First Freedom Read online

  York had excelled at sharpshooting contests in his home county, and once convinced that his destiny was to beat the Germans, he took to it with a single-minded gusto that few would match. In October 1918, York found himself in command of his unit after an ambush killed two of his commanding officers. He helped fight off more than a hundred Germans. After his Springfield rifle was exhausted of ammunition, York claimed to have repelled a German bayonet charge of six soldiers with nothing more than his 1911 pistol. “The American fired all of the rifle ammunition clips on the front of his belt and then three complete clips from his automatic pistol,” the affidavit read. “In days past he won many a turkey shoot in the Tennessee mountains and it is believed that he wasted no ammunition on this day.”13 An investigator found twenty-three .45 rounds fired from a Colt 1911 handgun on the site.

  Other well-known guns would soon follow.

  General John Pershing, who had quickly come around to seeing the usefulness of rapid-fire guns, asked Browning to build an even more dynamic machine gun to deal with armored combat vehicles: Could Browning get to work inventing a machine gun that fired .50-caliber rounds? “Well,” Browning is said to have answered, “the cartridge sounds pretty good, to start. As for the gun—you make up some cartridges, and we’ll do some shooting.”

  His invention, completed in 1918, would go on to be nicknamed the “Ma Deuce.” It was too late to be used in World War I, but its progeny became part of the American armory for many decades as well. In tests, the gun fired 877 .50-caliber rounds without any malfunctions. When asked by the press how he had developed such an incredibly powerful gun, Browning replied, “One drop of genius in a barrel of sweat wrought this miracle.”

  Both the .30- and .50-caliber guns evolved and were widely used as antiaircraft and defensive guns at the outbreak of World War II. “Students of warfare are in general agreement that the most far-reaching single military decision made in the 20th Century was when a small group of British officers, shortly before World War II, decided to mount ten caliber .303 Brownings on their Hurricane Fighters,” wrote the gun historian Colonel George Morgan Chinn. “This single act undoubtedly brought about the turning point of the war.”

  • • •

  “I wonder from time to time,” Browning is said to have confessed to one of his sons in his later years, “whether we are headed in the right direction. For instance, we are making guns that shoot farther, harder and calling it progress. If just getting farther and faster from your starting place is progress, I suppose the meaning we usually give the word is correct. But if we limit the meaning to movement toward a destination where the most pleasure and satisfaction are to be found, then this progress we’re bragging about is just crazy, blind racing past the things we are looking for—and haven’t the sense to recognize. And in the matter of guns that makes me crazier than most.”14

  Browning may have been conflicted about his chosen vocation in ways that Hiram Maxim and others would never be, but move forward he did. Perpetually. Many of the great American gunmakers, including Sam Colt, argued that the success of their inventions helped diminish violence among men by heightening and then equalizing their power. While this may have been true for the average person on the western plains or the immigrant living in a bustling city, the twentieth century would awaken political and ideological forces that brought death on a massive scale, escalating the authority and importance of firearms.

  In late 1926, Browning died—predictably, working on the designs for a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at the bench of his son Val at the Fabrique Nationale offices. The gun he was working on would be finished by Belgian designers and finally put into production in 1935. Just as unsurprisingly, as with most of his guns, his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol would be popular for decades to come. Browning had created the template for the twentieth century. From now on, American inventors took his ideas and ran with them.

  17

  THE CHICAGO TYPEWRITER

  “There is enough business for all of us without killing each other like animals in the street. I don’t want to die in the street punctured by machine-gun fire.”1

  —Al Capone

  Amusements—Games and Rides—Woman shooting tommy gun

  Perhaps no gun undermined the intentions of its inventor quite like the “tommy gun.” And while John Browning’s machine gun was the catalyst for dramatic changes in warfare, none of his weapons captured the popular imagination of the men and women at home like the Thompson submachine gun.

  Aesthetically, the gun’s drum magazines forever came to represent the crime, mayhem, and death of the crime-ridden Depression era. The gun was mythologized, romanticized, and misunderstood. In many ways its celebrity changed the way the average American thought about guns and the way their government conducted domestic “gun policy”—a concept they would not have understood before the 1930s. Certainly, few guns had more of an impact on the modern laws governing firearms in the twentieth century.

  The tommy gun’s inventor, John T. Thompson, personified many traits of nineteenth-century American entrepreneurship—passion, creativity, and practicality—but his invention was firmly entrenched in the twentieth century. It was after witnessing the force of the Gatling gun during the Spanish-American War in 1898 that Thompson, an Army man, contemplated the damage a lighter automatic gun could inflict. He wasn’t the first to envision this kind of weapon, as Browning would be the first to get there. The reliance on trench warfare during the First World War had substantially changed military thinking about tactics, inducing Thompson to experiment with small, fully automatic arms—this time with an eye toward designing a weapon that troops could handle as they cleared an enemy position. They needed something lighter than any Browning gun. “We shall put aside the rifle for now and instead build a little machine gun. A one-man, hand held [sic] machine gun. A trench broom!”he told his fellow engineers. 2

  Isaac Newton Lewis, one of America’s unheralded weapon makers, had been a military man as well, graduating from West Point in 1884. As an artillery officer, his initial forays into invention were modern ranging systems, rapid-firing field guns, and gas-propelled torpedoes—although, like his namesake, Lewis had wide-ranging interests in invention and mechanics and would go on to patent numerous ideas, including one of the first car-lighting systems. After the Philippine-American War, Lewis prepared a report on modernization of the United States’ antiquated artillery doctrine and weaponry. He traveled to Europe to study the latest armaments and methods. What he witnessed transformed him into a sharp critic of the Army Ordnance Department—which, if perhaps not completely unrelated, had been standing in the way of the development of many of his ideas.

  Frustration led Lewis not only to retire from the Army in 1913 but to leave the United States completely and move to Liège to begin manufacturing his own guns, including a light machine gun. Once the war broke out, Lewis relocated his operations to Birmingham, England, where he produced more than 100,000 “Lewis guns” for the British armed forces. A gas-operated lightweight automatic rifle that featured a top-mounted pan magazine, the Lewis gun became a vital weapon for the British during the First World War. More importantly, unlike most machine guns of the time, it did not have a water cooling system, which made the guns heavier and unwieldy, but rather drew in air to operate a mini cooling system. By 1916, 40,000 were in use with Allied forces.3

  Thompson knew of the Lewis gun but wanted to make something even easier for soldiers to use. Convinced that automatic rifles were the future, he also soon became frustrated by the Army’s insistence on single-shot rifles and retired to take a job as chief engineer of Remington Arms and manage their plant in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, then the largest in the world. By 1916 he was confident enough in his ideas to form his own engineering company, Auto-Ordnance, in Cleveland, Ohio. (He would briefly return to Springfield when America entered the war, earning a Distinguished Service Medal.)

  The gun he invented packed a punch like no other light gun eve
r had up to that point. It hinged on the ideas of a “Blish lock.”4 The lock had been invented years earlier by John Bell Blish, a career naval officer, who had concocted a way of rapid-firing large artillery on ships a decade earlier. Although he never properly understood the physics of his invention, Blish had come to the conclusion that dissimilar metals tended to stick to each other, and he used the static friction to create a lock that discharged a spent shell and reloaded the gun in a single motion. Later, engineers would find simpler and more effective ways to create this action.

  By the summer of 1918, the first prototypes of the Thompson gun, the fittingly christened “Annihilator Mark I,” were being prepared for Allied troops. The delivery date on the manifest at New York Harbor read November 11, which, as luck would have it for most of the world, turned out to be the day the armistice was signed in Europe.

  The guns that would have been shipped to Allied troops weighed a mere twelve pounds when fully loaded and fired like the heavier machine guns that had dominated the European theater of war. It was, as Thompson saw it, ideal for close-quarter fighting and sweeping trenches. It was also simple and elegantly constructed from limited parts that could be easily stripped down and reassembled. It could empty 20-round magazines in less than a second. Or, if one desired, it could be fitted with drums that contained 50 to 100 rounds. It used rifle-size ammunition rather than the larger calibers of bigger guns, it would be popularly called a “submachine” gun.

  Because the Thompson gun had not been combat-tested, the Army remained skeptical regarding its effectiveness after the war. Thompson continued to retool the gun and attempt to sell it to police forces starting in 1919. The Colt company wanted to purchase the company for the rights to produce the gun. While Thompson resisted, he did license Colt to make 15,000 of them. Even with the efforts of Colt’s impressive sales team, few bought the gun, priced at $220 (which did not include the drum magazine, which was another $20), apart from some police in larger cities. For one, a man could buy a reliable semiautomatic pistol for a fraction of the cost. Few people needed that sort of firepower.

  Early sales were sparse, and when they came to fruition, often they were from unlikely sources. One small order came from the U.S. Postal Service, one from the Marine Corps (for use by troops in the Latin American “banana wars” of the 1920s), one from the U.S. Coast Guard, and one from the Irish Republican Army. The first time the gun was used in a combat setting was in June 1921 in Dublin when an IRA member fired at British soldiers at a train station. Michael Collins, the leader of Irish independence, was impressed by the practicality of the gun. The IRA found it rather useful in surprise attacks and hit-and-runs, since the butt could be removed and the gun could be hidden under trench coats. Sympathetic Irish-Americans hatched a plan to buy hundreds and ship them to Collins. After two years of fund-raising they were able to make a large purchase, but the cargo was raided by U.S. Customs agents and the guns were impounded.

  As the company, now run by John’s son Marcellus, continued to struggle into the 1920s, it would again make a push to find civilian uses for the imposing gun. The company ran ads in magazines depicting the Thompson submachine gun as a perfect tool to guard farms and ranches, and even as a means of home protection. Unless a small army was invading your house, however, the tommy gun was an extravagance in both cost and potency. It was like selling a jet plane to a commuter. Most ordinary people simply didn’t need it. Sales lagged.

  Unordinary citizens, on the other hand, might see the possibilities. The capability of such a gun, it turns out, appealed to one particular set of discerning shopper, and their interest in the weapon portended consequences that would far outlast the tommy gun.

  Many new guns that had come back from World War I ended up in civilian hands—and often in the hands of criminals. By the late 1920s, like other American business interests, gangsters began modernizing, organizing, and expanding their operations. The coming of Prohibition, which would be in effect from 1920 to 1933, only exacerbated the problem faced in larger urban areas by outgunned police forces, who typically had nothing more than shotguns and Colt revolvers.

  By the mid-1920s, gang warfare became an everyday reality in the streets of Chicago. The wars were complex and rife with intrigue, but basically pitted the predominantly Irish gangsters from the North Side against the predominantly Italian South Siders, led by the infamous Al Capone. During what became known as the Beer Wars of the 1920s, turf disputes between rival gangs over gambling, prostitution, and liquor ratcheted up, and soon machine guns began making their appearance. It was during this time that the tommy gun earned a slew of nicknames from the inventive newspaper scribes of that era: “Chicago Typewriter,” “Chicago Piano,” “Chicago Style,” “Chicago Organ Grinder,” and so on.

  In truth, the first gangland attacks using tommy guns were dramatic in their scope but often produced no fatalities. Perhaps gangsters meant to use the gun only as intimidation, or perhaps the thugs had yet to learn how to properly use the muscular new gun. (The latter would not have been surprising. Even soldiers had trouble aiming the Thompson because of the gun’s “muzzle climb,” which was the force of the recoil that raised the barrel every time it was fired.)

  One infamous event transpired on September 20, 1926, when North Siders set out to avenge the assassination of their boss, Dion O’Banion. Capone, eating at the Hawthorne Inn, one of many hotels he owned in the suburb of Cicero, heard machine-gun fire open up from a car and hit the floor. Once the noise subsided, the boss of the Chicago Outfit attempted to go outside to get a glimpse of the would-be assailants as they were driving away. But the initial shooting was merely a trap meant to lure the crime boss out of the restaurant and to his death. Seven more cars drove by, teeming with gangland notables like George “Bugs” Moran, Vincent “the Schemer” Drucci, and Hymie Weiss, and they riddled the hotel with 1,000 rounds of machine-gun fire.

  There wasn’t a single fatality.

  Soon the gangsters would improve their aim. A month later, Weiss (a Pole whose real name was Henry Wojciechowski) was ambushed on the streets of Chicago when Capone’s men perched on a second-story window and unloaded their Thompson machine guns and a shotgun, killing him and another man and riddling a Catholic church with bullets. When he died, Chicago papers noted that Weiss had been carrying a .45-caliber semiautomatic, rosary beads, and more than $5,000 in cash.

  Thompson exerted much manpower and energy attempting to save the company’s image from the gangsters. After the 1926 machine-gun assassination of Illinois assistant state’s attorney William H. McSwiggin, Marcellus Thompson traveled to Chicago to personally attempt to track down the seller of the tommy gun. “We designed the gun for law enforcement and military usage,” Marcellus told Chicago reporters. “I feel very sorry now to learn that one of them is in the hands of the lawless element. Its killing power is terrible.”5 The serial number, of course, had been filed off the discarded gun, but by this point the company was including a second secret serial number location that could be accessed only if the gun was disassembled. Marcellus drove to the North Side hardware store where the gun had been sold to mobsters. “If I tell you, I’ll die,” the horrified clerk reportedly explained to police later. “I sold these fellows one gun and then they said they’d kill me if I didn’t get the others. Then, when they got them, they swore they’d take me for a ride if I ever squawked about them.”6 This scene played out many times over the coming years, although the gangsters became increasingly sophisticated in the smuggling of weapons.

  The violence and potency of the tommy gun would be best remembered in the bloody massacre of Irish mobsters on Valentine’s Day, 1929. Five members of Bugs Moran’s gang and an associate were lured into a garage by gangsters posing as police officers. All of these men and a garage worker were lined up and then executed by at least two tommy guns that pumped more than seventy rounds into them. The murders became worldwide news.

  It is commonly asserted that the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacr
e immediately galvanized the American public to finally do something about gangsterism and the spread of machine-gun violence. This isn’t exactly right. It is fairer to contend that the murders galvanized a cultural movement that still permeates our films and books. The truth of the matter is that the Chicago homicide rate per 100,000 residents was 9.2 in 1910 and rose, at its peak, to 14.6 in the 1930s.7 (In the 1990s, the rate would hit 33 per 100,000 residents.) Much as they had exploited the western outlaws and their guns, movies served to glorify and mythologize the gangster and his tools.

  It is a strange contradiction of American life that one could be horrified and yet consumed with the life of violent men. Yet, during the Depression, the tommy gun—without any “muzzle lift”—appeared in a slew of movies that featured criminal antiheroes, often portrayed as modern-day Robin Hoods blazing away. The silent movie Underworld, written by former Chicago crime reporter Ben Hecht, who claimed to have “haunted whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops” of the city, covered the emergence of gangsters in the early 1920s. Little Caesar would be the first great gangster talkie in 1931, and an immediate hit. It made Edward G. Robinson a star and became a template for 1930s-era mobsters for a century to come. Other movies like Scarface starring Paul Muni and The Public Enemy starring James Cagney enjoyed similar success. All of these movies featured tommy guns. Soon there were dozens of copycat films saturating the market, and Americans loved it. Like Colts and Remingtons in western shoot-outs, tommy guns unloaded a hundredfold more on the silver screen than in real life. “No motion picture genre . . . was more incendiary than the gangster film; neither preachment yarns nor vice films so outraged the moral guardians or unnerved the city fathers as the high-caliber scenarios that made screen heroes out of stone killers,” one film historian has noted.8