American History Tellers

In the aftermath of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, authorities faced mounting pressure to clean up Chicago and take down the violent mobsters who overran the city – most notoriously, Al Capone. The federal government took on the challenge, pursuing Capone relentlessly. In the end, Capone did go down – not for murder, but for tax evasion. And since Capone’s conviction in the 1930s, this unorthodox charge has been used repeatedly to bring down otherwise “ungettable” criminals.

To discuss how the feds finally closed in on Capone, Lindsay speaks with Jonathan Eig, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster.
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On Valentine’s Day 1929, seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage in an attack that stunned the nation. Photographs of the bloody scene appeared on front pages across the country, and the public reacted with horror. Even in Chicago—a city hardened by daily gang violence—the message was clear: this was different.
City officials were under intense pressure to respond, and suspicion quickly fell on the city’s most powerful gang leader, Al Capone. But proving who ordered the hit would be far more difficult than expected. And as investigators struggled to build their case, the fallout from the massacre would change Chicago—and Capone’s fate—forever.

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In 1920, a young Al Capone arrived in Chicago looking for a fresh start, and his timing couldn’t have been better. That same year, Prohibition outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol, turning America’s thirst into a criminal gold rush. Chicago quickly became the epicenter of bootlegging, and Capone was determined to seize the moment and make himself rich beyond imagination. But the city was already crowded with ambitious gangsters chasing the same prize. As rival bootleggers carved up territory, Chicago descended into a violent turf war that would reshape the criminal underworld.

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In the early 1950s, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin were in a race to develop a vaccine against polio. While Salk’s killed-virus vaccine was the first to be distributed, Sabin continued working to perfect his own approach. In the end, Sabin’s oral polio vaccine—made from a weakened live virus—proved easier to administer and was ultimately distributed far more widely, though his name never achieved the same recognition. In this episode, Lindsay is joined by epidemiologist and oral historian Karen Torghele. Her book Albert Sabin: The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer is due to be published by Yale University Press in June of 2026.
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In April 1954, a group of first graders lined up in the gymnasium of an elementary school in McLean, Virginia for the start of the Salk polio vaccine trials. In an era before widespread federal government involvement in public health, the National Institute of Infantile Paralysis executed an unprecedented experiment involving nearly 2 million children and tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, and volunteers. It was the largest peacetime mobilization in American history.
While scientists evaluated the results, Americans waited anxiously to find out whether the vaccine was safe and effective, putting an end to 40 years of fear. But in the spring of 1955, a shocking revelation would bring the vaccination program to a sudden halt.
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