1934

 

February 20: There have always been, and always will be strands of American political thought that most of us would find repugnant. Twenty thousand people showed up at Madison Square Garden for a Nazi rally.

 

 

* 

Judgment day will come about 1970.

 This assessment in Keesing, published in 1970, may be outdated: 

The Black Muslim movement – its formal named is the Nation of Islam – was originally founded in Detroit by a W. D. Fard, a door-to-door peddler who claimed that he had been “sent by God” and professed to have come from Mecca. After Fard’s disappearance in 1934 the movement came under the leadership of Elijah Poole, who took the name of Elijah Muhammad. Advocating complete separatism for Negroes, and strongly opposed to racial integration, Muhammad envisages for the Black Muslims a closed economic society aimed at fighting “unemployment, abominable housing, hunger and the nakedness of 22,000,000 black people in America.” The sect demands two or three States in America exclusively for the Negroes. 

Membership of the black Muslims is secret but is variously estimated at between 50,000 and 250,000. …

 

The beliefs of Elijah Muhammad and the black Muslims were described by the New York Times as follows: “So-called American Negroes belong to the ancient tribe of Shabazz and traced back to Asia rather than Africa. They are part of the “black nation” meaning all non-whites. … The original man was black, and the white man was “grafted” from the black and is physically and mentally inferior. Judgment day will come about 1970, destroying both the white man and Christianity, which is associated only with whites. (27-6)

 

*

May 9: Longshoremen at ports all along the Pacific go out on strike, and remain out for 83 days.  A general strike in San Francisco gave the workers added support and longshoremen won the right to unionize. Harry Bridges, leader of the strike, was reputedly a communist, and the strike “struck fear in the hearts of Californians not unlike the feelings loosed by the Seattle General Strike of 1919.” (U1, 144) 

The American Legion and groups of farmers and growers helped organize a new “counter organization,” The Associated Farmers of California. Starting in 1934, they managed to suppress most labor protests. During the Salinas “lettuce strike,” two years later, a citizens’ army of 2,500 was mobilized to break the workers.

 

*

 

May 23: Operating on a tip, law enforcement officers set up a roadblock to stop Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde are stopped, but refuse to surrender and go for their guns. Fifty bullets hit them, and Bonnie is found with a machine gun in her lap, Clyde with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands.

 

Among Bonnie Parker’s effects was this poem:

 

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the

            Barrow gang,

I’m sure you all have read

How they rob and steal

And how those who squeal

Are usually found dying or dead.

 

If they try to act like citizens

And rent them a nice little flat,

About the third night they are

Invited to fight

By a submachine gun rat-tat-tat.

 

Someday they will go down together,

And they will bury them side by side,

To a few it means grief,

To the law it’s relief,

But it is death to Bonnie and Clyde.

 

*

 

“You cannot run the mines without them.” 

Labor organizers faced real danger during this period. Only a few years before, the chairman of the board of the Pittsburgh Coal Company was asked why machine guns guarded the company coal pits. “You cannot run the mines without them,” he told a congressional committee.  In the 30s, “hired guns still loomed over the toughest of the company towns, where a word for the union could get a man beaten up or killed.” (1129/162) 

John L. Lewis led a strike by 70,000 miners in the summer of 1934.

 

We’re going to meet ’em at the bridge and break their goddam heads,” shouted the mayor of Duquesne as the strike spread across the Allegheny Valley. Before it ended, the mine owners had poured some $17,000 into munitions and their henchmen had bombed miners’ houses and set crosses ablaze on the hillsides. But in the settlement, acceptance, and the road toward union recognition was staked out for every man in America’s far flung laboring forces.

 

As one assembly line worker put it: “So I’m a Red? I suppose it makes me a Red because I don’t like making time so hard on these goddamned machines. When I get home I’m so tired I can’t sleep with my wife.” (1129/164)

 

* 

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers star in the movie The Gay Divorcée, a smash success. RKO insures Fred’s legs for a million dollars. His first screen test had read: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” 

The movie was released after the stricter codes of decency came in, but still included lines such as these:

“Marriage is a weakness of men that women take advantage of.” 

“A man tore my dress off!”

“Anyone we know?” 

“I’ve never tried breakfast with two gentlemen before!” 

One blogger describes the movie:

 

First, the plot. The movie is a total lark, so I’ll save you too much detail: Mimi is in London seeking a divorce, where Guy, a dancer, meets her over a skirt trapped in a traveling trunk. He’s smitten, so through car chases and swing dancing he tracks her down to a hotel resort where his lawyer pal, Egbert, has arranged for her to have a fake love affair uncovered to provoke her husband to leave her. A few songs, a little dance, everything turns out okay.

 

*

 

“The criminal army in America today is on the march.”

 

July 22: In an era when bankers and financiers are sometimes viewed as the enemy, bank robbers are not always cast as the villain. As Time-Life explains,

 

many people, impoverished and embittered by the Depression, actually found a certain justice in the mounting number of bank robberies. The most notorious of the bank thieves, John Dillinger, even emerged as a kind of Robin Hood folk hero. “Dillinger did not rob the poor,” wrote an admirer in Indianapolis. “I am for Johnnie.” Indeed, Dillinger projected an image of swashbuckling glamour and generosity. … Once, when he broke out with two hostages from a supposedly escaped-proof Indiana jail, he gave the men four dollars carfare home. In their admiration, Dillinger’s fans managed to forget that their hero had gunned down 10 men during his career, and that… he was basically just a cold-blooded thug.

 

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I. was warning, “The criminal army in America today is on the march. … Crime is today sapping the spiritual and moral strength of America.” (1129/100) 

On this date, Dillinger is famously caught exiting a movie theater in Chicago, and shot and killed by federal agents when he refuses to surrender. Dillinger at one time grew a moustache and used acid to mar his fingerprints, in hopes of avoiding capture. 

Other famous criminals of the era: Machine Gun Kelly, supposedly “so hot with a Tommy gun that he could write his name with bullets on a barn door,” and his wife Kate, who urged him to think big and graduate from small-time crime to bank robbery, kidnapping and murder. Kelly was known to hand out spent shell casings to fellow crooks as souvenirs. “Pretty Boy” Floyd took up crime at 18, robbing a post office of $350 in pennies, but moved on to rob more than thirty Midwestern banks, filing ten notches in his pocket watch to represent the ten men he had killed. “Ma” Barker and her gang, including sons Dock and Freddie made bloody news, and Clyde Barrow “shot down people for the sheer love of killing.” “Ill-tempered and somewhat effeminate, Barrow was generally despised by other Midwestern bandits, who felt that his haphazard killings and frequently bungled robberies lowered the standards of the profession.” (1129/101-107)

 

* 

Hoover, at the F.B.I. was developing a successful public relations strategy, and helping plant favorable stories in the press. “Outside the Director’s office,” for example, where no visitor could fail to miss it, including reporters, “was display case that contained an array of confiscated weapons, along with John Dillinger’s death mask and bloodstained straw boater.”

* 

Tom Bridge was a young boy when the great dust storms of the 1930s swept over Kansas and other Plains states. He remembers: 

We looked north and there was a curtain of brown dust, sometimes black. The storm came on like a cliff. The sun shone right into the irregularities in that wall, and it was like looking into a canyon. There was a period of quiet: the air got still as the dust came on. It was hundreds of feet high. And then the high-velocity winds that were riding over the top of the storm roared in, It turned so dark I could hardly see the end of my arm. We watched from the house, and we felt the grit between our teeth, and pressure changes pulled dust into the house and into everything – linens, trunks, hat boxes. Lids weren’t any use, so my mother hung wet towels over the windows and when we went out she had us wrap wet clothes over our mouths and noses. The dust was silt – fine quartz sand pulled up off the alluvial fan east of the Rockies. …

 

After a duster, we’d go out and hunt arrowheads: the wind had carried off the lighter topsoil and the flint points lay shining on the hard pan. I had cigar boxes of them “dug up” by the wind. We live near a leg of the Santa Fe Trail, where the ruts were compacted so hard that the wind would blow away the soil around them and following a storm we’d find ruts raised like railroad tracks. We never had to open a gate after a duster: the fences would catch the tumbleweed to make a windbreak, and the drifts covered the barbed wire. We rode our horses right over the fences.  100/31-32

 

Even today, William Least Heat Moon jokes, the wind in Kansas and other Plains states is so strong that it will take up fence posts.

 *

 

“The New Deal is as old as Christian ethics.”

 

August 9: In a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin, FDR tells the story of a businessman who had asked him to abolish all government supervision of business. “My friends,” the president assures the crowd, “I told him and I tell you that the people of the United States will not restore that ancient order.” (1127/110) 

He notes that the first settlers of America had to battle Nature. Now a second battle, equally hard, must be waged. “But man has been fighting also against those forces which disregard human cooperation and human rights in seeking that kind of individual profit which is gained at the expense of his fellows,” he says. 

Some had told him that all that was necessary for economic recovery was for “confidence” to be restored. FDR explained:

 

Before I left on my trip on the first of July, I received two letters from important men, both of them pleading that I say something to restore confidence. To both of them I wrote identical answers: “What would you like to have me say?” From one of them I have received no reply at all in six weeks. I take it that he is still wondering how to answer. The other man wrote me frankly that in his judgment the way to restore confidence was for me to tell the people of the United States that all supervision by all forms of Government, Federal and State, over all forms of human activity called business should be forthwith abolished.

 

Now, my friends, in other words, that man was frank enough to imply that he would repeal all laws, State or national, which regulate business – that a utility could henceforth charge any rate, unreasonable or otherwise; that the railroads could go back to rebates and other secret agreements; that the processors of food stuffs could disregard all rules of health and of good faith; that the unregulated wild-cat banking of a century ago could be restored; that fraudulent securities and watered stock could be palmed off on the public; that stock manipulation which caused panics and enriched insiders could go unchecked. In fact, my friends, if we were to listen to him and his type, the old law of the tooth and the claw would reign in our Nation once more.

 

The people of the United States will not restore that ancient order. There is no lack of confidence on the part of those business men, farmers and workers who clearly read the signs of the times. Sound economic improvement comes from the improved conditions of the whole population and not a small fraction thereof.

 

Those who would measure confidence in this country in the future must look first to the average citizen.

 

In closing, he adds:

 

We who support this New Deal do so because it is a square deal and because it is essential to the preservation of security and happiness in a free society such as ours. I like its definition by a member of the Congress. He said:

 

“The new deal is an old deal – as old as the earliest aspirations of humanity for liberty and justice and the good life. It is as old as Christian ethics, for basically its ethics are the same. It is new as the Declaration of Independence was new, and the Constitution of the United States; its motives are the same. It voices the deathless cry of good men and good women for the opportunity to live and work in freedom, the right to be secure in their homes and in the fruits of their labor, the power to protect themselves against the ruthless and the cunning. It recognizes that man is indeed his brother's keeper, insists that the laborer is worthy of his hire, demands that justice shall rule the mighty as well as the weak.

 

“It seeks to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.”

 

Keep that vision before your eyes and in your hearts; it can, it will be attained.

 

 

* 

Kenny Sailors, age 13, is playing his older brother Bud, 17, on a makeshift basketball court at their home in Wyoming. Bud starts poking fun at his little brother, daring him to get a shot off. “I had to think of something,” Bud tells reporters many years later. So he squared up, planted his feet and leaped. 

In this way, the jump shot in basketball was born. 

Kenny Sailors, 5' 10", developed the shot during his high school years then perfected it during his years at the University of Wyoming, where he was a three-time All American guard. In 1943 he led the Cowboys to their only NCAA championship, capping a 31-2 season with a 46-34 victory over Georgetown and a 52-47 overtime win against St. Johns in the NIT. 

Born in Bushnell, Nebraska in 1921, Sailors’ mother had come west in a covered wagon and grown up in a sod house. His parents divorced when the boys were young; and his mother raised them on a 320-acre farm outside of Hillsdale, Wyoming. They remembered going to school in the morning and seeing their mother out in the fields and returning that afternoon and seeing her still hard at work. Speaking to NPR about the moment the shot was invented, he said. “The good Lord must have put in my mind that if I’m going to get up over this big bum so I can shoot, I’m going to have to jump.” 

He got the shot off and it went in; and Bud told him, “You’d better develop that. That’s going to be a good shot.” 

Sailors went on to lead the Laramie Plainsmen to a state championship and then went on to college on a scholarship. At the end of the 1943 season he married Marilyn Corbin, a cheerleader for Wyoming, then joined the Marines, serving in the South Pacific. (Bud was already flying B-25s). Discharged in 1945, with a Bronze Star to his credit, he rejoined Wyoming midseason, led the team to a 22-4 record and made All-American for the third time. He played in the fledgling pro leagues in the 40s and early 50s, but one coach warned him, “You’ll never go in this league with that shot” and benched him. Later a new coach realized how much talent he had. Sailors found himself back in the starting lineup. Salaries in those days were low, however, and he retired as a player at age 30. 

 

Sailors shooting in a pro game. Life magazine, 1946.

 

*

 

“He can turn the lights out and get in bed before it’s dark.” 

The Pittsburgh Crawfords, the best team in the Negro National League, scheduled a number of road exhibition games before, after and during the 1934 season. One game pitted the Crawfords against pitcher Dizzy Dean and a team of other major-leaguers. Dean was coming off a 30-7 season with the St. Louis Cardinals. 

James Bankes, in The Ol’ Ball Game (pages 50-52) tells the story:

 

Dean first tasted black medicine in York, Pennsylvania. Shortly before game time, he ambled over and did some pleading with the Crawfords. “Now listen,” he said, “I just pitched two days ago, and my flipper’s tired. Please take it easy on me.”

 

“Sure, Diz, you know you can count on us,” replied Josh Gibson with a sly grin.

 

In the very first inning, [Cool Papa] Bell opened with a vicious single and Ted Page followed with another. Dean then filled the bases drunk bypassing Oscar Charleston. Next came Gibson and Dizzy served up a high fastball. Gibson’s eyes opened wide, and he swatted the fat bug high and far over the center field fence.

 

For once, Dean stood speechless. As Gibson circled the bases, he shouted, Hey, Diz! I said you could count on us.”

 

The Crawfords extended their lead to 8-0 in the second inning, and Dean refused to pitch anymore, moving to second base. Meanwhile, [Satchel] Paige fanned 16 of the first 18 men he faced, and Pittsburgh breezed to an 11-1 victory. “They batted by ear that day,” remembered Paige. “They sure couldn’t see my fast one.”

 

The Crawfords won two more in Dayton, one a brilliant pitching duel in which Paige bested Dean 1-0 in 17 innings. The two clubs next met in Yankee Stadium on a bright Sunday afternoon. Bell smashed two doubles off Dean, the second coming in the seventh inning with no score and one out. After Ted Page walked, Dean retired Charleston on an infield pop. When Gibson stepped up, a nervous Dean started screaming to the outfield, “Get back! Get back!”

 

From center field, Jimmy Ripple yelled, “How far do you want me to go back?” Dean just kept waving him toward the fence.

 

Gibson lifted a long fly to Ripple, and Bell tagged up at second. When Ripple made the catch, he raced for third. As he neared the bag, coach Dick Lundy gave him the stop sign. Looking over his shoulder as he ran, Bell noticed the shortstop just getting the ball from Ripple. He decided to keep going and put on a huge burst of speed, his feet skimming over the ground. He hooked home plate well before the tag.

 

An astonished Cool heard the umpire shout, “You’re out!”

 

“I was safe!” yelled bell. “It wasn’t even close!”

 

The umpire just laughed and said, “I’m not going to let you do that against major leaguers. Maybe you can do that in your league, but not against major leaguers.”

 

Oscar Charleston charged out of the dugout on the dead run, and only Gibson’s enormous strength kept him from attacking the umpire. The protest served no real purpose and in the eighth, Jimmy Ripple lead off with a triple and scored the winning run on a wild throw.

 

Always fair, always angered by prejudice, Dizzy Dean approached the umpire after the game. “Everybody knows that Bell was safe on the play at the plate,” he said, “and if the Cardinals had him, along with Paige and Gibson, we could sew up the pennant by the 4th of July and spend the rest of the season fishing.”

 

The Crawfords encountered even stronger racial prejudice off the field. Many establishments refused to serve the team. In such cases, their touring bus provided a place to sleep and eat the apples, cantaloupes and melons purchased from roadside stands.

 

The situation often proved less than desirable even when the team was served. In many of the hotels, remembered Ted  Page, “We had to sleep with the lights on to keep the bedbugs from coming out.”

 

Jimmy Crutchfield tells about an incredible incident which happened between Birmingham and Montgomery when the Crawfords stopped at a roadside cafe. They approached the proprietress, who immediately started shaking her head “no.”

 

“Why are you saying no,” Crutchfield asked, “when you don’t even know what we want?”

 

“Whatever it is, we don’t have any,” she replied.

 

“Won’t you sell us some drinks?”

 

“No,” she said.

 

One of the players asked if they could use the well – she motioned them around the building. After drinking, several of the Crawfords thanked her. She responded by smashing the drinking gourd on the stone well and muttering, “Now that you niggers have used this, it’s not fit for white folks anymore.”

 

In another story about Bell, in the book, his speed is mentioned. In 1933, he stole 175 bases in 185 games. As Paige once remarked, “Cool Papa Bell is so fast he can turn the lights out and get in bed before it’s dark.” 

Legend has it that he hit one ball up the middle and got hit by the ball as he was sliding into second base. 

In 54 games against major league players, Bell hit .391 in 215 at bats, including facing off against Dean. “I liked old Dizzy, he was a good guy. Like when you asked him who was the best picture he ever saw, Dizzy said, ‘Satchel Paige is the best and I’m next.’ Said if we had Satchel Paige, we wouldn’t need any more pitchers.” (56) 

These “Negro” stars were just as good, and sometimes better, than the white players of the era. In a game in 1930, Josh Gibson, only 18 at the time, hit a mammoth drive to left. The ball traveled at least 500 feet, and another foot or so “and it would have been the only baseball ever hit out of Yankee Stadium.” 

According to John B. Holway, however, all the black players agreed: Oscar Charleston was the greatest player of all time, “the black Ty Cobb.” Black writers insisted Cobb “was the white Oscar Charleston.” John McGraw called him the greatest player he ever saw, as well. 

The greatest Negro League team ever may have been the Homestead Grays, who lost only ten times in 134 games in 1930. 

As for Gibson, Holway says he hit an estimated 962 home runs in sixteen years against all comers. His end came at age 33, in 1945. 

…when the news exploded that an unknown kid named Jackie Robinson signed to make the historic breakthrough into the white major leagues. It hurt Gibson deeply. He considered himself the king of black baseball. If anyone should be first, it should be him. Gibson took to drugs, and one bitter cold night in Pittsburgh in January 1947, just three months before Robinson’s historic debut in Brooklyn, Gibson died in his sleep of an overdose. 

His friends were grief stricken. “They say Josh Gibson died of a brain hemorrhage,” Ted Page says. “I say he died of a broken heart.” (58/66)

 

 

*

 

Burleigh Grimes threw the last legal spitball during the 1934 season, although Gaylord Perry and others would throw it illegally for decades to come.

 

* 

October: The NAACP argues that the “Lindbergh Law,” which makes kidnapping a federal offense if “the kidnapped person was knowingly transported in interstate or foreign commerce and held for ransom, reward or otherwise,” applies in the cases of lynchings. 

George Wolfskill explains:

 

In October 1934, after a Georgia black had been abducted and not been discovered for more than seven days, NAACP representatives approached the Department of Justice. They were told there was “nothing to indicate that the person alleged to be kidnapped was transported in interstate commerce and was held for ransom, reward or otherwise,” and that the case would be left in the hands of Georgia authorities.

 

Three weeks later, a black was kidnapped from an Alabama jail, was carried away in a car bearing Florida license plates, and was later found in Florida brutally and obscenely mutilated and lynched. Before the NAACP could act, the Department of Justice issued a statement claiming that lynching was not included in the meaning of “otherwise.”

 

FDR’s failure to address the issue rankled Negroes, as they were then called. Walter White complained that three men had been lynched in one week,

 

“in The United States of America during the regime of the world’s greatest liberal – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” The newspaper the Afro-American was not so kind. It claimed that the only difference between the President and the South is Mr. Roosevelt has violated the Constitution for four years and Dixie  for forty.” 

 

* 

November 6: The president is confident that voters will be supportive in the election. “I am inclined to believe,” he told Vice President Garner, “that the voters as a whole are pretty well satisfied that we are going someplace and that they still want action.” 

He proves correct. Democrats gain ten seats in the U.S. Senate – giving them 69 votes, and in the House, they gain 19, and hold 332 seats. It is the first time since Teddy Roosevelt was in office that the party in power gained. Arthur Krock, said it was “the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics.” William Allen White agreed, saying FDR, “has been all but crowned by the people.” (1127/34)

 

* 

“Putty-faced stooges.” 

December 17: I thought this brief item on Huey P. Long, in American Heritage, made it clear how power gathered into too few hands can grow out of control. 

I include it almost in full:

The U.S. senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana spent the week before Christmas in Baton Rouge with his state’s legislature. The Populist Democrat had not been governor since 1932 but he now had the most absolute control of a state government in the nation’s history. Tightening his grip, he had pushed through dozens of bills in two quick sessions in August and November. One new law had given the governor, a virtual Long puppet, dictatorial control over the state’s election machinery; others had allowed panels headed by the governor to independently set utility rates and property taxes throughout the state, to control the bar association, and to hire and fire almost all local police and fire chiefs. By now nearly every conceivable state or local government job had become a patronage position controlled by Huey Long.

This week Long held another whirlwind session, introducing thirty-five bills on opening night. Most further increased the patronage he could hand out – one effectively gave his organization the authority to hire and fire sheriff’s deputies across the state. A bill aimed at Long’s archenemy, Standard Oil, imposed a five-cents-a-barrel tax on oil refining in the state; others enabled the governor to overthrow and replace the uncooperative local governments of Alexandria and New Orleans.

 

On the first day of the session an obedient House passed Long’s bills to its Ways and Means Committee at the rate of one a minute. The next day Long, the committee’s only witness, explained his bills as the committee’s members sat surrounded by state police officers and his personal bodyguards. That took seventy minutes. The day after that the House passed the bills at the rate of one every three minutes. Only one was dropped – at Long’s suggestion; however, he was forced to modify the law concerning sheriff’s deputies.

 

When the bills reached the Senate, that body rejected one while Long was out of the room. The decision was reversed when he returned.

 

Such special sessions seemed to be called at Long’s whim, and the lawmakers appeared to be overwhelmed by the Kingfish’s demands. … The most controversial laws were often inconspicuously tacked on as amendments to innocuous bills just before the roll call. Legislators who did not support Long’s programs felt helpless.

 

Long described one of the most sweeping bills as dealing with the financing of education for children who crossed parish lines to go to school. The next day it became known that the bill in fact gave Long’s organization the power to hire and fire every schoolteacher in the state. The Kingfish commented: “Aw, that ain’t nothing. That ain’t no new power. ” In response one representative announced that the House had been made into a body of “putty-faced stooges.”

 

Huey Long leading a parade.