One Summer: America, 1927

to do so. For entirely understandable reasons, judges were not permitted to receive money from private interests. Eventually Landis was compelled to give up his role as judge, an outcome that may have affected history more than is appreciated because Landis was also a vigorous defender of Prohibition – a novel position to take in Chicago in the 1920s. He handed out prison sentences of up to two years to people found guilty of purveying even small amounts of liquor. On his very last day as a judge, in early 1922, he sentenced a small-time Chicago saloonkeeper to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine for selling two glasses of whisky. Had Landis stayed on the bench, Chicago might not have remained the world’s most comfortable place to be a criminal. Whatever Kenesaw Mountain Landis did for baseball, he may actually, if inadvertently, have done even more for Al Capone.
     
    Chicago in 1927 was both the second largest city in America and the fourth largest in the world. Outside America, only London and Paris were grander. But it was also famous, in the words of an editorial in the Chicago Tribune , for ‘moronic buffoonery, barbariccrime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship’.
    What the Tribune editorialist didn’t say – obviously couldn’t say – was that a certain portion of that buffoonery resided with the paper’s own proprietor, Robert Rutherford McCormick.
    McCormick was born, in 1880, into a family that was rich and unhappy in roughly equal measure. Through his father he was related to Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, which brought a lucrative connection to the farm-equipment company International Harvester, and on his mother’s side he stood heir to the Chicago Tribune . His mother was so disappointed that Robert was a boy that she dressed him as a girl and called him Roberta until he was old enough to go to school. Whether for this reason or some other, McCormick didn’t discover sex until he was well into his thirties. Then he became something of a satyr and, among other transgressions, stole his first wife from a cousin.
    He had a boyish enthusiasm for warfare and was delighted beyond words to be made a colonel in the Illinois National Guard without ever having done anything to merit it other than to exist as a rich person. For the rest of his life he insisted on being addressed as ‘Colonel’. When his wife died he had her buried with full military honours, a distinction to which she was not remotely entitled (or very probably desirous of). When the First World War broke out, McCormick served briefly in France. His one battlefield experience was at Cantigny, which so moved him that he made that the name of his estate at Wheaton, Illinois, upon his return to civilian life.
    With another cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson, McCormick ran the Chicago Tribune from 1910. Although Patterson was an avowed socialist and McCormick was just an inch or so to the left of fascism, they worked surprisingly well together, and the paper prospered, doubling its circulation in their first decade of management. In 1919, the cousins launched the tabloid New York Daily News . Remarkably, for the first six years of its existence they ran it from Chicago. Eventually Patterson went off to New York to focus on the Daily News , leaving McCormick in sole charge of the Tribune .
    Under McCormick, the Tribune achieved its era of greatest importance. By 1927 its circulation was 815,000, almost double what it is today. The company owned paper mills, ships, dams, docks, some 7,000 square miles of forests, and one of the country’s earliest and most successful radio stations, WGN (short for ‘World’s Greatest Newspaper’). It also had interests in real estate and banks.
    As the years passed, McCormick became increasingly eccentric. When the president of the Lake Shore Bank, which he controlled, displeased him, McCormick demoted him to running a vegetable stand outside his estate. He insisted that the Tribune always refer to Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine, whom he loathed, as ‘Henry Luce, who was born in China but is not a Chinaman’. He developed a private theory that men at the University of Wisconsin wore lace underwear and dispatched a reporter to find out if that was true. (Coincidentally, this was just at the time that Charles Lindbergh was a student there.) For reasons never explained, McCormick kept eastern time at Cantigny, but didn’t tell guests, so first-time