Here's what I find most fascinating about this: how unremarkable it is. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre is exactly what you think of when you think of the mob: a bunch of guys with suits outside getting shot with Tommy-guns. I'm just fascinated why this is the story that persists through time. It has so many cliche elements to it, I don't know if that's why, or if it started all these cliche elements. Why is this case the one we always hear about? If there's anybody out there who has a love of organized crime history, I'd be interested in hearing what it is about this case...
This was like catnip for me, because it's exactly the sort of question I love exploring by digging up old newspaper articles. In my genealogy work, I've discovered that the modern sense of an event may bear little resemblance to how people of the time saw it. The choices that newspaper publishers made speaks to the sort of content that they thought would sell papers, so poring over contemporary articles has provided me with insights into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture that I never could have gotten otherwise.
So I went to FultonHistory.com and searched for articles from 1929 that contained the words "2122 North Clark Street". I cropped the images and put the "clippings" in an album linked below. Below that is a stream of phrases that leaped out at me as I read through the articles. I stopped after six, because the content started to repeat itself. Those repeating patterns reveal the particular images and stories that news writers of 1929 thought would grab readers' attention.
The most obvious thread was brutality; words like "slaughter" abound. But look a little deeper. It's not just brutality that characterized these stories, but automated brutality. Now consider the year: 1929. World War I, famous for traumatizing the world with the advent of mechanized warfare, was just ten years in the past. To those readers, the thought of lining people up and executing them as dispassionately as one would cows in a slaughterhouse was still a shockingly new horror. Sitting here in 2017, having steeped in such images since childhood, it's difficult if not impossible for me to imagine how disturbing this was.
Further exploring the theme of dehumanizing mechanized murder, we see an obsession with cars. Again, think about the year. The 1920s were the first time in history when a working class person could afford a car, and that transformed the way people lived and worked. It must have been fascinating for consumers, who had only just begun to benefit from this innovation, to see it used for crime.
Note that, although the seven men seem to have been herded into a back room and executed, some articles claim that they were killed by bullets sprayed from machine guns mounted on cars. At least one article contains both contradictory versions! This error is understandable when you consider the following.
Today's slayings, was something new in Chicago gang warfare. Before the gangsters took their victims for a "ride", luring them into automobiles and killing them, or else swept past in automobiles and raked their victims with gunfire.
Never before, however, has one gang invaded the stronghold of another, rounded up the victims and calmly shot them to death. The slayers escaped today in approved gangster fashion, dashing away in waiting motor cars.
So this story was a twist on what readers were used to. It took the fresh concept of a drive-by shooting and incorporated other captivating story elements never before associated with gang warfare: the planning, the "siege" by an enemy disguised as police, and the herding of an enemy into a well-lit, impersonal, mechanized killing floor. Oh, and it also included a juicy story about a possible connection between the crime and the election of an alderman. Nothing like collusion between the mob and the Chicago machine to spice up a story.
slaughter
Chicago's latest, and bloodiest of all, gang killings
72 previous gang killings in the last four years without a conviction--many without an arrest
lined up their victims against a brick wall
two dressed as policemen
four theories: two involving liquor, politics and the cleaning and dyeing business
line victims up against wall and shoot them down
bodies are riddled with bullets from shotguns and machine guns
pose as policemen
invade headquarters of rival gang and commit murder wholesale
summarily executed
cold blood
posing as policemen
invade the stronghold
mow them down with automatic pistols and machine guns
wholesale execution is carried out with the precision of an army firing squad
posing as policemen
lined up seven helpless, unarmed victims with their faces to a white brick wall
mowed them down with automatic pistols and machine guns
wholesale execution
precision of an army firing squad
it was an innovation in Chicago gang history
They rushed into the garage with drawn pistols and machine guns, infoming the seven men they were police officers. Some of them flashed stars and others wore parts of police uniforms. Without ado they herded the victims to a courtyard in the rear.
Overhead gleamed a powerful electric light to make the work of the firing squad easier
The victims, killed by their merciless executioners without having a chance at escape sprawled grotesquely on the floor
wholesale killing
brutally annihilated
slaughter
wholesale slaughter, unlike any killings ever before attempted in the gang war of annihilation
wholesale raids
active alliance between crime and politics
Alderman Titus Haffa
aldermanic elections, a laundry labor controversy and a Detroit rum running syndicate
brutally shot
victims of a band of men who invaded their north side headquarters
intruders posed as policemen
men lined up against wall and shot down with shot and machine guns
lined up against a wall and summarily executed
shot them down in cold blood
heaped bodies
displaying stars
herded their victims
herded
Today's slayings, was something new in Chicago gang warfare. Before the gangsters took their victims for a "ride", luring them into automobiles and killing them, or else swept past in automobiles and raked their victims wtih gunfire.
Never before, however, has one gang invaded the stronghold of another, rounded up the victims and calmly shot them to death. The slayers escaped today in approved gangster fashion, dashing away in waiting motor cars.
lined up against wall and shot
lined up against a wall and summarily executed
posing as police
shot them down in cold blood
heaped bodies
displaying stars
herded
lining them up against a wall with hands over their heads
mowed down by machine gun fire from two automobiles
The guns were mounted on the sides of the two cars
fell like ten-pins
