Read One Summer: America, 1927 for Free Online Page B

young and dazzlingly erratic bride, affectionately known to all as Peaches, when the Graphic ran a photo showing (without any real attempt at plausibility) Peaches standing naked in the witness box. The Graphic sold an extra 250,000 copies that day. The New Yorker called the Graphic a ‘grotesque fungus’, but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By 1927, its circulation was nearing 600,000.
    For conventional newspapers, these were serious and worrying numbers. Most responded by becoming conspicuously more like tabloids themselves, in spirit if not presentation. Even the New York Times ,though still devotedly solemn and grey, found room for plenty of juicy stories throughout the decade and covered them with prose that was often nearly as feverish. So now when a murder like that of Albert Snyder came along, the result across all newspapers was something like a frenzy.
    It hardly mattered that the perpetrators were spectacularly inept – so much so that the writer and journalist Damon Runyon dubbed it the Dumbbell Murder Case – and that they were not particularly attractive or imaginative. It was enough that the case involved lust, infidelity, a heartless woman and a sash weight. These were the things that sold newspapers. The Snyder–Gray case received more column inches of coverage than any other crime of the era, and would not be exceeded for column inches until the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1935. In terms of its effect on popular culture, even the Lindbergh kidnapping couldn’t touch it.
    Trials in 1920s America were often amazingly speedy. Gray and Snyder were arraigned, indicted by a grand jury and in the dock barely a month after their arrest. A carnival atmosphere descended on the Queens County Court House, a building of classical grandeur in Long Island City. A hundred and thirty newspapers from across the nation and as far afield as Norway sent reporters. Western Union installed the biggest switchboard it had ever built – bigger than any used for a presidential convention or World Series. Outside the courthouse, lunch wagons set up along the kerb and souvenir sellers sold tiepins in the shape of sash weights for 10 cents each. Throngs of people turned up daily hoping to get seats inside. Those who failed seemed content to stand outside and stare at the building, knowing that important matters that they could not see or hear were being decided within. People of wealth and fashion turned up too, among them the Marquess of Queensberry and the unidentified wife of a US Supreme Court justice. Those fortunate enough to get seats inside were allowed to come forward at the conclusion of proceedings each day and inspect the veneratedexhibits in the case – the sash weight, picture wire and bottle of chloroform that featured in the evil deed. The News and Mirror ran as many as eight articles a day on the trial. If any especially riveting disclosures emerged during the day – that, for instance, Ruth Snyder on the night of the murder had received Judd Gray in a blood-red kimono – special editions were rushed into print, as if war had been declared. For those too eager or overcome to focus on the words, the Mirror provided 160 photographs, diagrams and other illustrations during the three weeks of the trial, the Daily News nearer 200. For a short while, one of Gray’s lawyers was one Edward Reilly, who would later gain notoriety by defending Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial, but Reilly, who was a hopeless drunk, was fired or resigned at an early stage.
    Each day for three weeks, jurors, reporters and audience listened in rapt silence as the tragic arc of Albert Snyder’s mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown. She was thirteen years his