The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (49 page)

Near eleven, Mayor Smith emerged and shouted his appeal. A pamphlet printed locally soon after the riot described the next several minutes:

The crowd surged toward the mayor. He fought them. One man hit the mayor on the head with a baseball bat. Another slipped the noose of a rope around his neck. The crowd started to drag him away.

“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me,” the mayor gasped.…

He was carried to Sixteenth and Harney Streets. There he was hanged to a metal arm of a traffic signal tower.

Mayor Smith’s body was suspended in the air when State Agent Ben Danbaum drove a high-powered automobile into the throng right to the base of the signal tower. In the car with Danbaum were City Detectives Al Anderson, Charles Van Deusen and Lloyd Toland. They grasped the mayor’s body. Russell Norgard, 3719 Leavenworth Street, untied the noose. The detectives brought the mayor to Ford Hospital. There he lingered between life and death for several days, finally recovering.

It was the same basic American scene that
Young Mr. Lincoln
would, twenty years later, seek to mythify and make right. But that was Springfield, 1839, in the sheltering darkness of fable. In Omaha, 1919, in the real American night, nothing worked out that way.

*   *   *

No utterance is attributed to Will Brown in any account of the Omaha riot, save one. To the sheriff, he is supposed to have shouted: “I am innocent, I never did it, my God I am innocent.”

The police herded well over a hundred shackled prisoners—male and female, white and black—to the roof, which gave threat of collapsing. There the police decided on their last resort. The females were allowed to exit the courthouse safely, but the males were told to get ready to run. Led by the cops, they charged down the stairs and were met by the mob. The consensus account is that the prisoners, not the police, were responsible for the final surrender of the victim.

Will Brown was stripped and beaten—castrated as well, one historian claims, and there is no particular reason to disbelieve it. He was then dragged down the stairs to the south entrance. There his hands were tied and he was beaten further. He may have been dead even before the rope went around his neck.

Men scaled a ladder to the top of a lamppost at the intersection of Eighteenth and Harney. The other end of the rope was thrown over, and those on the sidewalk grabbed it and pulled. Will Brown’s body flew skyward, and as it spun, shooters riddled it with bullets. It was then tied to the rear of a car and dragged with raucous ceremony for four blocks, to the corner of Seventeenth and Dodge. A bonfire was built, and the body thrown on top. As it blackened to char, photographs were taken, men and boys jostling for position, their faces aglow in the flames.

Eventually, the burned thing was again tied to a car and dragged through the downtown streets. No record reveals what then became of it—where its parts were found, who disposed of them and how.

By “it,” we refer to the body, not the man. Will Brown was long gone.

*   *   *

Lt. Col. Jacob Wuest, commander of nearby Fort Omaha, belatedly dispatched over two hundred army troops. One company was stationed at the hanging corner, and another at the center of “Colored Town,” Omaha’s black community. The next day, the city was placed under martial law. Whites were told they would be arrested if found with guns; blacks were simply ordered not to leave their homes.

In a joint investigation by army and city officials, over one hundred men were charged with crimes ranging from disturbing the peace to murder. The investigation quickly focused on a plausible set of local suspects—among them, the brother and friends of Agnes Loebeck. In November, a grand jury blamed “a certain Omaha newspaper” for its smear campaign against the Smith administration, and asserted that the riot was “premeditated and planned.” Lt. Col. Wuest’s superior, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, likewise concluded that accountability rested with “‘the old criminal gang’ … and one newspaper.”

Not one of the grand jury’s 120 indictments was acted upon. According to an Omaha railway official quoted in the
New York Times,
two thousand blacks fled the city by train within days of the riot. Ed Smith ran in the next election, holding to his reform principles; opposing him was Cowboy Jim Dahlman. Invoking the courthouse siege as proof of Smith’s unfitness to lead, Dahlman regained the mayor’s office, holding it until his death in 1930. Smith died the same year, having retired from public life. Tom Dennison passed on four years later, wealthy and feted throughout the state.

With the Omaha lynching, the lid was off populist racism in Nebraska. In 1921, the state’s first Klan klavern was founded in Lincoln, and within two years, the KKK was active not just in the capital city but also in Omaha, Fremont, York, Grand Island, Hastings, North Platte, and Scotts Bluff.

*   *   *

In the years before his death, Henry Fonda’s witnessing of Will Brown’s lynching is regularly adumbrated in interviews and feature stories. It becomes a part of his template biography, along with the heartland boyhood, heroic roles, suicidal wife, and controversial offspring. Henry tells the story in his autobiography, and in the late Grobel interview. The lynching is invariably cited in obituaries, and after he is gone, both Peter and Jane reference it as a key to their father’s concern for social justice.

But Fonda seems not to have spoken publicly about the event before 1974, when he mentions it in connection with
Clarence Darrow
—which begins with a similar anecdote from the life of its subject. He describes it most fully on November 1, 1975, as a guest on Norman Parkinson’s BBC chat show during the London run of the Darrow play.

Parkinson runs a clip: the lynch mob scene from
Young Mr. Lincoln.
He suggests the scene might have been especially meaningful to Fonda: Didn’t he himself watch, as a child, a man being lynched?

Fonda says yes, he did, and begins to tell the story. His father had come home after a day at the printing office, and told his family about the mob that was growing at the center of town.

After supper he put me in the car with him, and we drove back downtown. And it was very unusual for me for my dad to be taking me, at my age, and turning lights on and unlocking doors and going up the stairs.… It’s not like doing it in the daytime. I remember those physical things and walking across this empty office to a window that overlooked the courthouse square. This was where the riot was happening.

My father never talked about it. He never preached about it. We both just were observers. And I watched an out-of-control mob of several hundred men … drag a young black boy out of the jail in the courthouse. Overpowered the sheriff to get him out. Strung him up on a lamppost. Riddled him with bullets. Dragged him around back of a car, something like that. The
mayor
 … they damn near lynched the
mayor.
That’s how out of control these … these bastards can get, you know.

Fonda returns to the scene in the Lincoln film. He wonders, as Lincoln had, how men who read the Bible, who were raised on Christ and pretend fealty to the highest morality, could commit such acts. Still there is no answer. Only the question; only the memory of the question.

“I’ll never forget it,” Henry says.

His father has imprinted him with a memory the weight of which will be his lifelong gift and burden. The darkness, the quiet, the odd sense of ceremony, an approach both solemn and ordinary: climbing stairs, unlocking a door. Something is opening before him in the dark. The boy is admitted to knowledge, knowledge he can never not remember, knowledge as horrible as any there is: Mobs kill, people disappear, and there is murder in the American night.

*   *   *

Parkinson asks Fonda why his father would have made him witness such a thing.

“He never told me,” Fonda replies, “but I would like to think he realized it would be a lesson. I had to grow up and move away from Omaha to appreciate that my father was a liberal Democrat in a hotbed of Republican reactionaries. That’s Omaha. And Nebraska still is. That’s another reason I feel you’re lucky to have the parents—”

Fonda stops, inarticulate when speaking of himself, and as himself. He shifts to the skin of his character, and, as he has always done, lets his character speak for him.

“Clarence Darrow says it in this play. He was brought up right.”

*   *   *

What Fonda never said, though he probably knew it, was that Will Brown’s was not the first lynching at the Douglas County Courthouse. In October 1891, a five-year-old white girl claimed she was molested by a black man named George Smith. A mob formed. The sheriff was abducted and restrained. Smith was removed from the jail, beaten, dragged, and hanged from a trolley wire at the corner of Seventeenth and Harney—at which point, a newspaper report claims, “a shout from ten thousand throats rent the air.”

The lynching of Will Brown twenty-eight years later, eerily similar in outline, was the return of a hell with which Omahans were familiar. William Fonda would have been a boy of twelve when George Smith was killed. Did he see it? Was he made to see it by his father? Might Grandpa Nike and young William even have been among the mob?

Such questions are pebbles down the deepest well: We let them fall without hope of hearing the answer. But something happened to make Henry’s father “a liberal Democrat in a hotbed of Republican reactionaries,” and we can be certain that William Fonda was thinking of the past as well as the present when he took Henry downtown, mounted dark stairs, unlocked an empty room, went to a window, and made his son witness the inevitable in silence.

*   *   *

It is important to understand, or at least imagine, how the Will Brown lynching affected Fonda. This is why it has been recounted in detail, and why we have avoided countenancing it until now. The event is a specific outrage, a unique obscenity, but it also implies—or seems to—much about the man whose life and work we have traced.

It suggests the seeds of so much sorrow, anger, and solitude in Fonda. It justifies his distrust of patriotic rhetoric, and his certainty that democracy was fearsome in the hands of mendacious men and bigoted mobs. It explains his projection of himself into lynching scenarios, whether as savior, victim, or finally villain, and his insistence on memories, ghosts, and obligations. It traces his own hiddenness to that of his father, and his own fine, deep, natural silence to the silence of a dark room, a night of fear, and an act of witnessing.

We may postulate at length about what the lynching symbolizes. But Will Brown was not a symbol, and against the facts of his murder, postulations matter very little. Yet we hope to take
something
when we go—if only an idea. Thus, the thought that the story of the lynching would explain not just how Will Brown died but how Henry Fonda lived. That, like fire in the night, it would illuminate men’s faces.

But here is the twist: It won’t. At most it is a context, a history, a memory. All we may claim is that it happened, and all we may justifiably imagine is that a boy witnessed it, remembered it, and carried it with him through all the years of a long, difficult, meaningful, magnificent American life—until he too was dead, his bones burned, his body released from all pain, all memory, ashes to ashes.

Epilogue

Douw Jellis Fonda’s tombstone. Caunawagha Cemetery, Fonda, New York.

History can be measured in many ways. Here are two:

Not long after this book was begun, Henry Fonda turned 100. The centenary was honored by the United States Postal Service, which made Fonda the subject of the eleventh stamp in its Legends of Hollywood series. A press release was issued, summing up the actor’s significance in terms that had for decades comprised his standard tribute.

Henry Fonda typically played thoughtful men of integrity, and was indelibly associated with the American characters he portrayed, among them young Abe Lincoln, lawyer Clarence Darrow, marshal Wyatt Earp and, in what many consider his finest performance, the dispossessed farmer Tom Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath.
As an actor, Fonda was noted for his seeming naturalness and ease, an illusion he worked hard to convey, and his distinctively flat Midwestern accent.

Someone labored over that paragraph, trying to truthfully summarize a life and its meanings in a space too small to breathe in. The attempt has honor, if not elegance. Combine it with the stamp itself—a nice lifelike painting of Fonda circa 1941, looking right at you, as handsome as Hopsie in a blue suit and tie—and you have one measure of history: an official measure, declared in civil tongue and placed in the civic space. It is meant for the museum, the time capsule, the permanent record, and so is made with permanence in mind. It may be polite and evasive, but within its limits it is not false.

In upstate New York, where Fonda’s ancestors settled after fleeing Europe, there’s a cemetery in the small town that was named for the family. No sign heralds it; the town itself, one in a long line of off-thruway villages damaged by recession, can appear, on some days, all but empty. Yet the cemetery, dominated by trees taller than any in dreams, looks down from the top of a hill on mountain valleys to the south, farm fields to the west, and damned if it isn’t a living place.