____________________
“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
____________________
January: Basketball is growing in popularity – especially in New York City – where Columbia wins the Ivy League championship for the second year in a row. The leading scorer for Columbia (and the Ivy League, itself) is a 6-foot-1 forward named Lou Bender. Clearly the game is different in that era. There’s no shot clock, for example, and certainly no three-point line.
Bender’s scoring averages: 1930: 9.8 points per game; 1931: 9.6. In fact, he’s using the two-handed set shot, the jump shot still not having been invented.
New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker comes up with the idea of holding a tripleheader at Madison Square Garden, to raise money for unemployment relief. In one game Manhattan defeats NYU, by a score of 16-14. In another St. Johns triumphs, 17-9, over City College. Finally, Columbia goes on a scoring spree, defeating Fordham 26-18. Bender leads all scorers with eight points, and 15,000 fans go home excited with what they have seen.
“It was a turning point for
the sport,” The New York Times explains
in Bender’s obituary (He lives to age 99).
*
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.
*
March 1: William Least Heat Moon sets a scene. There are eight men aboard a thirty-six hour flight from New York to Los Angeles – which included an overnight stay in Kansas City.
Now the plane is heading east again, with Knute
Rockne aboard. At that point the legendary football coach of Norte Dame has a record
105-12-5. As for others aboard, “They had a single thing in common: their
numbers were all soon to come up at the same moment three miles southwest of Bazaar,
Kansas, a few hundred feet above route 13.”
“The Rock,” the forty-three-year-old
Norwegian immigrant, was not a tall man, about five-eight, and never an
exceptional athlete, yet he played on the obscure Notre Dame team that beat Army,
the national football power of 1913, 35 to 13. He caught a number of passes
that season and predicted putting the ball in the air would change the game; he
was right, and so successful with his teams at throwing that by 1931 some Notre
Dame faculty and alumni were complaining about excessive emphasis on football and
the deleterious effect they believed it was working on the real purpose of the
university.
In “breadline America,” one reporter noted, Rockne was making $40,000 a year through various means.
Least Heat Moon continues:
Two years before the
beginning of commercial air transport in 1924 (the year the Four Horsemen rode
over Army), Anthony Fokker moved to the United States and started building
large commercial aircraft employing his favored design of single-high-wing
planes made of composite materials.
Specifically: The aircraft had many wooden and canvas parts, including the wings and wing coverings.
Least Heat Moon notes, “Government policy at the time was to keep information about airline crashes secret.”
The pilot was Robert Fry, a member of the “Caterpillar Club,” related to the use of silk parachutes, having bailed out of a falling plane, three years earlier, in China. He was 32. His co-pilot was Jess Mathias, 30. They were carrying 63 pounds of mail, 200 pounds of baggage, including tennis rackets, golf clubs, and balls belonging to John Happer, a passenger. The combined weight of the six passengers came to 1,100 pounds.
Two ranchers, Edward and Arthur Baker heard the plane sputtering overhead, and then a loud, thudding crash. Edward could see a “long silvery and red object” dropping “in the slow zigzag of a falling slip of paper, what turned out to be the broken half of a wing. They were first to ride to the scene – but clearly, no one had survived. Others arrived, including an ambulance. Large sums of cash, jewelry and five watches were gathered up, along with mail, and body parts. One partition, that had separated cabin from passenger area was lying on the ground but a sign with the pilot’s name still remained in place on a piece of frame above. One ghoulish fellow was seen walking around with a passenger’s ear, “and when a friend admired it, he pulled out a knife and sliced it in half to share.” Happer’s rackets and golf balls were long gone, and another souvenir hunter had part of Rockne’s wallet. Another man rolled one of the flattened tires away, over a hill, in the direction of Matfield, a nearby town. Years later, a gold tooth also turned up at the site.
“Harv Cox, who drove the speeding ambulance to the crash site and returned with Rockne’s body, said later, “I’ve never seen people go so crazy in my life.” When Cox died half a century later, he still had not returned to the site; he said, “I got my fill of it that day.”
“Although 99E [as the plane was numbered] was
hardly the first airliner to crash – the prior twelve months had seen six major
accidents in the country, one taking sixteen lives and another thirteen – it was
the first American disaster to kill someone as famous as Rockne.”
…confidence in the plane
was gone: TWA even pulled the engines from some of its F-10s [the Fokker model
number] and torched the bodies. Fokker aircraft was finished in America, and
General Motors took over and changed the name to General Aviation before
leaving the business altogether a few years later, as did Ford. The demand for
all-metal aircraft was national and insistent: two years after the crash the
first of the DC series of airliners, some of the most reliable big planes ever
made, appeared.
“Peggy of the Flint Hills” wrote in a letter to the newspapers, after the crash: “If Knute Rockne’s pockets contained all the articles which local souvenir fans claim to have removed from them, it must have been that extra weight which brought down the plane.”
A slower mail plane in the same area, around the same time, the day of the crash, reported icing of the wings, and the pilot began to fly low and look for clear weather in any direction. At 10:35 a.m., Mathias received a report of fair weather farther ahead. “Can you get through?” a radio operator in Wichita asked.
“Don’t know yet, don’t know yet!” the pilot responded.
Then: No answer.
A federal
inspector wrote a letter a week later:
he had definite
confirmation from pilots (most of whom insisted on an anonymity) that the F-10
series planes, particularly the long-winged job, do set up a decided flutter in
the wing when the normal cruising speed is slightly increased and bumpy air
encountered. One pilot told the inspector the flutter was so rapid wing tips
would move up and down as much as eight inches and keep increasing if not
corrected by pulling the nose up and throttling back; he said all TWA pilots
knew about the problem but never discussed it because they were afraid of being
fired or blacklisted. … Several fliers said they didn’t know a Fokker pilot who
wasn’t afraid of the ship.
Least
Heat Moon described the end, as 99E tries to find a safer route, as problems
mount:
Captain Fry heads
northwest, ninety degrees off course, in search of a way out of the muck and
light rain icing the wings and beginning to shut down his instruments and
radio, everything happening rapidly; the trimotor catches the tailings of the
cyclonic cloud, and the laden plywood wings begin to vibrate, the stress on the
spars immense; the cabin fabric shudders terribly, and port-side passengers
watch the wing tip flutter ever farther and faster until it appears to be
flapping, and their terror – that fear of the novice air traveler of a wing
falling off – is unspeakable: and then a loud, shattering report, and half the
left wing is gone, severed as squarely as if this black mayhem of a cloud
concealed massive shears: the plane turns over violently: cries of the helpless
men, engines going silent, the hiss of wind, the ship turning over again:
upside down, the five hundred-foot plunge begun, Niner-Niner-Easy falls into
the prairie snow.
Even
Least Heat Moon fails to list the other crash victim’s names: Waldo B. Miller,
H.J. Christen, John Happer, Spencer Goldthwaite, C.A. Robrecht, the Fry, then
Mathias, first name given as “Herman.” 100/387-399
*
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.
*
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)
*
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.”
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).
