Terror in the City of Champions (33 page)

Sinclair chided Sugar and the gathered masses. “I’m sorry for the state of the brains of some of you people who cheer my opponent,” he said. “If and when Mr. Sugar polls 879,000 votes in Michigan, as I did in California, I’ll grant him the right to criticize working within Constitutional frameworks and in a Democratic fashion.”

Among the audience were spies—opponents of Sugar, likely Black Legion members. They left behind a new batch of fake campaign literature. “Vote for Comrade Sugar who . . . will aid in making the revolution. . . . Comrade Sugar has come out definitely against the church. . . . Down with religion. . . . There is no god.”

Using the flyer as justification, Col. Heinrich Pickert’s Detroit police raided communist party headquarters on Fourteenth Street the next morning. The building was a few doors from
The
Daily Worker
. Police arrested several party officials. They told journalists that they had found the (counterfeited) pro-Sugar literature at the office. One paper included a story in that day’s pre-election issue. S
EIZE
S
UGAR
L
ITERATURE
, read the headline. “On the walls were pictures of Lenin, Trotsky, Tom Mooney, and Sugar,” said the story. “Other placards bore the slogan, ‘Every factory a fortress of communism.’ ” Sugar protested, “It’s a last-minute move on the part of interests that want to defeat me.” On election day the papers noted that Sugar had been absolved. “There was nothing of an incriminating nature,” one story stated. But the damage had already been done. Sugar lost the election by 12,000 votes, finishing tenth. The top nine vote getters won council seats.

The Black Legion’s interest in Sugar waned but didn’t expire after the election. Dayton Dean, who had been dividing time between the state headquarters and two legion regiments, got transferred full-time into Harvey Davis’s command. One night in a nearby meeting hall, Davis asked Dean if he’d like to make an easy hundred or two hundred bucks by killing Ecorse mayor Bill Voisine. Dean said he would. He didn’t feel it was actually a question, but a directive with financial benefits.

The bombing of Mayor Bill Voisine’s Ecorse home and the burning of the communist camp in Farmington Hills were not anomalies. The Black Legion had an arson squad and it used gas and kerosene-like naphtha to torch buildings. The legion also deployed dynamite and black-powder explosives. Dean himself had hurled bombs at a house of prostitution and at “black and tan” clubs where the races mixed.

Suspected communists provided a favorite target. In Berkley, Michigan, near Father Coughlin’s Shrine of the Little Flower, the legion set a fire that destroyed a picture frame store where radicals met. In Detroit the Modern Book Shop along Woodward, with its selection of revolutionary literature, endured a daytime back-door bombing that damaged stock, busted windows, and terrified children at the dance school next door. Eight months after a communist party office was hit, a second office, near Belle Isle, was bombed. The reaction of the police reinforced Col. Pickert’s reputation. Police pulled party members’ names from the carnage and investigated those individuals. One communist fumed, “One of our party sections is bombed in the dark of the night and the Detroit Police instead of hunting for the outrageous perpetrators of this crime are endeavoring to prosecute the victims.” In Highland Park, blocks from the home of a legion officer, Hazelwood Cleaners, a workers’ center, bore the impact of heavy explosives, which also blew out the windows of neighborhood homes. In Warren a Ukrainian Education Center was bombed, and in Royal Oak, a socialist hall. The legion also opposed a strike at Motor Products Company, damaging a UAW local and the homes of five picketing workers.

When he resided near the State Fair Grounds, Dayton Dean had gotten to know his neighbors. He was in charge of recruiting a northern section of the city. He took particular interest in John George Quindt Jr., a nineteen-year-old who lived a block over. Dean entertained the young man with self-aggrandizing stories of his days in the Navy: how he had fired shots during the race riot in Washington and how he had crewed for President Woodrow Wilson aboard the
Mayflower
, which had seen action in the Spanish-American War before becoming a presidential yacht.

One evening Dean convinced Quindt to go with him to the meeting of a patriotic organization. In a house in Highland Park Quindt took the Black Oath at gunpoint. The experience frightened him. Quindt wasn’t new to guns. His father had been taking him on hunting trips since he was a boy. He could handle a shotgun and both he and his dad had belonged to a shooting club before his father started the Wayne County Rifle and Pistol Club. It was Quindt’s father-son shooting trips and the rifle club that interested Dean most.

The Rifle and Pistol Club met on Mondays for target practice at Eppinger Sporting Goods in Cadillac Square. The store was a few doors from Sugar’s office in the Barlum Tower. It had a gun range on the fourth floor. Many clubs used it. Dean joined the rifle club. He was followed by state commander Arthur Lupp, Col. Wilbur Robinson, and a few dozen other legionnaires. The older Quindt, a Russian immigrant, must have wondered about his good fortune. How were all these men hearing of his club? His son had not told him about being forced into the Black Legion or about Dean hounding him to attend meetings. Junior kept the pledge of secrecy and went to occasional gatherings, including a major barbeque in the Irish Hills region where four hundred legionnaires watched one hundred men be inducted. “If you’d ever been to a meeting and seen all the guns, you’d understand why everyone who was forced into the outfit was terrified,” Junior said.

Was it possible to refuse the Black Legion? Some men heard word of the secret society and successfully dodged membership by repeatedly declining invitations from persistent friends. Some even faced down the legion. In Vassar, where Dayton Dean was born and still visited family, a meat cutter at Economy Market spurned two local men who approached him several times. When they threatened him, asking what he would do if a gang of armed men showed up at his house and forced him to join, he fought back. “I told them that I had a gun in the house and that at least six of them would have to be carried out,” he said.

In June 1934 legion members had organized a patriotic gathering at the VFW hall in Sandusky, a town in the thumb of Michigan. Without revealing their identity, the recruiters invited VFW and American Legion members to attend a meeting. Organizers envisioned forming a new unit of men with military experience. Sixteen ex-servicemen showed up. The armed legionnaires began their usual procedure, adding the names of the prospects to the fake insurance cards. But before they got far the Sandusky men began peppering them with questions. They refused to accept the vague platitudes about Americanism and pushed for answers. Unimpressed, they demanded their cards be returned. This time the Black Legion relented. No Black Oaths were sworn. The legion left town.

The Rev. Ralph C. Montague, a minister at the Baptist church in Rives Junction, a dozen miles north of Jackson Prison, had been asked repeatedly by a parishioner’s husband to attend a meeting of good Americans. Montague, forty-five years old, had served in France with the 328th Field Artillery Battalion in the Great War. He loved his country and considered himself a patriot. After repeatedly declining, he relented and out of kindness and curiosity accompanied the man on a fifty-minute drive to a field near Norvell. It was nighttime and dozens of cars were parked there. When Montague spotted men in black robes, he was amused at first. Tomfoolery, he thought.

Montague had studied at Michigan State College before the war and at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for two years afterward. Described as “outspoken” and “square-jawed,” Montague wasn’t anyone’s dupe. From where he stood in the field he couldn’t clearly hear the speech being delivered. But he could tell that the man delivering it was angry.

Finding himself in a line with fourteen other recruits, Montague listened as the robed men asked their usual questions. Their demeanor and their guns temporarily filled him with fear and he responded by answering “yes” to their questions. Yes, he was willing to kill if ordered to do so. When they began reciting the oath, Montague hesitated. He kept quiet as others repeated the words. A legionnaire noticed his unmoving lips and questioned his defiance. Montague felt emboldened and spoke his mind. He told them the ceremony was “despicable and un-American.” He told them they ought to be ashamed. When one legionnaire argued with him, Montague, a minister since 1928, accused him of misquoting the Bible. He told the crowd that the ceremony was un-Christian. One man argued that legion members were God-fearing men. Several shouted threats. A salesman from Jackson pointed a gun at Montague.

“String him up,” someone hollered.

Another peppered him with profanities.

“Don’t swear at me,” Montague said. “I’m a minister of the gospel.”

“You know too much about our organization now,” a leader replied. “You’ve got to join.”

He wouldn’t, Montague said. “I’ve taught the gospel of God, and if you’re going to kill me, I’m prepared to die,” he said.

Perplexed by his defiance, Black Legion leaders talked privately about what to do with him. Finally he was loaded into a car and driven away. They released him unharmed.

The other recruits didn’t immediately know what had become of him.

Uncle Frank

On the crisp morning of Wednesday, November 13, Frank and Grace Navin headed out to the Detroit Riding and Hunt Club, as they had been doing for thirteen years. Both had been horse lovers before they met. Their mutual passion was one thing they found attractive in each other. In her earlier days Grace, thirteen years his junior, had been a competitive rider, participating sidesaddle in dressage and jumping exhibitions. They still frequented horse events and owned a small horse farm in Kentucky. The Navins typically rode at the Detroit grounds three times weekly, though Frank had not been there since late October. He had once served as president and director of the club, located about six and a half miles from their home. The facility’s paths wound through a wooded and pastoral landscape in northwest Detroit along Seven Mile near Wyoming and Meyer Roads. The rustic landscape had seen development in recent years. The new campus of the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, with its red clay mission roof and imposing, four-story front, had risen nearby.

At the stables Grace mounted her horse and set off on a mile-long trek. Frank liked to ride by himself. He preferred a leisurely pace and enjoyed solitude. Feeling tight and tired, he asked groom Elie Lukin to boost him on to Masquerader, his favorite of the two horses he kept there. He had been riding Masquerader for a decade. The horse had a gentle demeanor, but its unusual gait made for a bumpy ride that Navin appreciated as “good for my liver.” He had difficulty getting on the horse that morning.