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Murder, Booze, and Sex: Three Perspectives on the Roaring Twenties

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Murder, Booze, and Sex: Three Perspectives on the Roaring Twenties Murder, Booze, and Sex: Three Perspectives on the Roaring Twenties WILLIAM L. BURTON Ghost: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther. Hamlet: Murther? Ghost: Murther most foul. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5 URDER AND MURDER TRIALS caught and held M the public imagination in twenties America. Crimes and the names of criminals became household words. As one juicy story faded and dimmed in the pop- ular mind, another shouted in the headlines to take its place. The Fatty Arbuckle trial titillated the public fancy with tales of debauchery, sex parties, and riotous living in Hollywood, along with homicide, and the whole busi- ness dragged through three trials before it ended. And that was only the beginning. "Thrill slayers" Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, both spoiled sons of wealthy Chicago families, won the nation's attention and may even have spawned imitators; a nineteen-year-old Los Angeles murderer, when arrested in 1927, asked police if they thought he would get as much publicity as Leopold and Loeb. The Hall-Mills murder trial of 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey, had everything. There were sexual escapades in church, the lurid testimony of the "pig woman," newspaper contests on the guilt or innocence of the defendants, and twelve million words transmitted over news wires made it the (374) TWENTIES IMAGES 375 biggest story since the invention of printing. On and on the stories went. There was the Snyder-Grey trial, the Parker-Hickman trial, the Rosenbluth trial, and so many others that a standard formula evolved to help reporters tell it all. America's fascination with murder and murder trials was to a large extent engineered by newspapers. Murder was news, and the press stressed the most sensational aspects of murder trials to build circulation. This news- paper coverage reflected as well as stimulated public in- terest, because popular fiction as well as sociology encouraged literate Americans to focus attention on crime. Charlie Chan, Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, and other classic detective characters appeared in the twenties and sold well; the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theo- dore Dreiser contained murders as important elements in their plots. Criminologists like John Cillen added an academic respectability to the general supposition that the country was experiencing a crime wave, and that social conditions were somehow responsible for crime. This preoccupation with crime, both real and fictional, did not occur in a vacuum. The decade began with the nation in the midst of the Creat Red Scare. Governmental hysteria over an illusionary radical menace, when coupled with the extraordinary corruption of the Harding admin- istration, left ordinary folk as well as intellectual hberals with the feeling that government was something to be feared and distrusted. Excesses in the exercise of gov- ernmental authority combined with the criminal misuse of that authority by "establishment" leaders, encouraged in intellectuals a suspicion about the behavior and in- tentions of government. They were prepared to believe the worst about government, to see it as the enemy of the people. Crime was the fault of society, not criminals. It was in this atmosphere that the most extraordinary murder, trial, and subsequent executions of the decade 376 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY occurred. Virtually gone from the public memory today are the murders and trials associated with Fatty Arbuckle and Nathan Leopold. Never to be forgotten are the trial and executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. So familiar is the Sacco-Vanzetti case and its conse- quences that we need only to sketch in its outline here. The two men, both Italian immigrants and both professed anarchists, were arrested in May, 1920, and charged with the robbery and murder of a shoe company paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. In the highly-charged atmosphere of the Red Scare, the men were tried, found guilty, and after seven years of delays, appeals, and in- ternational campaigns aimed at averting the completion of the death sentence, executed on August 22, 1927. When they were first arrested, Sacco and Vanzetti at- tracted little attention; by the time they were executed, they were an international cause celebre. Unlike the other murder trials of the twenties, this one became a standard fixture in history textbooks. It took on the attributes of a moraUty play, complete with villains and saints. Quite typical of American history text- book accounts of Sacco and Vanzetti is that found in Mary Beth Norton's A People and a Nation (2:696): Fear of radicalism, left over from the Red Scare of 1919, fueled these antiforeign sentiments. The most notorious outburst of hys- teria occurred in 1921, when a court convicted Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two immigrant anarchists, of murdering a guard and paymaster during a robbery in Brockton, Massachusetts. But Sacco and Vanzetti's main offenses seem to have been their political beliefs and Italian origins, since evidence failed to prove their involvement in the robbery. Judge Webster Thayer never- theless openly sided with the prosecution, privately calling the defendants "those anarchist bastards." Appeals by protesters failed to win a new trial, and the two Italians, who remained calm and dignified throughout their ordeal, were executed in August 1927. Their deaths chilled those who had looked to the United States as the land that nurtured freedom of belief. TWENTIES IMAGES 377 Implicit or explicit in this account is the assumption that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, that they were tried and electrocuted for their political beliefs and because they were foreigners, that their trial was unfair, and that the deaths of these noble beings tarnished the image of the United States as a land of freedom. It is not surprising that textbook authors, and perhaps most historians today, accept these assumptions. They are the result of a long, determined, and extraordinarily successful campaign that turned Sacco and Vanzetti into symbols, symbols and martyrs for a variety of causes. While the final unsuccessfiil appeal for the two men was still undecided. Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter published in the Atlantic Monthly in January, 1927, a long article in which he criticized the judge, the jury, the whole legal process, and the verdict; it was clear to Frankfurter that the two were innocent, and that their conviction was a miscarriage of justice. From that point on, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti never left the public eye and the fate of the formerly obscure anarchists came to symbolize different things to different people. For Italian-Americans, as well as other immigrant groups, Sacco and Vanzetti's fate symbolized American nativism, and they supported the Massachusetts men as a way to promote their own cause. For the American Federation of Labor and other labor sympathizers, Sacco and Vanzetti symbolized the poor working class slob, oppressed by both capital and the state, and they sup- ported the two as a means of publicizing the cause of the working man. To intellectuals like John Dos Passos and Haywood Broun, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti confirmed a belief that America was a land of prejudice and hatred. For communists, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union, Sacco and Vanzetti symbolized the depravity of a capitalist society and provided a golden opportunity to stir up anti-American feelings around the 378 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY world. And so it went; in their deaths, Sacco and Vanzetti provided to anyone or any group with a grudge against the United States or the "establishment" or with a con- viction that the typical American was a nativist, a splendid symbol and an opportunity for public protest. Perhaps the most effective element in the campaign to canonize the dead men was the work of artist Ben Shahn. Deeply impressed by what he regarded as a tragedy and perversion of justice, Shahn produced what seemed like an endless series of paintings and drawings of the two men and other principals in the case. Shahn, who was the leading social realist painter and muralist of the Depression years, gave to posterity a powerful, graphic image of Sacco and Vanzetti as two gentle and noble human beings, philosophical anarchists whose humility and honesty stand in sharp contrast to the cruelty and malice of Judge Webster Thayer and the prosecutors. The reproduced paintings of Shahn, more than the printed word, convey to the readers of today the assumption that Sacco and Vanzetti were martyrs to their beliefs and victims of American nativism. Maxwell Anderson, the leading social realist playwright of the thirties, created still another indelible image of Sacco and Vanzetti. His Winterset, the most famous play of the decade, burns with the author's sense of indignation at the injustice meted out to the executed men. Within a year, the play became a movie starring Burgess Meredith; that movie, which was Meredith's film debut, still appears on late- night television and keeps the Sacco-Vanzetti legend alive for today's generation. So it was in novels, plays, movies, and a steady flow of graphic art and monographs that the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti remained alive and in the public con- sciousness in the decades after 1927. This myth of mar- tyrdom, however, like most myths, contains elements of internal contradiction and reductionism. TWENTIES IMAGES 379 Nativism, according to the myth, acted like a kind of epidemic disease, infecting almost everyone connected with the case. From the judge and jury at the trial to the appellate court, from the governor of Massachusetts to the U.S. Supreme Court and the majority ofthe Amer- ican people, this malady poisoned the nation's atmosphere and caused the death of the innocents. (Intellectuals, artists, and socialites, of course, had a natural immunity to this disease.) John Dos Passos attributed the miscar- riage of justice to a vague "they," apparently the rich and the powerful whom he assumed dominated society.
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