One Summer: America, 1927

see either. ‘I’d been saving that homer for him, and then he doesn’t show up,’ Ruth said afterwards. ‘I guess he thinks this is a twilight league.’
    Lindbergh, through no fault of his own, simply couldn’t get there. Delayed at every turn by people wanting to speak to him, shake his hand, have a moment of his time, he didn’t reach Yankee Stadium until well after 5 p.m. when the game was nearly finished, at which point it was decided that he didn’t have time to go in anyway, so his motorcade turned round and went back to town for him to collect the Orteig Prize from Raymond Orteig at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. There, as everywhere, he was met by a mob and had to be bundled into the building through a sea of straining hands.
    Lindbergh was beginning to look distinctly shell-shocked. The historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon met him in the midst of all this and reported with genuine concern: ‘Never have I seen anyone as hopelessly tired, as courageously tired, as that boy whose brain was still doing a duty which the rest of his body could no longer follow up. Another three days of this and the reflected-glory hounds will chase him to his death.’ In fact, Lindbergh had much more than three days of it to get through, and it would only get worse.
    He must at least have been glad to meet Raymond Orteig, for Orteig was a delightful and likeable man with a knack for putting people at their ease. He had started life humbly as a shepherd boy in the French Pyrenees, but in 1882, aged just twelve, he had followed an uncle to America. There, he taught himself English, got a job as a hotel waiter, and worked his way up the ladder of opportunity until he was first the maître d’, then the manager and finally the owner of two of Manhattan’s smartest hotels, the Lafayette and Brevoort, both in Greenwich Village. For Orteig, Lindbergh was a saviour. The Orteig Prize, offered in a moment of impetuous magnanimity, had become something of a nightmare for the Frenchman. Six men had lost their lives trying to win the prize, and until Lindbergh’s triumph it had seemed likely that that number would just keep rising. Critics had begun to observe that Orteig, however well-meaning, was a murderer – a thought that was understandably painful for him to bear.
    So it was with relief and pleasure that he handed Lindbergh his cheque – though he must also have felt a stab of unease at parting with such a hefty sum, for $25,000 was a great deal of money in 1927 and rather more than he could comfortably afford.
    The unfortunate fact of the matter was that Orteig was slowly going out of business, and he was being killed by the same thing that was killing lots of other people, sometimes all too literally: Prohibition.
     
    fn1 New York’s Woolworth Building, 792 feet high, built in 1913, was still the tallest in the world. The Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, which would both overtake the Woolworth, would not be built until 1930 and 1931 respectively.

C HAPTER 12
     

     
    SOME TIME ON the night of 23 June 1927, Wilson B. Hickox, aged forty-three, a wealthy businessman from Cleveland, Ohio (and, coincidentally, a neighbour of the US ambassador to France, Myron Herrick, in the suburb of Cleveland Heights), returned from an evening out in New York City and poured himself a nightcap in his room in the Roosevelt Hotel.
    Shortly thereafter, Mr Hickox began to feel some peculiar and unpleasant sensations – a tightening of the throat and chest, a kind of bitter pain spreading through his body. We may reasonably imagine the glass slipping from his hand and Mr Hickox rising with difficulty and stumbling towards the door to summon help as his symptoms swiftly worsened. One by one his body systems were collapsing into paralysis as the toxic effects of strychnine swept through him. Mr Hickox never made it to the door but died slowly and wretchedly on the floor of his room, bewildered, frightened, and unable to move a muscle.
    What was most notable about Mr Hickox’s death was not that he had been poisoned but that it was his own government that had killed him. The 1920s was in many ways the most strange and wondrous decade in American history, and nothing made it more so than Prohibition. It was easily the most extreme, ill-judged, costlyand ignored experiment in social engineering ever conducted by an otherwise rational nation. At a stroke it shut down the fifth largest industry in America. It took some $2