Breaking Blue (3 page)

Food riots broke out in several cities, mobs clamoring for something to eat; they were dispersed, in some cases, by riot police with tear gas. Families that had studied the hard face of a half-dozen acres for a generation now packed themselves into a house on wheels and set out for land where the rain was said to be reliable and life-renewing. Throughout 1935, they poured into California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. By train, they arrived in Spokane, the railroad and commercial hub of four states covering two hundred thousand square miles. Like the streams that fed the Columbia River from distant draws, desperate families channeled into the valley of the Spokane River.

With just under 120,000 people, Spokane in 1935 called itself “the Queen City of the Richest Empire in the Western Hemisphere.” The city was an infant, barely fifty years old, built around a triple-tiered waterfall that dropped through a rock canyon. It was isolated from the rest of the world by a fence of mountains: the Cascades to the west, the Selkirks to the north, the Bitterroots, the Coeur d’Alenes, and the Rockies to the east, and the trench of Hells Canyon to the south, where the Snake River cut the deepest gorge on the continent. Spokane’s ceaseless promoters, whose grandfathers had grabbed the valley from the Indians after a terror campaign that consisted of summarily hanging the native leaders, slaughtering all their horses, and burning caches of winter food, billed their town as a diamond in the Depression rough, the center of that Inland Empire which produced a third of the nation’s lead, a fourth of its silver, a fifth of its apples, a tenth of its wheat, a fifth of its water power. The biggest stands of white pine—cut down to make matchsticks—were just across the border in Idaho, as was the biggest silver mine in the world, the Bunker Hill tunnels into the Coeur d’Alene Mountains.

The farmer families had clambered aboard trains, packing pots and pans and bits of dried food, dodged the head-busting goons, and then emerged from week-long journeys in the rail yards east of Spokane. They considered themselves lucky; many train-riders never survived the trip. On one line alone in 1935, the Northern Pacific, more than
150 people were killed while trying to hop aboard. Every day brought families, some wearing everything they owned, to the Hillyard section of town. A generation earlier, these railroads had deposited Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Irish, most of them with a little stake. For $350 a family could buy a home and twenty acres. Now the railroads brought to Spokane a new breed of passenger, a reluctant hobo: the American farmer.

When they arrived in the valley of wheat and orchards in a city whose fine stone buildings were built with money from farmers in the Palouse and silver miners in the bordering mountains, they found what they had left behind: a land sick with thirst. Spokane’s September of 1935 was the driest in half a century. The sky was clouded by smoke, drifting in from the forest fires that raged in the surrounding pine forests. When the fires weren’t started by lightning, they were started by hungry men looking for work. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was looking to find jobs for the 13 million unemployed—one out of every four Americans of working age. A fire on national forest land meant a fire crew on a federal payroll would be dispatched to the woods. So there was always somebody who made sure the pine forests of the Inland Empire were burning. Governor C. Ben Ross of Idaho used National Guard troops to patrol his state’s forests against arsonists, but the big pines continued to burn.

And where was all the water that was synonymous with the Pacific Northwest? Certainly not on the east side of the Cascades. Instead of black earth and plump streams, the migrants found dust devils of whirling wind and parched irrigation ditches. In Green Acres, the orchards outside Spokane, brown fruit rotted on trees, spoiled by sun spots. West of town, in the treeless sage country, coyotes, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes roamed across farm fields gone fallow. In Idaho—where the suicide rate had gone up 600 percent since 1930—a mob of farmers dynamited a dam whose reservoir of irrigation water was siphoned off for the exclusive use of a few large landowners. Governor Ross declared martial law and threw the farmers into jail. A local jury refused to convict them. Deep inside Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, another group of angry men blew up a dam on the Salmon River that
blocked chinook from spawning at the end of a nine-hundred-mile journey from the Pacific. In the Northwest, during the worst of times, there were always king salmon to keep people alive; the saboteurs justified their action by saying they preferred wild fish to breadlines.

Around Othello, in the heart of eastern Washington’s wheat country, land prices fell to thirty-five cents an acre—and still there were few takers. Without water, the soil was worthless. In 1935, for the first time in memory, America imported wheat.

And where were all the jobs? The mines limped along, with skeletal crews scraping out silver, ore, and lead which sold for dismal prices. With few people building new homes, demand for timber was anemic. The most visible product of the “richest empire” was apples, and they moved, sold by sad-faced street vendors on every corner in downtown Spokane, for a nickel apiece. It was a form of charity.

One morning in August of 1935, a headline in the Spokane
Chronicle
—one of two daily newspapers in town owned by the powerful Cowles family—told readers what many already knew:
SPOKANE BUTTER SHORTAGE LOOMS
. “Creamery men report that a serious scarcity of butter is developing in Spokane territory,” the story said. With farms folding and the land dying, even butter was scarce in the new land. Prices reached forty cents a pound—more than double the cost of one year earlier. For the poorest of working families, those who labored cutting cords of firewood for a dollar a day or picking apples for five cents a bin, a week’s supply of butter, if they could find it, meant handing over a day’s wages.

Worse, much of the butter that had been stockpiled was now being taken in a series of creamery burglaries. In the dead of night, thieves backed up trucks to creamery entrances, broke into the buildings, and hauled away huge loads of butter, cheese, and cream. Nearly half a dozen such burglaries took place in August and early September. Who would steal butter from farmers? the local people asked themselves, aghast. Although police had few leads, they had some ideas. In the rail yards, the new arrivals, the farmer families, had been stealing coal to keep the fires and stoves in their cardboard and tin hovels warm at night. Everybody knew how desperate they were.
Throughout hamlets of the rural West, there was serious talk of violent revolution.

And there was a saying, muttered around campfires in the rail yards east of Spokane, the city’s own Hooverville, where upwards of two hundred and fifty people a day arrived from the Dust Bowl: “An empty stomach does not recognize the law.”

F
RESH ON A JOB
that promised not only a guaranteed salary of twenty-seven dollars a week but clean clothes as well, Bill Parsons was given a leather strap, brass knuckles, an oak billy club, and a six-chamber, five-inch-barreled, .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, and was introduced to the routine of a lawman in a town staggered by the sixth year of the Great Depression. Outside the city limits, creameries were getting knocked off. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, a series of quick strikes. Inside the city, cafes and diners were broken into and large quantities of butter taken. Some merchants believed that one gang was behind the dairy heists; they seemed systematic.

In 1935, the most common crime in Spokane was vagrancy. As defined by Washington state law, a vagrant was a person without visible means of support; and in the middle of the decade that was supposed to bring an end to poverty, nearly half the adults in the inland Northwest were technically criminals.

There was a simple order to this universe of broken families and uniformed enforcers in Spokane: a policeman was prosecutor and judge, jury and executioner. It was up to the patrolmen and detectives to decide who should be rousted out of the cardboard shacks and canvas tents along the river’s shore—who should be plucked from the ranks of emaciated migrants, banged across the head, and made
into a usual suspect—and who should not. Gypsies were jailed for telling stories, and union organizers were hustled away from small rallies and sent packing with nothing but bruised shins to show for their visit to Spokane.

Vagrancy was the nightstick of the foot patrolman, wielded freely against the outsiders whose presence was so threatening. It was not uncommon for a judge to give somebody a six-month prison term for vagrancy. The problem was, the city could throw you in jail, but once you were there it couldn’t afford to feed you. Although more than twelve hundred arrests were made every month in Spokane for a variety of crimes, the city budgeted no more than three hundred dollars a month to feed all the prisoners. It was cheaper, and certainly more expedient, to squeeze a suspect—extorting sex, food, change, or the grocery scrip that had been substituted for money—than to bring him into jail to starve or survive on potato sandwiches. By one official estimate, more than $100,000 a year was spent bribing Spokane police officers in the mid-1930s—twenty-seven times the annual amount spent on jail food.

Around the city, posters had advertised a $15,000 reward for information leading to the capture of John Dillinger, the bank robber who’d been wending his way through the West. Holding a submachine gun in one hand and a pistol in the other, Dillinger presented a formidable challenge in the poster. When word had it that he was passing through Spokane, every cop on the 120-man force was drawn into the manhunt. They found not a trace of Dillinger, who stood only five foot four inches tall but was a giant of the type of diversionary crime that kept so many American minds off their hollow stomachs. The feds finally caught up with him in Chicago—a city whose most prominent soup kitchen was funded by its most prominent gangster, Al Capone—where he died in a shootout. The reward money went unclaimed.

Young Bill Parsons was advised that more reliable money could be found elsewhere. As a policeman, he was told, he had certain privileges. For starters, there was legitimate moonlighting. Foreclosures, one of the few growth industries in the 1930s, relied on off-duty policemen to provide force for the hated banks. A third of all the
legal work at the time was in taking back property. And it wasn’t just failed mortgages that led to foreclosure; many people couldn’t pay for the most basic of services. One woman lost her home because she was behind on a twenty-four-dollar sewer bill. Old and sick, she begged a pair of Spokane policemen to let her die in her home. Attempting to cut a deal during her eviction, she promised to leave her house to the city if they let her live her last months inside. The city took the home and kicked the woman out.

As a hub for miners, lumberjacks, fruit-pickers, railroad workers, and assorted farmhands who’d lost their tenuous link to the land, Spokane had always been a town where the most urgent of vices—sex and booze and gambling—were well serviced. Just before the start of statewide prohibition in 1913, there were seventy-eight saloons within the small downtown area. Nearly twenty years later, in the dying years of the dry era, a newspaper survey found eighty-six illegal liquor joints. Chinese workmen, who had stayed long after the railroads were built, set up a thriving lottery business and sold opium to regular customers. Farm girls who couldn’t make it on tired fields found easy work hopping from laptop to laptop of saloon clients. At least forty-two Spokane establishments burned the red lampshade of the brothel in their windows after dark. The toils of liquor-consuming and ass-chasing went on almost exclusively in a ten-block section downtown, on the south banks of the river, across from the falls. The gentry—those families enriched during the boom years around the turn of the century—lived above all the riffraff, on the South Hill, in elegant mansions shaded by thick oaks. They promoted their town through annual marketing reports, issued by the
Spokesman-Review
, the morning daily; they produced an official version of city history that was like a Christmas card from a fractured family, omitting all mention of the bruises or beatings. The paper trumpeted the virtues of a city with 156 churches, a “negro population of less than one-half-of-one percent,” a place where “white and native-born people far exceed the general average.”

Just south of the crashing torrent of Spokane Falls, at the center of the vice factories, was a six-story stone building erected in 1912: headquarters of the police department. When Bill Parsons first walked
out of that building in 1935, he beamed, wearing a uniform of navy blue, a cap with a badge atop its brim, polished leather shoes, and the confidence of a young man who’d found secure job footing amidst an economy where the earth had moved. Before the Depression, everyone seemed obsessed with how much his neighbor made; after 1929, the talk was of how much he had lost.

Hundreds of men applied for the five openings in the police department that year. They didn’t need a high school degree or any knowledge of law enforcement or particular skill at shooting a pistol. What the department was looking for were men who could kick butt and walk away from it, men who wouldn’t burden the pension system with their broken noses, back problems, bad teeth, or flat feet.

Pictures of the new officers ran in the
Spokesman-Review
, five young patrolmen whom the civil service commissioner labeled “as fine a bunch of men as I have seen in a long time.” Each face stared out sternly, already wearing the sphinxlike visage of the cop—except for Bill Parsons. He was a stunning looker, with perfect teeth, smooth skin, thick, dark hair, and sleepy, half-lidded eyes that in a later time might have been compared with those of Elvis Presley. His cap was half-cocked, on the side, and he smiled in a jaunty, got-the-world-by-the-tail look.

Parsons weighed in at nearly two hundred pounds; his upper body was knotted and hard, his hands shiny from calluses. Before moving to Spokane, he had labored in the forests of northern Idaho, fighting fires, building trails, sawing through the four-foot-thick waistbands of Ponderosa pines. Parsons was not afraid of the raw elements of the rural West. What’s more, his confidence was bolstered by a moral code forged in the woods. A guy had to be loyal. A guy had to be fair. A guy couldn’t cheat another guy out of something that was rightfully his. So when twenty-five-year-old Bill Parsons first walked out of the stone building as a Spokane police officer, he found his philosophy inscribed on a statue of Abraham Lincoln looking west from a perch above the falls. The words read: