Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago

281 Pages·2017·3.63 MB·English

by  William Hazelgrove

Al Capone and the
1933 World’s Fair
Aerial view of the 1933 World’s Fair (Source: Library of Congress)
Al Capone and the
1933 World’s Fair
The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago
William Elliott Hazelgrove
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hazelgrove, William Elliott, 1959– author.
Title: Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair : the end of the gangster era in
Chicago / William Elliott Hazelgrove.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2017] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006093 (print) | LCCN 2017023717 (ebook) | ISBN
9781442272279 (electronic) | ISBN 9781442272262 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Chicago (Ill.)—History—20th century. | Chicago
(Ill.)—Civilization—20th century. | Chicago (Ill.)—Social
conditions—20th century. | Century of Progress International Exposition
(1933–1934 : Chicago, Ill.)
Classification: LCC F548.5 (ebook) | LCC F548.5 .H39 2017 (print) | DDC
977.3/11—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006093
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/
NISO Z39.48-1992.
For Kitty, Clay, Callie, and Careen
A smile can get you far, but a smile with a gun can get you further.
—Al Capone
I haven’t been out of work since the day I took off my pants.
—Sally Rand
Contents
Forty Years Later. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Chapter 1: Chicago, May 27, 1933. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 2: Valentine’s Day, 1929. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Chapter 3: Chicago’s Second World’s Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Chapter 4: WAMPAS Baby Star. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Chapter 5: Public Enemy Number One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Chapter 6: The White City. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Chapter 7: Bootlegging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
Chapter 8: The Big Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37
Chapter 9: The Big Fellah Comes Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
Chapter 10: The Perfect Storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Chapter 11: Financing a Fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Chapter 12: The Untouchables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Chapter 13: Birth of the Nymph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Chapter 14: Death in the Underground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
Chapter 15: Breaking Ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78
Chapter 16: The Secret Six. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Chapter 17: The Modernists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89
Chapter 18: Lady Godiva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95
Chapter 19: Horatio Alger Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Chapter 20: The Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter 21: The Secret Six Get to Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Chapter 22: Beginning to Build the Rainbow City . . . . . . . . 114
Chapter 23: Gold Diggers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Chapter 24: Meeting Al Capone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
vii
Contents
Chapter 25: Water, Electric, and the Sky Ride. . . . . . . . . . . 128
Chapter 26: One Hundred Thousand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Chapter 27: The Depression Fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Chapter 28: Nymphs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Chapter 29: Springtime in Chicago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Chapter 30: The Sky Ride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Chapter 31: The Trial of Al Capone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Chapter 32: Color and Light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Chapter 33: The Plea Bargain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Chapter 34: The Temple of Womanhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Chapter 35: The Bad Plea Bargain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Chapter 36: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Chapter 37: Hayseeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Chapter 38: The Gaseous Tube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Chapter 39: The Trial of Al Capone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Chapter 40: The Disposable Fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Chapter 41: Verdict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Chapter 42: Racing the Clock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Chapter 43: Capone on Ice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Chapter 44: Lady Godiva Again. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Chapter 45: Death of the Untouchables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Chapter 46: A Day at the Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Chapter 47: Sex at the Fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Chapter 48: A Century of Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Chapter 49: Rags to Riches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Chapter 50: End of the Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
viii
Forty Years Later
Forty years after the Columbian Exposition and Dr. H. H.
Holmes’s macabre, psychopathic murders in 1893, Chicago decided it
was time to have another world’s fair. The times and the reasons dif-
fered, though. Orville and Wilber Wright had left the earth for twelve
seconds in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. The Titanic had met
black ice in the Atlantic and already been resting on the bottom of the
ocean for two decades. The beau arts tradition of 1893 had been left
in the dust for a modernist vision of the world promoted by industry,
architecture, and advertising.
The intervening years had rendered Holmes’s crimes quaint by com-
parison with the mechanized slaughter of World War I and gangsters
duking it out over the fruits of Prohibition in the streets of Chicago.
Humanism was dead. Technology and materialism had taken its place—a
very different God indeed. The secular world was using Thompson sub-
machine guns and offering sex through peep holes and in back rooms.
The 1933 World’s Fair would hold its breath and hope Al Capone didn’t
pull the whole thing under.
When the Great Depression came crashing down, many thought
people would never spend money on a fair in the bleakest times America
had ever known. In 1933, when the fair opened, 15 million people were
unemployed, and one-third of the banks had failed. Men from the J. P.
Morgan and DuPont empires had plans to overthrow the government
and replace Franklin D. Roosevelt with a fascist government modeled on
that of Italy. Only when General Smedley Butler revealed the plans to
Congress was the coup thwarted.
While the Columbian Exposition of 1893 showed that Chicago had
arrived, the 1933 World’s Fair declared that the city and the nation would
ix