A Dose of Heroine

Lillian Cross, circa 1934

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool.

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The woman pictured above is a genuine American hero. Her name is Lillian Cross. You likely have no idea who she is, but what she did may have saved this country from a dreadful fate: Two of them, actually.

Mrs. Cross died in 1962, at 77. And yet, historically, her actions on February 15, 1933 in Miami still resonate today. So keep reading, and try to remember the point in this narrative when you not only knew what this is about, but also the full and fascinating reason why it is literally about the events of … today.

We’re in Bayfront Park in the city of Miami. It’s 9 p.m. on a balmy 75-degree day in the dead of winter, and chairs are set up for a major event. The president-elect of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is driven up to the outdoor bandstand in a green Buick convertible, with the top down. Aides hoist him to sit atop the back of his seat, both because this elevates him above the crowd, and because it eliminates the possibility that he’d have to make his way toward a lectern, which would have revealed his disability, something he always took pains to conceal.

In chairs around the podium were local dignitaries such as the Mayor of Miami, Redmond Gautier, and A.B. Willis, the Dade County Democratic executive committeeman, as well as prominent supporters from afar, including Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago. Twenty-five thousand people were in attendance, said to be the largest gathering in Miami, ever, up to that date. Roosevelt spoke for one minute only, said 195 inconsequential words, and his car prepared to leave.

Mrs. Cross, 48, the wife of a physician, had wormed her way through the crowd until she was just 20 feet or so from Roosevelt. A petite woman at five-foot-four and 105 pounds, she had found a wobbly bench to stand on, for a better view. After a few minutes a man stood on the bench next to her. He was even smaller than she was — only five foot tall — and he also was elevating himself to get a better look. He extended his right arm.

Mrs. Cross saw the gun. She couldn’t miss it. It was right next to her head. She slapped it with her pocketbook, then grabbed the arm, held tight, and pushed it up and away. The man was already firing, now tottering on the unsteady bench, fighting to free himself from this, you know, crazy grabby bitch. He couldn’t. She would not let go. Quickly, two men in the crowd got into the fray, and subdued the shooter, an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara. He was an immigrant from Italy. His .32 revolver held five bullets, and he had emptied it; there had been five shots, in all.

Zangara was said to be skilled with firearms. He’d bought this gun only days before, for $8, at a Miami pawn shop. It is highly likely that at 20 feet, unimpeded, he would have hit his target, which he later confirmed was Roosevelt. But Roosevelt escaped unharmed. Instead, one of Zangara’s misdirected bullets hit Cermak in the chest. The Chicago mayor — himself an immigrant and a champion of his city’s immigrant population — was a seeming nobody who had unseated “Big Bill” Thompson, who is considered, almost by acclamation, the crookedest mayor Chicago ever had. In the wild confusion following the attack, Cermak is said to have turned to the new president and whispered, “I’m glad it was me, not you.” (This may be apocryphal.). Cermak died of peritonitis a few weeks later..

How close had Mrs. Cross been to Zangara? When she arrived home that night, her family saw that she had powder burns on her cheek.

Zangara spoke in comically stereotypical Italian-accented English. He sounded like Chico Marx. During his interrogation in jail, he was quoted thus:

"I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists."

And, after being sentenced to death, he said:

"You give me electric chair! I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!"

On the electric chair on March 20, 1933, his last words were: “Pusha da button. Go ahead, pusha da button”.

Zangara in custody. He was five foot one.

Wait, we haven’t reached the weird part yet, and we won’t get there for a bit. We need some historical perspective, first.

We all know that FDR was one of only three “great” presidents, and that his forceful personality, steady leadership and wise, intuitive risk-taking nimbly shepherded the country through two of its most perilous existential crises: The Great Depression and World War II. Here’s what you may not know:

A mere three weeks before the assassination attempt, the United States had ratified the 20th Amendment, which specified, among other things, what would happen if a president-elect died before taking office. There had been no clear rule before. What would happen from then on is that the vice presidential candidate takes office as president.

Roosevelt’s running mate was John Nance Garner, the guy most famous for declaring that the vice presidency "is not worth a bucket of warm piss." Good quote, but bad man. Garner would have been a terrible president for the times.

A southern Democrat chosen by FDR for conservative ticket balance, Garner opposed strikes by labor unions. He opposed the essential deficit financing of The New Deal. Within a few years, Garner opposed most everything his president was doing, including the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s successful crisis-mode political philosophy: The centralization of power in the federal government. Garner actually primaried FDR in 1940. If he was president, and still president in 1941, he almost certainly would have opposed Lend-Lease, especially to The Soviet Union, a country he detested because of Communism. That decision alone could have tipped the war to the Nazis.

So I think we can establish that Mrs. Cross was a very fine hero, indeed.

Okay, so. The weird part, which is the present-day part:

In all of American history, I know of only two cases of assassinations where a significant part of the motive — possibly all of it — involved the gunman having been driven half crazy by physical pain. You know the new one: Italian-American political extremist ideologue with a chronic bad back.

Luigi, meet Giuseppe.

Zangara’s unhinged political anarchism appears to have been wrought, mostly, from having suffered stomach pain every day of his life since he was six years old, pain that became excruciating in adulthood. Lawyers initially figured this was a lie, a ploy for mercy from the courts, but doctors performing Zangara’s autopsy concluded that he must have had severe abdominal pain and that it must have been chronic. They attributed it to long-standing adhesions they found on his gallbladder.

(Zangara’s screaming gut is a historical curiosity and an occasional punchline. In the Stephen Sondheim play “Assassins”, when Zangara complains of a never-ending bellyache, John Wilkes Booth responds, “Have you tried shooting Franklin Roosevelt?”)

It was not known at the time of Zangara’s arrest, or of Sondheim’s play, for that matter, but, yes, 21st century medicine has determined that suffering serious chronic physical pain significantly increases the possibility of violent behavior.

Roosevelt speaking at Bayfront Park

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OKAY HERE COMES THE WEEKEND GENE POOL CHALLENGE FOR TODAY. I have already given you the entertainment. Now you have to give me your thoughts, anecdotes and observations.

Here is what happens when I attempt to reach my doctor’s office online to arrange for an appointment. Or the social security office to check on a payment. Or my bank. Or any one of about a dozen institutions with which I must sometimes interact:

The office keeps me on hold for five minutes — it is apparently their duty — then they accept my password, and usually welcome me by name, and then inform me that they have sent a very temporary password to my phone, for two-factor authentication.

Here is where things get complicated. Usually, I don’t know for sure where my phone is. I’ll hunt briefly, then I’ll ask Alexa to call me, and she will, and I hear nothing in the house so I race out to my car, and there it is! So I race back into the house, and run to my computer, and I now have to re-enter my computer password to get out of sleep mode, which I do, whereupon I find that my temporary doctor’s office password has expired. I must start the six-minute process again.

But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I will NOT find my phone in my car, and race back into the house and look harder for it, and find it, say, half under the bed BUT IT IS NOW OUT OF JUICE, so I have to charge it before I get back to my doctor, and start the six-minute process again.

Or I conclude that I left the phone somewhere, like in a restaurant, so I get in my car….

Look, I am not one of those people who always carries my phone with me, as though it were a pacemaker keeping me alive. I have a good friend named Tom who does just that. It’s always in his pocket. If you call him when he is pooping, he’ll probably answer. I will never ever sink to become one of those awful people like my good friend Tom.

So. My point is, I hate Two Factor Authentication. Detest it. I believe it is mostly there not to protect YOU from being hacked — as the companies contend — but to protect the company from lawsuits in the event that the company is hacked.

And it’s only getting worse. The Social Security Administration now routinely asks if I want to add a THIRD factor. My good friend Tom probably would. He’s like that.

I know you probably don’t hate Two Factor Authentication. You see it as essential, or easily avoidable, or completely fine; you are not a superannuated, absentminded technophobe like I am. We’ll check that out in a minute. But first, here is your challenge:

Tell us about some aspect of technology that you dislike and tell us why. Be funny if you can. It can be current technology but does not have to be. It can be something you ONCE hated. in all cases, tell us why, even if it is something you have since come to terms with. Send it here:

(Send any other, unrelated observations you have to the same button.)

And finally, the Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Good. Only one more item on the agenda today. You know what it is, you’ve known it is coming and you’ve dreaded it. You know you can simply X out of this right now and not even have to read it. Not have to slog through the guilt trip. Believe me, I know. Have you X’d out yet? No? Why? Because you know it is punishment you must endure. Believe me, this hurts me more than it hurts you.

See you all on Tuesday, or before.