These days, it’s hard to be an optimist. War, inflation and unrest seem to be steering us toward the dystopia we’ve been seeing in movies and books for years. We could use an antidote, a vision of ourselves and our world at its best.
We’ve done it before. After the horrors of World War I, at the height of mob violence in America, people dared to choose optimism right at a time when it was sorely needed. America built a World’s Fair.
In Chicago, of all places.
The Wild West
In 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre shocked the world. Seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage by an unknown group, some dressed as Chicago cops. The city’s big mobsters bantered about who did it. Al Capone said it must’ve been Bugs Moran. Bugs said it must’ve been Capone. Nobody really believed the culprits would be caught (they weren’t). Chicago was corrupt, bloody, lawless. It was the Wild West fueled by the speakeasies and bootlegging of Prohibition.
The massacre was a wake up call. The straight-laced businessmen of the city had had enough of Chicago’s reputation for violence. Under the leadership of the dour-faced Rufus Dawes, the city was going to push back by showing the world a different Chicago: safe, clean, sober. A World’s Fair on Lake Michigan, the biggest, grandest fair that had ever been held, could attract millions of people from across the country, families looking for a good, wholesome time. It was planned for 1933.
No mobsters allowed.
The Plan
After the massacre, the press descended on Dawes, demanding to know how he could assure the country that the World’s Fair would be safe from mob violence. “We have a plan,” Dawes said, “and I assure you the gangsters will be gone by the time the fair opens.”
It was a big promise. The massacre had the potential to scare away the investors Dawes needed to get the World’s Fair off the ground. If all went well, the Fair would stretch for miles along the lakefront and would feature the most modern buildings and technology yet seen in one place. It would glorify industry and science, celebrating the achievements in those fields in the past hundred years. The Fair would be called A Century of Progress.
If the mob didn’t kill the project first. Dawes picked up the phone and called in the Secret Six.
The Secret Six
The mythos around Al Capone shrouds the fact that he was quite a businessman. During Prohibition, his mob largely controlled the production and distribution of beer in Chicago. That was big business when every Chicagoan statistically drank six pints of beer a week. It sold for a dollar a bottle, and while Prohibition lasted, Capone made a fortune. In the Great Depression, he funded soup kitchens, the image of the man of the people. He was an international star, the dapper uncle who kept his violence in the shadows.
He seemed invincible. Elliot Ness and the Untouchables made for good stories but barely made a dent in Capone’s world. It was quickly clear he couldn’t be caught on Prohibition charges. Most Prohibition agents, like the rest of Chicago, were bribed by the gangsters.
To break the mob’s hold on the city, the anti-mob powers needed a war chest that would fund the fight to bring down Capone, a move that would show the gangsters their time was over. Enter the Secret Six, a shadowy group of millionaires headed by Robert Randolph who wanted Chicago cleaned up in time for the World’s Fair.
By Any Means Necessary
To Randolph, fighting gangsters called for extreme measures. He favored interrogations under torture and the suspension of the Fifth Amendment. If the murder of a mobster was necessary, so be it. Randolph hired his own corps of investigators from law enforcement organizations, and funded others in the background. The Secret Six even opened its own speakeasy as a front to learn Capone’s business and recruit informants.
By 1930, the fight seemed to be escalating. The murder of a foreman at a construction site signaled the mob’s intention to infiltrate the World’s Fair as it broke ground on the lakefront. If something wasn’t done soon, the mob would be demanding a cut of the Fair’s construction, concessions and other businesses.
By then, Capone and the mob were getting heat from all directions. Investigators for the Secret Six had infiltrated Big Al’s businesses. Agents of the IRS were amassing the evidence it would use to convict Capone on tax evasion. The Chicago Tribune launched a crusade against the mob after a police reporter was murdered in the street. Public opinion was shifting. The city had had enough of the Wild West.
End of an Era
As it turned out, the taxmen got to Capone first. In 1931, he was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Lopping off the most prominent head of the Chicago mob didn’t cure all the violence in the city, but the mob grew quieter, more subtle. The gangsters were worried. Across the country, the states were repealing the amendment that had launched Prohibition. Soon beer would be legal again, and the mob would lose its biggest moneymaker.
The mobsters did not get a piece of the World’s Fair. On May 27, 1933, the Fair opened to a fanfare of publicity. In its first summer season, the Fair was so successful and lucrative, it would return the following summer for a second season. Millions of visitors flooded to Chicago and left with stories and souvenirs of the Fair. Chicago had succeeded in cleaning itself up, for the time being.
The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair not only gave America a fun time, it showed a positive vision of the world, at least for some. The Fair was less popular with Black Americans and others who didn’t share in the utopian view of the country. European fascists also used the Fair for their own ends. But in the duel between the mob and the fair – a violent today or a positive, peaceful tomorrow – it was optimism that won.
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Further reading: Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago by William Elliott Hazelgrove.
Anika Scott’s new novel Sinners of Starlight City is a “Godfather-esque tale of revenge” set at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. She’s the internationally bestselling author of The German Heiress and The Soviet Sisters. Her mother’s family is Sicilian-American, but as far as she knows, none of her relatives was ever in the mob.
