One Summer: America, 1927 (72 page)

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish vendor, and Nicola Sacco, shoemaker—two Italian immigrants whose convictions for murder and death sentences made them an international cause célèbre. Their guilt or innocence is still a matter of dispute
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The funeral procession through Boston for Sacco and Vanzetti on August 29 following their execution attracted many thousands of viewers—quite a different gathering from the ones greeting Lindbergh
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Robert G. Elliott, America’s top executioner and a master of the difficult art of administering death by electrocution. He would execute, among many others, Sacco and Vanzetti in the summer of 1927, and the next year Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray at Sing Sing Prison
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Nineteen twenty-seven was a great year for movies. One of the best was William Wellman’s
Wings,
a thrilling and technically groundbreaking epic about World War I air combat that won the first Academy Award and featured the famed “It Girl” Clara Bow
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While it was by no means the first “talking picture,”
The Jazz Singer,
starring the singer Al Jolson in his first film role, was the production that made sound movies real to a mass audience and ended the silent era—in the process saving Hollywood from financial ruin
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Movie theaters that showed those films were constructed on the scale of palaces, as this interior shot of New York’s famed Roxy Theatre demonstrates. Its opening in 1927 was so momentous an occasion that President Coolidge sent a telegram of congratulations to its builder, Samuel Rothafel
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Two of the oddest business titans America ever produced were the brothers Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen. Inseparable and reclusive, they made a fortune in railroads and real estate and built Shaker Heights, the first planned suburban community, and Cleveland’s Union Terminal, at the time the tallest building in America
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Al Capone, the famed Chicago gangster and one of the most successful men in America. In 1927 his murderous mob flourished in the most politically corrupt city in the country and grossed more than $100 million
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Capone’s eventual downfall came at the hands of Mabel Willebrandt, the chief federal Prohibition prosecutor, who developed the novel theory that he could be prosecuted for evading taxes on that $100 million
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The 1920s was a decade justly noted for financial chicanery. Dapper Charles Ponzi’s famed “scheme” involved postal reply coupons. By 1927 he resided in Charlestown Prison with his fellow Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti
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