Terror in the City of Champions (2 page)

And it was at a family gathering that I first heard of the Black Legion. Clements Maximilian Stone was the eldest of my father’s nine siblings, one of several who changed his last name from Stankiewicz. On a summer evening in 1936, Clem was walking near Hastings Street in Detroit’s black district with his brother Bucky and two friends. They were white, left-leaning, aspiring writers and artists in their early twenties. Their presence in jazzy Paradise Valley spoke to their progressive nature, their sense of adventure, and, likely, their desire to score reefer. As they made their way down a side street, a car carrying two men slowed beside them. A white man in the driver’s seat asked why they were in the neighborhood.

“What’s it to you?” said Bucky, feisty and fierce.

“You don’t belong here,” the guy answered.

In Uncle Clem’s retelling, Bucky tensed his meaty biceps, raised his bulldog shoulders, and stepped toward the car.

“Who the hell are you?” he snapped.

The driver flashed a police badge. Bucky, already a veteran of several protest marches, had heard rumors of activists being abducted and killed. He didn’t believe the men were actually cops—they were in street clothes and their car was unmarked—so he barked out a challenge. The two men pulled revolvers and ordered the four into the backseat. As the car sped off, Clem imagined the two gunmen to be Black Legion night riders. Clem thought he and his comrades were heading to a bloody end. Instead, they wound up at a police precinct, where they spent a night in jail, angry but relieved to have not encountered the Black Legion’s infamous thugs. In his 1970s recitation my uncle provided only the vaguest sense of the organization, enough to intrigue but not terrify an eleven-year-old.

Most of my uncles died years back. In the seasons that followed, while researching other books, I would occasionally stumble upon references to the Black Legion and the true, horrific, nonromanticized, adult version of the secret society would come into focus. With tens of thousands of members across the Midwest, the legion harbored grand, sinister ambitions.

Its eventual exposure—and the revelation that its tentacles reached into police forces, court systems, and elected offices—spawned hysteria. Neighbors turned on neighbors. Officials selectively purged public payrolls of accused members. Terrified citizens flooded J. Edgar Hoover with demands for action. For months the legion dominated page one, even prompting a Humphrey Bogart movie.

The rise and fall of the Black Legion paralleled, intersected, and overlapped that of the City of Champions. One of Detroit’s darkest hours became entangled with one of its grandest. Much of this story has faded into history, passing with the men and women who lived it. Some of it has never been told until now.

Tom Stanton

P
ART
I
:
S
OMETHING
A
FOOT

1933–1934

Mickey and Dayton

Mickey Cochrane stepped off the train into the night air at Michigan Central and grinned for the press photographers. As he removed his fedora, he revealed the two physical features everyone always noticed about him: his helmet of brilliant black hair, dark as coal smoke and glimmering like obsidian in the camera flash, and his protruding ears, which over the years had been compared to a mule’s and a dairy cow’s and to the handles of a milk jug and a sugar bowl, and had been said to be so large that they could cast a shadow over Philadelphia’s Shibe Park.

Cochrane looked older than thirty. It might have been his decade as a catcher, baseball’s most physically demanding position, with games spent crouching behind a mask, or maybe his days as a boxer at Boston University, where as 160-pound “Kid” Cochrane he absorbed punches from true heavyweights. His fiery nature—the burning competitiveness, the flaming anger—also might have aged him. Cochrane wore his intensity on his prematurely creased face. It smoldered in his eyes, which columnist Jimmy Powers of the
New York Daily News
described as a window into “a soul of torment.” It was Cochrane’s forceful temperament, steeped in his success with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics—two World Series championships, three pennants, six seasons of ninety or more wins—that earlier in the week had prompted Detroit Tigers owner Frank Navin to acquire him as manager. Mickey Cochrane was a winner, and Navin needed desperately to win.

The rousing, heroic story of Gordon Stanley Cochrane—only his parents called him by his given name; fans knew him as Mickey, friends and teammates as Mike or Black Mike, for his moods—was familiar to every baseball-obsessed kid in America. He grew up outside Boston in the small town of Bridgewater; aspired to be an Olympic runner, sprinting, frightened, past rural cemeteries late at night; loved to hunt and fish; studied hard; earned a partial scholarship to Boston University; through vigor and zeal became the star of the football team, practicing beside the rail yards; demonstrated flashes of valiance in day-to-day life (rescuing a teen who had fallen through ice, for one example); chose baseball against all odds; through more vigor and zeal learned to be a catcher; rose to the position with Philadelphia at age twenty-two; drove his team to victory; and worked furiously until he became the game’s best, winning the Most Valuable Player Award at twenty-five and being selected three years on for a baseball tour of Japan with Lou Gehrig and other luminaries. And as if all that weren’t enough, Cochrane liked to sing, played saxophone in jazz bands, dressed about as fashionably as anyone in the game, and, being a good sport, had even tried his hand at Shakespearean acting.

As he headed into the grand vaulted lobby of the train station, Cochrane exuded an optimism that defied the reality of life in Detroit. It was a Thursday evening, December 14, 1933, within the final weeks of a dreary year. Outside, the temperature hovered in the teens. Two inches of snow covered Theodore Roosevelt Park. The Great Depression had devastated the whole nation, but Detroit had suffered more than most. The year had brought bank panics and closures, unemployment of 45 percent, winding food lines, burgeoning public-relief rolls, and severe wage cuts for surviving auto workers. Car sales fell by four million units between 1929 and 1932. Almost half the city’s population qualified for assistance, limited as it was.

In rough times Detroiters had often found comfort in their sports teams. But in 1933 no one had found solace in the Tigers. They had finished in fifth place, twenty-five games out, closer to the bottom than to the top. The Tigers—the papers had taken to calling them Kittens—hadn’t lifted anyone’s spirits. Not in a long time. It had been almost a quarter-century since the team had captured first place. Long gone were the heady days of Ty Cobb.

Frank Navin felt it, not only in his weakening, sixty-two-year-old heart, but also in his pocketbook. Attendance had plummeted to barely 4,000 per game, 321,000 for the year—the lowest since the war and a steep drop from the one million who had come in 1924, the last time the Tigers had seriously contended. Weary of waiting for a champion, fans belittled Navin as a cheap, complacent loser. Even longtime friend and
Detroit Free Press
editor Malcolm Bingay, who as a cub reporter had covered the Tigers during their heyday, urged his old pal—in newsprint—to produce a winner. “If baseball is a sport, then Frank Navin should bestir himself to present to the public some form of competition,” he wrote. “It’s up to Mr. Navin to show some sporting blood, take a gambler’s chance, spend some money.”

“Gambler’s chance”—a sly choice of words by “Bing.” As a young man, Frank Navin had worked taking bets for a bookie and dealing cards in a gaming house. There, he learned the art of poker. He still loved to gamble. Schooled to become an attorney, he eventually bet stacks of bills, reportedly parlaying a $5,000 prize at an all-night poker party into a greater share of the Tigers. But wagering on cards paled beside his love of horses. He rode daily at the Detroit Riding and Hunt Club, followed the thoroughbreds passionately, studied racing forms, owned a box at two tracks across the river in Windsor, and went almost annually to the Kentucky Derby. Once firmly established as a baseball executive, he bought a racing stable near Lexington, Kentucky, and raised horses as a pastime. Navin bet smartly and heavily, and he won regularly. When he did lose, he did so without remorse. In gambling, money came and went.

But with his business it was different. The team provided Navin’s income. Unlike his sometimes-silent partner, automotive tycoon Walter O. Briggs, Navin didn’t have a gushing stream of nonbaseball revenue. The team was mostly it. When it came to running his club, Navin guarded his money. He bordered on miserly, shunned expensive prospects, and claimed poverty in negotiations, bickering over small amounts. Players found him cold, unsmiling. They called him a “nickel-nurser.” Cobb referred to him as “Old Stone Face.” With his ball club Navin the frugal business owner kept Navin the gambler in check.

Until Mickey Cochrane.

Since arriving in the major leagues, Cochrane had been part of the Philadelphia team that for nine straight seasons finished ahead of the Tigers in the American League. Navin could not have helped but notice him. Cochrane pulsed with energy. He needled opponents, dove for foul balls, and expended every ounce of himself on the field. He abhorred losing and after avoidable defeats flew into tantrums. When Cobb, long believed to be the most competitive man in the game, was finishing his career with the Athletics, he saw the young Cochrane up close. “He put on one of the greatest examples of what it means to be a ‘hard loser’ that I’ve ever seen,” said Cobb.

Cochrane wasn’t only a hothead. He had the ability to motivate teammates, to keep the game loose at the right moment, and to inspire and arouse. “Men fall naturally into his groove, particularly young men who are still impressionable and who unconsciously ape a leader,” wrote H. G. “Harry” Salsinger, the formidable dean of Detroit baseball writers, a man so sage that his august column could legitimately carry the tag “The Umpire.”

Yet for all of his achievements, Mickey Cochrane had never managed a club. And there, for Navin, lay the gamble. He was putting his team in the hands of a rookie manager and it was a costly experiment. The Depression had eroded Navin’s finances, as well as Connie Mack’s. Mack had been selling his stars to stay in business. Ballplayers had little say in such matters. Owners bought and unloaded them as they pleased. If he hadn’t found a buyer for Cochrane, Mack would have had to cut Cochrane’s wages, which gave the catcher reason to be receptive to Detroit’s inquiries. To purchase him Navin borrowed $100,000, backed by a bank and the much-wealthier Briggs, who had wanted Cochrane for years. During such dire economic times, the transaction posed significant risks to Navin.

Navin Field occupied a corner six blocks from the train station, just east along Michigan Avenue at Trumbull. On Friday morning Cochrane went to Navin’s office to talk of the coming season. Age-wise the two men could have been father and son. But they looked nothing alike. At six feet Navin stood two inches taller than Cochrane. He was portly, a fact accentuated by his bald, moonlike head, circle-framed glasses, and three-piece suits that skirted over his troubled stomach. Those features combined with his narrow, squinting eyes—friends nicknamed him Jap, a term used commonly in the press—to make him appear eternally suspicious.

The lack of a championship clung to Navin like a cocklebur. It wasn’t as if he had been a failure. He had been with the Tigers for three decades, working up from bookkeeper to owner, building the team from vulnerable fledgling to established club. He had already secured his place in baseball history by signing eighteen-year-old Ty Cobb to his first contract. If he did nothing else, that was enough. He had also launched other young stars, including one of Babe Ruth’s drinking buddies, Harry Heilmann; handsome Heinie Manush; and silent Charlie Gehringer, the current Tigers veteran. Plus, he had built a steel-and-concrete ballpark, and along the way risen in stature within the American League, serving as vice president and as one of the sport’s top spokesmen. He had much to be proud of. Only one thing made his career incomplete.

The absence of a World Series title ate at Navin. Truly ate at him, not symbolically. For a dozen years doctors had been treating him for stomach ailments. For the past three years, friends, family, and physicians had been urging him to sell the ball team. It was costing him his health, aggravating his stress, and provoking needless worry. Compounding the problem, Navin seldom showed emotion in public. His poker face rarely betrayed him. “I wish I could let my feelings out like some other men,” he said, “but I just can’t.” Navin told his doctors that he wouldn’t consider parting with the team until he won a World Series.

With Cochrane beside him, Navin lingered over the photographs that decorated his office walls. The pictures conjured warm memories. He reminisced more regularly these days, about old friends and players, about the teams of 1907, 1908, and 1909, all of which had made it to the World Series only to lose. Amid the good cheer Navin did not lose sight of what was at stake. Cochrane would be catching as well as managing, and he would be making more money than anyone on the team. Navin needed to know that his top man was in top shape. So he put Cochrane through a physical, which he passed. Then Navin hedged his bet by purchasing a $100,000 insurance policy on Cochrane. “Now we can shove him off a diving board . . . if we have a bad season,” he said with a laugh.

Later that night, after less than twenty-four hours in town, Cochrane headed back to the train station. The snow had melted; the temperature had jumped forty degrees into the unseasonably high fifties. Cochrane boarded the Ambassador train for Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife, Mary, his sweetheart since high school, and their two children, Gordon Jr. and Joan.