The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  In early September, Woodrow Wilson boarded a train and delivered forty speeches in three weeks to cheering throngs. The president sought to save the Treaty of Versailles in the name of peace and humanity.

  But he suffered headaches, sleeplessness, coughing fits. On September 25, in Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson gave his final public speech. At two o’clock the following morning, his physician found the president gasping as a facial muscle twitched. Wilson told him that he wanted to carry on, but admitted, “I just feel as if I am going to pieces.” The remainder of his tour canceled, the president returned to Washington.

  Six days later, Wilson suffered a massive stroke at the White House. He never again functioned effectively. His most vocal critics, including James A. Reed, were blamed.

  On that night in March 1920, when the Senate voted against the United States joining the League of Nations (the United States would sign treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary), Wilson told his physician, “Doctor, the devil is a busy man.”

  A reporter rushed to Reed in the Senate lobby. “Senator, what does this vote mean?” the reporter asked. “Mean?” Reed replied. “It means this is the greatest day in American history since Cornwallis hauled down his flag at Yorktown.”

  Reed would pay a price for his stance. In 1922, he fought for his political life in the Senate race against Breckinridge Long, a former Wilson official whom Reed termed an “administration valet.” Among those opposing Reed were the Wilsonians, the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-alcohol “Drys,” the statewide press (at least, much of it), women, and blacks who had not forgotten Reed’s fear-mongering about a “colored”-dominated League. In rural towns, Reed’s advance troupe set up a tent big enough for five thousand listeners, and Reed, in a blue silk suit and white shoes and with a Panama hat on his head, stood inside the big top and gave two-hour speeches. He spoke from the backs of trains, and once from a pine platform in an oak grove, the rows of faces lit by kerosene flares. From his deathbed, former president Wilson described Reed as a subversive meddler, a “marplot.” He called the senator “incapable of any sustained allegiance to any person or any cause.” But Reed, in a startling victory, narrowly defeated Long in the primary and then, with help from the Pendergast machine and crossover Republicans in St. Louis, including those of German ancestry who enjoyed beer more than Woodrow Wilson, defeated Republican R. R. Brewster to win reelection to a third six-year term.

  His presidential run in 1924 withered, and at the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston, Reed delivered a speech for Governor Al Smith of New York, even as he suffered from disappointment that Smith’s nomination wasn’t his. Later, Reed reportedly was offered the vice-presidential position on the Smith ticket, but turned it down, saying, “Gentlemen, I appreciate the compliment but I do not care for a back seat on a hearse.”

  Reed desperately wanted to become president. In The American Mercury magazine in 1929, though, H. L. Mencken wrote, “[Reed] would laugh himself to death in the White House. Worse, he would come to despise himself. It is not a place for realists.”

  To Mencken, Reed was

  an anachronistic and disquieting reminder of the days when a Senator of the United States stood on his own legs and was his own man.… The stature of such a man as Reed is not to be counted by his successes. The important thing is that he fights.… The forensic talents of the man are really almost unparalleled. He is, for our time, the supreme artist in assault. There are subtleties in the art he practices, as in any other, and he is the master of all of them. The stone ax is not his weapon, but the rapier; and he knows how to make it go through stone and steel.

  In spring 1930, J. Francis O’Sullivan approached Reed to seek his help, and to gauge his interest in representing the widow Bennett.

  Though Jack Bennett earned an enviable living, his widow was not an automobile titan or an oil company. Jack had purchased $32,500 in life insurance polices. The payment to Myrtle of $2,500 from his war-risk insurance went uncontested. But a dozen members of the extended Bennett family contended that they—and not Myrtle—were Jack’s rightful heirs. If a jury convicted Myrtle of murdering Jack, they stood to collect the three remaining $10,000 policies. It was clear that Myrtle could not afford to pay Jim Reed’s usual rates.

  Reed met with Myrtle and listened to her story. He asked if Jack had ever struck her before that last fateful night. He agreed to take Myrtle’s case.

  He would, by damn, tell that jury what to decide.

  SEVEN

  Ely and Jo: Stars on the Rise

  Adaptability is a basic law of the survival of the fittest in bridge and no player, however perfect technically, can claim to be an expert or indeed even be a winning player, unless he learns how to play bad partners as well as he can play bad cards. Players who bemoan bad partners are certainly less justified than those who bemoan bad cards. Partners (and opponents) can be largely controlled and guided by superior skill.

  —ELY CULBERTSON,

  in Contract Bridge Blue Book

  At the Knickerbocker Whist Club, the bridge masters smiled tightly at Ely Culbertson as he walked past. Then came the whispered innuendo. They called him devious, deceitful, a crackpot, a womanizer, a fraud. They heard him refer to Jo as Sweetka, and Jo speak of Illiusha, and they knew that Culbertson was, like Lenin and Trotsky, dangerous. The word spread: Culbertson’s a Red! Another Vladimir Ilyich! For years these bridge experts had been individualistic competitors, but now they became a collective with a shared disdain for the Russian. Ely was struck by the irony of his life: growing up in Russia, he was considered an American; and now in America, he was called a Russian. His fate: always to be an outsider. He pondered the gossip, and then made his play. His rivals had forgotten his family’s paternal roots, the Culbertsons of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Slyly, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution, and touted his membership.

  For every card his enemies played, the elegant man of mystery had a trump.

  Contract bridge proved a splendid populist game during hard times. It was respectable and social, and a deck of cards could be had for thirty cents or less. That bridge was a partnership game for four made it an ideal fit for two couples looking to spend a quiet social evening together, and helped spur its ascendancy during these years. By the middle 1930s, other parlor games would also experience widespread popularity. Board games such as Movie Mart (based on films) and Finance (about banking) presaged the rage of 1935, Monopoly, the real-estate game that swept the nation. In November 1935, The New York Times explained the inescapable lure of such games against the backdrop of the Depression: “Instead of carrying the person away from daily affairs, they in effect bring daily affairs to him in a new guise, on a small scale, with ‘the world to win.’ ”

  Even so, none rivaled the parlor-room supremacy of bridge. Bridge had become “the supreme hostess technique, supplying the best inexpensive guarantee our culture has discovered against a ‘dull evening’ when friends ‘drop in,’” according to Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd. In 1935 the Lynds returned to Muncie, Indiana, with their team of cultural anthropologists to produce a sequel to their seminal 1925 study of a small Midwestern city (later identified as Muncie, population thirty-eight thousand), Middletown: A Study of Modern American Culture. In Muncie, they found women leading a bridge surge that seeped down even to sixth graders. Leaders of girls’ groups in Muncie complained that bridge had distracted girls from other activities. Bridge allowed couples to socialize without having to discuss life. “Social talking presents far more risks to the hostess, as it is a much more personal type of relationship liable to run on the rocks of monotony, vacuousness, gossip, or outright antagonisms,” the Lynds wrote. “[Contract bridge] is an unparalleled device for an urban world that wants to avoid issues, to keep things impersonal, to enjoy people without laying oneself open or committing oneself to them, and to have fun in the process.”

  But widespread troubles emerged at the table: cheating, a lack
of decorum, tensions. Was it the hardship born of the Depression, the bloodlust inherent in a competitive game, or the base instincts in the American character?

  Lt. Col. Walter Buller, the British bridge savant, defined four categories among the world’s players: (1) first class; (2) good; (3) average; and (4) bad ’uns. By Buller’s computations, first-class players represented only a “fraction infinitesimal,” good players comprised 4 percent, and all others the remaining 95 percent.

  Social players—Buller’s 95 percent—committed the most egregious acts. In Seattle, a wife threw an alarm clock at her partner/husband, knocking out one of his teeth. In Chicago, a husband watched his partner/wife fail to make a contract and struck her with a cut-glass bowl.

  The elites, angling for supremacy, were guilty of more subtle infractions: stealing glances at opponents’ hands; hesitating for effect before playing a singleton, the only remaining card of a suit in a player’s hand; using secret signals to pass information to partners.

  The bridge old guard rose up to defend their game. In summer 1930, Wilbur Whitehead wrote, “Personally, I have always deplored playing the game too seriously. Bridge, after all, is only a game and a social one at that. Its primary purpose is to entertain.”

  Milton Work longed for the gentlemanly days of whist, reminding readers that bridge “is a game in which superiority in play, not superiority in cunning, is the desideratum.” Work offered a method to end the cheating that dated to the days of whist: “Ostracize the offender… Unless that is done, the ethical player will decline to participate in contests in which such practices are winked at.”

  The Saturday Evening Post summed up the state of American bridge in 1930: “Now and then a wife does throw the cards in her husband’s face, and one did shoot and kill her partner one night.… Unpleasantness is now general, for every player has developed a genius for argumentative protectiveness toward his or her pet convention. Insults are no longer kept for the intimate friend or relation.” The real hardship, the magazine suggested, was endured by the bridge hostess: “Likely as not, at twelve o’clock she stands alone in her living room, looking gloomily down at the neat tray of sandwiches, peanuts and potato chips which have not been touched. From the elevator shaft the noise of battle wafts into the room, and later rebounds, from the street below, through the window. If the game is not broken up violently, the players are, as a rule, too nervous and excited to eat.”

  The only remedy, The Saturday Evening Post said, was to standardize the convention and bidding methods—that is, create one system to satisfy the world: “If Germany and England and America and the other powers of the world can get together and agree, it seems little enough to ask of men and women who have only cards, instead of battleships, to play with.”

  Ely’s task was to make certain that the universally accepted system was his.

  Ely’s grandiosity was much like Jim Reed’s. He saw himself as an emperor of his realm, fortified by his intellectual superiority, and the rightness of his ways. Ely had his own magnificent bellicosity. As Reed had trampled Wilson and the party traditionalists, so Ely would trample the existing authorities of bridge. As Reed now laid plans to gain the highest office in the land, so, too, did Ely plot his ascension.

  What he needed most, Ely knew, was a good controversy. People rushed to controversy. Controversy sold magazines. He created small controversies when he could. In April 1930, he took on Dr. Alfred Adler, the famed Viennese psychologist, who reportedly told an audience at Columbia University, “Bridge players are usually suffering from an inferiority complex and find in the game an easy way to satisfy their striving for superiority.” Adler also said, “Most people play cards to waste time.” Ely viewed Adler’s comments, “like his books, but half truth.” He accused Adler of jealousy that “the world is more interested in Bridge sects than the ‘isms’ of Psychology.… In these times of intense struggle for material and mental felicity what would the dear professor want us to do in order to feed the worm of inferiority which is gnawing our vitals?” Ely’s circulation grew to more than eight thousand, and then fifteen thousand, as the magazine itself grew from thirty-two to forty-eight to sixty-four pages.

  Still, to launch his name on a national scale Ely needed more. He needed to put himself at the center of a controversy. In London, he found the trump card that would change everything.

  The blustery Lt. Col. Buller, bridge writer for The Star of London, seemingly chimed with his lofty opinions about bridge with the frequency of Big Ben. Attached to the War Office as a staff captain during the war, Buller was well known in London social circles. In his book Reflections of a Bridge Player, published in November 1929, Buller criticizes American experts for their boastfulness: “Mr. Wilbur C. Whitehead describes himself, or permits himself to be described, as ‘The World’s Greatest Authority.’ Mr. Milton Work is also described as ‘The World’s Greatest Authority.’ Then Mr. Sidney S. Lenz is advertised as ‘The World’s Champion Bridge Player’ and ‘The International Champion.’ It is all very confusing. None of these gentlemen has ever played with first-class players in this country … I feel sure that a good four could be got together to take on the Americans, and that, while not necessarily the best available, they would beat them ‘sky-high.’ ”

  In The Bridge World of April 1930, Ely used those words to his own advantage, issuing a “friendly challenge” to Buller. An unspecified American team-of-four (clearly, Ely had his own team in mind) would travel to England in the summer of 1930 to play a British team selected by Buller in a duplicate match of at least three hundred deals for any stakes within reason, and in accordance with the rules of London’s Portland Club. Ely called for “a show down,” and did so knowing Britain had not yet fully embraced contract bridge (most Brits still played auction), and that its top players had little experience with duplicate play. In the proposed duplicate match, two tables would be arranged in separate rooms. In one, the Americans would occupy the north-south positions, and in the other east-west. Each hand dealt in the first room would be reproduced in the second room. On each deal, then, a team with the better cards in one room would receive the worse cards in the other. This would eliminate the luck of the cards. The outcome would be determined by skill.

  Buller bit. He accepted the challenge immediately. The match would be played in September in London at New Almack’s, at No. 19 Upper Grosvenor Street, Park Lane, a historic club founded in 1765, during the age of Hoyle, by a former valet of the Duke of Hamilton.

  The Bridge World crowed that, except for chess, this Culbertson-Buller match would be “the first purely intellectual competition between England and America in history, arousing widespread interest on both sides of the ocean.”

  Already, the spinmaster was spinning. Ely admitted in the magazine that his team-of-four (Lightner, von Zedtwitz, Ely, and Jo) was perhaps not America’s best—it had finished third in the Vanderbilt Cup the previous fall—though certainly it ranked among the best. “The overwhelming majority of America’s advanced players,” Ely wrote, “will abide by the victory or defeat of this team.”

  At the Knickerbocker Whist Club, though, eyes rolled and bile rose. Who does Ely Culbertson think he is? He held no claim to being America’s top bridge player. His team-of-four was not America’s best.

  By the design of this match, though, Ely would wrap himself in an American flag. He was representing the country and traveling to a foreign land to do so. Americans would cheer for him and Jo against Buller just as surely as they would cheer for Harold Vanderbilt and his yacht Enterprise in his defense of the America’s Cup against Britain’s Sir Thomas Lipton and his Shamrock V. That yachting competition would be held near Newport, Rhode Island, at virtually the same moment Ely and Jo cut cards with Buller in London.

  Ely had outmaneuvered the bridge old guard, and not for the last time. He had put himself in a position to be noticed on a broad scale. When Jo learned of Buller’s acceptance, she said to Ely, with exas
peration, “How could you do such a thing!” Ely’s honest answer might have been, “How could I not?” He was desperate for money and attention. Ely told Jo they would need $5,000: $2,000 for travel expenses, $2,000 for betting, and $1,000 to leave behind for their magazine and the children. As for von Zedtwitz and Lightner, he reassured her, “Waldy and Teddy will pay their own way.”

  Jo demanded to know how Ely would get this money.

  “From the Blue Book,” he replied.

  “Suppose you don’t write it?” Jo said.

  He would. Ely said bridge teachers had been asking for a book on the Culbertson System. He would self-publish (through his magazine’s printer), and sell his new book for two dollars. To collect the money required for the trip to Britain, he said he would announce in The Bridge World’s next issue that a special autographed edition of his book could be purchased now for only $1.50 and delivered considerably in advance of regular trade channels.

  And so he did just that. The full-page advertisement read: “At last!! A book by Ely Culbertson ‘the man behind the big guns of Bridge.’.… Simple enough for a child, Deep enough for a master player.… CONTRACT BRIDGE BLUE BOOK By ELY CULBERTSON, Editor-In-Chief, the Bridge World.” Ely said four thousand orders had arrived in the mail. He told Jo they had their money, plus a little extra for tipping English butlers.

  The pieces began to fall into place. In July 1930, Ely’s team-of-four captured the championship of the American Bridge League Summer Tournament. The Bridge World teammates posed together beside their trophy on a lawn in Asbury Park, New Jersey: Ely (hunched over, exhausted), Jo (in a dress, at ease, her hand on the trophy), the bookish Lightner, and the wiry von Zedtwitz, dapper in his white knickers and two-tone shoes. As the ocean breezes blew through the convention hall, Ely’s team-of-four had defeated a Columbia University team by nearly 1,500 points and then, in a hard-fought final, fought off a Knickerbocker team captained by Hal Sims by only 415 points. The magazine trumpeted that twelve of the sixteen teams in the tournament had played the Culbertson Approach-Forcing system, including all four semifinalists. According to the conditions of this ABL trophy, the winners could be challenged at thirty-to ninety-day intervals. Sims filed his challenge at once. The caption in The Bridge World beneath the photograph of the champions read, “… And now to England!”