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This Week in History: St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the roots of ‘fake news’
This week in history features Chicago mobsters and America’s original “fake news.”
Feb. 14, 1929
La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the Mob – take your pick. However you label it, there are few things so uniquely American than the organized crime syndicates of Chicago and New York City of the 1920s.
The image of a well-dressed, tommy-gun-wielding Mafioso leaning out of a racing Ford Model T is as iconically American as a masked bandit astride his horse.
Since the early 1930s, Hollywood has romanticized the brutal truth of these gangsters; the courteous swagger of Marlon Brando certainly plays better on screen than the egomaniacal, ill-tempered Vito Genovese of reality.
By far the most popularized mobster of the 20th century is “Scarface” Al Capone and on this day in 1929, the actions of his cronies sent him to the top of the charts as the most wanted man in Chicago.
Feb. 14, 1929 was the day of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The massacre itself was the culmination of a long-running gang war between Al Capone and his rival Bugs Moran.
Moran was a career criminal who ran the Irish-American North Side gang in Chicago during the lucrative bootlegging years of prohibition.
Moran and Capone, who ran the competing South Side gang, had repeatedly fought each other over control of the bootlegging industry of the city.
Both men had also repeatedly survived each other’s assassination attempts. In one noteworthy instance, Moran and his men had riddled a restaurant where Capone was lunching with hundreds of bullets.
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre actually remains to this day an unsolved murder case, although it has been widely assumed that Capone was the mastermind behind it.
Under this theory, the massacre transpired like this: The last straw for Capone was Moran placing a $50,000 bounty on his head. Wishing finally to knock his competition out of the running, Capone ordered his men to a garage on the morning of February 14 where he had learned Moran and his men would be waiting for the arrival of a shipment of hooch. Dressed as police officers, Capone’s cronies entered the garage and lined the seven men found lounging inside up against a wall.
Although Moran himself was not one of the seven, several of his top advisors were among the unfortunate victims, including his bookkeeper, two top hitmen and brother-in-law.
Pulling out a tommy gun, shotgun and revolver, the “policemen” opened fire. When the last spent cartridge lay still on the cold floor of the garage, 90 bullets had ripped into the seven men and in one bold act, Capone had cut his primary competition down to size.
With his gang in shambles, Moran’s control over the bootlegging traffic in Chicago slipped and Capone was quick to pick up the slack. The public was astonished at the brazen brutality of the massacre.
Although he had been in Florida at the time of the crime, Capone was immediately suspected of being behind it and this “Public Enemy Number One” was put firmly in the crosshairs of justice.
Within two years, Capone would be rotting in prison for tax evasion – a far less Hollywood-esque ending than a bullet-riddled car.
Feb. 15, 1898
It seems more than ever that this country’s politicians and the media that report on them are at an impasse.
Each one seems unable to trust the other. In an atmosphere of such partisanship and distrust, we should all look for common ground – wherever it might be.
Call it overly optimistic of me, but there does appear to be one thing that politicians and the media can agree on: the perfidious influence of “fake news.”
These unethical and unfounded reports have increasingly insinuated themselves into the newsfeed of innocent Americans.
We used to be able to safely identify fake news by its relative location in the grocery store: the closer it was to the checkout line, the more dubious its authenticity.
Immediately to the left of the conveyor belt was the Enquirer and other tabloids but the New Yorker and national newspapers were either in their own aisle or outside in a coin-operated machine.
Now, however, Facebook and the Internet as a whole have broken down these safety nets and given rise to fake news.
Well, not quite. In fact, fake news is not only not a 21st-century invention, but it used to be far worse than it is today. In fact, on this day in 1898, fake news had a large part in thrusting America into a war and onto the world-stage as a new empire.
On Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. Destroyer Maine was docked at the port of Havana, Cuba. At the time still a territory of Spain, Cuba had been in the process of a years-long revolution to rid itself of the colonial power.
America, disturbed at the economic and political instability of a region so close to her, and eager to expel another European power from North and South America, began to agitate against Spain.
At the forefront of this American dissent were several newspapers – especially those owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
The battle between these two newspaper publishers over the New York market led to the creation of the term “yellow journalism.”
“Yellow Kid,” was the name of a cartoon character created by Richard Outcault for Pulitzer’s newspaper. The popular cartoon significantly boosted sales of Pulitzer’s paper, at a loss to Hearst. Hoping to boost his own sales, Hearst hired Outcault away from Pulitzer and the battle raged on.
The constant one-upping between the papers inevitably resulted in sensationalized news as eye-catching headlines were favored over actual substantive stories. So was born “yellow journalism.”
When the Maine was sunk on the night of Feb. 15 by an explosion of unknown origins, the newspapers went wild.
Injecting the story with a healthy dose of unsubstantiated rumor, Hearst and Pulitzer published headlines that blamed the destruction of the ship on Spanish saboteurs. These stories whipped the public into a furor and by May of that year America was at war with Spain.
Although not the sole cause of the conflict, the sensationalist newspapers of the day certainly went a ways towards convincing the American public that war was the just answer to a cowardly act of sabotage.
One-hundred and twenty years later and we are back in the streets of New York, the newsboys hocking their papers to us unsuspecting and gullible consumers.
Instead of neatly arranged typeface, we are easily drawn in by clickbait titles on our Facebook feed. The means have changed, but the results look to be the same.
Antone Pierucci is curator of the Lake County Museums in Lake County, Calif.
