of all earnings from the flight and to provide them with generous life insurance cover for the security of their wives should they lose their lives in the crossing attempt, but the document he now presented mentioned neither. Instead it declared that Levine would receive all moneys earned and that for a period of one year following the flight they would cede to him total management of their lives. Levine alone would decide on endorsements, motion picture roles, vaude
ville tours, and any other professional commitments. From these earnings, Levine would pay them each $150 a week, to which he would add unspecified “bonuses” from time to time as seemed to him appropriate. When pressed about the insurance, Levine said he would consider it once Bertaud and Chamberlin had signed the contracts. Having just told Bertaud and Chamberlin that he was taking everything they earned, Levine informed reporters that “every nickel of the prize money goes to the Columbia’s pilots.”

  Bertaud, exasperated beyond forbearance at Levine’s endless duplicity, found a lawyer named Clarence Nutt, who took out an injunction enjoining Levine from sending the plane anywhere until the matter of insurance and a fair contract was resolved. A court hearing was scheduled for May 20—a date that would prove to be fateful for all concerned. In a demonstration that there was almost no limit to his unpredictability, Levine now said that he would pay Lindbergh $25,000 to accompany him to Paris. Lindbergh politely pointed out that his plane didn’t have room for a passenger.

  The upshot was that Lindbergh suddenly had the running all to himself, at least until the weekend, if only the weather would permit. He was beginning at last to win converts, too. After working with Lindbergh for a week, Edward Mulligan, one of the mechanics assigned to help him, rushed up to a colleague and, in a mixture of excitement and wonder, cried: “I tell you, Joe, this boy is going to make it! He is!”

  * * *

  * The field was named after Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, who had died in aerial combat in World War I. Lindbergh had known him, at least slightly. They had been students at the same time at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, though Quentin Roosevelt was five years older.

  † In addition to Wanamaker, Byrd was supported by John D. Rockefeller, the National Geographic Society, and, interestingly, Dwight Morrow, Charles Lindbergh’s future father-in-law.

  5

  The weather remained terrible, not just in New York but everywhere. In Washington, D.C., on May 14, a tornado fifty feet across at the base touched down at Prospect Hill Cemetery and proceeded in an erratic fashion up Rhode Island Avenue, uprooting trees and causing consternation among onlookers before harmlessly dematerializing a minute or so after forming. Farther west, unseasonably late blizzards caught much of the country by surprise. In Detroit, a Tigers-Yankees game was postponed because of snow—the latest snow-out of a major league baseball game ever recorded. Rains continued to pound the beleaguered central and lower Mississippi valley.

  In Chicago, Francesco de Pinedo, having resumed his tour of America in a replacement plane, arrived more than five hours late from Memphis because of bad weather. His tour had become increasingly embarrassing to his hosts because his rallies were more and more overtly political and increasingly ended in violence, while Pinedo himself had a tendency to say strangely inappropriate things. “I think New York is the best Fascist city in the whole world,” he declared generously but bewilderingly after meeting with Mayor Jimmy Walker. Two days later, when Pinedo addressed a Fascist rally at an Italian Legion post on Second Avenue, two thousand anti-Fascist demonstrators marched on the hall. Bricks were thrown through windows, and most of those inside rushed outside and began fighting with the demonstrators. By the time police arrived in force a crowd estimated at ten thousand had gathered. Police restored order by wading through the crowd and clubbing people robustly with nightsticks. Pinedo, meanwhile, continued giving his talk, seemingly unaware that he was addressing a hall that was almost entirely empty. The number of injured was not recorded.

  Chicago was the last of Pinedo’s forty-four stops in the United States before he headed back to Europe by way of Quebec and Newfoundland. His hope now was to steal a march on the Roosevelt Field aviators by getting across the Atlantic ahead of them. He couldn’t qualify for the Orteig Prize because he needed to refuel in the Azores en route, but it would still be a glorious symbolic triumph for Fascism if he were waiting at Le Bourget, fists on hips, to greet with an air of cheerful condescension the first American fliers to get there.

  Happily, there were no anti-Fascist demonstrations in Chicago—though ironically Pinedo faced serious injury from the exuberant backslaps and crushing embraces of several hundred black-shirted supporters who greeted him dockside at the Chicago Yacht Club.

  One of those waiting to meet Pinedo at the official reception was Chicago’s leading Italian American businessman, Al Capone. Even in Chicago, the most corrupt city in America, it was a little striking to see the nation’s most notorious hoodlum mingling with the mayor, the local head of the coast guard, and several judges and other civic dignitaries. It was the first time Capone had been invited to take part in an official ceremony in his adopted city—the first time any gangster had been invited into society. So it was a proud moment for Capone. In fact, though he had no idea of it yet, he was just one day away from the start of his downfall.

  The person responsible for this unexpected turn of events was a slight, very remarkable thirty-seven-year-old woman named Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Until only a little more than a decade earlier, Willebrandt had been an anonymous housewife in California. But, growing bored with that life, she enrolled in night classes at the University of Southern California and in 1916 emerged with a law degree. For the next five years, she represented battered women and prostitutes—an unusually noble use of a law degree in the 1910s. (She also at some point shed Mr. Willebrandt in a divorce.) She so distinguished herself that in 1921 she was brought to Washington and made assistant attorney general in the Harding administration. This made her the most senior woman in the federal government. She was given special responsibility for enforcing Prohibition and income tax laws. It was a wonderfully prescient, if inadvertent, combination of roles because it led her to hit on an ingenious way to tackle organized crime.

  Until now, mobsters had seemed invincible. They couldn’t be prosecuted for murder or other serious crimes because no one was ever brave enough to testify against them. It was almost impossible to connect them to their illicit businesses because they never put their names to contracts or other incriminating documents. Willebrandt, however, was struck by the thought that mobsters were always demonstrably rich and yet never filed an income tax return. She decided to go for them on those grounds. Prosecuting criminals for tax evasion is such a common ploy now that it is easy to overlook how brilliantly original—how completely, stunningly out of left field—the idea was when she first came up with it. Many judicial authorities thought it was completely insane.

  The first man she targeted, as a kind of specimen case, was a bootlegger in South Carolina named Manley Sullivan. Lawyers for Sullivan argued that criminals could not file tax returns without incriminating themselves, and that would be a breach of their Fifth Amendment rights. The lawyers also maintained that in claiming a share of the illegal profits the government would make itself an accessory to the original crime—a breach of its fiduciary responsibilities. The person most implacably opposed to Willebrandt’s strategy was a federal appeals court judge named Martin Thomas Manton. “It is hard to conceive of Congress ever having had in mind that the government be paid a part of the income, gains, or profits derived from successfully carrying on this crime,” he wrote. “It is incredible to believe that it was intended that a bootlegger be dignified as a taxpayer for his illegal profit, so that the government may accept his money for governmental purposes, as it accepts the money of the honest merchant taxpayer.”

  Despite Manton’s objections and those of many others, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Formally known as United States v. Sullivan, 274 U.S. 259, it was scheduled to be decided by the court on May 16, 1927—the day after Capone met Pinedo in Chicago. Mabel Walker Willebrandt would argue more than forty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, but none would have a more lasting effect than this one—if she won.

  She did.

  By a neat touch of irony—indeed, it would be hard to find a neater one—the following decade the opinionated Judge Manton was suc
cessfully prosecuted by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes after he was found guilty of pocketing $186,000 in bribes. He served seventeen months in a federal penitentiary.

  Thanks to United States v. Sullivan, Al Capone’s days were numbered, though neither he nor almost anyone else realized it yet. The New York Times, along with virtually all other papers in America, barely noted the case, reporting it in a small story on page 31—just as it paid little attention to another landmark Supreme Court case that month, Buck v. Bell (about which much more anon). Instead, it gave far more prominence that day to a brief but lively return to the news of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who on the morning of May 16 were transferred from their prison on Long Island to death row at Sing Sing in a scene of mayhem dazzlingly reminiscent of a Keystone Kops feature.

  A crowd of ten thousand people—many standing on rooftops or fire escapes to get a better view—gathered outside the Queens County Jail to watch as a motorcade of fourteen cars, escorted by six police motorcycles with sidecars (each containing a policeman with a rifle), set off with America’s two most popular murderers just after ten thirty in the morning. The convoy included prison officials, newspaper reporters, and two aldermen, James Murtha and Bernard Schwartz, who had nothing to do with the case but came along for the ride. “They were accompanied by their wives and children, who seemed to enjoy the outing,” noted a New York Times correspondent.