Terror in the City of Champions (32 page)

Some ballplayers, like Elden Auker, accepted invitations from friends to dine in fine fashion (at the Detroit Athletic Club, in his case). Others, including Gee Walker, hung out in their apartments with friends and family. Tommy Bridges, feeling the pains of a stress headache, went to bed early. Schoolboy Rowe, seeking an escape from visitors, went to a movie—maybe a
Midsummer Night’s Dream
with James Cagney or
The Return of Peter Grimm
with Lionel Barrymore—hoping to sleep unnoticed in the dark theater. The World Series finale and the merriment it inspired generated an estimated 800,000 words from the more than three hundred journalists in town. Much of it, in Detroit especially, bordered on the elegiac and sounded as if written for the ages.

“The Leaning Tower can now crumble and find its level with the Pisan plain,” wrote Grantland Rice. “The Hanging Gardens can grow up in weeds. . . . The Detroit Tigers at last are baseball champions of the world.”

Offered Sam Greene of the
Detroit News
: “We graybeards of the years to come will be telling our children and our children’s children how poetic justice once descended on Navin Field as the long October shadows fell softly across its broad green carpet, how it fell over the slender shoulders of Tommy Bridges like a mantle, and how it draped itself about the broad proportions of the Goose and Mickey Cochrane, two battle-scarred heroes of many a World Series contest.”

On its front page the
Free Press
editorialized about what it all meant: “It was Detroit’s salute to America. . . . Detroit celebrated because it had won the world championship. It celebrated because it was the city that had led the nation back to recovery. It celebrated because it was the city that wouldn’t stay licked; the city that couldn’t be licked. It was Detroit the unconquerable, ready to tell the world when the moment arrived. The moment had arrived, and the world was told.”

For owner Frank Navin it was the fulfillment of his dream. “I can now die in peace,” he said.

Amid the Joy, Punishment

The Black Legionnaires were baseball fans like the rest of Detroit. One legion crew even waited until the contest had ended on Saturday before heading out on its mission. A half-hour after the Game Four victory Fred Gulley appeared at Robert Penland’s door on Auburn Street in Ecorse. They lived about a mile apart, southeast of the Ford Rouge plant. It was five-thirty. Penland had just sat down to dinner with his wife, Mamie.

“Your foreman wants to see you out in the car,” said Gulley, motioning toward the street. Penland repaired massive cranes at Great Lakes Steel. He thought nothing of being called for emergencies at odd times. He headed outside in shirtsleeves. It felt cold for early October. The air smelled slightly putrid from the nearby industrial plants. When Penland looked in the car, he realized the visit had nothing to do with his job. Two Black Legion members, Thomas Cox and Earl Angstadt, occupied the front seats. Angstadt, who had done time in Ohio for stealing a car, lived in Ecorse; Cox lived in Detroit. “I know what you want,” Penland said. “If you come back after dinner, I’ll go with you.”

Gulley ordered him into the car. He pressed a gun against Penland, who reluctantly climbed into the backseat. The four headed out to a field a good hour’s drive away. Penland was cold. One man loaned him a coat and another turned on the heater. They offered him a few grapes and invited him to light a cigarette. Maybe their mood had been lightened by the Tigers’ win, or maybe they realized they were all in a similar bind—sworn legion members who no longer wished to belong but feared the repercussions of quitting. Gulley had nothing against Penland, but he had heard that legion members who didn’t follow orders paid with their lives. He had been instructed to bring Penland to stand trial for missing meetings and had resigned himself to the task. En route, they talked about baseball much of the time.

By the time they arrived, two dozen members had gathered at the site off Lahser Road in Oakland County. They drove up to the outer guards and provided the proper passwords. A quarter-mile farther was the inner circle where hooded men awaited. Formally charged, Penland offered his best defense: Family illnesses had kept him from attending meetings. He promised he would do better. Stripped of his shirt, Penland was tied to a tree and lashed with a whip. Gulley, the spy, turned away. He knew a worse punishment might find him if legionnaires discovered he was Mayor Bill Voisine’s pigeon.

Penland returned home at eleven-thirty. He refused to tell his pregnant wife where he had been. Some wives, unaware of their husbands’ legion activities, viewed their late hours as evidence of romantic affairs. Sworn to secrecy and wanting to protect their spouses, many of the men wouldn’t reveal the actual reasons they didn’t return until after midnight.

Frances Wellman, Rudyard Kipling Wellman’s wife, suspected her husband of being unfaithful. He owned a service station at Kercheval and Springle Streets, blocks south from where Peg-Leg White had once lived. Wellman had narrow eyes and a pencil-thin moustache, which drew attention to his crooked, gapped teeth when he smiled. Wellman could be brutal to his five-foot-two wife. He had been known to blacken her eyes, and she feared he would do worse if he discovered that she had been searching his pockets. She knew about his involvement in a secret society. A member of an intelligence squad, he bragged about being a big shot in the organization. Occasionally, she pawed through his coats, writing down the names of various members, including prominent ones. Regardless, she imagined that given such frequent nighttime absences, he must be having an affair. The Wellmans lived less than a mile from the border of affluent Grosse Pointe and she suspected a dalliance with a wealthy woman. She had even had him followed by a private investigator.

Floggings like the one Penland endured were not uncommon. If you missed meetings, you might be whipped. If you questioned the legion’s actions, you might be whipped. If you spoke of the group to nonmembers, you might be whipped. Legion leaders preferred to deliver floggings before an audience, making examples of errant members. Rather than one man dispensing the punishment, many shared the responsibility, one lash delivered by each of seven, eight, twelve, or thirteen members. The beatings left victims with painful cuts, slashes, and blood blisters and they terrified those who witnessed them.

The family of Thomas Ness noticed that he had changed suddenly in the spring. Though he didn’t share the reason, Ness had seen his good friend, a fellow Irish immigrant, beaten bloody by the legion, to which both hesitantly belonged. Ness would only acknowledge that he had beheld “a terrible, shameful sight.” The stress weighed on him. Within a few months he collapsed and died while marching in an Orangeman’s parade in Windsor, Ontario. After seeing whatever he had seen, he was never the same, his family said.

In the autumn of 1935 Harley Smith’s family in the village of Norvell, not far from Jackson State Prison, watched in horror as men shoved Smith into a car and drove off. An unemployed farmer and a father of five children under the age of twelve, Smith had been roped into joining the legion by a friend. He had taken the oath with a gun pointed at his chest. He went to one other meeting and then quit attending. His truancy brought the legion to his door. Awakened from his sleep, Smith was drawn outside. When his wife saw him forced into a vehicle, she charged after the men, screaming for her husband. She loaded the kids into the family car and drove into town, telling a deputy that her husband had been abducted. The deputy said that without more information he couldn’t do anything. Smith was driven blindfolded to a farmhouse that belonged to Dite Hawley, a guard at Jackson Prison. A hooded legion jury convicted Smith and ordered six lashes. Smith recognized the voice of the man who pronounced his guilt. It was Ray Ernest, a prison employee who had successfully enrolled many of the 380 guards at the state institution. Ernest, who had a sub-machine gun secreted away in his home, frequently testified to his willingness to “die for the Red, White, and Blue on any or all occasions.”

Stripped from the waist up, Smith endured his stinging punishment. The tongues of the whip were studded with brass. Blindfolded again, he was returned home, writhing in pain. He told his wife what had happened but insisted she not go to the police. He feared the legion would kill him.

Denver Carter, thirty-nine years old and a friend of Smith, was another man beaten by the Jackson-area legion. He died of a heart attack months after the assault. His wife blamed the lingering impact of the attack. Authorities disagreed, saying that his heart trouble was unrelated. A similar fate would befall Paul Every, forty-one years old, another prison guard. Ernest and company flogged him for poor attendance. Already sickly with diabetes, Every saw his health immediately decline. He never recovered, dying two months on, according to his wife and son. And then there were the disappearances, suspicious deaths, and suspected suicides of Black Legion members and their enemies. Three weeks after the World Series, patrolman Alfred Roughley, who had brought several of his Detroit co-workers into the legion, turned up dead in his car, an apparent victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. Police ruled it a suicide.

Not long after, streetcar conductor Alexander Murdy, forty-seven years old, got up from his living room chair and walked out of his house. It was a mid-January evening and he didn’t say a word to his wife or his two teenage children. He grabbed some coins and left. His family assumed he was going for cigarettes. Murdy had joined the Black Legion two and a half years earlier and even introduced several co-workers into the organization, but after being whipped harshly for not attending meetings, he grew reluctant to leave his house at night. Murdy had a decent job and had been talking of buying a new car. He was also looking forward to traveling to Ireland to see his mother. But he did not return that night or the next or ever again.

The Pastor Who Said No

The October primary showed attorney Maurice Sugar to be a serious Detroit council contender. With nine seats in play, Sugar finished tenth, making him one of eighteen candidates to advance to the November election. His goal appearing within reach, Sugar wrote an optimistic song titled “We’re Moving to the City Hall.” (
When we get wise and organize to battle for our rights, they set their sneaking stools and spies to get the guy that fights.
)

But forces were mobilizing against Sugar. As the general election neared he was receiving more death threats. Black Legion officers suggested that Dayton Dean bomb Sugar’s apartment, but Dean refused. Despite all his depraved actions, the legionnaire drew a few moral lines. He worried about collateral damage. More than a hundred people lived in the building and Dean feared that a bomb would kill children and innocent bystanders. He had two kids of his own and he loved them. He also preferred not to shoot Sugar in public. The idea was to escape, not leave a trail of witnesses. He needed to choose his moment carefully, he told his legion bosses.

Masquerading as prospective clients, Sugar’s enemies tried repeatedly to lure him from his law office. Forceful and confident, Sugar couldn’t be scared easily. His labor battles had hardened him. Still he took precautions. He refused to meet any unknown clients outside his office in the Barlum Tower. From his window Sugar could see into the rooms of a neighboring hotel. He figured the occupants could see him as well. Concerned that one of his enemies would have a clear shot, Sugar moved to a less prominent office.

Sugar advertised on the radio to spread his campaign message. He bought ten minutes of time during the WEXL Polish Hour. “The automobile manufacturers of this city are making tremendous profits,” he said. “In 1933 General Motors’ profits were $84 million. In 1934 their profits were $95 million. And already for the first nine months of 1935, their profits have risen to the tremendous total of $114 million. . . . While the working people are in poverty and suffering, big business is making greater and greater profits.” On the more substantial WJR station he blasted officials who denigrated those seeking relief. “I say that the unemployed of this city are entitled to relief—adequate relief—and not as an act of charity, either. And they’re entitled to get relief without standing in line for six or seven hours, too.”

Sugar’s big publicity coup came when he debated Upton Sinclair, author of
The Jungle
and numerous other works, who a year earlier had finished second in the California governor’s race. A longtime socialist, Sinclair had switched to the Democratic party for that election, advocating for his End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform. On a Sunday afternoon, two days before the Detroit election, Sinclair appeared in the city for a debate with Sugar: “America’s Way Out—EPIC or Labor Party?”

Six thousand people, most aligned with Sugar, labor, or leftist parties, packed the Naval Armory along Jefferson Avenue. Two thousand people couldn’t get through the doors. The audience booed Sinclair repeatedly. They booed when he blamed the communists for abetting the rise of Hitler in Germany. They booed when he endorsed Roosevelt for reelection, saying that the only other choice would be a “reactionary Republican.” They booed when he said that those who “denounce and ridicule procedure under our Constitution, as has been done in this hall today, and . . . breathe violence and threats” were opening the door for fascism.

The audience cheered when Sugar rebutted him. “Upton Sinclair still loves Roosevelt,” Sugar said. He continued by parodying a popular folk song.
“Oh, Frankie and Uppie were lovers,”
he sang. The audience roared. “Mr. Sinclair, you lovely man, you have been seduced by the demagogy of the New Deal and Roosevelt, the demagogue whose demagogy has not been matched in decades.”