One Summer: America, 1927

forty cases before the US Supreme Court, but none would have a more lasting effect than this one – if she won.
    She did.
    By a neat touch of irony – indeed, it would be hard to find a neater – the following decade the opinionated Judge Manton was successfully prosecuted by the Internal Revenue Service for non-payment of taxes after he was found guilty of pocketing $186,000 in bribes. He served seventeen months in a federal penitentiary.
    Thanks to United States vs Sullivan, Al Capone’s days were numbered, though neither he nor almost anyone else realized it yet. The New York Times , along with virtually all other papers in America, barely noted US vs Sullivan, reporting it in a small story on page thirty-one – just as it paid little attention to another landmark Supreme Court case that month, Buck vs Bell (about which much more anon). Instead, it gave far more prominence that day to a brief but lively return to the news of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who on the morning of 16 May were transferred the thirty-five miles from their prison on Long Island to death row at Sing Sing in a scene of mayhem dazzlingly reminiscent of a Keystone Kops feature.
    A crowd of ten thousand people – many standing on rooftops or fire escapes to get a better view – gathered outside the QueensCounty Jail to watch as a motorcade of fourteen cars, escorted by six police motorcycles with sidecars (each containing a policeman with a rifle), set off with America’s two most popular murderers just after 10.30 in the morning. The convoy included prison officials, newspaper reporters and two aldermen, James Murtha and Bernard Schwartz, who had nothing to do with the case but came along for the ride. ‘They were accompanied by their wives and children, who seemed to enjoy the outing,’ noted a New York Times correspondent.
    From the jail, the procession drove at high speed (which in 1927 was about 40 miles an hour) over the Queensboro Bridge, then across Manhattan by way of Central Park, but it constantly got bogged down in traffic.
    No place in the world was less hospitable to a speeding convoy than New York in the 1920s. It was the most congested city on earth. It contained more cars than the whole of Germany, but it also still had 50,000 horses. The combination of hurrying motorized vehicles, plodding carts and horses and lunging pedestrians made New York’s streets wildly dangerous. Over a thousand people were killed in traffic accidents in New York in 1927 – four times the number that are killed in traffic accidents today. Taxi cabs alone were responsible for seventy-five deaths in Manhattan that year.
    In an effort to improve things, traffic lights had been introduced to Manhattan three years earlier, but so far had little detectable effect. Elsewhere traffic improvements were being implemented where they could be, but in the short term these just added to the chaos. Along Park Avenue, the leafy central esplanade was in the process of having eighteen feet sliced off each side to add extra lanes between Forty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Streets, thus taking most of the park out of Park Avenue. Along the west side of Manhattan, noise and congestion were further aggravated by the construction of the Holland Tunnel, which would open that autumn. It was a wonder of the age – the longest underwater tunnel in the world – but the challenge of boring and ventilating a tube a mile and a half long a hundred feet beneath the earth was soformidable that the tunnel’s designer and chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, dropped dead from the stress before it was finished. He was only forty-one, but at least he had the consolation of having the tunnel named after him. His successor, Milton H. Freeman, keeled over just four months into the job himself, dead of a heart attack of his own, but received no commemoration. Thirteen other workers died in the course of construction. To most New Yorkers in the summer of 1927, however, the Holland Tunnel was just a mighty disruption to traffic.
    So it was optimistic of the Snyder–Gray motorcade to hope that it could somehow clear a way through the chaotic streets. Worse, because it was so instantly recognizable, whenever the motorcade stopped or slowed, people crowded round to peer through the windows in the hopes of spying the murderers within, slowing its progress even more. News of the convoy’s arrival on a street spread like wildfire. ‘Occupants of street cars deserted their seats to rush out