1892

 __________ 

“Nick is shot but not dead yet.” 

Nate Champion

__________

Powder River Pass, Johnson County, Wyoming.
(Blogger's collection - feel free to use.)

 

BORN IN BAVARIA in 1848, Nathan Straus first settled in the South, where his father established a profitable general store. By the 1880s, Straus and his brother Isidor had become part owners of Macy’s department store in Manhattan. Straus had long been concerned about the childhood mortality rates in the city — he had lost two children to disease. From another German immigrant he heard about “pasteurization,” which was finally being applied to milk. 

As The New York Times noted, 

Straus saw that pasteurization offered a comparatively simple intervention that could make a meaningful difference in keeping children alive.

 

One major impediment to pasteurization came from milk consumers themselves. Pasteurized milk was widely considered to be less flavorful than regular milk; the process was also believed to remove the nutritious elements of milk — a belief that has re-emerged in the 21st century among “natural milk” adherents. Dairy producers resisted pasteurization not just because it added an additional cost to the production process but also because they were convinced, with good reason, that it would hurt their sales. And so Straus recognized that changing popular attitudes toward pasteurized milk was an essential step. In 1892, he created a milk laboratory where sterilized milk could be produced at scale. The next year, he began opening what he called milk depots in low-income neighborhoods around the city, which sold the milk below cost. Straus also funded a pasteurization plant on Randall’s Island that supplied sterilized milk to an orphanage there where almost half the children had perished in only three years. Nothing else in their diet or living conditions was altered other than drinking pasteurized milk. Almost immediately, the mortality rate dropped by 14 percent. (See also: 1858 and 1907.)

 

*

“Necktie Parties” and Vigilante Days.

April 5: Savage violence flares in Wyoming, in what comes to be known as “The Johnson County War.” 

For some years previously, trouble had been brewing, as rich cattle barons suffered heavy losses to bad weather, and then became convinced that part of their losses were due to rustlers. The Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, and a variety of rich men, organized to seek justice. Several people were lynched, including Jim Averill and his business partner and paramour, Cattle Kate, who ran a log cabin saloon in a valley off the Sweetwater River. Averill, says Smith, “was a bit of a Populist” and had been critical of the biggest ranchers. Sometimes referred to, even in the caption to a picture accompanying the article, as “necktie parties,” these extra-judicial killings were crude and often gruesome affairs. Yet Owen Wister, later the famous writer, could report one day, “Sat yesterday in smoking car with one of the gentlemen indicted for lynching the man and the woman. He seemed a good solid citizen and I hope he’ll get off.” (52) 

The Stock Growers’ Association made increasingly tough rules. Cowboys were not allowed to own a brand or stock on their own, lest they be tempted to brand a few mavericks. The Association ran the roundup as it pleased, and made it hard on smaller ranchers to participate. Says Smith, “If you call a man a thief, treat him like a thief, and deprive him of all chance to earn a living honestly, he will soon oblige you by becoming a thief.” (53) 

Now, in the spring, a group of small famers and stockgrowers announced plans for their own roundup. The group hired two foremen, including Nathan D. Champion, a Texan said to be lightning with a gun.

The big ranchers announced a plan of “extermination,” Smith writes, not “arrest” but “extermination.” Their death list includes 70 names, including 19 alleged rustlers, but also the sheriff of Johnson County and three county commissioners. The acting governor and both Wyoming senators were aware in advance of this plan. The Stock Growers’ Association even imported 25 gunfighters from Texas to help them in the fight. 

On April 5, fifty men headed for Buffalo, the county seat, but heard that Nat Champion and, they hoped, a few rustlers, were at the cabin on Powder River. A bad storm caught them as they approached, coating their beards and moustaches as they rode. They soon had the cabin surrounded; and when morning came Nick Ray, one of the suspected rustlers, was shot down going for a morning bucket of water, and had to be dragged back inside. The cabin was eventually set on fire, and when Champion exited, he was cut down by 28 bullets. The posse left him on the bloodstained snow, with a note pinned to his shirt: “Cattle thieves, beware!”

 

Champion was trapped for hours, being surrounded, and took some time to write down what had happened. “Me and Nick was getting breakfast,” he said, “when the attack took place. … Nick started out and I told him to lookout, that I thought there was someone at the stable and would not let them come back.” 

He kept up a brief running account: 

Nick is shot but not dead yet. He is awful sick. I must go and wait on him.

 

It is now about two hours since the first shot. Nick is still alive.

 

They’re still shooting and are all around the house, Boys, there is bullets coming in here like hail.

 

Them fellows is in such shape I can’t get at them. They are shooting from the stable and river and back of the house.

 

Nick is dead. He died about 9 o’clock.

 

Hours passed. The attackers loaded a wagon with hay and wood chips and set it afire, pushing it up against the cabin. Champion was still writing: 

I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house to-night.

 

I think I will make a break when night comes if alive.

 

It’s not night yet.

 

The house is all fired. Goodbye boys, if I never see you again.

 

Then he signed the paper, “Nathan B. Champion.” 

After he was cut down, the attackers found his diary, and it was presented to a Chicago newsman who had ridden along with the posse. 

The cowboys and small ranchers were outraged at the news, as were many citizens of Buffalo, and the went looking for the posse on April 10. The 50 men took shelter at the ranch of a friend, and dug in. Soon they were surrounded by 300 “hornet-mad” foes, led by Sheriff “Red” Angus. Ladies of the town were busy baking cakes to send to Angus and his men. (74-75)

 

Telegraph lines out of town were cut repeatedly; but on April 12, a message was finally sent to the governor. Troops from the Sixth Cavalry were sent to the rescue, arriving the next day. Forty-four men surrendered that day, not including a few defectors, and two Texas gunmen, who later died of their wounds. Other than that, the leaders of the Stock Growers’ Association paid little price. 

They were never brought to trial. Two fur trappers had been in the cabin with Champion and Ray, but had been taken prisoner before the shooting. Now they were prepared to testify in court – until they were “escorted” out of the state, so that they couldn’t. As Smith explains, 

“Counting bribes to federal officers and judges, legal fees, forfeited bail, and other expenses, it was said to have cost $27,000 to get the witnesses across Nebraska alone. The trappers have been promised a payoff of $2500 each, and given postdated checks. When presented for cashing, the checks proved to be on a bank that had never existed.”

 

The average citizen of Buffalo, Wyoming in 1892 might have strong feelings about the abuse of the powerful ranchers. But since most of the big ranchers were Republican, and most of their opponents were Democrats, the war also had a political side. A newspaper writer noted at the time, that the members of the posse, whose leaders were all important men, had the backing of “the Republican machine from President Harrison on down to the state organization…They have the president, the governor, the courts, their United States Senators, the state legislature and the army at their backs.” There were even efforts later, to silence the press. 

Smith writes: 

A small town editor who criticized the cattlemen two violently was jailed on a charge of criminal libel and held for 30 days – long enough to silence his paper. A second editor was beaten. But the latter, whose name was a period S. Mercer, exacted an eye for an eye in his celebrated chronicle of the invasion, published two years later and resoundingly entitled: the banditti of the planes, or the cattlemen's invasion of Wyoming. The crowning infamy of the ages.

 

Thereupon his print shop was burned to the ground, and another subservient judge ordered all copies of the book seized and burned. But while they were awaiting the bonfire Kama and wagonload of them was removed one night and drawn by galloping horses over the Colorado line. Thereafter copies on library shelves were stolen and mutilated as far away as the Library of Congress until only a few were left. But two new additions of since been published, and so—in the end – Mr. Mercer won.

 

A trial might still have been held, but a judge friendly to the big ranchers, agreed to move any trial from Johnson County to Cheyenne, where the defendants would have many friends. More than a thousand veniremen were examined over a period of nineteen days (January 1893), but only eleven were seated on the jury, and the prosecutors gave up. 

Their witnesses, of course, were long gone. (77) 

That party was then surrounded soon after by enraged citizens and narrowly avoided being lynched. (“The Johnson County War,” undated American Heritage article by Helena Huntington Smith).

(Picture from the internet.)

 

* 

June 7: The New York Times notes, that on this date, 

a racially mixed shoemaker from New Orleans named Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket for a train bound for Covington, La., and took a seat in the whites-only car. He was asked to leave, and after he refused, he was dragged from the train and charged with violating the Louisiana Separate Car Act. He pleaded guilty and was fined $25.

 

On Friday [November 11, 2021], nearly 130 years after the arrest, the Louisiana Board of Pardons voted to clear his record.

 

“There is no doubt that he was guilty of that act on that date,” Jason Williams, the Orleans Parish district attorney, told the board during a brief hearing on Friday. “But there is equally no doubt that such an act should have never been a crime in this country.”

* 

The following account is from Ridpath’s People’s History of the United States, published in 1895. 

About the time of the national conventions in this year began the distressing series of events which, with increasing volume, widened into all departments of American industry, blasting the fruits of labor and indicating in the industrial society of the United States the existence of profound and dangerous vices. On the 30th of June, the managers of the great iron works at Homestead, a short distance from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, apprehending a strike of their operatives on account of a reduction of wages, declared a lockout, and closed the establishment. This was said to be done under the necessity of making repairs and the like; but the dullest could not fail to understand the true intent of the corporation.

 

The operatives, thus wronged, assumed a threatening attitude; and the manager sent secretly to the Pinkerton detective agency at Chicago for a force to protect the works. A large body of armed men was sent with the purpose of putting the same secretly into the works to defend the establishment. As the boat bearing the Pinkerton force came near to Homestead, it was fired on by the strikers, and a battle ensued, in which ten strikers and four detectives were killed. A very large number of the latter were wounded on the boat, and the whole were driven away. The strikers gained possession of the works; the civil authorities were powerless; and an appeal was made to the Governor of the State.

 

The Pennsylvania National Guard to the number of 8500, was called out, under proclamation of the Governor. On the 12th of July, a military occupation was established at Homestead, and was maintained for several weeks. The restoration of order was extremely difficult. Superintendent Frick of the iron works was attacked by an anarchist who attempted to assassinate him in his office. At length, under the necessity which the social order has to maintain itself, the original wrong done by Andrew Carnegie, proprietor of the works, and his subordinates, was enforced by law and by the power of the military. In the meantime, the miners of the Coeur d’Alene mining region in far-off Idaho rose against a body of nonunion working men, who had been introduced into the mines, killed many, and drove away the remainder. Railroad bridges and other property were destroyed, and a reign of terror established. It was not until the 17th of July that military rule prevailed over the rioters, whose leaders were arrested and imprisoned. (1219/522) 

1899

 

__________ 

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” 

Kate Chopin

__________

The United States must now govern the Philippine Islands. 

 

JILL LEPORE writes,

 

    For a while, starting in the eighteen-nineties, the bicycle seemed likely to finally beat out the horse. Aside from not needing to be fed and not dying, bicycles are also quieter and cleaner than horses, something I thought a lot about as a kid, because I had a job mucking out stables. But then along came the automobile. “There are some who claim the automobile will replace the bicycle, but this is rank nonsense,” a Maine magazine reported in 1899. “Those who have become attached to their bicycles—there are several millions of bicycle riders—will not easily give up the pleasure of skimming along the country like a bird . . . for the more doubtful delight of riding in the cumbersome, ill-smelling automobile.”

 

    In 1899, 1.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States. Henry Ford’s Model T made its début in 1908. The next year, only a hundred and sixty thousand bicycles were sold in the U.S.

*

IN AN ESSAY by Claire Vaye Watkins, she offers up an assessment of Kate Chopin, and her novel, The Awakening. According to Watkins, it may be one of the first feminist stories. Her review begins with an incident where Edna, the protagonist, and her husband Léonce Pontellier have argued. 

    It’s the middle of the night and Edna goes out on the balcony and weeps. “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness,” Chopin writes of Edna, “filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” 

    Watkins compares Chopin’s tale to the “Woke” movement today. 

    “#StayWoke,” the millennial iteration of an adage that has bolstered the black community’s freedom fight since the black labor movement of the 1940s, as Kashana Cauley explored in The Believer. Historically, the phrase stay woke, Cauley wrote, “acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives.”

 

    She mentions a poem by Juliana Gray, which even takes off from Chopin’s writing, “The Awokening.” 

    Watkins explains: 

    In June 1899, a review of The Awakening in The Morning Times of Washington, D.C., concluded that “the agency of the ‘awakening’ is a man, Robert Le Brun.” In fact, as generations of readers have observed, the agent of Edna’s awakening is Edna herself: her body, her friends, her art, her time in nature. Edna’s awakening begins outdoors, an escape from the structures of patriarchy into the unbuilt landscapes of the sensual, sublime and the supernatural. Edna swims in the gulf, languishes in a hammock, escapes to the balcony, where “there was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea.”

 

    The heroine “finds her own voice” among female friends, Watkins explains. At one point, sitting with a friend, Edna admits something which might have shocked Victorian women. She does not find motherhood entirely fulfilling. “She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way,” she admits. “She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she would sometimes forget them.” Edna knows, in other words, that “she is ‘not a mother-woman’ like her radiant and ever-pregnant friend, not ‘some sensuous Madonna.’” Soon after, Edna begins “a breathless flirtation with Robert.” 

    One day, during a trip to the shore, 

    Edna “walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence” into the gulf, where swimming alone is “as if some power of significant import had been given to control the working of her body and soul.” Solitude is essential to Edna’s realization that she has never truly had control of her body and soul. (The novel’s original title was “A Solitary Soul.”) Among Edna’s more defiant moments is when she refuses to budge from her hammock, despite paternalistic reprimand from both Robert and Léonce, who each insist on chaperoning, as if in shifts. Edna’s will blazes up even in this tiny, hanging room of her own, as Virginia Woolf would famously phrase it nearly 30 years later. 

 

    Edna and her husband return to New Orleans, but she exchanges the normal rounds, what Watkins says is 

…expected of upper-crust Victorian white women—receiving callers and returning their calls—for painting, walking, gambling, dinner parties, brandy, anger, aloneness and sex. She shucks off tradition and patriarchal expectations in favor of art, music, nature and her bosom friends. These open her up, invite her to consider her self, her desires. One friend offers the tattoo-worthy wisdom that “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.” 

 

    Chopin also shocked in her day because she refuses to condemn her heroine. 

    Many readers were scandalized in 1899. Edna refuses to live with children as the center of her world. Edna knows, and Watkins agrees, a woman must find “free space” in her own mind, space, like the heroine does, “for yourself, for painting, stories, ideas or orgasm. To forget your children and remember yourself was a revolutionary act and still is.” 

    “Edna Pontellier does what she wants with her body –she has good sex at least three times in the book,” Watkins adds.  

    Like Edna, Kate Chopin did what she wanted with her mind, whatever the cost, and it cost her almost everything. In 1899 “The Awakening” earned her a piddling $102 in royalties, about $3,000 in today’s money. Shortly after its publication the now unequivocally classic novel fell out of print. Chopin’s next book contract was canceled. Chopin died at age 54 from a brain hemorrhage after a long, hot day spent at the St. Louis World’s Fair with her son. Her publishing career lasted about 14 years. 

 

What was a woman's proper place?

*

 

“A Negro’s life is a very cheap thing in Georgia.”

 

March 16: Racial violence stirs the town of Palmetto, Georgia, southwest of Atlanta. On this date nine black men, accused of arson, are lined up against a brick wall and shot by vigilantes.

 

    The latter, says a modern writer, were “likely prominent citizens.”

 

*

 

April 12: Alfred Cranford, a “prominent farmer” is murdered, and his wife Mattie is raped. Their youngest son is blinded in the left eye during the attack. The white people of Palmetto are outraged, and the killer, a black man named Sam Hose, pays a horrific price.

 

    Hose, also known as “Sam Holt,” and Tom Wilkes, was soon apprehended and died in hideous fashion. According to a news article in 2019, “Several people who were involved in Hose’s killing had emotional difficulties afterward. In a 2006 interview, a Coweta [County] retiree recalled a relative who took part ‘regretted it all his life.’”

 

    Wilkes was said to have assaulted an elderly black woman in Coweta, but left Macon County and took on a new identity.

 

    Once news of the attack on the Cranford family spread, rewards totaling $1,600 were offered for Sam’s arrest, and he was promptly captured. Before he could be turned over to legal authorities, however, he was dragged off a train and lynched. Former Gov. W.Y. Atkinson and Judge Alvan Freeman pleaded for Hose to be taken to jail, but a crowd of several hundred (some estimates place the figure at 2,000) watched as Hose was chained to a tree. “His ears, fingers and genitals were severed.” Then he was doused with kerosene and set on fire. His last words were reported to be, “Sweet Jesus.”

 

    Or, alternately: “Oh my God. Oh Jesus!”

 

    Wikipedia adds even more detail: That Hose was still alive when the skin from his face was cut off; that he lived for thirty minutes before the flames put an end to his agony; that part of his body were cut off and sold as souvenirs. A journalist who was present reported that the white members of the mob watched “with unfeigned satisfaction.”

 

    On the tree where he was chained to die, a sign was later posted, “We Must Protect Our Southern Women.”

 

    Many papers described Sam as “the black beast,” and “the monster.” But there were hundreds of monsters that day.

 

    The black historian and reformer, W.E.B. Dubois, was on his way to a meeting with Joel Chandler Harris, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to discuss some kind of reasonable written response, when he learned Hose’s knuckles were on sale in a grocery store on the same street.

 

    DuBois gave up on the meeting and went home. The story made newspapers across the country and even overseas.

 

    A white investigator from Chicago later who headed South to dig into the story, came away with this: “I made my way home thoroughly convinced that a Negro’s life is a very cheap thing in Georgia.”

 

    As he saw it, “The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South, he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist.”

1906

  ____________________ 

“Talk about Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii, 

this surely beats all.”

 

Frank Collins

____________________

Justice Harlan.
    (All pictures in this post from the internet.)

 

January 25: The New York Times has revisited a Supreme Court case now mostly forgotten, which has its roots in a lynching in early 1906. That case, as described by Peter Canellos, who wrote a book about Justice John Marshall Harlan, was The United States v. Shipp. 

The story of the Shipp case begins in January 1906. That’s when Nevada Taylor, a young white woman, was raped in a Chattanooga cemetery. The crime provoked a frenzied reaction, putting pressure on the local sheriff, a proud Confederate veteran named Joseph Shipp, to identify and apprehend the rapist. The search had turned up a piece of leather. Upon the offering of a $375 reward for information leading to an arrest, a white man claimed to have seen a Black man milling around the cemetery, twirling a piece of leather shortly before the crime. He identified Ed Johnson as the man at the scene. Seizing on this shred of evidence, Sheriff Shipp arrested and jailed Mr. Johnson.

 

On the night of Jan. 25, a mob of hundreds of men tried to ram their way through the jail to reach Mr. Johnson. The local judge, Samuel McReynolds, in an effort to calm the crowd, promised to put the case first on his docket and expressed hope for an execution “before the setting of Saturday’s sun.”

The rush to judgment continued through the trial. There were numerous witnesses who could say that they’d seen Mr. Johnson elsewhere during the time of the attack. And when asked to identify her rapist, Ms. Taylor said she believed that it was Mr. Johnson. But she declined to make a definitive identification. Taking the stand a second time, under a demand that she swear “in God’s name” that Mr. Johnson was the man who assaulted her, Ms. Taylor only reiterated that she believed that Mr. Johnson was her attacker. A juror shouted out a threat: “If I could get at him, I would tear his heart out right now.” Judge McReynolds failed to remove the juror, and Mr. Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death.

 

Two Black pioneering lawyers — Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins — led Mr. Johnson’s appeals. In an attempt to stop an unfair execution, Mr. Parden made a frantic journey to see the Supreme Court justice designated to hear emergency appeals from Tennessee, John Marshall Harlan. Fortunately, Justice Harlan was also the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that advanced the separate-but-equal doctrine.

 

Over two decades, Justice Harlan had failed to persuade a single colleague of the injustices being visited on African Americans. States’ violations of Black defendants’ rights were more a norm than an aberration. But the Supreme Court had resolutely looked the other way. For Justice Harlan, Mr. Parden’s arrival was a rare opportunity. Here, finally, in his capacity overseeing the Sixth Circuit, was a chance to order a federal review on his own.

 

After Mr. Parden presented the facts of the case, Justice Harlan telegraphed the local authorities on March 18 that a stay of execution was necessary for the Supreme Court to review the case. White Chattanooga rebelled.

 

The next day, jail keepers offered no resistance when the mob came around.

The vigilantes carried Mr. Johnson to the city’s most visible landmark, the Walnut Street Bridge. Using trolley wires, they strung him up and offered a last chance to confess. “God bless you all. I am a innocent man,” he said.

They hanged him and peppered his body with gunshots.

 

Someone attached a note addressed to “Chief Harlan.” Here lay his man — though that’s not the word they used. “Thanks for your kind consideration of him. You can find him at the morgue.”

 

Outraged, Justice Harlan persuaded his colleagues to take the unprecedented step of sitting as a trial court. The U.S. attorney general, William Henry Moody, filed a petition charging Sheriff Shipp, other officials and mob leaders with contempt of the Supreme Court. After the presentation of voluminous evidence — including the testimony of Sheriff Shipp’s Black cook, who said that the sheriff had anticipated a mob attack should the execution be stayed — six of the defendants, including Sheriff Shipp, were found guilty of contempt. The sheriff and two others were sentenced to 90 days in jail; the other three received 60-day sentences.

 

Sheriff Shipp was released early and returned home to thousands of supporters and a band playing “Dixie.” Much of white Chattanooga promptly forgot about the case. 

 

In a forgotten corner of a black cemetery in Chattanooga, you can still visit Mr. Johnson’s grave. There on the headstone are his last words: “God Bless you all. I am an innocent man.” 

The decision of the court, delivered by Chief Justice Fuller, can be found here. He writes: 

[Sheriff Shipp] and his deputies and the jailer, who had knowledge…of an intense feeling in the neighborhood against the prisoner which on previous occasions had threatened his safety, [and] were bound to use all means within their power to protect him, and failure on their part to take any precautions whatever to prevent the seizure and killing of the prisoner at the hand of a mob attacking the jail while in a defenseless condition was, under the circumstances of this case, willful negligence, and disregard of duty to, and contempt of, this Court, and so held…in connection with the lynching on March, 19, 1906, of Ed Johnson by a mob after this Court had allowed his appeal from an order refusing relief on habeas corpus. …

 

[Shipp, Matthew Galloway, and Jeremiah Gibson] had every reason to believe from current reports and rumors conveyed to them, that an attempt would be made on the evening of the nineteenth or early in the morning of the 20th, by a mob composed of a large number of armed men, to force an entrance into the county jail for the purpose of taking Johnson therefrom and lynching him; that notwithstanding said information and said reports, the sheriff withdrew from the jail early in the evening of the nineteenth the usual and customary guard, and left in charge thereof only the night jailer – defendant Gibson – and committed other acts and did other things evincing a disposition on the part of said sheriff to render it less difficult and less dangerous for the mob to prosecute and carry into effect its unlawful design and purpose of lynching Johnson; that about 9 o’clock in the evening of said March 19, defendants and others conspired to break into the jail for the purpose of taking Johnson therefrom and lynching him, with intent to show their contempt and disregard for the above-mentioned order of this Court, and prevent it from hearing the appeal of Johnson[.]

 

Three lawyers assigned to defend Johnson in court, and three other prominent lawyers in Chattanooga met to discuss options. Should they appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court? 

Twice the militia had already been called out to defend the jail. 

To say that they failed to take a principled stand is an understatement. As one of the three put it: 

“We discussed the recent mob uprising and the state of unrest in the community. It was the judgment of all present that the life of the defendant, even if the wrong man, could not be saved; that an appeal would so inflame the public that the jail would be attacked and perhaps other prisoners executed by violence. In the opinion of all of us, a case was presented where the defendant, now that he had been convicted by a jury, must die by the judgment of the law, or else, if his case were appealed, he would die by the act of the uprising of the people.”

 

The Court also notes: 

About half-past 8 or 9 that night, a number of men entered the jail and went directly and without resistance to the door leading to Johnson’s corridor.

 

There is a conflict of evidence as to whether the door leading from the offices to the jail proper was locked during the evening, but, if it was locked when the mob came, it was easily broken down.

 

Gibson was the only officer there at the time, and he was on the top floor with Johnson.

 

Keys were obtained from him without resistance, but, as the lock on the door leading to the corridor where Johnson's cell was located had been broken by a member of the mob, the keys would not work.

 

The mob, with sledge and ax, then began to break the bolts on the corridor door.

 

About twelve men were actively engaged in breaking down the door and in all subsequent events of the lynching. Some of these men were masked.

 

A crowd of spectators began to gather around the jail soon after the mob reached it, and continued to gather in and around the jail until Johnson was taken out. This crowd was variously estimated from a few to 150 or more.

 

Two men then went through the circular door and in a few minutes brought Johnson out with his arms tied with a rope.

 

When Johnson was thus brought out, the dozen men or so composing the mob grabbed him.

 

This mob took Johnson from the jail to the county bridge over the Tennessee river, which was about six blocks from the jail.

 

Johnson was taken from the jail a little after 10 o’clock. …

 

The crowd which had gathered around the jail followed the mob down to the bridge.

 

When the bridge was reached, the mob took Johnson a little beyond an arc light, put a rope around his neck, threw it over a beam, and swung him up.

 

At the bridge, the mob actively engaged in lynching Johnson were close to him and separated by a space from the crowd of spectators.

 

The first time Johnson was swung up, the rope broke or slipped and he fell. He was swung up a second time and shot. After some shots were fired, Johnson again fell, and while lying on the ground was again shot. It was about ten minutes after the mob had reached the bridge until Johnson was killed.

 

It is apparent that a dangerous portion of the community was seized with the awful thirst for blood which only killing can quench, and that considerations of law and order were swept away in the overwhelming flood. 

*

April 18: The San Francisco Earthquake leaves the city in ruin.

 

*

 

April 24: In Letters of the Century, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, a letter from Frank Collins to his family, gives interesting details in the wake of the San Francisco Earthquake.

 

Collins and his business partner Max Koenig had escaped from the shattered city by ferry. Now they had returned. He described the scene:

 

From the ferry to Van Ness it looks like a gray and black graveyard, as far as you can see, there isn’t a house visible until you get within a few blocks of Van Ness. The fire passed way beyond Van Ness on both sides of the city. Rob [Robert Knox Collins, probably his brother, owned a cigar store], was wiped out same as Max and I.

 

Six days after the quake, it was still unsafe to venture out after dark. Troops were on patrol to stop looting and keep law and order. Collins explained to his family:

 

…they take a shot at you if you are out after 8:30 p.m. So you sit in pitch darkness with a gloomy pall of smoke over your heads and a graveyard silence and an occasional earthquake tremor.

 

At 5 o’clock a rifle shot was heard on the block and some young fellow fell dead who was misprudent enough to venture out to borrow some whiskey for his sick mother. A soldier ordered him to throw it away and shot him for refusing.

 

A friend was helping take care of babies who were still being born. “Soon as they’re born,” Collins said, “they just have to roll them in some old coat or rags until they find clothes. One woman had triplets.”

 

As for the damage around him, he wrote, “Church towers of stone have crashed and crushed into homes beside them. Many places crushing the occupants. No one will ever know the hundreds that were killed under fallen buildings and then buried.” Elsewhere, he noted, “Valencia St. has slid 40 feet out of its course and a hotel on that street and Market collapsed, killing 103 out of 106 that were in it. The earth split open there wide enough for a man to fall in and you can hear a running river or creek under it.” Wrecked buildings were already being cleared ways. In another neighborhood, he found, “They are dynamiting dangerous walls…and an earthquake last night at 11:30 shook down a few more besides scaring the balance of courage out of the people there.”

 

Collins and his partner had been hit hard:

 

You know what we have lost of course. Our beautiful store, a $50,000 stock. Everything at our apartments, my library, your paintings and mine — Bronzes, silver vase. Expensive pictures, our embroidered robes, linens, steins. All good clothes such as black suits, overcoats, hats, shoes, underclothes, shirts. All souvenirs and pictures from Germany, cut glass, all photographs, piano, hand painted china — and so on down to just what useful thing we could rush into a valise and to bundles (enough to cover us in case we had to sleep on the hills) Everything else went. Still we are like all other big losers. We meet it cheerfully and we’ll have to make a new start when all confusion is over and we see if S.F. is doomed to be left or the rest of it demolished.

 

They have dug “Privy” holes in the middle of streets out in the part that’s saved for women to use.

 

Collins notes that there are “tearfully funny things,” stories of people who saved what they could, and not always what one might expect:

 

One woman saved a bird and one shoe. Another a few flat irons. One poor Chinaman crossed the bay with a stick of firewood wrapped up, and some ran with an “enlarged picture” of someone of the family as a child. Old women and men were seen dragging chairs loaded with things in the way of clothing and blankets, pulled by a little rope over their backs.

 

“Talk about Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii, this surely beats all,” he added.

 

To end the letter, he describes for his family his own experiences, when the quake first struck:

 

Max and I were almost thrown from our beds when the shock came at about 5:15. I rushed to the door casing between bedroom and Turkish room, Max at my heels. We hung onto the sides of the wall while the building seemed to split, groan and crack and rock, expecting each second for the whole big structure of stone and its main floor to crush us at each roll. Stones from the top were falling at our window sills outside and the screams of hundreds of women rushing into the streets half naked.

 

When the stillness came, I climbed into bed to stop the chatter of my teeth, which seemed to be loose in stiffened jaws. Then we dressed hurriedly and ran to the store over the debris of fallen chimneys and top stories of buildings in the street. Found our store stood it fine. Our wax figures never tipped over but stood unscratched even though the big plate glass windows lay on the sidewalk and glass surrounded them...

 

Inside the store dressing was full of fallen plaster that was all. We even began to clean up and arrange things for business when another shock came and we saw that the city was on fire, so we locked the doors and left the swell story to its fate and went to our home. A little later, when the fire had reached within three blocks. So, expecting the building on our heads any minute, we hurriedly packed some useful clothing, took a farewell look at all our belongings and “hiked” out over the high steep hills and made a circuit to the water’s edge and followed that around to the Ferry.

 

Everything was smoking ruins then right up to the Ferry building. It seemed the only thing left and they saved that by pumping water on it from the bay.

 

We can’t tell what we are going to do yet as we don’t know yet what is going to happen here so will let you know later on. But have hardly recovered from it all yet. All are well here but no fires are allowed here either in stoves as everybody’s chimneys in the yards, so it’ll be a long time before everything is entirely safe.

Earthquake and then flames.

Watching fire spread in the wrecked areas.

Soldiers guard the ruined city to stop looting.

Damaged city center.

What would residents of these houses have been thinking?

Street split by quake.

Street split by fault.

San Franciscans coping as best they can.

Ruins days later.

*

 

June 26: Harry K. Thaw shoots the architect Stanford White to death at a restaurant atop Madison Square Garden. Thaw believed that White had raped his wife, the Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit, when Nesbit was 15 or 16. (Maybe: 22; birth records were destroyed in a fire; and Nesbit said she wasn’t sure.) Eventually, Thaw was found innocent of murder, pleading temporary insanity.

Women: The Eternal Question, drawn by Charles Dana Gibson.
Nesbit was his model. Note the shape of her hair.

Evelyn Nesbit.

*

 

June 30: The Pure Food and Drug Act is passed. For the first time, the federal government takes responsibility for safeguarding the health and safety of the American people, in terms of what they eat and the medicines they take. Thank you, Upton Sinclair (See: Year 1905)

 

For examples of why this law might be necessary, consider the disastrous birth defects that resulted when pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness, mouse turds in hotdogs, and cheap fish sold in restaurant as expensive kinds.

 

Of course, no one should ignore the disaster that has resulted from the over-prescription and sale of pain-killing opioid drugs.

*

 

September 22: Headlines in various Atlanta newspapers describe a “carnival of rapes,” supposedly committed by African American men against white women. A race riot, or massacre, results. Forty blacks and two whites would lose their lives in the violence that followed.

 

    Ibrahim X. Kendi gives his version of events many years later: 

    What became known as the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 had been several months in the making. It was an election year, and all year long, candidates for governor and their propagandists had enraged white Atlantans with tales of “uppity” Black Atlantans refusing to stay “in their place.” 

    “Uppity” Black Atlantans like J. Max Barber, the editor of The Voice of the Negro, perhaps the first Southern magazine to be edited by Black people. Barber had dedicated the magazine to rendering current events and “history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations.” 

    Born in South Carolina, Barber had come a long way from the place of his parents, who had been enslaved. After graduating from Virginia Union University in 1903, he moved to Atlanta to edit The Voice of the Negro. He secured contributors including the renowned educator Mary Church Terrell and the Atlanta University historian W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1905, Barber joined Du Bois and 27 others in forming the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the N.A.A.C.P. One of the Niagara Movement’s main initial outlets: Barber’s Voice of the Negro, which claimed 15,000 subscribers. 

    Barber refused to publish the lie about the causes of the Atlanta massacre in 1906. “There has been no ‘carnival of rapes’ in and around Atlanta,” he wrote. “There has been a frightful carnival of newspaper lies.” He figured “this mob got its first psychological impulse from Tom Dixon’s ‘Clansman,’” which “came to Atlanta last winter” as a play. 

    Thomas Dixon Jr. had published The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan in 1905, depicting Klan attacks as heroic acts of justice. D.W. Griffith adapted the novel for his 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. One of the film’s intertitles had been written by the president of the United States, who screened the film in the White House. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,” Woodrow Wilson had written in 1902, “until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South to protect the Southern country.”

 

    When Barber continued to challenge the justification for the rioting, the governor of Georgia threatened him with arrest. Kendi goes on to explain that Barber had to flee the city, soon after, and settled in Chicago.

 

    His newspaper soon went out of business.

 

    Kendi adds: 

    Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.

NOTE TO TEACHERS: This blogger managed to find copies of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novels at antique stores. Project Gutenberg makes them available online. They are assuredly repulsive.

*

 

November: A U.S. Army officer arrives at the Second Mesa, on the Hopi reservation in Arizona. 

He said the government had reached the limit of its patience. For two decades, the tribe had refused to send its children to government-sanctioned boarding schools, as directed; now, under military compulsion, every Hopi child had to attend one. Soldiers began rounding up sleepy-eyed children and older kids, too. Mothers wailed, babies cried and fathers vowed to stand up to the Army. But the unarmed Hopi were no match for the soldiers, and their young ones were seized. … 

    Tsökahovi Tewanima, a teenager who was 5 feet 4½ inches tall and weighed 110 pounds, was described by one soldier as “thin, emaciated and beligerent [sic].” Tewanima and ten other teens were handcuffed and marched 20 miles east to Keams Canyon … There, the Hopi youths were shackled and forced to build a road.

 

    They were soon marched 110 miles, as prisoners, to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, where they boarded a train. Soon after, they arrived at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, roughly 2,000 miles from home.