Jack Dempsey and the Roaring Twenties by Thomas Myler

Author:Thomas Myler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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With 1919 drawing to a close, the Roaring Twenties was about to begin with a loud bang. When the decade arrived, it changed America and eventually the rest of the world. The old was out and the new was in. As the weeks and months passed, an explosion in new fashion and entertainments was beginning to thrill and excite a great many people, though some were still too poor to take part and turned back to traditional ways. People flocked to the new cinemas and dance halls. Jazz music and dances such as the Charleston, the Shimmy and the Foxtrot were all the rage. F. Scott Fitzgerald coined it the Jazz Age.

Women demanded greater equality with men. The authorities had banned alcohol. The 18th Amendment of the Constitution, which banned the making, transportation and selling of alcohol, meant that people wanting to toast the end of the year and welcome in the new one would have to fill their glasses with water. It meant a triumph for religious groups who had fought a long campaign for the outright banning of alcohol. Many states had already passed prohibition laws. Maine did it in 1851 and others followed.

There was the fear that drinking would go ‘underground’ to secret drinking dens. In cities such as Chicago, it was rumoured that the gangsters who ran the prostitution trade were already organising an illegal operation by making and selling alcoholic drinks and turning in huge profits. It was no secret that mobsters such as Jim Colosimo, Johnny Torrio and Capone himself were already operating in Chicago.

It was felt, too, that if the gangsters made a fortune out of illegal alcohol, which seemed likely, it would only increase the threat they posed to law-abiding Americans. When big profits were at stake, the hoodlums would be desperate to come out on top in power struggles with rival gangs, bringing a spiral of violence to American cities.

The gangster element had already spread into sport with a major scandal in baseball. Eight players attached to the White Sox club had been suspended on 28 September after being accused of deliberately losing the 1919 World Series, baseball’s end-of-season championship match, against the Cincinnati Reds. The players were believed to have lost the game in exchange for a large sum of money offered by a New York syndicate led by gangster Arnold Rothstein. Three of the players had already confessed to the crime.

It meant that many mobsters had made huge profits from the incident, which became known as the Black Sox Scandal. Abe Attell, the former world featherweight champion who ran several bars at the time, was said to have been involved, although he was never convicted of any crime.

The fallout from the scandal resulted in the appointment of Judge Kenesaw Landis as the first Commissioner of Baseball, and granting him absolute control over the sport in order to restore its integrity. Despite acquittals in a public trial in 1921, all eight players were banned for life by Judge Landis. The

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