Never Been a Time (14 page)

A former member of the St. Clair County Board of Supervisors, Bundy was the proud—even at times prideful—son of a prominent black family in
Cleveland. In his mid-thirties, hard working, and ambitious, he invested money from his dental practice in a small car dealership, a gas station, and an auto repair shop. He was outspoken and sometimes argumentative in his support of full equal rights for blacks. He was the sort of “New Negro” resented by many whites. The
Chicago Defender
described him as a “natural” leader whom “the ordinary fellow looks to for guidance.”
²⁰

Bundy was arrested in Chicago and held for questioning on allegations that he had masterminded at least three hundred illegal registrations in four predominantly black wards of that city's south and west sides. He was soon released for lack of evidence, and the charges eventually died away, but the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
played the report of Bundy's arrest as the turn story at the top of the right-hand column of the front page, the most prominent location in the paper. Below the Bundy report, in a secondary position, was a story headlined, HEAD OF MURDERED BOY FOUND IN DUMP. In the most horrific crime in years, a three-year-old boy had been kidnapped and beheaded by East St. Louis gangsters. The body and head were found in separate locations. The victim was white. So were the kidnappers.
²¹

Two weeks before the November election, Wilson's Justice Department announced that it was launching investigations into voting fraud in Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. The announcement was vague, but there was little doubt in the minds of Republicans that the principal targets were thousands of newly registered black voters in those three swing states. Four days later, the chairman of the Republican National Committee struck back, charging that the Democrats were trying to frighten black voters by false charges of colonization and by challenging the right to vote of thousands of legitimate black voters in cities like East St. Louis. He announced, “A bold attempt to disenfranchise Negro voters in the North as well as in the South is the latest scheme of the Wilson campaign managers.” He further noted that the conspiracy, although clearly illegal, was proceeding without interference from Democratic federal prosecutors, who were interested only in Republican crimes.
²²

Woodrow Wilson won a narrow victory on November 7, carrying the South and the West while losing almost all of the Northeast and the North Central states. His victory was greeted in Washington with rebel yells. Wilson took St. Clair County by a few hundred votes, although his defeated Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, carried the state of Illinois. The
Democratic machine kept all its seats on the East Side Levee and Sanitation Board, with its hundreds of thousands of dollars in county, state, and federal flood-control funds sitting in interest-free accounts in politically favored banks. Democratic mayor Fred Mollman was safe—he would not be up for reelection until the spring of 1917. And the powerful local congressman William Rodenberg, closely aligned with the East St. Louis political machine, won reelection. Rodenberg was a Republican, but that really didn't matter. At the end of the day, the politicians from both parties in East St. Louis would get together and carve up the pie once again.

A couple of weeks before the election, to insure the machine candidates got the church vote, Mollman and police chief Payne had closed a few shady establishments. Immediately after the election, those barrel houses, juke joints, and brothels reopened, and a full panoply of whores went back to work in time for the victory celebrations.
²³

After the election, it became clear that Democratic charges of thousands of illegal black voters in southern Illinois—and as many as three hundred thousand nationwide, according to Wilson's attorney general—had been grossly exaggerated. The November 1916 election in East St. Louis seems to have been no more dishonest than usual, perhaps ironically in part because all the lies and false rumors on the front pages of newspapers alerted poll watchers of both parties and both races. After all the furor and all the challenges, the bipartisan Board of Election Commissioners ended up striking only 86 blacks from the registration rolls.
²⁴

Mayor Mollman himself, a Democrat with significant black support, later made peace within the bipartisan machine by downplaying his party's inflammatory preelection charges that Republicans had “imported” thousands of black voters to southern Illinois. What the Republicans actually did, he said, was work hard to register those blacks who had already established residency. As for the newcomers, most of them came looking for work but “in numbers larger than could be utilized,” he said, in what may have been his first public hint that some of the employment practices of the local captains of industry might be problematic in the long term.
²⁵

Be that as it may, the repeated charges of “Negro colonization” in the weeks leading up to the election strengthened the feeling of many East St. Louis whites that their community was under siege by thousands of blacks who were up to no good.

On the first Sunday of 1917, prodded by a disapproving visit from stiff-necked federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis of Chicago, East St. Louis mayor Fred Mollman and police chief Ransom Payne began enforcing the ban on Sunday drinking. What's more, Mollman closed down completely, if not permanently, about fifty of the city's more notorious saloons. More than half of those saloons happened to be places with predominantly black patrons, which could have presented the mayor with a potential problem. Angry black voters and politically powerful black saloon owners might turn against him, and he had an election against a “good government” candidate coming up in three months. But he had tried to fix that.
¹

Prior to the closings, Mollman had a quiet chat with a politically well-connected black lawyer named Noah W. Parden, and Parden passed the message on to his constituents in the alcoholic beverage, numbers, and prostitution trades, men with such names as Hophead Nelson, Red-shirt Frank, Alabama Jack, Seven Hundred Dollar Jimmie, and Long Tom Lewis. If the crucial black vote went to Mollman and he was reelected in April, Parden explained, things would “loosen up” after the election—and maybe even before then, if the saloonkeepers would keep their patrons from overt acts of criminality in the immediate vicinity of certain drinking establishments.
²

On February 15, the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
aroused its readers with a front-page story headlined, NEGRO BRUTE SEIZES WHITE GIRL OF 19. (The girl was unharmed; the “brute” she said had grabbed her could not be found.) Four days later the three-hour epic movie
The Birth of a Nation
—which had swept through much of the country two years before, triggering small riots,
Klan marches, and sporadic picketing by the NAACP—finally opened for a three-day run at the Majestic theater in downtown East St. Louis. The theater was packed with families. Twice a day, a few blocks from black neighborhoods, the flickering white knights of a Klan-like army rescued Southern damsels on screen from the paws of blacks who, to movie patrons, resembled those men hanging around downtown in ever-increasing numbers, some of them actually sitting next to white women on the streetcar.
³

Robert Abbott of the
Chicago Defender
, relentless promoter of black migration to the North, outdid himself in 1917 with an extravaganza of ballyhoo called the Great Northern Drive. This mass exodus of the South was set to begin on Thursday, May 15, but the
Defender
began promoting it months ahead of time, and many thousands of readers in the South were so excited about the prospects of life in what Abbott's paper referred to as the “Promised Land” that they couldn't wait. All winter the paper was full of reports of blacks leaving Tampa, Jackson, Huntsville, Birmingham, and dozens of other Southern locales, heading for points north. As the spring of 1917 and the official date of the Great Northern Drive approached, the weekly paper promoted migration even more intently, urging its hundreds of thousands of black readers to “Leave to all quarters of the globe. Get out of the South.” Week after week, articles promoted the drive it characterized as the “Flight out of Egypt.”

The movement succeeded beyond even Abbott's grandiose expectations. The white South watched in dismay as train after train packed with its former farmhands and mill workers headed North, leaving fields fallow or un-harvested, looms still, and band saws silent. “The loss of her best labor is another penalty Georgia is paying for her indifference in suppressing mob law,” opined the
Atlanta Constitution
, noting that the heaviest migration came from “those counties in which there have been the worst outbreaks against Negroes.” Public officials used legal subterfuges to sidetrack trains for days and even resorted to inducing black preachers to plead with men and women waiting in stations with segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains for trains to Chicago or St. Louis. Things would be better, they promised. Stay.

TURN A DEAF EAR, responded the
Defender
. “You see they are not lifting
their laws to help you. Are they? Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars? Can you buy a Pullman sleeper where you wish? Will they give you a square deal in court yet? … Turn a deaf ear to the scoundrel, and let him stay. Above all, see to it that that jumping jack preacher is left in the South, for he means you no good here in the North.”

A poem arrived anonymously from the South, fifteen stanzas long, and Abbott printed—and reprinted—the whole thing. A sample stanza read:

 

Why should I remain longer south
To be kicked and dogged around?
Crackers to knock me in the mouth
And shoot my brother down.
I would rather the cold to snatch my breath
And die from natural cause
Than to stay down south and be beat to death
Under cracker laws.
⁴

 

MILLIONS TO LEAVE SOUTH! roared a headline in the
Defender
. GOOD-BYE, DIXIE LAND exulted another.
⁵

 

In early March of 1917, Missouri Malleable Iron Company, a large East St. Louis employer, added to the exodus by placing help-wanted ads in regional newspapers in four towns with large black populations—Vicksburg, Nashville, Memphis, and Cairo, at the lower tip of Illinois. One ad read, “Colored Labor for Foundry Work … wages $2 to $2.60 a day. Can earn $3 to $3.50 piecework. Steady work for steady men.”
⁶

There were no ads for black skilled workers.

By then, many of the illegal saloons and gambling joints and bookmaking parlors that had been closed were open again. Mayor Mollman was trying to maintain a very tricky juggling act, keeping the church vote in one hand while the other was supporting illegal activity, which for many St. Louisans, black and white, was the only economic activity available.

Layoffs at the Aluminum Ore plant continued into the early spring. On March 19, labor leaders would later charge, plant superintendent C. B. Fox and other executives of the aluminum plant met in secret with streetcar company
officials and other potential employers to plan a joint campaign to lure another fifteen hundred unskilled Southern black workers to East St. Louis with extravagant promises. Fox denied that such a meeting had taken place. In any event, waves of young black men continued to arrive at the train station with empty pockets and, as the blues singers put it, “a matchbox for their clothes.” Some of the untrained black men, the lucky few, got low-paying jobs replacing experienced, better-paid white men at the Aluminum Ore plant. Others ended up on the streets.
⁷

In National City, by the spring of 1917, membership in the meatcutters' union had dwindled from several thousand to several dozen. Management had intimidated most workers into avoiding the union by openly firing strikers and then, week by week, getting rid of anyone who merely spoke up for the union and replacing him with a black man. Workers were angry and frustrated, and they placed much of the blame on blacks. Although earlier labor actions against meat plants had included a significant number of blacks—the leader of the union at a smaller plant in one strike had been an African American meat cutter—by the end of 1916 nonunion strikebreakers, most of them black, had replaced about twenty-five hundred low-level white meatpacking workers. Blacks made up about 40 percent of the meatpacking work force, up from 15 percent a few years earlier. Most of the men who had been replaced in the filthy, backbreaking lower-level jobs at the meat plants were from the recent wave of immigrants to East St. Louis—Austrians, Poles, Russians, Bohemians, Greeks, Turks, and Armenians. The Irish and the Germans who had come earlier, at least those that still had jobs, had moved up the ladder into more skilled positions.
⁸

Thousands of cows, hogs, and sheep were slaughtered every day in the swampy bottomlands of the National City stockyards, at 640 acres a third again as large as the Chicago yards. The stink of death and rot and animal waste spread south across St. Clair Avenue into downtown East St. Louis until it permeated the air. About 8 percent of the men in East St. Louis with jobs worked in the stockyards and the slaughterhouses. Men in the slaughterhouses, Upton Sinclair wrote in
The Jungle
, his 1904 exposé of the Chicago stockyards, “worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run,” wading through blood as fast as they could move their legs.
⁹

Although most of the work to be had in and around the city—in the steel and aluminum mills, in the oil refineries, in the rail yards, and in
the chemical plants—involved hard physical labor in dirty, dangerous surroundings over long hours for low pay, working in the meatpacking plants was particularly dehumanizing work, in which mass killing quickly became either unbearable or routine. The slaughterhouses were at their worst in the summer, when, Sinclair wrote, the killing beds “became a very purgatory”: