National Affairs: Escape

When he walked into “a place that had a big front with a sign ‘Money to Loan’ and bought a gun for $8,” Joe Zangara, 33, native of Calabria, Italy, onetime bricklayer in New Jersey and last week a blurry-minded transient in Miami, thought to himself: “My stomach, it hurts. I hate all Presidents. I kill them.” He had pondered the possibility of killing President Hoover until he read, tore out and stuffed in his pocket a newspaper clipping that said President-elect Roosevelt would visit Miami in two days. With the .32-calibre revolver, which he got from the pawnshop without need of permit or self-identification, he was a fully equipped assassin.

Most illiterate dagoes* have the killer instinct, especially when their animal comfort is disturbed. In the countrysides they are notorious pothunters. Hunting U. S. Presidents or other public officials is far easier for deranged dagoes than pothunting afield. All Joe Zangara had to do was go to Miami’s Bay Front Park and take a front seat, wait like an ardent if stupid-looking patriot until the President-elect should come within range.

Shortly after dusk President-elect Roosevelt docked at Miami on Vincent Astor’s sleek white Nourmahal. After his twelve-day fishing trip he was tanned, cheerful, energetic, quite out of touch with affairs of State. “I haven’t really seen a newspaper since I left, except the Nassau paper yesterday,”* he told reporters who crowded aboard the yacht to greet him. After dinner the President-elect got into an open automobile with Miami’s Mayor Gauthier and drove to Bay Front Park where some 20,000 cheering Floridians and visitors were gathered to see and hear him before he entrained for New York.

At 9:30 p. m. his car stopped before the bandstand, crowded with notables. A lapel microphone was put into his hand. He pulled himself up on the car’s downfolded top and began one of the brief, pleasant little speeches at which he is so adept:

“My friends, I’m no stranger here. . . . I’ve had a very wonderful twelve days’ fishing. … It has been a wonderful rest. I’m not going to attempt to tell you any fish stories. . . . The only fly in the ointment has been I’ve put on about ten pounds. … I hope to come down here next winter. . . . Many thanks.”

The crowd cheered and clapped as the President-elect slid back down to the seat. On the bandstand sat Chicago’s Mayor Anton Joseph Cermak. Mr. Roosevelt beckoned him down to his car. “Hello, Tony!” “Hello, Mr. President!” After a moment’s chat Mayor Cermak turned to walk away. A man rushed up to hand Mr. Roosevelt a long telegram. The President-elect started to read— Bang! Joe Zangara was standing up on a wobbly bench among the spectators firing his pistol at President-elect Roosevelt not 35 ft. away. The first shot dropped Margaret Kruis, Newark showgirl, with a head wound.

Bang! The second bullet drilled into Mayor Cermak’s belly, on the right, just below the ribs. He crumpled to his knees. Blood oozed through his white shirt, making a narrow rectangle parallel to his belt.

Joe Zangara’s shooting arm was suddenly shoved up in the air by the frail hand of Lillian Johns Cross, wife of a Miami physician. From the row behind, Thomas Armour, a lanky Miami contractor, reached forward, also grabbed that lethal arm. But Zangara’s fingers kept working the stiff trigger.

Bang! Mrs. Joseph Gill, wife of the president of Florida Power and Light Co., staggered down the bandstand steps, grievously wounded in the abdomen.

Bang! Blood spurted through the white hair of William Sinnott, an oldtime New York City detective who used to guard Governor Roosevelt and, who, vacationing in Florida, had come to watch the doings from the bandstand.

Bang! A bullet nicked the forehead of Russell Caldwell, Coconut Grove youth.

In five confused seconds the fusillade was over. The crowd was roaring, “GET THAT MAN! GET HIM!” An avalanche of spectators and police smashed down on small Joe Zangara, buried him under a mill of arms, legs and bodies. Down with him also went nervy little Mrs. Cross, the breath knocked out of her 100-lb. body. Handcuffs were forced on Joe Zangara’s wrists. Furious hands clamped his arms and neck.

Behind a barrier of Secret Service guards President-elect Roosevelt stood up in his car, waved his arms at the panicky onlookers. His clear voice rang strongly above the din: “I’m all right! I’m all right.” His car started out of the packed people. Somebody jumped on the running board yelling: “Mayor Cermak’s shot.” Mr. Roosevelt had the car stopped. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Bring him here. Put him in my car.” Supported by William Wood, Dade County Democratic leader, Chicago’s “World’s Fair Mayor,”* sagging with shock, was lifted into the Roosevelt machine. The President-elect held him in his arms as they streaked away to the Jackson Memorial Hospital behind shrieking police sirens.

(Back in the Park.) “Kill him! Kill him! Lynch him!” cried angry voices in the crowd around Joe Zangara. The police yanked him to a waiting car into which some of his victims were being loaded. They shoved him onto the trunk rack, mounted guard on the bumpers. The car jerked forward. Joe Zangara fell off. Police threw him back on, held him down.

Thus bouncing around on the trunk rack the would-be assassin of the next President rode first to the hospital to unload his victims, then to Miami’s skyscraper jail where he was stripped and safely locked up on the 21st floor.

(At the Hospital.) Physicians found that a bullet had grazed Mayor Cermak’s liver and lodged at the back of his abdomen in his spine. His condition was critical. Mrs. Gill was on the brink of death as the result of a stomach wound. The other three were suffering only from flesh wounds.

Canceling his special train home, President-elect Roosevelt lingered at the hospital. He went in softly to see Mayor Cermak after the nurses got him comfortable in bed. His face taut with pain, the Mayor looked up at the President-elect and murmured: “I’m mighty glad it was me instead of you. I wish you’d be careful. The country needs you.”

“And the country needs men like you, Tony,” replied Mr. Roosevelt.

Back on the Nourmahal for the night, Mr. Roosevelt, as he said later, “slept like a top.”

That night Mrs. Roosevelt got word of the attempt on her husband’s life when she returned from a speaking engagement to her Manhattan home. Said she: “Phew! . . . But then those things are to be expected.” Next day she went as scheduled to Ithaca, N. Y. to deliver an address.

In Washington, President Hoover exclaimed: “A dastardly act!” He sent a telegram to his successor “rejoicing” at his escape.

Speaker Garner who as Vice President-elect would (under the new 20th Amendment) have succeeded to the Presidency if Zangara’s bullets had found their intended mark, did not hear the news until the following day, so strict is his hotel rule against being disturbed at night.

Next morning Mr. Roosevelt paid a second visit to the hospital before starting for New York. Mayor Cermak and Mrs. Gill were holding their own. Perhaps they would not die after all. The President-elect urged the Mayor to “hurry up and get well in time to attend the inaugural.” Later aboard his private car Mr. Roosevelt called newshawks about him, calmly gave them his version of what happened:

“A man came forward with a telegram. . . . Just then I heard what I thought was a firecracker; then several more . . . the chauffeur started the car. . . .

“I looked around and saw Mayor Cermak doubled up and Mrs. Gill collapsing. . . .

“I called to the chauffeur to stop. “I saw Mayor Cermak being carried. . . . He was alive, but I didn’t think he was going to last. I put my left arm around him and my hand on his pulse, but I couldn’t find any pulse.

“After we had gone another block, Mayor Cermak straightened up and I got his pulse. … I remember I said, ‘Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt you if you keep quiet.’ . . .”

Meanwhile big-eyed mop-haired Joe Zangara sat in his high Miami cell rubbing his aching stomach and repeating: “If I could eat, I no kill anybody.” He appeared without remorse, explaining that his animosity ran against Mr. Roosevelt only as President-elect, not as an individual. Police investigation revealed the following case history:

Zangara arrived in the U. S. in 1923. He worked as a brick mason in Hackensack and Paterson, N. J. He was quiet and solitary, had no police record. But one employer recalled that he harangued fellow-workers against “the rich and powerful” during lunch hours. In 1929 he was naturalized, later registering as a Republican voter. In 1926 his appendix was removed. Suffering from stomach ulcers he roamed the country restlessly. This chronic complaint evidently warped his reason, excited him to last week’s mad act.

Pleading guilty to four assault charges, Zangara was sentenced to 80 years in prison by Judge E. C. Collins. “Don’t be stingy, give me 100 years!” he shouted.

Back in Manhattan, Mr. Roosevelt’s bodyguard was at wartime strength and alertness as he settled down to conferences on his Cabinet and policies. An important caller: Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British Ambassador, back from London with his Government’s latest views on War Debts. An important development: Senator Carter Glass finally refused the Treasury portfolio, which thereupon went, it appeared, to William Hartman Woodin, musical president of American Car & Foundry Co.

From the world at large messages of sympathy and relief flooded in upon President-elect Roosevelt. To a man, his country rose to applaud his cool courage in the face of Death. All minor political discords were hushed in the paean of popular rejoicing at his escape. The Miami episode added one more asset to the large store Franklin Roosevelt already has to take into the White House: he is a martyr President at the start of his term.

*TIME here uses advisedly a word offensive to Italians and other persons of Mediterranean origin. In the average U. S. vocabulary the word conveniently connotes foreigners of suspicious, possibly vicious character. (In distinction, “wop” seems to mean a more goodnatured individual.) Used without respect to nationality, let “dagoes” not unduly offend any national sensibilities.—ED. *The curious, eminently readable, 89-year-old Nassau Guardian, semiweekly (circulation 3,000), composed on old tombstones and jointly owned by Miss Mary Moseley and Knowlton Lyman (“Junior”) Ames of Chicago, assistant to Col. William Franklin Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News. *In 1893 Carter Henry Harrison, another “World’s Fair Mayor” of Chicago, was assassinated in his own doorway by a young jobseeker.