HUNDRED CENTS ON THE DOLLAR: The Unbelievable Story of Wm. H. Malone

You are the last juror.

He taxed the Pullman Company at the full value its lawyers had hidden for a generation. He forced Cook County to print every hidden assessment in the newspaper, by street and by house number, where any neighbor could do the subtraction. When the Depression closed his bank he crossed an ocean to reopen it and paid every depositor a hundred cents on the dollar. And in 1937 the United States sentenced him to prison for evading his own income tax. Its bill for two years ran to fifty-nine thousand dollars. His return for one charged year showed five dollars and twenty-three cents, and for the other, nothing at all.

The prosecutor told the jury there was nothing personal in it, that he would sleep just as well either way. The judge who pronounced the sentence had warned, a decade earlier, that Malone’s great reform was legal, but political suicide. Seven years later, Franklin Roosevelt pardoned him in full. Ten years after the verdict, the Government settled his three-hundred-thousand-dollar tax bill for three thousand: one cent on the dollar. No two of its numbers ever agreed.

His sister kept the scrapbook. His granddaughter kept the doubt. Her grandson pulled the federal file. None of them will tell you whether the man was a martyr or a thief, because the record never says. You are the last juror. The verdict page is blank.

A historical novel drawn from the trial docket and Bill of Exceptions in United States v. Malone, the 1944 presidential pardon, the family scrapbook of Ethel Blanche Malone, and the genealogical files of Ethelee Malone Carlson.