One Summer: America, 1927

the Chicago Tribune . (The trial was then moved to Michigan, outside his jurisdiction.) During and after the First World War, Landis became particularly noted for prosecuting radicals. He sentenced Victor Berger, a socialist congressman from Wisconsin, to twenty years in prison for criticizing the war in a newspaper editorial. Later he said that he would far rather have stood Berger in front of a firing squad. That sentence was later overturned.
    He held a group trial for 101 Wobblies who were collectively charged with 17,022 crimes. Despite the complexity of the case, under Landis’s expert guidance the jury took less than an hour to find every one of the defendants guilty. Landis dispensed total sentences of over 800 years and fines totalling $2.5 million – enough to finish the Industrial Workers of the World as a national force.
    In the same period, Landis took charge of an antitrust case between the existing major leagues and the upstart Federal League. For years the American and National Leagues had enjoyed monopoly powers, which allowed them to impose a contractual submissiveness on players through the reserve clause, but the Federal League threatened all that by offering better pay and the chance of free agency. Landis permanently endeared himself to American and National League team owners by deferring a ruling for so long that the Federal League owners eventually ran out of money, gave up and disbanded.
    With the Federal League out of the way, the baseball owners were able to return to treating their players appallingly. They renounced all agreements made during the Federal League’s existence, refused to deal further with a new players’ union, and cut salaries everywhere. All this created quite a lot of ill will among the players, and nowhere more so than with the Chicago White Sox, whose owner, Charles Comiskey, was famed for his miserly instincts. Comiskey charged players for laundering their uniforms. He promised an infielder named Bill Hunnefield a $1,000 bonus if Hunnefield stayed healthy enough to play in 100 games, then benched him for the remainder of the season when he got to 99.
    In 1919, seven members of the White Sox, with names that could almost have been supplied by central casting – Chick Gandil, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, Lefty Williams, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson – agreed to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds for fairly modest payoffs. The ‘Black Sox’ conspirators were not, by and large, terribly bright. Risberg had just a third-grade education and was a borderline psychotic; he threatened to kill anyone who blew the whistle on the fix, and was deemed just about unbalanced enough to do so. Jackson had never been to school at all and couldn’t read or write. Several of the conspirators seemed not quite to understand what was expected of them. Jackson batted .375 in the series and had a record eight hits, one of them a surprise bunt in the tenth inning of a tied game that he beat out with great hustle. Gandil won a game with a walk-off hit. In the end, the White Sox did lose the series, 5 games to 3, but seemed to struggle to do so. One reason for this, it has been suggested, is that the Reds were in on a separate fix and were doing their utmost to lose, too.
    Nearly every baseball insider, it seems, knew what was going on. When the scandal broke, the major league owners invited – in fact, all but beseeched – Landis to become baseball’s first commissioner. Landis agreed on the understanding that he be givendictatorial powers and a written undertaking from the owners that they would never question his judgements. He set up office in the People’s Gas Building in Chicago behind a door that had a single word on it: ‘Baseball’.
    The seven conspirators plus another player, Buck Weaver, who didn’t take part in the fix but knew about it and didn’t report it, were put on trial in the summer of 1921. A fact not often remembered is that the jury found all eight not guilty, then went out with them to a restaurant to celebrate. One reason the players were cleared was that it was not actually illegal to fix a baseball game, so they could only be charged with wilfully defrauding the public and injuring Comiskey’s business, and the jurors decided that that case was not proved. The point was academic because Landis banned them for life anyway.
    Landis at first kept his federal judgeship even though it was illegal for him