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By Root 470 0

someone with standing either accused Ponzi of wrongdoing or declared him a genius, he failed to meet the most basic definition of news. It was easy to expend ink on a shady politician, a disgraced sports figure, or an accused murderer. But editors and reporters understood that it was dangerous to go out on a limb to challenge a seemingly successful private businessman. It was no secret that the Supreme Court took a narrow view of the First Amendment. Only a year earlier, the court had unanimously ruled that the First Amendment, in the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., does not “protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater.” Though that decision upheld the Espionage Act, journalists could imagine how the same court might respond to a libel case in which a businessman was mistakenly branded a fraud. Someone like Ponzi, with access to money and lawyers, might end up owning any newspaper that attacked him without hard evidence.

Another reason Ponzi escaped reporters’ attention was the extraordinary number of major stories occupying Edwin Grozier’s Post and the city’s other newspapers during the first months of 1920. The national news pages were filled with stories about the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution: Prohibition and women’s suffrage. The liquor ban took effect in January, and the state-by-state battle to ratify women’s voting rights raged into the summer.

Boston was overflowing with local news as well. The city was still recovering from the police strike the previous fall. Reporters were paying close attention to the abundance of rookies on the reconstituted force. Political reporters were taking the measure of Governor Calvin Coolidge, who had made a national name for himself by breaking the strike. Now he was being talked about as a vice presidential candidate.

Roundups of suspected radicals had the city on edge, as shackled foreigners were being held for interrogation and deportation at the emigration station on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Crime reporters were keeping track of the usual mayhem, devoting an abundance of ink to the April 15 murders of a paymaster and a guard during a robbery in South Braintree, followed by the arrests of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Sports pages followed Babe Ruth’s first season pounding home runs for the New York Yankees after his stunning sale the previous winter by the Boston Red Sox. The Babe’s move fueled the question of whether New York City might eclipse Boston as the “Hub of the Universe.” Most Bostonians doubted it.

The Post kept its readers abreast of all those stories, while preoccupied by yet another, one that would take a heavy toll.

James Michael Curley was anxious to mount a political comeback. After losing the mayor’s office, he ran for Congress in 1918 but lost again. With another mayoral election approaching, Curley was determined to regain City Hall and its spoils. As he looked around the city to count friends and enemies, he knew the Post would surely be among the latter. Edwin Grozier and his managing editor, Clifton B. Carberry, Boston’s premier political commentator, considered Curley and his machine throwbacks to a corrupt past. They were ready to throw the full weight of the paper against him.

In the spring of 1920, Curley went on the offensive. He publicly and repeatedly accused Grozier of secretly taking money from England to oppose Irish independence. Such a charge, if true, would certainly alienate the Post’s large Irish immigrant readership, which Grozier had assiduously and sincerely courted for decades. Curley took the stage at the St. Patrick’s Day celebration on Boston Common and claimed that he had learned of Grozier’s alleged perfidy several years earlier. In 1917, Curley claimed, he’d discovered that Grozier had purchased a quarter million dollars in city bonds. Curley said the city treasurer had informed him that money for the bonds had come from a draft on a London bank and that the money was “part of an immense propaganda campaign fund spent in this country . . .