One Summer: America, 1927

seems, were very happy to look at it that way. When students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism (named for Robert McCormick’s grandfather) were asked in 1927 to name the ten most outstanding people in the world, they chose Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, the golfer Bobby Jones, and Al Capone.
    For Capone, 1927 was an exceptionally good year. Profits were flowing in, Chicago’s gangs were mostly at peace, and Capone increasingly found himself a person of importance. When newspaper deliverymen threatened a crippling strike in Chicago, it was to Capone, not Big Bill Thompson, that the proprietors turned for help. Capone got the strike called off and was invited to a meeting of the owners, chaired by Robert McCormick, so that they could express their gratitude.
    ‘McCormick wanted to pay me afterward,’ Capone said later, ‘but I told him to give the money to a hospital.’ McCormick’s version of the story was rather different. ‘I arrived late at a publishers’ meeting,’ he recorded briskly in a memoir. ‘Capone walked in with some of his hoodlums. I threw him out.’ Whatever in fact transpired, there was no strike, and the newspapers of Chicago for ever after went easy on Capone.
    As the summer of 1927 wound to an end, Al Capone was the world’s favourite gangster. In a couple of weeks 150,000 people would pack into Soldier Field in Chicago to watch the Dempsey–Tunney rematch. The place would be full of celebrities, but it would be Al Capone that everyone in the stadium would crane to see. At the age of twenty-eight, he appeared to be on top ofthe world. In fact, time was about to run out for him. Within months he would be gone from Chicago and his empire would be crumbling around him.
     
    fn1 In 1927, McCormick had not yet settled on his most celebrated idiosyncrasy – namely, a devotion to simplified spelling. That would begin in 1934, when he would introduce to the Tribune such novel spellings as frate , burocracy , iland and lam , among a large and ever-changing corpus. The Tribune maintained the practice for forty-one years.

C HAPTER 30
     

     
    LOU GEHRIG, IN his quiet, methodical, all but invisible way, was having a fantastic year. As the second week of September began, he had 45 home runs, 161 runs batted in, and a .389 batting average. As his biographer Jonathan Eig notes in Luckiest Man , Gehrig could have stopped there, with almost a month of the season still to play, and had one of the best seasons ever. In fact, he did essentially stop there.
    His mother was unwell with a goitre and needed surgery. Gehrig was beside himself with anxiety. ‘I’m so worried about Mom that I can’t see straight,’ he confided to a teammate.
    ‘All his thoughts were on Mom,’ the sportswriter Fred Lieb wrote later. ‘As soon as he finished the game, he would rush to the hospital and stay with her until her bedtime.’ Gehrig hit just 2 more home runs the rest of the season. His heart wasn’t in the game. All he could think about was his beloved momma.
    Babe Ruth, meanwhile, began knocking balls out of parks as if hitting tee shots at a driving range. Between 2 and 29 September he hit 17 home runs. No one had ever done anything like that in a single month.
    The Yankees seemed incapable of doing anything wrong. On 10 September, they beat St Louis for the twenty-first time in a row –the most consecutive victories by one team over another during a single season. On 16 September, Wilcy Moore, who was such a bad batter that players would come out of the locker room and vendors would pause in their transactions to watch the extraordinary sight of him flailing at empty air with a piece of wood, miraculously connected with a ball and sent it over the right-field wall for a home run, an event that nearly gave Babe Ruth a heart attack. On the mound, Moore scattered seven hits to push his record to 18 and 7 as the Yanks beat the White Sox 7 to 2.
    In the midst of this, almost unnoticed, the Yankees clinched the pennant. They had been in first place every day of the season – the first time that had ever happened. Their position was so commanding that they could lose all fifteen of their remaining games and the second-place Philadelphia Athletics could win all seventeen of theirs, and the Yankees would still come out on top. In point of fact, the Yankees won twelve of their last