1931

____________________ 

“Carried to its logical extreme, all this shouldering of individual and community responsibility upon the Government can lead but to the superstate where every man becomes the servant of the State and real liberty is lost.” 

President Herbert Hoover

____________________

 

 

February 12: Herbert Hoover warns that the federal government alone cannot – and should not – try to pull the country out of the Depression:

 

The whole of our governmental machinery was devised for the purpose that through ordered liberty we give incentive and equality of opportunity to every individual to rise to that highest achievement of which he is capable. At once when government is centralized there arises a limitation upon the liberty of the individual and a restriction of individual opportunity. The true growth of the Nation is the growth of character in its citizens. The spread of government destroys initiative and thus destroys character. Character is made in the community as well as in the individual by assuming responsibilities, not by escape from them. Carried to its logical extreme, all this shouldering of individual and community responsibility upon the Government can lead but to the superstate where every man becomes the servant of the State and real liberty is lost. Such was not the government that Lincoln sought to build.

 

…

 

The ever-growing complexity of modern life, with its train of evermore perplexing and difficult problems, is a challenge to our individual characters and to our devotion to our ideals. The resourcefulness of America when challenged has never failed. Success is not gained by leaning upon government to solve all the problems before us. That way leads to enervation of will and destruction of character. Victory over this depression and over our other difficulties will be won by the resolution of our people to fight their own battles in their own communities, by stimulating their ingenuity to solve their own problems, by taking new courage to be masters of their own destiny in the struggle of life. This is not the easy way, but it is the American way. And it was Lincoln’s way.

People who lost their homes joked that they were living in Hooverville.

Seattle, Washington.

* 

Franklin P. Adams penned a poem about prohibition:

 

Prohibition is an awful flop.

   We like it.

It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.

   We like it.

It’s left a trail of graft and slime,

It’s filled our land with vice and crime,

It don’t prohibit worth a dime,

   Nevertheless we’re for it.

 

* 

The story of the Scottsboro Boys and their trial is told in a pamphlet issued by their defense committee. This blogger absolutely believes the nine African Americans charged with rape in the case were innocent. Still, the use of the English language, to paint pictures the “artist” likes can mean that even if no facts are twisted, a golden ray of sunshine may help one fact stand out, while others are in dark shadows or in the distant background, or just not in the picture at all. That is: the artist chooses what to show in the picture and what to leave out. 

Students might be asked to pick out what I called “loaded” words or phrases, that swing the narrative in favor of the nine defendants in the case. An example, I used, when talking about the Boston Massacre (“massacre” clearly being a loaded word), was the difference between what the colonists would call “a crowd,” and the British soldiers under attack would refer to as “a mob.” 

The same forces were at work in the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in November 2021. In fact, both sides in a trial, or for that matter, in almost any argument involving angry humans, choose words and wordings to bolster their points. 

In any case, the defense paints the picture:

 

March 24, 1931: A misty drizzle falls over Huntsville, Alabama, in the early hours before dawn. Four shadowy figures drop to the ground from the yawning mouth of an empty box car. Two men and two girls. They stop a little further along the railroad embankment and the girls go off together.

 

A few hours later. The sun is shining and along the same embankment stand the two girls and one of the men. The girls wear overalls. The taller and prettier of the two looks a little frightened. The older one, her bold face rigidly molded into a harsh cynicism, looks annoyed. A freight train pulls out of the Huntsville yards, and our three adventurers swing aboard. The boy is tall, blond and strapping. All three sit in the open door of the box car, swinging their feet over the edge, singing songs. The boy, Lester, knows lots of songs and ballads and he can play them all on his mouth organ.

 

After dark they arrive in Chattanooga, Tennesee [sic]. They wander through the tangle of the railroad yards and meet up with a slim dark boy. He knows his way around. He’s been here before and he leads them to the jungle alongside the tracks. The jungle is a wide field bordered by scraggly shrubbery and at the far end a row of little rickety Negro homes.

 

Shortly after, the boys have been to town and returned with some food, and the girls have built a fire. The four young people, their faces outlined by the orange glow of the flames discuss their plight. The young girl, Ruby, agrees to everything the older woman, Victoria, says.

 

They decide to go back home to Huntsville the next morning – back to the 11 hour night shift in the textile mill at $2.75 a week, back to the unpainted company houses, the pellagra diet, the endless monotony of work and exhausted sleep. Victoria, who the night before had agreed to go off without her companion Jack Tiller, until he had found a more graceful way of leaving his wife and joining her, insists on going back. Ruby, to whom the adventure of a ride on a freight train, sleeping out under the stars, had seemed the night before a thrilling adventure and marvelous escape from the drudgery of toil – shivers and agrees. The ground is hard. The dark is frightening. And Lester doesn’t care much where he goes anyway just so long as he keeps on moving. Huntsville is not the most attractive place to him. He has just finished serving a chain-gang sentence for vagrancy there. That’s how he met Jack Tiller and Victoria Price the night they were brought into the city lock-up for “public lewdness” and Huntsville was the place where he had met Ruby. Gilley, their “jungle guide” is just as ready as not to go on to Huntsville with his newly-found friends.

 

March 25, 1931: A freight train lumbers out of the Chattanooga yards. It’s a long rattly train – mostly empty box cars, oil tanks and in the middle a string of chat-filled gondola cars. A varied company has scattered itself throughout the train.

 

One gondola car holds our four young white friends. In the one next to it a group of white boys. One empty oil tank has a single passenger – half blind Olen Montgomery finally started on his way to the hospital in Memphis. Further along hanging onto the straps of another tanker is a very sick boy. Too sick to get on the train without help. After he was sentenced to death, the world learned that his name was Willie Roberson.

 

A group in another car is more congenial. The three boys of the railroad ties, Roy and Andy Wright, their pal Haywood Patterson and little Eugene Williams – escaped from his home and its hunger, determined to make a fortune for his mother and the kids. Three more Negro boys, Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems and Ozie Powell, strangers to the four and to each other, joined up with this little group – all bent on the same mission, all in search of hope and plenty.

 

The white boys get bored as the train rattles along. They begin to throw some of the sharp pebbles at the Negro boys. They amble over and step on their fingers – and the fight starts. The Negro boys outnumber the whites. One runs to the edge and shouts over to the next gondola car for help. Lester Carter, who is also getting bored in the company of Gilley and the girls, hops over to join the fight. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care much what it’s about – except that some white boys are asking his aid in fighting a bunch of “niggers.”

 

But the Negro boys get the best of the fight and the white boys noticing that the train is slowing up as it mounts a slow but steady grade, jump over the side – land easily on the embankment along the tracks. Lester jumps with them. Gilley, apparently tired of his role as protector of the white womanhood of the south, abandons his fair ladies without any compunction and attempts to join up with the other white hoboes who, not too angrily, amble along the tracks back to the nearest town – Stevenson, Alabama. But Gilley is clumsy. He tries to jump from the corner of the car. He slips. He is about to fall under the whirring wheels when a strong arm pulls him back. It is Haywood Patterson’s arm.

 

Gilley goes back to the girls.

 

As the five white boys approach the station at Stevenson they begin to realize the seriousness of their plight. Five young boys walking along the tracks must beware. There’s always the “law” around waiting to clap charges of vagrancy on them and send them to the chain gang.

 

Sure enough, when they reach the station – there is the “law”. Six months of back-breaking toil on Alabama’s roads stare them in the face. And suddenly their way out becomes clear. From shiftless young vagrants with no place to go and no money in their pockets they can become the victims of a foul attack – the heroes of a narrow escape.

 

Their imaginations run riot. They tell a wild tale of knives and pistols brandished by ferocious blacks who hurled them from a swiftly moving train. The “law” jumps to the trigger. The wires start humming along the line – to the next station – Paint Rock – “Stop that train – stop that freight – round up the niggers –” 

  

By the time the train is flagged to a stop at the dusty metropolis of Paint Rock, Alabama – the total population of the town is at the station armed with broom-sticks, rusty rifles, ancient shot guns. Savage delight and grim determination – waiting for that train.

 

The round-up begins. The seven Negro boys who were in the same car – dazed -surprised – frightened –are shouted to the ground. “Here’s another one,” “Here’s another,” as zealous deputies find the two sick boys in the empty oil tanks.

 

Nine Negro children are huddled together in the middle of the station platform. Nine youngsters – the youngest thirteen the oldest scarcely twenty. Ragged, dusty, dazed. Armed men crowd around them shouting in their faces.

 

And suddenly a yell of glee from behind the train which is just making ready to pull out … “There’s two white girls out here – two of them!”

 

And as the train leaves Paint Rock, Alabama, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price – who has managed to fall into the most extraordinary faint – are led to a little store just by the station. “Did they hurt you? Did they touch you? The black. …” Without waiting for any answer from Ruby and with Victoria probably watching them from beneath lowered eye lids – the words begin to spread through the crowd – “Rape –lynch – rape – attack – white girls – niggers lynch them – lynch them.” 

 

Regardless of how accurate or inaccurate parts of this account might be, it is true that what follows is the equivalent of a lynching. Only in this case a judge, jury and witnesses are involved.

 

    As the crescendo mounts, the nine Negro boys are loaded into a car and rushed down to the county seat of Jackson County – Scottsboro, Alabama.

 

    A few moments later Ruby and Victoria and Gilley follow them. By the time they arrive their fellow passengers the five white boys, are already installed in the little brick jail house right behind the court. The Negro boys have been thrown into the jim crow cells. Victoria and Ruby are rushed in and out again, to the doctor – to Dr. Bridges.

 

March 30, 1931: Nine Negro boys are indicted for rape by an all-white grand jury of horse swappers and farmers in Scottsboro, Alabama. The Jackson County Sentinel – Scottsboro’s weekly pride – has long since announced to the world in blazing headlines that the nine Negro fiends are held in jail for raping two white girls. The news spread throughout Alabama. The roads and highways filled with old flivvers, and wobbly wagons carrying the citizens to the county seat – to watch the fun.

 

On April 6, 1931[,] the trial begins. The jury sits waving to friends and comrades from the jury box. The judge, E. A. Hawkins, raps impatiently for a little order and some speed. Singly or in groups the boys are herded into the court room to be bullied and shouted at. They discovered that a man named Milo Moody has been appointed by the court to defend them. They also see a drunken sot named Stephen Roddy who’s supposed to be defending them but doesn’t even seem to be following the trial very carefully.

 

They hear Victoria Price relate a marvelous tale. From the top of a boxcar right next to the gondola she and Ruby were in a horde of black fiends leaped down upon them brandishing weapons. In language too foul to be printed this flower of southern white womanhood graphically describes how she was ravished by six of the boys “That one – the black thing” she spits from the witness stand pointing, while a knife was held to her throat and while the other three attacked Ruby Bates. Just what Gilly was doing all this time is ignored.

 

Ruby is put on the stand. She tries to remember what Victoria said – she doesn’t get it quite straight – the prosecutor comes to her assistance with leading questions to which she nods her head or says yes.

 

Dr. Bridges is not called to testify. Not one of the men who worked on the train is called. None of the white boys who jumped off the train, nor Gilley – the alleged witness. They are kept safely locked in the jail house. The Negro boys are put on the stand. One after the other they swear they never touched the girls. Andy Wright, tall, slim, clear eyed, says, “I’ll stand on a whole stack of bibles and swear I never saw them girls till we was taken off the train. Olen Montgomery whispers, “Even if I had seen them I couldn’t tell whether they was men or girls. I can’t see.”

 

By late afternoon of April 6 – the jury has been charged, sent out and returns with a verdict of guilty. Applause fills the courthouse. Word is passed to the great crowds outside – held back by State troopers rushed from Gadsden by Gov. Miller when the paper started screaming and cry of “Rape”. In fact the boys had even been carried to Gadsden under armed escort until the opening of the trial for safekeeping from the lynch-mad mob that kept growing larger in the big square outside the Scottsboro courthouse.

 

But April 6 was horse swapping day in Scottsboro, Alabama and the crowds were thick and breathless. “Let the law take its course,” counseled the newspapers – “let the law take the lives of these black fiends – let’s show the world we’re willing to let the law lynch them – no matter how our own feelings are outraged.”

 

On the night of April 6 a parade is started through the streets of Scottsboro, a parade that circles the little jail house and makes itself heard right inside the cells with a brass band braying: “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

 

April 7 – a repeat performance. Haywood Patterson sentence to death.

 

April 8 –Ozie Powell, Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery, Andy Wright, Willie Robertson – found guilty. The crowd cheers. The mob applauds. Only one more to go.

 

Roy Wright, not yet fourteen years old. Small, thin, looking hardly a day over ten. The jury comes back. No verdict. One juror held out for mercy in his case – recommended “life imprisonment” – a mistrial is declared.

 

April 9 – Eight young Negro children stand before judge E. A. Hawkins in the courthouse of Scottsboro, Alabama, and hear themselves sentenced to die in the electric chair at Kilby prison. Troops herd them into waiting cars. They are whisked away and locked into the death house of the large, modern, sanitary, coldness of Kilby prison.

 

*

 

May 1: The Empire State Building is completed after thirteen months of construction. At 1,250 feet, it is the tallest in the world. Nineteen years later, an antenna spire was added, making the structure 1,472 feet tall. In 1955, it is ranked as one of the seven greatest engineering achievements in American history, along with the Hoover Dam and the Panama Canal. 

In 1978, a race to the top, up 1,500 steps, was organized, and is now an annual affair.

 

* 

Al Capone told reporters: “You can’t cure a thirst by a law…It’s bootleg when it’s on the trucks, but when your host hands it to you on a silver tray, it’s hospitality…They say I violate Prohibition. Who doesn’t?”

 

*

“A kiss meant that a proposal was expected.”

Worried men and women in New York City spend an estimated $25 million at fortune tellers’ studios, as grave concerns for the future grip the nation. (1127/145)

Looking back in 1931, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “among other young people the old standard prevailed until after the War, and a kiss meant that a proposal was expected.” 

He traced the advance of “sex” in literature, “then we learn that there’s a lot of sex around if we only knew it” (Winesburg, Ohio; 1920), “that adolescents lead very amorous lives” (his own This Side of Paradise), “that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined” (Flaming Youth, 1922) and that there was all kinds of promiscuity, described in numerous books, including Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).