Batman 1919
I scribbled this down right after my knee surgery, when I was stuck being awake at nights because of the pain anyway. I tend to write fragments when I’m trying to get the feel for a project. I had no intention of doing anything with this. I am mostly posting this oddity because I ran out time yesterday.
Written as a popular history of Batman covering 1919-1939
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I’m telling you Bruce Wayne is a once in a century mind combined with a once in a thousand-years athletic talent. He’s as handsome as the day is long in Alaska. On top of all that the son of a bitch is rich. And, I wouldn’t swap places with him for all the tea in China. When you really get to know him, you can’t envy him.
– Eddie Rickenbacker
Gotham City between the World Wars was more than just a pit of crime and corruption. It was home to ////Long flowery list of civic achievements///
Yet when people discuss that bygone Gotham City today, the only thing people talk about was the catapulting crime rate, the rampant political corruption brought on by Prohibition, and the bizarre one-man war waged on both by the scion of its richest family.
It is frustrating for a historian trying to construct an accurate record of the alliances of political bosses, their office holding lackeys, the police, and the crime lords, when you know that even your most scholarly of readers will skip past all of that to concentrate on the accounts of the Batman.
Bruce Wayne was born in 1893 to Doctor Thomas and Mrs. Martha Wayne. Grandson of the famed inventor and robber baron Randolph Wayne.///Canonically Patrick Wayne but that was a stupid choice on DC’s part. Wayne is a WASP surname, which is just fine for a patrician family. Patrick however, is way too Irish for 19th century upper crust America.///
Famously orphaned when his parents were murdered in 1902. Wayne makes for a fascinating psychological case study, not least because he was in his day one of the foremost authorities on the subject of criminal psychology, as well as a pioneer in the sciences of forensic investigation and criminal profiling.
It is well known that at the age of 23 he abandoned work on his second doctoral thesis to join the Lafayette Escadrille and fought for the French during the Great War. When America joined the war two years later, Wayne transferred to the United States Army but quite unusually, opted to serve in the infantry. This is something of a head-scratcher for many because he had been flying over France for two years, he could have had no illusions of the danger and horrors that would await him in the trenches. For myself, I am quite convinced he felt the need to steel himself in the hottest fire he could find.
Most of Wayne’s biographers maintain that “The Batman was born in the trenches in 1918.” This is based on the supposition that Wayne had severe PTSD and that Batman was both a cathartic release as well as a way of acting out. While there is some element of truth to this, a more detailed examination of his life strongly indicates that Batman had been hiding in the back of Bruce Wayne’s mind for a very long time. I maintain that Bruce Wayne was swept away the night of his parents’ murder and a changeling was left in his place who would become Batman. The boy who had been born so blessed by Fortuna that he should have been one of the greatest men of the 20th century was lost that night, in his place there was left someone his city desperately needed.
Randolph Wayne’s rearing of his grandson has been frequently if uncharitably described as “hands off.” The common view is that young Bruce’s upbringing was left to servants.
I however back a rebel school of thought. That Randolph was a very active participant in what I believe was his grandson’s lifelong (and self-assigned) mission. On top of a typical education for a man of his station at the turn of the last century, I have accumulated several pieces of evidence that Bruce Wayne was provided with a private training ground (Agoge, really) and an array of instructors that would seem bizarre to anyone who knew about all of them, but they were experts in every field that Batman would need. It included everything from Asian martial artists and forensic accountants to European counterfeiters and master burglars.
After the death of his only son, Randolph abandoned the day-to-day running of Wayne Amalgamated Electric and returned to the lab that had built his fortune with a vengeance. This era was even more productive than the first rush of inventions in Randolph’s twenties. The common perception is that he was too busy to give Bruce any of his time.
This is not true. I have unearthed numerous second-hand accounts of a stream of daily written letters being passed between the two men, this was a period of time when the Gotham mail system was at its peak and deliveries were being made an astonishing 10 times a day. **
The reason this is overlooked is that both Waynes were absolutely meticulous in the destruction of their correspondence. This also applied to the many experts that were imported to tutor young Bruce. One of the few accounts that survived were the reports of Sensei Sanda Chinen of Okinawa to Randolf Wayne. Sanada kept duplicates for himself, describing ten-year-old Bruce thusly, “he possesses an astonishingly ferocious, yet completely disciplined aptitude for violence.”
Harvard coach Ambrose Cabott was absolutely furious that Bruce would not represent his country in the Olympics. “He wouldn’t just take gold in the decathlon, and he would have set records that would have lasted a century.”
While frequently described as a shockingly gifted athlete, Wayne always shied away from public athletic competitions. This would be more understandable if he wasn’t the best race car driver of his era. The only times he didn’t win was due to mechanical failure. There are accounts of him competing with athletes in private settings, but these are third-hand accounts, and the feats attributed to Wayne in them are bluntly beyond belief.
Or given that it is Bruce Wayne, I would require first-hand accounts with photographs before I would risk my academic reputation by publishing them.
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Footnote: If you are going to use my book to again bring up the theory that Bruce Wayne was a meta-human, please refer to appendix 7, Autopsy and Genotyping of the remains of Bruce Wayne. While I was personally appalled that his remains were forcibly exhumed by dint of the Meta-Human Registration Act. It did solve the question once and for all. Bruce Wayne was an unenhanced homosapien. A “vanilla human.”
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Those f__king morons in Washington is gonna make us richer than kings. The country is going dry? Well, I say, The City is gonna be as wet as the Gotham River!
– Boss Cobblepot (AKA The Penguin) 1919
On January 16, 1919, the requisite number of states was reached to pass the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The Volstead Act which provided national enforcement of the amendment and Prohibition went into effect 12:01 am, on January 17, 1920.
At 12:04 am the first recorded infringement of the Volstead Act occurred in Gotham City. For all of its noble intents, Prohibition’s effect was to turn the vast majority of Americans into criminals and turn those who were already criminals into millionaires.
At 03:20 am that same night, the earliest reported sighting of the Batman took place. It was an assault on serial sexual predator Joachim Buechner, the witness was the woman he had been assaulting (name withheld). She did not file charges, however, Buechner never regained the use of his legs.
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“Sure, the river is closer, but it’s riskier. Bodies float up in the spring thaw. Now, the f___ing cops gotta at least pretend they’re looking for a killer. But everyone knows Slaughter Swamp never gives up its dead.” – Carmine Falcone
The initial sightings of the Batman were dismissed as urban legend because Wayne himself was playing strongly into a specific urban legend. Slaughter Swamp near the southern edge of the Gotham City Stockyards had had sightings of the so-called Bat-Man since the mid 1800s after Jefferson Adams published his macabre short story the Legend of Slaughter Swamp. Myths of a Bat-Man emerging from the swamp to break the wicked and drag them off to hell go back to before the Civil War. All Gotham school children heard about them sooner or later.
Originally known as Ingram Marshes, Gotham City’s wetlands acquired its colorful sobriquet when the slaughterhouse district was created. It was conveniently located outside Gotham proper and the prevailing winds generally kept the overpowering odors headed out of town, the slaughterhouses used the marshlands to dispose of unsalable offal of the animals that were processed.
The City’s criminal population had also long utilized the swamp to dispose of their unwanted remains. Whether they were dead or not. In other cities criminals feared “going for a ride” but in Gotham criminals were terrified of “dancing in quicksand.” More horrifying are early accounts (sadly well documented) of impoverished families abandoning mentally impaired children in the swamp. To top it all off, the Algonquin tribes in the area held that a powerful wendigo inhabited the swamp. This last may well be the start of the legend of the Bat-Man.
Anyone who goes there is immediately struck by the awful stillness of the place. A wetland should be lively, frogs croaking, birds singing, insects buzzing. In Slaughter Swamp there is nothing but thundering silence. Even in broad daylight the utter quiet is deeply unsettling. In truth, quite unnerving. Cardinal Jonathon Butler author of God in Gotham City stated that those marshes felt like they were inhabited by a powerful and hateful genius loci. That it was the seat of one of the apostle Paul’s ‘powers and principalities.’
The first month’s accounts of the Batman’s early and sporadic attacks were confined to the stockyard district, near Slaughter Swamp. It was quite successful. Boss Cobblepot was furious when the Gotham Cowboys, the gang charged with running the stockyards protection rackets disbanded rather than continue suffering the Batman’s nightly incursions.
It had been one of his primary revenue streams but rumrunning and speakeasies easily vaulted past it by the end of 1920.
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Will there be organized crime in Gotham? You God damned right crime is gonna be organized! – Boss Cobblepot 1889
It is frequently noted that Gotham City was unique in the era of political corruption in being completely corrupt. If you had a problem in Gotham you didn’t bother your city councilman, you went to your ward captain. If you had enough money or were willing to do a big enough “favor,” then something would be done about it.
The most ruthless and effective boss in the age of political bossism was Oswald Cobblepot. By 1895 he had assumed complete control of every aspect of political and criminal life in Gotham City. His term as Police Commissioner was best known for turning the GCPD into his own patronage factory. Promotion and retention were entirely dependent on the level of personal loyalty the officer demonstrated to Cobblepot. Even his worst critics were forced to admit that he was an organizational genius and a demon for work. His average day lasted from six am until 2 in the morning, often sleeping on a couch in his office. During the day he had one phone receiver in each hand. His secretaries would be making the next call before the current one was finished.
It didn’t matter who the mayor was, everyone knew Boss Cobblepot ran Gotham.
Around 1900 the reform movement took hold within the City. Doctor Thomas Wayne purchased the rundown Gotham Gazette, hired the like-minded Cyrus Ackerman to run it. The Gazette began the unthinkable task of shining a light on Boss Cobblepot’s affairs. The paper’s political cartoonist, Thomas Nash, frequently portrayed him as a greedy and disgusting but well-dressed penguin in white tie and tails. The image stuck. Privately Cobblepot was incensed but publicly played it off as a joke, frequently making quack-quack noises when in white tie. In time it became something of a nervous tic for Cobblepot.
By the 1920s he had embraced the image. During Prohibition, the most terrifying words in Gotham City were, “The Penguin wants to see you.”
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Broads? Carmine, there’s no way I’d try to muscle in on your racket. – Bruce Wayne
One of the most frequently asked questions of my students is, why didn’t anyone suspect Bruce Wayne of being the Batman? He was the right, height, weight, race, and approximate age. Wayne was rich and the Batman obviously had expensive toys. Combine all of that with Wayne’s well-known athletic prowess and it seems all too obvious who the “Caped Crusader” was.
While I admit that Bruce Wayne seems obvious now. Much of that is hindsight on our part. We know he was the Batman, so why didn’t anyone else? Knowledge colors perception, before 1977, Bruce Wayne was only ever viewed as a business man who had had a colorful private life in 1920s but settled down in the 1930s. We didn’t know any better either.
Although, I will grant that Batman’s numerous enemies should have on the face of it at least given Bruce Wayne a cursory look.
The reason the criminals didn’t suspect him was that they thought he was one of them.
Sort of.
Something that is frequently swept under the rug of history is that Wayne was himself a rumrunner, or properly speaking, a bootlegger. Today people frequently mistake a bootlegger as the maker of moonshine, but during prohibition, it referred to the drivers who would frequently employ “bootleg turns” to evade pursuit. The former race car driver was known to frequently “make the run” in laughably obvious disguises.
Bruce Wayne presented himself to the mobsters as a sort of crime groupie. He talked gangster talk with his supposed pals while they told jokes about him behind his back. They thought he was the classic spoiled rich boy playing at being a wise guy. They didn’t suspect he was Batman because they simply could never believe it. He was a laughingstock to them.
But one that was happily tolerated because he owned the highest-end speakeasy in Gotham, The legendary Empyrean Club. Wayne spared no expense in building the most fabulous nightclub in America. He began construction of his club a year before the 18th Amendment was passed.
Bruce always served the good stuff. The highest-end European and Canadian brands were shipped in on privately owned tramp freighters that would drop anchor just outside the three-mile limit. It wasn’t just high-end whiskeys and gin, if you had ever heard of a liquor, the Empyrean had it. Everything thing from Japanese Saki to Turkish Raki was available. There was a supply of Absinthe which had already been illegal since 1912. Every pre-Prohibition brand was in stock and awaiting the Empyrean’s delighted customers. There were rumors (which were actually true as it turned out) that Wayne had a submarine that would dock with the ships and transport his wares to the underwater caverns beneath Wayne Manner. The underworld all knew about it, so they thought nothing of black boats and cars roaring out the area at high speed. Why would they care?
The service was a seemingly effortless ballet of white-glove perfection. The staff was kept under the all-seeing eye of Wayne’s maitre d’hotel Alfred Pennyworth.
The entertainment was provided by the top acts in the country, world-famous Jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Jellyroll Morton, and Bix Biederbecke would play all night. Scandalous dancers like Josephine Baker and Selina Kyle would leave their audiences in gasping enthrallment. Wayne knew enough not to overdo entertainment like that. Which is why he also brought in the best magicians in the country, his guests were astounded by the likes of Harry Houdini, Jasper Maskelyne, and Giovanni Zatara.
The Empyrean’s stage was large enough to support circus performers like Mabel Stark and her tiger-taming act or everyone’s favorite The Flying Graysons.
While the club’s name was Empyrean the mobsters called it “Holy Ground.” Wayne had, (for a great deal of money), extracted a guarantee from Boss Cobblepot that his club would be neutral territory. The Penguin later claimed that he would have happily paid Wayne twice what he’d paid him if he had known how useful Holy Ground was going to be.
The neutral territory served a vitally important purpose for the mobsters. It was a designated place where they could safely discuss things with both their competitors and enemies. The Penguin loved the innovation of it.
All men entering the club had to check their weapons at the door. Their bodyguards would be conducted to their own club on a lower floor called Pandemonium. While accompanied women were permitted in the Empyrean, the Pandemonium was men only. Fights were frequent and expected. The imported German lager beer was on the house and it ran like a river. Anyone who pulled a “holdout piece” in the Pandamonium was immediately and permanently expelled, so was his boss. Which meant the offending bodyguard would be “dancing in quicksand.”
Unbsurprisingly, Bruce Wayne had it bugged seven ways from sunrise. The club was a critically important intelligence source for him. He knew every major crime in advance. In truth he also knew about many minor ones as well. It must have weighed on him. He simply couldn’t stop all criminal activity by himself and there was no point in telling a pre-James Gordan GCPD. A great moral dilemma was that he also knew about murders in advance and if stopped all of those even the stupidest of criminals would eventually add things up. He had to triage those that could be saved. Criminals were at the bottom of the list. Criminals that had turned state’s evidence might or might not be rescued depending on crimes they were being given immunity for. Innocent civilians were a much different matter. Batman would always intervene if it was at all possible.
For thirteen years The Empyrean Club was both the center of organized crime and the secret heart of enemy territory. Until the night of December 5th, 1933.
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Crime fighters?! Nuts! What we are is crime management. – Patrolman James Gordon 1906
Another way that Gotham City was unique was that the Mafia never established a meaningful presence. It was not for lack of trying but Boss Cobblepot preferred to foster local gangs native to the various lower-class wards. Ultimately, he didn’t like competition. When the Wayne Murders shook the city, Boss Cobblepot redirected the Gothamite’s wraith against the nascent Mafia, blaming them for the Assassination. Eighteen of its leaders were arrested, then broken out of jail and lynched. The lynch mob didn’t do the killing. Only four men did the actual hanging, one of whom was Cyrus Gold, the Penguin’s chief enforcer. The local Mafia boss Rico Falcone was spared and took the hint. The biggest crook in town would remain the Penguin.
The murderer (*either Irish or Italian flipping a coin*) Giuseppe di Chiara, AKA Joe Chill turned himself in 1932 without explanation. Chiara plead guilty and offered no defense for his crimes. He was later murdered by the other inmates of Blackgate Penitentiary, allegedly for not revealing the identity of the Batman.
When Joe Chill finally turned himself in, presenting the murder weapon and Martha Wayne’s pearl necklace as proof of his guilt, old questions were suddenly raised. Chill been the leader of the Westie Rippers at the time of the murders. The Rippers had their own brothel and gambling parlor, both rather low rent but that doesn’t change the fact that Joe Chill’s days as a street thug were well behind him when he murdered the Waynes. Bosses don’t do that kind of thing themselves.
Thomas Wayne was Boss Cobblepot’s most public adversary and had been the backbone of Gotham City’s reform movement. After the murders, Joe Chill had suddenly risen high in the Penguin’s Outfit. It was obvious why he had assassinated the Waynes. Public sentiment turned sharply against Boss Cobblepot. Enough so that the Penguin was forced to appoint, Inspector James Gordon, a man widely regarded as ‘the only honest cop in the City,’ as Police Commissioner.
James Gordon has been more realistically described as being as honest a cop as he could afford to be. He would drop murder investigations when ordered to. He avoided asking awkward questions when the answers would get him killed. And while he never took a bribe, he never considered reporting officers that did. Indeed, he would encourage his junior officers to accept the money if they were being bribed to give information on him, the caveat being he wanted to know what the questions were and who was asking them.
His first three weeks on the job appeared rather disheartening to the reformers. Nothing changed, it seemed that things would be business as usual at GCPD. The Penguin himself was starting to breath easier. Apparently, Gordon was tame after all.
Then came the Monday Morning Massacre. LEOs arriving for the morning briefing were informed there would be new badges issued. Their old copper ones were being replaced with new steel badges. And if you didn’t get a new badge after turning in your old one, you were off the Force.
When reporters asked how the Gotham City Police Department was supposed to do its job with such a drastically reduced police force Gordon replied, “Hell, only twenty percent of the cops were doing eighty percent of the work anyway.” Political patronage on the Gotham PD ended that day, anyone applying for a job had to have a clean record and take an IQ test. Veterans of the Great War were strongly encouraged to apply. A training program for recruit officers (rookies) was instituted with an already detailed curriculum in place as well as trained instructors, (courtesy of the Wayne Institute of Criminology) in place and ready to go. The Gotham City Police Department quickly became the model for the country.
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Gotham City is one of the great shining gems in the crown of Columbia. The City has the finest of everything America has to offer. Industry, Culture, Engineering, and Art, this city leads the country and soon we will lead the world. What Gotham City is NOT is the outlands of the Wild West or backwaters of the Deep South. We must have faith in our justice system. The masked vigilant has no place in the City. – Harvey Dent, District Attorney 1932
A reformed police force would mean little if the District Attorney’s office remained in the hands of Leonard Shump. Gordon’s appointment came shortly before the city’s elections. Some have described the 1932 election as nearly an uprising. While the mayor proved to be a disappointment to the Reform movement, the city’s new prosecutor was not.
The fundamental problem with Bruce Wayne’s reform schemes was that it was over reliant on irreplicable men. Commissioner Gordon quickly acquired a self-appointed bodyguard of officers. He wasn’t happy about them getting a nickname in the press, The Steel Guard.
Sadly, Harvey Dent insisted that the law was the only bodyguard he needed.
Transcript of FBI interview with patient Harvey Dent, Arkham Mental Health Hospital, 1977
Harvey Dent: Good Afternoon, Special Agent. Please forgive the bandages on my head. It’s a crutch for my therapy you understand.
Special Agent Jeffery Graves: I understand perfectly. Thank you for taking time to see me, Mister Dent.
Harvey Dent: I assure you, you didn’t tear me away from anything vital.
SA Graves (laughing): Regardless, I’m sorry for any inconvenience I have caused you.
Harvey Dent: Not at all. I confess I was a little curious. Law enforcement officers haven’t taken much interest in hearing what I have had to say for about twenty years. Not that I blame them. Not after what happened last time.
SA Graves: Umm, uh… Yeah.
Harvey Dent: Not to worry. I have been most cooperative in my therapy for decades now. All the doctors have said so.
SA Graves: So I’ve been told.
Harvey Dent: So, what can I do for you?
SA Graves: I am with a new department of the Bureau called Criminal Profiling.
Harvey Dent: It sounds like a fancy new name for old cold cases. What do you do there?
SA Graves: In a manner of speaking, that is kind of what we do. What I’m here to ask you about is a few things relating to the Batman.
Harvey Dent: Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. I’ve long since told law enforcement authorities everything I knew about him.
SA Graves: I see.
Harvey Dent: Sorry.
SA Graves: Did you know that STAR Labs had to halt construction of their new facility in Gotham City. They had just started excavating.
Harvey Dent (chuckles): Whatever the problem was, it had nothing to do with me. (pauses) Probably. Hmm. Where were they digging? I hope they didn’t find anything too distressing.
SA Graves: They were digging on the site of the old Wayne mansion.
(Patient Harvey Dent begins laughing uncontrollably for approximately 2 minutes. Tone and timbre of voice changes repeatedly)
Harvey Dent: Which one of Bruce’s imbecile grandsons signed off on that?
SA Graves: His eldest, Richard Wayne. Although, we don’t think any of them knew he was Batman.
Harvey Dent: He was right not to trust them with anything important. Cat’s out of the bag now. So does Criminal Profiling mean you do urban archeology?
SA Graves: You know exactly what I do, Two Face. And I know you’re faking it.
Harvey Dent: I don’t know what you mean Special Agent.
SA Graves: Take the bandage off your face. I mean your real face. Let him b-r-e-a-t-h.
(silence for a few seconds followed by rustling sounds)
Harvey Dent (new deeper, gravely voice): That. Is. Much. Better. Thanks G-Man. Mighty white of ya.
SA Graves: You knew Bruce Wayne was the Batman.
Two Face: Sorry G-Man, I can’t work like that. You know that dontcha?
SA Graves: I can’t give you your coin. Nothing metal you understand.
Two Face: Sucks to be you, asshole.
(rustling sounds)
SA Graves: You see in my hand a plain deck of cards. I have marked over all of the red cards, they will act as the defaced side of your coin. (shuffling sound) Take the deck. I will ask questions and you will draw to determine whether you answer or not.
Two Face: That’ll do G-man. That’ll do.
SA Graves: You’ve already demonstrated that you knew Bruce Wayne was the vigilante known as Batman.
Two Face: Damn that poker face of mine.
SA Graves: When did you know that Bruce Wayne was the Batman?
Two Face: (flip) Red. (voice and timbre changes suddenly) I’m not entirely certain. You have to understand Special Agent, even before my evolution, I was a man of two minds. You have to be when you’re an attorney. For instance, if I’m defending a man who I am certain in my heart is a murderer, I have to put that aside while I defend him. So long as he doesn’t do something profoundly stupid like admitting to the crime then I will force myself to assume he is innocent. So long as Bruce never admitted to me that he was the Batman, I could continue with our relationship above board.
Criminals only ever saw the silly fop play-acting a gangster. Jim and I worked with the real man at the Wayne Institute of Criminology. We knew he had a mind in the point zero zero one percent of the human race and he hated criminals with a holy passion. He had to be the Batman but I could never let myself think about it. It put something of a strain on Harvey.
SA Graves: Did James Gordon know Bruce Wayne was Batman.
Two Face: (flip) Red. We never asked him. Weren’t you listening to us? (*voice shifts*) Ask Barbara Wayne, dumbass.
SA Graves: The excavation at the site of the old Wayne Manor has turned up evidence implicating Barbara Wayne in Batman’s activities.
Two Face: I mean most nights her husband doesn’t come in until five in the morning and he’s beaten the fuck up half the time. Babs was smart enough to add it up. So she protected her husband. It’s her job. Big deal.
SA Graves: Barbara Gordan Wayne was the Bat Girl. Did you know she was the Bat Girl?
Two Face: (flip) Black. Went to the well too many times G-man.
SA Graves: Did Barbara Wayne murder, Selina Kyle?
Two Face: (flip) Black. Fuck right off.
SA Graves: You were abducted on the night of September 10th, 1932. In the early morning of September 19th you were found in front of the emergency room at Gotham General with 50% of your body disfigured by acid.
Two Face: I believe I recall the incident.
SA Graves: Is Batman the one who found you? You never said at the time. The coin flip was tails.
Two Face: (flip) Red. Yeah, Bruce found me.
SA Graves: You’ve never admitted that before.
Two Face: You’re the first copper to win the toss. Lucky you.
SA Graves: Do you know the name of the person or persons who disfigured you?
Two Face: (flip) Black.
SA Graves: Fine. Do you know who was responsible for the bombing of the Empyrean Club?
Two Face: (flip) (pauses) MOTHER FUCKER! I’LL MURDER YOU!!!
(*sounds of an altercation. Special Agent Graves screams. door slams open. General shouting as orderlies subdue Harvey Dent*)
Final notes from Special Agent Graves at Riverside Hospital. Patient Harvey Dent’s violent episode began when he drew the Joker card.
** This was actually a thing. It wasn’t as fast as email, but at its height it something close to a cross town conversation was possible over the course of a single day.
