The "Noble" Experiment

I often wonder if the things I remember are true. I don't mean about the deviltries of youth. No man can remember himself accurately. The best he can do is locate the windings of a dried river bed, and invent the water that once flowed in it; invent the swift current, the rapids, the alluring swimming holes.

I mean the memory of events such as wars, political and moral upheavals and all the fanfares that become involved as history. Since most historians devote themselves to chronicling the ultimate triumph of virtue over evil, and since no such happy finale has yet come to pass, it is obvious that history is the science of daydreams, as are the reports of novelists, poets and priests.

In my efforts, here, at sketching the history of an era through which I lived, and of which I was a rather sprightly observer, I know I shall write as much out of bias as out of fact. How can one write of the seven deadly sins of morality without a touch of bias? A bleating piety inflamed the land, terrifying its Tom Thumb politicians. Result — the Prohibition Era, 1919—1933.

For some 14 years the Era turned the U. S. into a joke. You wouldn't have had a much funnier nation if a law had been passed requiring all its citizens to walk naked on stilts.

There are, naturally, two Prohibition Eras — the one that existed and the one that has flowered into an American legend. As box office, number two Era is today neck and neck with the winning of the West, and challenging its lead. The Chicago gangster of the Twenties in his pinstriped suit and his Mediterranean hairdo promises to pull ahead of the Indian chief provoked by crooked white men into scalping wagon-train passengers.

I was a Chicago newspaper reporter during the dry years, and, biased though I may be, I shall do my best to write of them without out-and-out lying. This is not an easy chore. The lies that have accumulated about the Twenties are now tall enough to receive homage as a myth, particularly from writers.

It is more profitable for writers to succumb to a myth than to contradict it. Succumb, and you can make a fortune peddling scenarios to the movies and television industry. In fact, I have. Contradict, and a few nickels will trickle in from the literary periodicals.

What is the myth? It is the same historical myth, with a jazz beat added, of virtue's triumph over evil. There are always a few carpers. But the human multitude never tires of applauding this fantasy. Perhaps it is all for the best — that the need for believing the world is better than it is never surrenders to reality.

Millions of current Americans gape nightly at TV sets and movie screens watching the virtuous lawmen take on the evil gangsters of the Twenties and mow them down with firearms. Virtue always triumphs, suffering seldom more than a minor flesh wound that any doctor can clear up in a week. The evil ones always getting plugged, rolling down stairways and pitching out of windows, ready for the morgue wagon.

It was not thus in the Prohibition Era. Good and evil did not meet in a head-on collision. They met only for the pay-off. The forces of law and order did not advance on the villains with drawn guns, but with their palms out, like bellboys.

During our prohibition spell some 600 gangsters were murdered in Chicago, nary one by a cop. For the 600 murders in Chicago's streets only two culprits were caught and convicted of homicide. The two were probably masochists who rushed neurotically to the station house for punishment.

This is not a wanton comment. Suicide was one of the occupational hazards for Chicago gunmen. Frank Nitti, Al Capone's "Enforcer" blew his own head off, as did a number of our town's most able killers.

I noted in my reporter days that professional killers were often moody fellows. They did a lot (continued on page 222) Noble Experiment (continued from page 174) of secret churchgoing. No such signs of troubled conscience were to be spotted among the city's officials fattening on the underworld's payrolls. There were no suicides among these high-class characters.

• • •

As a historian of a major upheaval that took place under my nose, I admit bias, but I also can boast of perception and participation. In the Twenties hundreds of bright young Americans spurned their native land and went looking for saner heaths across the Atlantic. John Gunther, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound were some of the successful émigrés. But Paris, London and Rome were overrun with scores of talented refugees from the U. S. who wound up as castaways instead of celebrities.

I also felt the lure of superior foreign climes. A fellow, finely arrayed, came into the Chicago Daily News local room after hours. Jimmy Butts and I were at our dog-watch posts, bowed over our typewriters, composing our first novels. The well-dressed visitor announced that he was looking for two reporters to fill out his staff of the Shanghai Sun. He was leaving for China the next day and needed a yes or no before nightfall.

The three of us went to Mangler's saloon to talk the matter over. I came to around three A.M., alone. Jimmy Butts had taken off for China. Despite my youthful fancy for far-off Cathay, I was still a Chicagoan. I learned later that the well-dressed recruiting fellow had deemed me unfit for service in China because I was unable to hold my liquor. I improved during the Prohibition Era as did most of my fellow Americans.

This brings me to my first historical statement. The gun-toting crooks of Prohibition and their political buddies were a minor phase of the Era. The main show was the public — the hundred-million Americans without previous police records who joined happily in the vast lawbreaking.

In Chicago, the spectacle of an entire city switching its allegiance from law to lawlessness was a fascinating performance to watch. Press and radio reported similar mass defections throughout the nation.

The thirst for forbidden alcohol was only part of this secession. This is no ex post facto theory. We used to talk about it in our favorite saloons that were no more bothered by Prohibition than were Santa Claus and his reindeer. We used to sneer at the amateur drinkers who were invading our once orderly liquoring places. It was obvious that most of the citizens who started hitting the bottle had been nondrinkers before Prohibition, or wine tipplers at best.

There was no mistaking the meaning of this booze rush. It was the minutemen of Lexington and Concord all over again. The thing that turned Americans into liquor lovers in the very first weeks of Prohibition was the fine American instinct for freedom. Yes, we used to have it, when freedom was a much simpler word than it is now. It had to do with living more than voting. It didn't mean saving the world, but enjoying the pursuit of happiness, as suggested in the Constitution.

I'll declare myself in on the national psychology of that time, despite the fact that I and my mentors felt as detached from the ideologies around us as if they were the sputterings of the hairy Ainus of Japan. I mean, we looked on President Warren G. Harding, both Houses of Congress and all the pontificators of the Republic as rogues and liars or victims of dementia praecox — the first psychiatric phrase to arrive from Vienna.

The thing that startled us at first was that we were no anarchic elite. We were part of a lawbreaking multitude. Everybody had become iconoclasts. Everybody explained to the speak-easy bartender that we had just won a war to make the world safe for democracy, not bluenoses. In fact, you could not find a soul to contradict anything you said against the Government and against morality unless you cornered a rabbi, priest or chairlady of the altar guild.

In the first months of Prohibition everybody became aware that breaking its law was no more dangerous than getting a haircut. The shooting started, but it was gangster versus gangster. The bootleggers battling it out for territorial rights would no more have plugged a bystander than rival automobile salesmen would have shot down a new-car yearner.

As for our opinions of crooked police, crooked judges, mayors, state's attorneys, etc., they were favorable. Our attitude toward the unprecedented spread of corruption resembled a mood described by Bret Harte in one of his Western tales. He wrote of a boomtown newspaper's account of a flood that had floated away most of its readers — "the editor observed with pensive pride that, 'an area greater than the State of Rhode Island is now under water.'"

There is this to say for our political grabenheimers. Usually crooked government shares its plums with the few. It will smooth the way for a financier to filch a few more millions, and clobber a shoplifter who tries to make off with an embroidered petticoat.

Our Prohibition crooks, from the White House down, were as greedy as any other, but they were not stooges for big business, only. They served also the multitude. They were on freedom's side, for mercenary reasons, to be sure; but who cared?

As a reporter I was aware that the cops turned their backs on the underworld killings, but my respect for the bluecoats was not lessened. They provided enough copy for the city desk by arresting amateur killers — relatives who kept knifing each other at breakfast, and decimating family reunions.

We were amused by the knowledge that the lawmen couldn't run down a professional killer if he was stuffed and put on display in Marshall Field's window. But it was no sour amusement. Indeed it was a less critical attitude than I feel today toward the police for not arresting the characters responsible for making my living room hideous with TV commercials. I can state firmly that the Americans of the Twenties would never have stood for them. There would have been an uprising in that freedom-loving time as there was against the bluenoses of the land.

• • •

I have still a few more historical generalities to put down before recounting remembered details and incidents of the dry spell. First, and tenderest, is this: I doubt if Americans will ever have as much fun as they found in the Twenties.

There were many reasons. We were still a practically untaxed people. And we had no future wars to worry about. We had just won the war that ended all wars. Skipping the Arabian Nights economy of the period — land booms, oil, coal, factory, building, automobile and chain-store booms — there was the added attraction of a crime boom. Our lives became full of theatrical diversion. The Untouchables, The Roaring Twenties (their authentic versions in which the bad guy always won) were playing bang-bang in front of us. We were, in a manner, members of their casts, but never their casualty lists. There were only two "civilian" deaths in our Chicago gang wars — an assistant state's attorney and a not-quite-kosher newspaper reporter.

My report of the Twenties as a happiness peak is without bias. I have heard and read lamentations from many who lived in that time, but these can be dismissed as enemy propaganda. The complainants would have had only disconsolate tidings to offer had they spent the Twenties in Mohammed's third heaven. There are always people who consider happiness a mysterious sin.

True, there were bewailers, groaners, and oratorical bores ululating about hellfire, but the American multitude embraced the Prohibition Era as if it were a permanent New Year's Eve. And so it was, in many ways. Not only drinking, but kissing was stepped up. Inhibitions petered out. Sex came into high favor.

Indeed, the Era altered the American character drastically, and chiefly for the better. It altered also the American scene but definitely for the worse. I mean it created a secondary U.S.A. known as organized crime. Corrupt public officials, since Prohibition, have handed over at least a fourth of the nation to criminals. We are a democracy and a crookdom; God bless our wondrous lawyers. Years ago I wrote a parody of America, as sung by the Devil:

My country 'tis of theeSweet land of larcenyI am thy God—Land where the crooks preside,And freedom, roped and tiedShrieks from each mountainside—Who pinched my wad?

About the American character change, I have a pleasanter picture to submit. First, one of the greatest historical events in human annals — the total emancipation, for better or for worse, of American womanhood.

Prohibition not only doubled the nation's booze consumption, but brought a new set of consumer throats to the alcohol market — the ladies. Before Prohibition, feminine drinking had been limited mainly to ladies in high society or in bawdy houses. The saloons were male compounds into which no female could step. The lower-class saloons sometimes broke with tradition and served a lady beer if she came to the back door and brought her own pail.

Even male drinking, before the dry era, was almost as privately practiced as sex. Men got stewed beyond the critical ken of home folks. Prohibition not only opened the nation's barrooms to the ladies, but elevated, generally, the social side of liquor drinking. Family groups started passing out highballs in their respectable parlors, and rarely did a neighborly visit wind up without a participant or two blotto.

I remember pious hostesses, all Caesar's wives, plying me with drink in their homes, and as arch about it as nice ladies in a fun house with their skirts blowing around their heads.

There was a genial thrill to home lawbreaking. It was like going slumming in your own parlor. You could enjoy a little glow of crime without losing your moral standing, since the best people were all criminals.

I recall also the rush-hour jam of respectable folk in the speak-easies. You didn't have to go to them for a drink. You could get one in nearly every hotel and restaurant in the city. But these lawbreaking locales lacked glamor. In the speak-easies you could rub shoulders with widely publicized gangsters and killers. A "hello" or a handshake from one of these underworld celebrities was something to brag about.

And there was never any risk to speak-easy patrons. The tough-looking waiters treated them with a deference never before, or since, encountered in any cafés. You drank and broke the law with a sense of swagger, and no worry. A police or Federal raid was as unlikely a prospect as an invasion by brownies. In some of the speak-easies, booze was served in thick coffee cups, but that was only a bit of showmanship to add a reminder of lawlessness to the safe goings-on.

The only people who were hesitant about visiting the speak-easies were the top gangsters and killers who owned them. These were, as a rule, socially shy fellows. Customers embarrassed them with their loud cries of admiration and hiccuping requests for autographs. There was also the possibility that when a drunk threw his arms around a gangster's neck, not love but homicide might be behind the gesture.

• • •

One of the most startling by-products of Prohibition was the nation's sexual renaissance. Our "dry spell" inflamed the national libido as if the entire Republic had been given an injection of Spanish fly.

As a young student of this phenomenon, I understood it not too well at the time. There is a motto about gift horses. However, I did some pondering in later years about the collapse of female morality during Prohibition. (Collapse is, perhaps, too dour a noun.) Obviously, the girls of the Twenties followed a basic psychological pattern — people who break one law are ready to try their hands at other taboos.

It is likely also that American Puritanism had run its course, and would have sidled off without Prohibition; although I doubt this. Whatever the cause, sexual morality underwent a revolutionary change. A myriad of virgins under the influence of bathtub gin yielded their virginity in the back seats of automobiles. In the time before the invention of the motel, the automobile flourished as the most popular courting place for the boss and his secretary, and other amorous duos. It was said then of the automobile that "no good girl would ride in one."

As the Era gained steam, a wave of adultery and wife swapping broke over the land. In the Far West, city planners took advantage of the nation's flickering home fires by setting up pioneer divorce mills. One Reno litigant (male) awaiting his freedom, offered Americans a new diagnosis of marriage — "The f---ing you get, ain't worth the f---ing you get."

The Republic instantly understood this mystic utterance.

The fact that a new sexual frontier had been opened up in the U. S. was signaled by the disappearance from the store counters of corsets, bloomers, step-ins and other survivals of the chastity belt. Instead of such glum trappings the store windows displayed diaphanous negligees, black-chiffon nightgowns and similar hints of female cooperation.

• • •

We had fun buying gallons of sacramental wine from synagogue janitors and cathedral caretakers. Door-to-door salesmen came into our homes and offered us a kit containing 12 different glass tubes of cordial flavoring. You added the flavoring to the gallon of alcohol that was part of the purchase, and your sideboard bloomed with bottles of crème de menthe, Grand Marnier, Benedictine, crème de cacao, etc.

There was a touch of glamor in buying whiskey bottles over which men had fought and died all the way from Canada to our own front doors. We enjoyed also chipping in for cases of Napoleon brandy, and becoming thus epicurean lawbreakers. I knew then, as I know now, that this imported tipple had never been nearer France than Gary, Indiana; that it tasted like our Chicago-made Martel brandy, and that the double-negative salesman was cheating us. But we low-income characters were tasting not only brandy but bounderism. We were happy to pay a bit extra for the status of booze bounders. Although the Napoleon-brandy label did not fool us, it fooled our less-knowing dinner guests.

It was fun, also, carrying a flask in your back pants pocket like a bindle stiff, and striking a blow for freedom every hour by taking a swig of it. As a result, we were as often drunk during the day as in the night. I can remember having to dictate home-edition stories at noon to sober colleagues, and returning their typewriting favor on other deadlines.

There was also an intellectual type of fun on tap. This was listening to what H. L. Mencken called "the wowsers in action." Prohibition's apostles and white knights filled the land with a joyous spouting. We used to read their speeches aloud in the speak-easies and set drunks to rolling on the floor with laughter. During the Era that recorded an annual 8000 to 12,000 murders in the U. S. — an all-time high in national homicide; that witnessed the collapse of honest government; that set a new world's record for a per-capita consumption of liquor — during this time of flowering corruption and chronic bacchanalia, the following wowser statements were headlined in the press:

William Jennings Bryan spoke out, "God has given America Prohibition and he has thus saved our country from the poorhouse and the drunkard's grave."

Ray A. Haines, U. S. Prohibition Commissioner, stated, "Prohibition has cut arrests in half, cut deaths, cut the population of prisons and almshouses, cut juvenile delinquency and offenses against chastity."

Dr. Louis Herman Smith, president of Washington and Lee University, called the Prohibition law, "The longest and most effective step forward in the uplift of the human race ever taken by any civilized nation."

The Attorney General of the United States proclaimed, "Prohibition will haul down the black flag of crime."

President Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was being successfully blackmailed at the time by a leading Federal dry enforcer named Gaston B. Means, prophesied, "Prohibition will put an end to the terrible evils that feed on alcohol."

Addressing a conclave of fellow solons in Washington, Senator Volstead, father of the dry amendment, announced, "We can now be proud as a nation that has restored sobriety and its attendant virtues to its grateful citizens."

Evangelist Billy Sunday preached the funeral of John Barleycorn in Norfolk, Virginia. It was an impressive interment. A span of horses drew a hearse to the jam-packed graveyard. A 20-foot papier-mâché bottle was lifted from the hearse and carried to its burial plot. A Devil in red tights followed the bottle and moaned grievously as Billy Sunday shouted, "Goodbye, John Barleycorn, you were God's worst enemy. You were hell's best friend. I hate you with a perfect hatred."

There are thousands of similar quotes moldering in the newspaper files of the Twenties. You would have to rummage in the Dark Ages of Europe to find utterances as clownish and pigheaded as came pouring out of our statesmen.

Remembering such pronouncements, I grin as I did when I first encountered them in all their pristine ninnyism. But the grin fades. I have grown up. I fall to wondering how many of today's statesmen will sound as ridiculous 40 years from now as did their predecessors of the Twenties. My guess is, most of them.

• • •

The American masses enjoyed Prohibition, but the criminals married it, loved and honored it until death did they part. Crooks all over the world, hearing the great news of the 18th Amendment, headed with or without passport for the U. S. A., which had become again the Promised Land. Some of them got sidetracked in New York, Detroit and Cleveland, but the cream of the crop reached Chicago in triumph. We were the big time. Our town was the Maypole around which the nation's lawbreakers capered.

Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Dion O'Banion, Frank Nitti, Hymie Weiss, Greasy Thumb Guzik (his right thumb had been permanently soiled by money counting), Spike O'Donnell, Bugs Moran, Neddie Herbert, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Schemer Drucci, Dago Lawrence, Three Gun Louis Alterie, Frankie Lake, Polack Joe Saltis, Terry Druggan, the Terrible Genna Brothers; these are some of the names of Chicago's leading antiprohibitionists. They still keep their stellar standing.

Of these, my favorite was Deanie O'Banion. He was Al Capone's greatest rival, but not in character. O'Banion was the gay boy of the underworld, its most romantic figure; a combination of Robin Hood and Dead Eye Dick. He did his own killing. He was involved in 25 murders, but never arrested, due not only to his purchase of police immunity but also to his personal charms.

Deanie's victims were all gangster opponents employed by Capone and the Terrible Genna Brothers to knock him off. Deanie would no more take a potshot at a nonunderworld citizen than a football halfback would leap into the stands to tackle a bleacherite. The police were able to soothe whatever conscience they had with the thought that every time an O'Banion opponent was beaten to the draw, another enemy of society entered the morgue.

Deanie was young, handsome, well-mannered, a persistent churchgoer since his early choirboy days, and a loving husband. He was also full of compassion for his fellow man. His charities were almost as great as his bribes. He toured the slums of his boyhood, handing out $100 bills to the needy, and beating up their heartless landlords. He had a $14,000 organ in his home on which he accompanied himself in hours of song.

He was full of pranks. He used to appear at dawn in the doorway of our all-night saloon, Quincy No. 9, a newspaper reporters' rendezvous.

"Who wants to go for a ride with me?" he would ask.

The journalists took turns joining him. I went twice. O'Banion owned a souped-up flivver. We headed for the lake front in normal style. Arriving at Michigan Avenue, O'Banion spurned the street and used the sidewalk for further touring.

The wide sidewalk was almost deserted at this early hour. But there were some traffic cops to play with. Sighting one of these, Deanie pretended his flivver was a bull in a Sevillian bull ring. He sent it charging at each officer, snorting and wheeling around him in toro fashion.

The cops played along as matadors. They were usually fellow Irishmen, with a soft spot for a man of high spirit; particularly if they were on his payroll.

As part of his business program, O'Banion undertook the elimination of his rivals — the Terrible Genna Brothers. During this campaign, a couple of Capone employees entered O'Banion's flower shop on the Near North Side, across the street from Holy Name Cathedral in which he had sung and worshiped since childhood. O'Banion's flower shop was no fake front for his bootlegging operations. It was an honest emporium. He delighted in trimming its show window, and was proud of his flower fancying clientele.

"Ain't seen you for a long time," said one of the two arrivals, and held out his paw for a handshake. Always the gentleman, O'Banion put his trigger finger out of play by clasping the hand of greeting. The other visitor pumped five bullets into Deanie, who was thirty-two years old at the time.

Capone sent an attractive floral wreath to O'Banion's funeral, inscribed in white carnations: "From a Friend."

The funeral was one of the most moving spectacles ever seen in Chicago. O'Banion's body lay in state for three days in its $10,000 bronze casket with solid-gold handles. Forty-thousand men, women and children filed into the Sbarbaro Funeral Home to view the remains in its Pharaoh's casket.

The hearse, heading for the graveyard was followed by 30 open automobiles all hidden from the eye by pyramids of flowers. There was not a blossom to be bought that day in Chicago's florist shops.

Following the slowly moving gardens were some 100 automobiles filled with silk-hatted dignitaries of city and state. An estimated 30,000 pedestrian mourners completed the cortege. A 50-piece band played Deanie to his resting place.

Despite much pressure, the Church refused Deanie Catholic burial rites. The Reverend Patrick Malloy, however, came out to Mount Carmel Cemetery, minus his priestly vestments. Standing in mufti over the grave, Father Malloy said three Hail Marys and the Lord's Prayer.

O'Banion's wife, Viola, a beautiful and loyal helpmate during his triumphs in Chicago had a tall shaft erected over his grave. Two words were chiseled on it: "My Sweetheart."

The day after the funeral Deanie's chum, Three Gun Louis Alterie, challenged O'Banion's assassins to a public duel. He said he would meet the murderers at State and Madison Streets, and shoot it out with them single-handedly, in true O'Banion tradition.

The gallant offer startled Chicago's reform Mayor, William Dever. He had, temporarily, ousted Big Bill the Builder from his City Hall perch.

"I'm staggered," said Mayor Dever, "are we living by the code of the Dark Ages, or is Chicago part of the American Commonwealth?"

Mayor Dever's unromantic attitude ruined the proposed duel. Hymie Weiss, another O'Banion pal and avenger, hired a vacant office overlooking the entrance of the Sherman Hotel. He had information that Al Capone was going to visit the hotel in the near future. With his machine gun in place on the window ledge, Hymie waited for three days and nights. He ate up several lengths of salami and downed a case of lemon pop.

On the fourth day, Hymie Weiss was rewarded. The street in front of the hotel filled up. A band played. Citizens cheered and Al Capone stepped out of the hotel entrance, right into Hymie's gun sights. But O'Banion's avenger didn't open fire. Beside Capone stood the sour-faced President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. The Chief Executive had fearlessly come to Chicago to repair Republican fences.

The military-band music, the fluttering American flags, and the face of a U. S. President misted Hymie's eyes with patriotism. A true-blue American, like his idol, O'Banion, avenger Hymie's trigger finger stiffened. What if by some accident he hit the wrong guy — knocked off a President of the United States! My God, he would never forgive himself. And Hymie allowed the hated Capone to walk out of range under the guard of the Chief Executive.

In the underworld, the event was long applauded as President Coolidge's greatest achievement while in office.

• • •

Of the booze monarchs produced by Prohibition, the least colorful was Alphonse Capone. He was a humorless man, and as obsessed with arithmetic as a bank president.

His annual bootleg gross was estimated between $150,000,000 and $300,000,000. Whatever the correct figure, 25 percent of it went into the pockets of city, county and state public officials. Capone also kept an emergency fund handy for Federal pay-offs.

In the pile of print and drama inspired by Al Capone there is usually missing the outstanding fact of his criminal career — his popularity. During his heyday, Al was the most popular and beloved figure in Chicago. In the rest of the nation his name had the glitter of a great folk hero. Of all the public figures who succeeded Al Capone, only Charles Lindbergh stirred the populace to as wild an appreciation.

I remember going to the opening day of a Chicago race track with Capone and a dozen of his business associates. There were some 30,000 men and women at the track. Spotting Al Capone in his box, they loosed an ovation that almost matched 1918's Armistice Day.

"The people love me," said Capone in an interview my editor Henry Justin Smith refrained from putting into our paper, the Chicago Daily News. "The reason is I'm their benefactor. I give them what they want, beer, and booze, at reasonable prices. If there was a law, for instance, against people enjoying sex which I wouldn't be surprised if it came, a smart fella who owned a string of whorehouses could get elected President of the U. S. A., if he cared for the position."

At the time of his prophecy, Capone owned 30 large brothels in Chicago and its environs. They were a heritage from Big Jim Colosimo, who had imported Johnny Torrio and Al Capone from Brooklyn to be his bodyguards.

Shortly after engaging his new protectors, Colosimo was mysteriously shot to death one dawn while in a telephone booth. Capone and Torrio inherited his 30 whorehouses, among other assets.

Big Jim must have chuckled in his fiery hell when his whorehouses avenged him. Capone died in 1947, gibbering with a brain destroyed by syphilis.

Capone was as near a practical reformer as ever reigned in Chicago. He cut the city's burglaries, holdups and jack rollings to a new low. He achieved the cleanup by employing from 300 to 600 criminals at a good wage and thus lessening the incentive for porch climbing and jack rolling. The weekly pay of a Capone killer ranged from $100 to $600 a week.

Capone also drove all the gamblers out of the city's Loop. He was especially stern with crooked gamesters. Tough, young Mickey Cohen who was running a "bust out store" in Randolph Street — a dice game at which no outside player could hope to win — was ushered out of town by Capone. Dozens of other confidence men and sharpers were similarly bum's-rushed out of the metropolis.

"The City of Chicago is my customer," Capone explained to the startled crooks. Mickey Cohen told me the conversation years later. "And I'm protecting my customer's interests," said Capone. "I don't want any citizens of Chicago getting rooked or beat up by any crooks. I want my customers to realize they ain't going to get hurt breaking the Prohibition law. If anybody gets hurt it'll be only me and a few of my associates. My 2,000,000 customers ain't even going to get their hair mussed."

"He was a smart man," Mickey Cohen reminisced, "and also very impressive." Mickey was, at the time of his reminiscence, the bookie king of California. "I have tried all I could to follow his policy by keeping Los Angeles free from crime and safe for its citizens."

I collided with Capone's business side once. A young Southerner arrived in Chicago and confided to me in a saloon that he had taken over the 14 Midwestern states in behalf of another Southerner named Lupton Wilkenson, who was annexing the Eastern Seaboard.

"The Far West, suh, is not worth our time or energy," said my informant.

His name was Grady Rutledge. He was direct from Georgia and his great-great-grandfather — a crony of Oglethorpe — had signed the Declaration of Independence. Grady's commander-inchief, Lupton, was another Georgian, 21 years of age. "But, suh, he is going to hold all the publicity campaigns of this enormous country in the hollow of his hand."

I agreed to join Grady, after newspaper hours, as a vice-president. I added Richard Henry Little to our organization which, in no time, occupied an entire floor of the Frances Willard Building in La Salle Street.

Our first enterprise was to raise $10,000,000 for the Northern Baptists, which we did with a single publicity wrinkle. We organized, through press and pulpit, a "kissless era" for the Baptist Faith. Every Baptist girl in every parish pledged herself not to allow any male to kiss her until the $10,000,000 was in Baptist coffers.

This Lysistrata gambit raised the millions needed for holy work in jig time.

"We have our finger on the public pulse, suh," Grady addressed me and our other vice-president, Dick Little. Dick, one of the finest of foreign correspondents — he had scooped the world on the fall of Port Arthur — was at the time conducting the Chicago Tribune's "Line o' Type" column.

"Our next task," said Grady, "is the overthrow of Prohibition."

After some discussions we decided to launch an organization called "The Camels." Grady, too full of gin to stand up, uttered his battle cry from his presidential chair, "A million members, a dollar a member — a million dollars!"

We staged a grand joiners rally in the La Salle Theater. A dozen girls in ornamental breechcloths and transparent brassieres passed among the prospective Camels in the theater, distributing our literature and their own phone numbers.

We landed a host of happy joiners, who in return for a dollar bill received a 10-cent Camel button to wear on their lapels. But The Camels was a short-lived organization. A few days after our La Salle Theater triumph a pair of Capone messengers visited our headquarters in the Willard Building which, to Grady's horror, also housed the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The messengers represented Capone's business side. They were lean, glittering-eyed natives of Sicily and their coats bulged with firearms.

"Al says to lay off," they informed us, "he don't want no Camels."

Grady, descendant of the Declaration of Independence signer, sputtered a bit, but Dick Little and I swung him around to Capone's side as a cozier place for Chicagoans. The underworld wanted nobody menacing the Prohibition goose that was laying the golden eggs. And what the underworld wanted was the law in Chicago.

The picture of lawmaker Capone would be incomplete without at least one account of his private life. As a Capone society item I offer the birthday party he gave one of his intimates called Curly. Pal Curly was a fat, bald-headed liaison man between Capone and his surviving rivals.

But pal though he was, Curly had a shortcoming. He had not been entirely honest in his negotiations with his boss' competitors. In return for large fees he had permitted them to remain alive and functioning.

Curly's birthday was celebrated in Cicero, Illinois. Some 50 ladies and gentlemen in evening rig arrived in motor cars. Curly was toasted as the guest of honor. A candlelit birthday cake appeared. Cries of "Speech, speech" brought a dewy-eyed Curly to his feet.

As Curly started his thank-you speech, six Capone men joined him and beat him into a pulp with baseball bats. During the pulpifying of Curly, the rest of the guests, led by Capone, sang, "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Curly ..."

• • •

The Republic teemed with famous crooks and killers. We heard of them in Chicago during the Twenties but, being chauvinists all, we considered them a sort of road-company troupe of malefactors. Many of them became criminals of power and prestige, particularly in New York City; Larry Fay, Owney Madden, Longy Zwillman, Waxey Gordon, Lepke, Gurrah, Meyer, Dutch Schultz, Frankie Yale, Lucky Luciano, Legs Diamond, Joe Adonis, Willie Moretti, Vito Genovese, Augie Pisano, Abe Reles, Vincent Coll, etc. I omit a few of the top ones who are still alive and guarded by expensive lawyers against any libelous references.

New York's criminal talent made little impression on Chicago. Its bootlegger vendettas, killings, hijackings seldom merited more than a few sticks on an inside page of our press. Chicagoans preferred to read about their own gun-blasting bravos. Besides, the Eastern bootlegger didos were small-time dramas alongside such events as our St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the destruction of the Terrible Genna brothers; and the return of seven Capone negotiators from a conference with the Purple Gang in Detroit.

Capone had been favorably attracted by the business talents of Detroit's underworld. Its bootlegging sales were mounting into the millions. Capone decided it was time for a big business merger. For a 25-percent cut of the Purple Gang's profits, Al was willing to add his prestige to its operation.

After a day of conference, the seven Capone negotiators returned to Chicago in an ambulance, on the floor of which they lay full of bullet holes and dead. The ambulance was abandoned by its drivers in the heart of the Loop.

Capone gave his negotiators a lavish funeral, and demanded in a graveyard interview that the U. S. Army take over the City of Detroit, and straighten it out. President Harding refused bravely to bow to this Capone dictate, and the Purple Gang continued to flourish in Detroit.

A few out-of-town episodes, however, made our Chicago front pages. One was the demise of Dutch Schultz.

After a period of warfare with Legs Diamond, Mad Dog Coll and Owney Madden — Dutch Schultz, nee Arthur Flegenheimer, was assassinated in the Palace Bar in Newark, New Jersey. Chicago editors were attracted chiefly by Dutch Schultz' deathbed utterances. As he gave up the ghost, the once puissant Dutch Schultz spoke, "Mother is the best bet. A boy has never wept or dashed a thousand kim."

George Briggs, New York correspondent for our Daily News, refused to be budged on this deathbed quote.

"I know it sounds idiotic," said Briggs, "but please bear in mind most New Yorkers sound idiotic. You can't expect their underworld characters to make more sense than the rest of the population."

• • •

One of the most curious things I noted in the Twenties was the activity of our professional censors, in Chicago no less than in all the cities of the nation. As the divorce rate doubled and adultery became as commonplace as theatergoing, as less than 30 percent of brides reached the altar as virgins, and half of our public servants were in cahoots with crooks and killers — the censors arose everywhere to bring the Devil to his knees. Not political censors, or censors of crime and corruption. There were a few such voices crying, "Wolf! Wolf!" They made a bit of noise but they were as powerless as a set of gophers.

The censors of power were the literary and entertainment arbiters. During our bawdy, lawbreaking Twenties, these vineyard workers had the situation in hand. No book, magazine, newspaper, movie screen or theater stage was permitted to print or exhibit any improperly dressed female. A citizen caught carrying a photograph of a nude lady was certain to be locked up in prison for three months. No publisher or producer was allowed to offer the public any literature or drama that concerned itself with sexual relations, by married or unmarried participants; that offered instances of unpunished infidelity, or that presented a heroine who was not a virgin.

During this time when Americans were illegally pouring a billion dollars worth of booze annually down their throats, the movie-censorship code forbade a movie showing any male or female taking a drink of liquor. And while our gangsters were blowing each other to hell and gone at the rate of 8000 to 12,000 a year, our movie code forbade the showing of any movie character shooting another movie character. Any movie producer who tried to outwit the code by depicting a crooked policeman or politician on the screen would have been run out of Hollywood as a subversive on Russia's payroll.

Of the many stories I covered as a reporter in the Twenties that celebrated the triumph of virtue, I offer one. A young lady passenger on a North Avenue streetcar was accused by a fellow passenger, a high-school principal, of showing her leg to way above her knee while traveling beside him.

The East Chicago Avenue police-court judge who absorbed the evidence was on gangster O'Banion's payroll. Deanie had told me he had bought His Honor cheap, $200 a week for liberating any O'Banion associate brought before his bench.

The judge fined the lady knee exhibiter $10 and promised to send her to jail if she indecently displayed her person again. From this episode I deduced that an ounce of morality was a cover-up for a ton of guilt.

I remember wondering in those flagrant clays if Americans would ever recover enough respect for their politicians to take an hour off to vote for any of them again. Apparently, they did.

Prohibition did not knock out democracy, it only corrupted it. It did this by producing a crop of crooks as smart as any bankers or railroad presidents. Our underworld, after Prohibition, became a coterie of lethal financiers, buffered by the best legal brains of the land. As of today the chances of convicting a top-echelon crook are as remote as sending an archbishop to the electric chair.

Another Prohibition legacy is the high regard for criminals that fills the American heart of today. Our good citizens' crush on gangsters has put billions of dollars into the movie and TV cashboxes.

After Prohibition dozens of actors became national idols by shooting blank cartridges at other actors in a flood of screen dramas. Among these catchup-shedding desperadoes were Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, George Bancroft, Clark Gable, George Raft, Jack Palance, Victor Mature, Richard Widmark, Dick Powell, Peter Lorre, John Garfield, Sydney Greenstreet, Rod Steiger, etc.

An eye-opener on what had happened to Americans during Prohibition was provided by John Herbert Dillinger, who led a kill-crazy gang in the Midwest in 1933 and 1934. Dillinger's score included ten men murdered, seven wounded, four banks robbed, three police arsenals plundered, and three jailbreaks in which he released all his fellow prisoners.

During his murder-and-plunder spree Dillinger wrote his sister, "Don't worry about me, I'm having a lot of fun."

An all out manhunt for Public Enemy Number One kept Dillinger's name in the nation's headlines. A Gary, Indiana, whorehouse madam named Anna Campanas gave the FBI a helping hand in locating the murderer. On July 22, 1934, Dillinger walked out of a movie theater in Chicago, and was shot to death by FBI agent Samuel P. Cowley.

It was the FBI's blackest hour. A large part of the public acted as if an American idol had been destroyed. Letters denouncing the killing of Dillinger, and editorials calling it a cowardly deed filled the press of the land.

Four months after killing the country's leading murderer, agent Cowley came unexpectedly on one of Dillinger's old gang, a murderer and bank robber known as Baby Face Nelson. In the ensuing gun battle FBI agent Cowley was killed and Baby Face was fatally wounded.

Again most of the nation's sympathy went to the slain murderer rather than to the heroic Cowley who had died in battle.

With the repeal of the dry amendment, the hangover became sharply apparent. The Prohibition Era had produced a nation of crime buffs. Not just bootlegger fans but a coast-to-coast audience with a yearning to see anybody shooting anybody else. Husbands shooting wives, psychos wiping out nests of relatives, cowboys plugging Indians, barkeeps or sheriffs. And, of course, the Bad Guys of organized crime falling in a hail of bullets from the Good Guys of law and order in the Prohibition Era.

Lawlessness today is our chief spectator sport. It even tops our interest in the Communist menace. From 50,000,000 to 90,000,000 Americans sit pop-eyed before a nightly roar of gun battles and corpses piling up.

The armchair infatuation with crime is the lesser half of the story. The Prohibition Era helped vitally populate the U. S. with the largest cast of real murderers, thieves, swindlers, muggers, rapists and crooked politicians ever assembled in one land. Our annual murder rate tops that of the entire rest of the world, with Chinese and Russian figures unavailable. Our criminals outnumber the combined felons of all Western civilization.

J. Edgar Hoover's blackboard lists an annual 6500 murders, 1,500,000 armed robberies, 1,500,000 rapes, muggings and skull fractures, and 1,250,000 automobile thefts and dope peddlings.

In all, the U. S. is the homeland of more than 3,000,000 active criminals who manage to steal and swindle an annual take of $20,000,000,000 out of their honest countrymen.

Almost none of this criminal loot is recovered. However, the Bureau of Internal Revenue reveals that last year it collected tax penalties totaling $1,684,000,465.

Very few of our important racketeers, extortionists, dope, prostitution and murder impresarios landed in jail that year or any other year. However, all is not darkness. The Internal Revenue Bureau reveals that the prison sentences meted out to income-tax jugglers totaled 2538 years.

The Prohibition Era is not solely to blame for our moral bust up of today. Other forces have been at work. Racial intolerance, fear of the atom bomb, and the timidity of the vote-hungry politician have all taken bites out of the American soul.

It is generally said of the Twenties (by other historians) that they echoed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: that they turned the U. S. into a land of Godless libertines, cynics, sadists, and Napoleonic crooks.

But give the Devil his due. He made some pleasant contributions in the Era. Jazz music brought the Negro his first taste of equality. The female figure came out of its sartorial cocoon. Its anatomy on full display, except for a few square inches, put an end to the peekaboo game that was called modesty. Hypocrisy changed from a social into a political force. Governments and not human beings took to talking through their hats. And religion, far from being scuttled by the Era, was actually improved by the cynicism of the Twenties. The gingerbread dogmas that made it almost impossible for an intelligent human to submit himself to a church service have been considerably chipped away.

Summing up my report of the Prohibition Era, I don't know if it was a time of feasting that ended a civilization, or a new look at human values that launched an improved existence. But this I know: the U. S. was a sweet land when it was having fun in the Twenties.

Biased or not, if I had the choice of a decade in which to live, from Pericles to Kennedy, I would ask for residence in the Prohibition Era.