The World полностью

On 13 April 1919, at Jallianwala Bagh, General Dyer ordered his Indian troops to fire into the crowd, killing between 500 and 1,000, wounding 1,200.^* The massacre shattered the facade of British benevolence and competence: Motilal Nehru burned his English suits, his homburgs and his London furniture in the garden, watched by Jawaharlal’s two-year-old daughter, Indira. Gandhi, backed by Nehru, assumed leadership of Congress.

Yet there was a flaw: the Indian Muslims were a huge minority: the British understood Islam better than Hinduism and based their Raj on the Mughals; in the First World War, 1.3 million Indians, mainly Muslims, volunteered. Ascetic, brilliantly empathetic and charismatic, Gandhi saw himself as a religious figure, seeking moksha, self-perfection, through ‘mortification of the flesh’, freed from normal rules. ‘It’s not necessary for me to prove the rightness of what I said then,’ he asserted later, ‘it’s essential only to know what I feel today.’ He was determined to unite the communities of India, but Congress, for all its secularity, became 97 per cent Hindu. When a movement of Dalits demanded their own representatives, Gandhi fasted to stop them. ‘The caste system,’ he argued, ‘isn’t based on inequality,’ but was the structure that held Hindu India together. Gandhi personified peaceful protest but knew that the ‘communal problem’ might only be solved by violence. ‘I’d rather be witness to Hindus and Mussulmans doing one another to death,’ he wrote in 1930, ‘than I should daily witness our gilded slavery.’^*

Having recast the world, Wilson had returned to DC exhausted. On 2 October 1919, he suffered a stroke, leaving him semi-paralysed and half blinded. Keeping his health a secret, his second wife, Edith Galt, managed the presidency – ‘I, myself, never made a single decision; the only decision that was mine was what was important … when to present matters to my husband.’

Like Wilson, Americans turned decisively inwards. That September, in Elaine, Arkansas, when black sharecroppers tried to organize a union, white lynch mobs and a new version of the KKK, backed by the governor, claimed that a ‘Negro Insurrection’ was afoot and killed 200 black people in three days of riots. Seventy-three more black innocents were tried for murder and insurrection, twelve sentenced to death. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) campaigned against the injustice, and the convictions were eventually overturned by Arkansas’s Supreme Court. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1921, after a black shoeshiner was accused of attacking a white girl, an attempt to lynch black prisoners led to a shoot-out at the jail. A white mob stormed and burned ‘Negro Wall Street’, killing many, while Gurley and other entrepreneurs lost everything. The National Guard interned 6,000 black people; 100,000 lost their homes. Among those who witnessed a lynching in rural Georgia was a young Baptist, Michael King, future father of Martin Luther King Jr, who decided to qualify as a minister in order to combat racial injustice.

Beside the racial tension, a new American puritanism vied with a wild joie de vivre that exploded after the years of war and pandemic.

THE BRAIN, THE DUMB DUTCHMAN AND LUCKY LUCIANO

In October 1919, the Volstead Act, propelled by an evangelical awakening, banned alcohol, a decision that criminalized much of society but legitimized a new criminal coterie whose members killed the traditional Sicilian padrini – godfathers. Lucky Luciano, aided by his Jewish allies Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, ran just one of the networks of criminals operating in all major cities ready to import alcohol and serve it in new secret bars. A fellow member of the Five Points Gang, Al Capone, known as Snorky for his dapperness and Scarface for his gashed cheeks, moved to Chicago where he assassinated the padrino and became boss himself. Luciano was mentored by an extraordinary uptown manipulator named Arnold Rothstein, son of a law-abiding Jewish businessman and a gangster more by choice than necessity. Known as the Brain, Rothstein made money by gambling – he supposedly fixed the 1919 baseball World Series – before importing Scotch on his own ships and trucks: crime run like a corporation.

The Brain backed Luciano, even teaching him how to dress, and coordinated influence, corrupting a network of judges, police and politicians. The alcohol business, dovetailing with their other interests – casinos, brothels, drugs, gambling, unions, docks and protection – suddenly made these rough immigrants into crime magnates.