Another wonderful book by Russell Shorto. He describes himself as a writer of narrative history, making a living telling non-fiction stories about the past. About his book Descartes Bones, I wrote that I enjoyed the digressions and reflections as “we wended our way through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.” So yes, Shorto is a storyteller. And in this case, the subject is his grandfather and the small-town mob in the mid-twentieth century, in his hometown of Johnstown, PA.
The topic of this book reminded me of my late brother-in-law’s declaration that organized crime was important in the town where he lived in the early-to mid-1970s. He was in the business community and presumably had some knowledge of how things worked. The evidence I remember him recounting was that no one ever wrote a bad check to the liquor store—it was bad for your health.
Shorto only knew his grandfather on his father’s side as a near-stranger that his father was estranged from, but the “writer of narrative history” could recognize a story. After years of gathering the men who had been active in that world to hear their stories, doing the research in archives, old newspapers, visiting nursing homes to hear the stories, he had a story. It is both a history of the criminals who had power in small towns all over the US beginning with Prohibition and ending in the 1960s and a personal family history centering on his great-grandfather in Sicily, his grandfather for whom he is named, and his own father.
Before we delve into the story, he reminds us of Johnstown’s tragic flood of 1899. The robber barons, including Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Clay Frick, created a recreation area for themselves in the hills above Johnstown. They built a dam and diverted water to create a mountaintop lake complete with palace-houses around the lake. The barons ignored concerns about the dam and during the spring rains, 2,209 people were killed when the dam burst and the city was flooded.
Shorto tells us that the movement to ban alcohol was motivated by more than just women pushing to improve the morals of men. While he acknowledges that alcohol consumption was higher in the early 20th century than it is now, he makes the case that the temperance leaders were offended by what they saw as the lack of “American values” of recent immigrants, that is, the Germans, the Italians, and the Irish. It’s certainly clear that one unintended consequence of outlawing something that people are not willing to give up is that it made lawbreakers of a large percentage of the population. This, he says opened doors for the mob to be active in smaller cities, as well as large urban areas.
A day after writing the paragraph above I saw a piece in the newspaper about the growing number of illegal slot machines in Virginia. What made this especially relevant to Smalltime is that the problem is much greater in Pennsylvania and that when one of the manufacturers of the machines was dropped by two lobbyists, their response was to accuse Pennsylvania legislative leaders of blackmail and engage in intimidation of the lawmakers.
A few other points that I want to remember:
It was the robber barons whose empires were built on violence, fraud, bribery and intimidation who provided a model for the illegal mob empires that grew up during Prohibition.
The Kefauver hearings in the 1950s revealed the existence of organized crime across the U.S. to the public. State and local crime commissions grew out of that work and eventually reduced the illegal gambling activities run in Johnstown. These activities were further reduced by a 1970 law. Apparently defiance of the law has not been eliminated permanently.
I seem to be focused on the story of the mob in small town America rather than Shorto’s family history, also an interesting story that enlivened the history of that criminal activity. He referred to the “imponderability of my subject” (his grandfather, one of the two most powerful figures in the town), and despite all the stories that featured him prominently, he struggled to get a fix on him. Perhaps he did in the end.
Russell Shorto, Smalltime, W.W. Norton, 2021, 259 pages (I read the Kindle version). Available in the public library.