Terror in the City of Champions (20 page)

All fall and winter Greenberg had been aching to pay back Dean. Because they competed in different leagues, the only opportunities arose in exhibitions and the World Series. One spring game Greenberg came to the plate with the bases loaded. He had “blood in his eye.” He worked the count full before blistering a Dean pitch to deep center. It cleared the bases and gave Detroit the lead. The Tigers went on to beat the Dean brothers 13–8. It was an inconsequential game but it felt good.

Bad feelings flowed between the Tigers and the Cardinals. When a photographer tried to get Joe “Ducky” Medwick and Marv Owen to shake hands and to show that all had been forgiven after the World Series spiking incident, Medwick refused. “To hell with Owen,” he said. “I tried to shake hands with him in the [1934] series and he refused. I don’t want to shake hands with him now.”

Joe Louis’s handlers carefully sculpted the fighter’s public image, coaching him continually on what was prohibited. The idea was to make him acceptable to white America. Among the don’ts: gloating, showing too much emotion, going out on the town alone, and being photographed with white women. He was to lead a clean lifestyle in the ring and out. In April there were staged photos of Joe Louis at training camp reading his Bible. The effort worked. One observer said that Louis “is the kind of man who would make the customers forget the antics of Jack Johnson. . . . Louis is a quiet, easy going Negro who goes about his own business until he gets in the ring.” Trainer Jack “Chappie” Blackburn had lived through Johnson’s tumultuous tenure as champion. “If you really ain’t gonna be another Jack Johnson, you’ve got some hope,” he told Louis. “White man hasn’t forgotten that fool nigger with his white women, acting like he owned the world.” While Louis wasn’t wild or out of control, he also wasn’t the muted, sexless black man his managers hoped to see portrayed in the press. He liked flashy clothes and sporty cars. He liked clubs and parties, and he certainly enjoyed sex.

The Detroit Lions were looking for ways to improve on their 1934 performance, so they tried to recruit a few college football stars for their 1935 season. Among them was the man voted Most Valuable Player of the Michigan Wolverines, senior Gerald “Jerry” Ford. Following the Michigan season but before graduation, Ford traveled to San Francisco and played in the Shrine East-West charity game, where he impressed scouts. Afterward, on the long train ride back to Michigan, two teams, the Packers and the Lions, tried to sign him to professional contracts. The Lions offered more money: $200 per game, $2,800 for the season. But law school was calling him, so he went to Yale to coach football there, biding his time until he would be accepted.

Some of Mickey Cochrane’s pals drove down to Cincinnati on Saturday, April 13, to see the Tigers in one of their final exhibitions before the regular season. The Tigers were scheduled to play the Reds at Crosley Field, but cold weather canceled the game. Cochrane held practice anyway, mostly hitting and fielding, perhaps to keep his guys fresh or maybe to give his chums something to see for their 260-mile journey.

Harry Bennett led the visiting party of ten men, including figures from sports, the armed services, and the auto industry: Wolverine coach Harry Kipke, Ford executive Russell Gnau, Ford attorney Lou Colombo, animal trainer Allen King, former UM athlete and auto-parts manufacturer Doug Roby, future four-star general Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, and two intimidating former athletes whom Bennett had brought into Ford, ex-boxer Elmer Hogan and former football player Stan Fay, a UM teammate of Gerald Ford. Most of the men had crewed on Bennett’s steel power cruiser,
The Margaret II
. Cochrane chatted with them and joked with the animal trainer, asking him not to tame his Tigers. “We want them all wild except the pitchers when the season opens,” he said.

Bennett had recently been dealing with some unpleasant attention at the Rouge plant, where a camshaft worker had died from eating poisoned food. Louis Sherry, twenty-five, had fallen over dead during his lunch break after biting into a sandwich powdered with cyanide, a substance used at the factory. Bennett said that he and his staff, working with the county prosecutor’s office, interviewed 140 employees. Though Bennett initially insisted the sandwich wasn’t sold in the plant, a coroner’s jury determined that Sherry bought it from lunch wagon number five.

More than a year later, after Dayton Dean’s wife suggested that the Black Legion might have been involved in Sherry’s death, Bennett would respond forcefully: “We believe a satisfactory explanation of Sherry’s death was discovered at the time, although there was not sufficient evidence to justify an arrest. The investigation has not been dropped but there is no reason whatever to believe that Sherry was a victim of the Black Legion or any other gang.” At the same time physician Dr. Nathan Bicknell would send a letter to Congressman John Lesinski Sr. urging a national investigation into the legion. “I would like to know . . . if Harry Bennett, chief Ford stool pigeon, is not behind the scenes.” Lesinski would forward the letter to J. Edgar Hoover. What Bicknell wouldn’t say was that he was a member of the jury that had investigated Sherry’s death but couldn’t determine what had happened.

Might Bennett have been in the Black Legion? Bennett showed a willingness to align himself with individuals and organizations that could help him. The legion, with its strong anti-union stance, qualified. By one member’s estimate some Ford departments were comprised mostly of legion members. The secret society also had a separate “businessman’s regiment” with a more dignified initiation ceremony for men like Bennett. At the very least it seems improbable that Bennett, whose spies knew everything happening on the factory floor, did not know and approve of the legion.

The visit with Cochrane must have been a welcome diversion for Bennett. The Tigers had taken shape over the past days. Almost all of the questions had been answered. Football star Dixie Howell turned out to be an unspectacular player who desperately needed time in the minors—even before a line drive struck his cheekbone and put him in the hospital. Flea Clifton, twenty pounds meatier than the previous season, won a backup spot, thus avoiding a trip to Hollywood. And Gee Walker fulfilled his dream, for the moment anyway, by being anointed the right fielder. His new stature led to an unusual editorial. It appeared in the front section of one daily beside opinion pieces about the Nazis and the National Recovery Administration. It said, “Navin Field fans are ever ready to forgive Gerald Walker his lapses and will be amiably disposed to his latest restoration to grace. . . . [But] two hours a day is not too much to have to focus one’s interest on a job. In the name of the baseball-loving population of Detroit, we urge the young man to turn a deaf ear to repartee from the sidelines and try to concentrate on the matter in hand, namely the bringing of a second pennant to Detroit.”

Back in his office in Detroit, Frank Navin flustered writer W. W. Edgar by not out-and-out predicting a pennant. Navin said he expected six of eight American League clubs to be competitive and that the Tigers would be in the hunt. “A lot of things can happen in baseball between April and October,” he said. “If we only knew what was in store in the way of luck and the form of the players, it would be much simpler to forecast.”

Navin looked jowlier than usual. Red blotches tinted his cheeks.

“Then you think the Tigers have a good chance of repeating?” Edgar asked.

“As I said, we should be right up in the fight all the way, unless something unexpected happens.” Navin sounded evasive, but perhaps he was just being honest.

The Tigers started the season by losing nine of their first eleven games.

Cochrane was furious.

The Radio Priest

Father Charles Coughlin finally took the platform after eleven o’clock on the night of Wednesday, April 24, 1935. The 15,300 men and women who had jammed into Olympia Arena, hundreds without seats, exploded in a feverish frenzy. Finally the man they most wanted to hear—the famed radio priest from Royal Oak, whose over-the-air sermons drew ten million to thirty million listeners weekly—approached the microphone.

Two and a half hours had passed since the addresses had begun. Eleven men had already spoken, including farm and labor leaders, senators, representatives, and a rabbi. The priest’s devoted followers had reason to be weary after so many talks, but they greeted the white-collared Coughlin exuberantly. All night they had cheered the mere mention of his name. The event, with socialists and communists protesting outside, was the first mass public gathering of Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice. The audience consisted mostly of working class people “from the more humble walks of life.” Coughlin’s message—anti-communist, anti-banker, share-the-wealth—appealed to a wide swath of struggling Americans, not merely Catholics.

Of Irish ancestry by way of Canada, Coughlin had a voice that writer Wallace Stegner described as “of such mellow richness, such manly, heartwarming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm, that anyone turning past it almost had to hear it again.” Over the years his radio sermons had shifted from religious lessons about charity to increasingly fiery political diatribes. As his listenership increased, so did his boldness. In 1932 he had endorsed Franklin Roosevelt. Now he was accusing him of being in cahoots with Wall Street. Roosevelt had not gone far enough in helping the poor, he felt. Coughlin’s intensifying attacks got him lumped with Senator Huey Long of Louisiana. Both were seen by Roosevelt’s supporters as a threat to FDR and by many others as either dangerous demagogues or national saviors.

Six weeks earlier in a long radio denunciation, General Hugh Johnson, a former Roosevelt appointee and 1933
Time
magazine Man of the Year, had condemned Coughlin and Long as “two pied pipers” riling the “lunatic fringes.”

“It is not,” Johnson said, “exaggeration to say that, through the doorway of his priestly office, covered in his designs by the sanctity of the robe he wears, Father Coughlin, by the cheap strategy of appealing to the envy of those who have nothing for those who have something, has become the active political head of an active political party. . . . We can neither respect nor revere what appears to be a priest in holy orders entering our homes with the open sesame of his high calling and there, in the name of Jesus Christ, demanding that we ditch the President for Huey Long, bastardize our American system, and destroy the government of our country.”

Johnson coyly fanned anti-Catholic bigotry under the guise of doing the opposite. He said he rejected the “ridiculous rumor . . . that Father Coughlin is the agent of the Pope in trying to upset this Protestant country in the interests of the Church in Rome. Nothing could be more absurd, and yet it is perfectly plain that either the Church or Father Coughlin should promptly sever his revolutionary political activities from his priestly office.”