There’s been a lot of grousing over the results of the election. The facts are simple: Donald Trump will be returning to the White House for another term. How he won is ample fodder for armchair political scientists and conspiracy theorists.
One popular theory making the rounds is that billionaire Elon Musk, through his 2022 purchase of Twitter and by sinking millions of dollars into Trump campaign coffers, bought the election. It’s a tempting, though unprovable, tale, with lots of intrigue, villains, and plot twists. However, it fits neatly into the long history of rich and powerful people putting their fingers on electoral scales.
In America and Pittsburgh, before billionaires, election outcomes were swayed by bottles of booze, sacks full of cash, and violence.
History books and newspaper archives are filled with accounts of voter fraud, bribes, and intimidation throughout Pittsburgh’s history. The Steel City was especially corrupt and did much to distinguish itself from such cities as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.
“The vice graft, for example, was not blackmail as it is in New York and most other cities,” wrote muckraking reporter Lincoln Steffens in 1903. “It is a legitimate business, conducted, not by the police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the chairman of one of the parties at the last election said it was worth $250,000 a year.”
Pittsburgh politicians, from mayors on down to aldermen (precursors to today’s council members), committed crimes to gain office and then used their positions to remain in office while directing criminal activities and profiting from corruption.
Among the most corrupt were Pittsburgh Mayor Charles Kline and mayor and future Pa. Governor David L. Lawrence. Kline’s term as mayor included national attention on corruption by him and many in his administration that culminated in his indictment and forced resignation in 1932. Lawrence had close ties to bootleggers and gamblers, and he was unsuccessfully prosecuted for taking kickbacks and threatening state employees before becoming Pittsburgh’s mayor in 1946.
The Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933, turned political corruption in Pittsburgh into an assembly line of crime.
“Members of election boards were routinely convicted of tampering with election results over the decades,” wrote Richard Gazarik in his 2018 book Wicked Pittsburgh.
That tampering included dumping ballot boxes into rivers and dispatching thugs to intimidate voters at the polls. Politicians operated speakeasies and gambling clubs where gamblers and drinkers were converted into voters. Some of these joints became legendary- the Monaca Club in Oakland, for example, was owned by state senator James Coyne. It operated openly on Forbes Ave. across the street from the district police station.
After Prohibition, the graft industry continued unabated. It was essential to flipping Pittsburgh from Republican control to a Democratic city in the wake of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 election victory.
During the 1932 presidential election, a Lawrenceville minister told Strip District residents which names to use for getting a poll tax receipt. In one Pittsburgh neighborhood, an alderman’s nephew handed out half-dollars to voters. These are some of the typical election hijinks recounted in historian Bruce Stave’s 1970 book on Pittsburgh machine politics, The New Deal and the Last Hurrah.
“Promises of money as high as ten dollars per man have been made,” wrote the Pittsburgh Courier in November 1933. “Our advice to every Negro who is promised one dollar, or five dollars or ten dollars by a Republican for his vote is to take the money, put it on your pocket and then go to the polls and vote the straight democratic [sic] ticket.”
That same election cycle, Democratic party leader Paul F. Jones told the Courier, “Despite the intimidation of the police department, racketeer’s money and whiskey, or Democratic organization … succeeded in keeping down the Republican majority.”
Entrenched corruption, coupled with the city’s large union population, made Pittsburgh ripe for organized crime to gain a foothold in all of the city’s neighborhoods.
August “Big Gus” Gianni was a small-time Hill District gambling racketeer. In the 1930s, he operated a numbers station out of a Hill District candy shop. “He was ‘just a bum without a shirt on Wylie Ave.,’” an associate told the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in 1946 after Gianni’s murder.
And then Gianni threw his weight around — he was five feet tall and weighed 225 pounds — at the polls, allegedly on behalf of Democratic Hill Alderman Thomas Geary. During the September 1937 primary, Gianni and four accomplices were convicted of assaulting an election judge at a Strip District polling place. Two months later, Gianni and an accomplice were convicted of intimidating voters by creating a disturbance.
Gianni and his henchmen appealed their assault conviction. “The undisputed evidence discloses that someone did beat and abuse, and drive from the polling place, the Judge of Election, Patrick Colangelo,” two judges ruled, denying the appeal.
Gianni’s role in the 1937 election was his ticket to the Pittsburgh mob’s top tier, and he was given control of numbers rackets in Oakland and Shadyside.
News accounts of voter intimidation from the 2024 election pale in comparison to the events of 1937. Yet the implications are the same. The law (and conviction) should be upheld “so that persons may cast their ballots unmolested,” wrote the judges who ruled in Gianni’s appeal.
Politics in the “before Billionaires” era was a big game sport. While methods have changed since the freewheeling days of Prohibition, there’s a throughline in the staggering sums of money being spent to influence election outcomes. Pay to play and dirty tricks aren’t blue or red, Democratic or Republican — they’re the American way.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2024.
