One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

Syracuse.
    Gray was convinced that even if he came under suspicion the police would be unable to prove anything because his alibi placed him three hundred miles away in Syracuse. Unfortunately, Gray was remembered by a Long Island taxi driver to whom he had given a 5-cent tip on a $3.50 fare—even in 1920s money a nickel was a paltry show of gratitude—and who was now extremely eager to give evidence against him. Gray wastracked down to the Hotel Onondaga, where he professed astonishment that the police would suspect him. “Why, I have never even been given a ticket for speeding,” he said, and confidently asserted that he could show that he had been in the hotel all weekend. Unfortunately, not to say amazingly, he had thrown the ticket stub from his train journey in the wastebasket. When a policeman fished it out and confronted him with it, Gray swiftly confessed, too. Upon learning that Ruth was blaming him for everything, he hotly insisted that she was the mastermind and had blackmailed him into cooperating by threatening to expose his faithlessness to his loving wife. It was clear that he and Ruth Snyder were not going to be friends again.
    Such was the intensity of interest in the trial that no aspect of the affair, however tangential, was overlooked. Readers learned that the presiding judge, Townsend Scudder, returned home to his Long Island estate each evening to be greeted—and presumably all but overwhelmed—by his 125 pet dogs, which he then personally fed. Someone else noticed, and solemnly reported, that the ages of the jurors exactly added up to five hundred. One of Ruth Snyder’s lawyers, Dana Wallace, merited special attention for being the son of the owner of the Mary Celeste , the infamous cargo ship found drifting in the Atlantic in 1872, its crew mysteriously vanished. A journalist named Silas Bent made a careful measurement of column inches and found that the Snyder-Gray affair received more coverage than the sinking of the Titanic . Analysis and commentary were provided by a pack of celebrity observers, including the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, the playwright Ben Hecht, the motion picture director D. W. Griffith, the actress Mae West, and the historian Will Durant, whose Story of Philosophy was currently a phenomenal best seller, if not obviously relevant to a criminal trial on Long Island. Also present, somewhat unaccountably, was a magician who went by the single name Thurston. Moral context was added by three leading evangelists: Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and John Roach Straton. Straton was famous for hating almost everything—“card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, jazz music, the theater, low-cutdresses, divorce, novels, stuffy rooms, Clarence Darrow, overeating, the Museum of Natural History, evolution, the Standard Oil influence in the Baptist church, prizefighting, the private lives of actors, nude art, bridge playing, modernism and greyhound racing,” according to one partial contemporary accounting. To this list he was now happy to add Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray; they couldn’t be executed fast enough as far as he was concerned. McPherson, more moderately, offered prayers and the hope that God would teach young men everywhere to think “I want a wife like Mother—not a Red Hot Cutie.”
    The critic Edmund Wilson wondered in an essay why it was that something so dull and unimaginative as the Snyder murder excited such earnest attention, without pausing to reflect that the same question could be asked of his essay. To him it was largely another case of “a familiar motif”—a “ruthless ambitious woman who commands the submissive male.” By almost universal consent, Ruth Snyder was held to be the guilty party, Judd Gray the hapless dupe. Gray received so much mail, nearly all of it sympathetic, that it filled two neighboring cells in the Queens County Jailhouse.
    The papers strove hard to portray Ruth Snyder as an evil temptress. “Her naturally