Terror in the City of Champions (5 page)

Complicating matters was that Cochrane didn’t fully believe in sore arms. Pitchers were losing their virility, he thought. “They’ve been babied so much that they’ve become a lot of mollycoddles,” he confided to a reporter. “Pitchers are always complaining. They complain of this and they complain of that. They generally complain of sore arms. I get tired hearing about sore arms. . . . Sore arms have become ultra-fashionable among pitchers. They think they don’t belong unless they have sore arms. It wasn’t that way before. . . . These sore arms are mainly in the mind.”

As the spring progressed, Cochrane lost sleep over Rowe. So much of the season hung on Rowe’s pitching success. Cochrane tried to motivate Rowe by implying that other players resented him. “He is no star,” he said. “He is only a rookie who has won seven games in the major league. I grant that we can use him and that he has great potentialities. But unless he gets in there and hustles like the rest of the gang, he will have to make room for somebody else. I am going to give him his choice.”

Major-General Bert

Three thousand or more Black Legion members, most of them armed, converged on a farm outside Oxford, Michigan, on a pleasant, dry spring Saturday for a two-day general muster. Men roasted pigs and oxen, and at midnight conducted skull-and-crossbones induction ceremonies.

Held a few times a year, musters were staged mostly at rural sites. Locations changed because legion officials didn’t want nonmember police officers snooping around. Gatherings were held in Saline, south of Ann Arbor, and outside Monroe, between Toledo and Detroit, and in the Irish Hills area, below Jackson Prison, and in border states. Oxford, on its way to becoming the gravel capital of America, sat forty-three miles from Detroit and even closer to Flint and Pontiac, industrial cities with significant populations and strong legion presences.

At the center of every muster stood Virgil “Bert” Effinger, the portly, suspender-wearing major-general of the Black Legion. A veteran of the Spanish-American War, Effinger made a modest living as an electrician. He didn’t have much in the way of money, managing the legion from the basement and porch of his simple, five-room house in Lima, Ohio. The legion didn’t require dues of its members; Effinger wasn’t in it for the profit. Married and a father of four, including two teenage daughters, he was in his early sixties. While overseeing the secret society, he ran for sheriff as a Republican in Allen County. “I will shoot square with everybody,” he declared, “and avoid if possible shooting at anybody.” It was his second campaign. In 1932 he had lost in the party primary. The eventual winner was Democrat Jess Sarber, later killed by John Dillinger’s posse when they broke the gangster out of the Lima jail. Sarber’s death did not deter Effinger.

Effinger’s proudest achievement, aside from his children, was the Black Legion and its exploding membership. Effinger boasted to his troops that their ranks had swelled into the millions. Three million, he said one time; six million, another. Both numbers amounted to wild exaggerations, but they served Effinger. By the early 1930s Effinger was the uncontested leader of the secret society. But he had not started it. Dr. Billy Shepard had.

In Bellaire, Ohio, where Shepard based his medical practice and served as the low-paid city health officer, residents regarded him as a “big wind jammer,” a blowhard, and a braggart. Townsfolk had heard his angry rants against Catholics and foreigners, but they didn’t fear him. Some mocked him. Most viewed him as about as dangerous as fermented cabbage. Even when he quipped about blowing up the local bank because it loaned money to European immigrants, the bank president did not take him seriously. “Doctor Billy,” in the words of one observer, qualified as nothing more than a “drugstore orator.”

Still, he had followers. Shepard had begun his secret organization in the 1920s after being kicked out of the Ku Klux Klan for establishing his own fiefdom. Back then he believed the Klan’s ways had become pedestrian. The group lacked mystery and thrills. Shepard convinced a group of followers to replace their white KKK robes with black ones and to brand themselves the Black Guard. For a short while they caused trouble in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia, whipping a local laborer who violated their sense of decency, threatening to hang a young man and tar his girlfriend, and forcing a black man onto a railcar headed south after he was seen socializing with a white woman. By 1929 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been made aware of the night-riding organization, but he had no name to attach to it and nothing came of the investigation. The legion withered quietly—until Effinger, two hundred miles west in Lima, visited Shepard and arranged to breathe new life into it. He shuffled Shepard into the role of a powerless figurehead and began to reorganize the group.

Using his old Klan connections, Effinger founded branches throughout the Midwest. At legion events he talked as if it were a national outfit, but it actually took root only in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, with scattered activity in a few border states. The legion’s unremarkable “Doctor Billy” origins could not inspire romantic life-and-death loyalty. Effinger fashioned more glorious histories. One traced its roots to colonial days, claiming Paul Revere and the Minutemen as early members and tying it to the Boston Tea Party. While Shepard’s name still surfaced (as “Shotgun Shepard”), he had no real role in the current legion.

At musters, some of which stretched over three days, men slept in tents or cars or under the stars. A few had campers. Effinger stayed in the brigade headquarters, emerging from a trailer, often with a black fedora atop his balding head. A blustery man, he could—and did—talk for hours about true Americans and the danger of a multitude of “isms”: communism foremost, but also socialism, fascism, Nazism, Trotskyism, Marxism, anarchism, radicalism, unionism, Catholicism, Judaism, Negroism, and more.

He regaled members with declarations of the legion’s reach, saying it extended into all branches of government, including the FBI and state guards. The legion had absolutely infiltrated many police, court, and prosecutor’s offices. In Detroit and Pontiac, legion members honeycombed the police forces. (Dayton Dean estimated one hundred officers belonged in Detroit alone.) Effinger claimed access to a vast array of weapons. On occasion at his home, he would bring down from the rafters an oversized map that he said showed the nation’s hidden military installations, including one within the Statue of Liberty. “The first prerequisite of a prospective member is that he be a real patriotic American citizen,” he said. (And a white Protestant, he should have added.) “The object of the Black Legion is preservation and perpetuation of our American ideals and social order.”

The legion expanded aggressively through deception, threats, and brutality. Required to bring others into the organization, members invited friends who soon found themselves in a frightful predicament. Surrounded by armed men cloaked in ebony hoods and gowns, they took the legion’s Black Oath, acknowledging the sentence of death for betrayal. Many went to their first legion meetings believing they were headed to political affairs. If they knew anything truthful beforehand, it was most often that the gathering would be for those opposed to communism. The issue resonated across wide swaths of America. “Nobody wants to see a red flag floating around,” member Riley Sparrow said. “I thought the outfit was out to fight the reds.”

Talk of communism surfaced continuously in the news and in discussions at work and home. In the Detroit area in 1932, in one of the region’s defining moments, thousands participated in the communist-organized Ford Hunger March, which saw Dearborn police and Ford security forces, under the charge of Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s top lieutenant, open fire and kill four individuals. The funeral march that followed attracted tens of thousands. Taken against the backdrop of the Russian revolution fifteen years earlier and the current unrest throughout the region, the sight shook the city’s political foundation.

During the Depression hints of rebellion pulsed through neighborhoods. Candidates who were neither Republican nor Democrat drew significant votes. In some local municipalities they were elected. Communists, socialists, and anarchists joined and led fledgling unions.
The Daily Worker
debuted a Michigan edition. Around the same time famed artist Diego Rivera, a Mexican Marxist, and wife Frida Kahlo lived in Detroit. He was laboring over his controversial Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a project funded by Edsel Ford but deemed anti-capitalist by critics.

The Black Legion’s dislike of leftists motivated many of its actions. Two members, one a Pontiac police sergeant, went undercover to a lecture intending to assassinate a celebrated communist speaker. But the event was so well attended that they didn’t attempt it. At their meetings legionnaires heard from “White Russians,” men who had fought the Bolsheviks in the 1910s. Legionnaires infiltrated enemy groups too, joining labor, socialist, and communist organizations as spies.

At the Oxford muster Major-General Bert Effinger complimented his underlings on the turnout. It was good, he said, “But not good enough.” He implored them to do better. He emphasized the necessity of electing candidates who would support the legion’s goals. He told of a mayor who had betrayed the legion by naming a Catholic to a top position. “A few weeks later, the mayor got tangled up with some gangster bullets and was found dead,” he claimed.

Perhaps no legion leader spoke more passionately against communism than Arthur Lupp, who was the Michigan commander. Even more than Effinger, the nearly forty-year-old Lupp had a talent for delivering long monologues. He carried an air of self-righteousness and he looked more polished than his peers, often in suit and tie, his hair slicked back, his face smoothly shaven, wire-rimmed glasses polished and perched primly on his nose. Stump speeches came easily to Lupp. He spoke frequently at the legion’s clandestine meetings about the principles that united legionnaires. His voice rose when he made an argument. Like a handkerchief-waving tent preacher, he could work himself to the point of hoarseness and perspiration. The legion, he said, gave men hope and purpose.

“When men have pledged themselves to be loyal to that flag,” he said, pausing to salute for effect, “their days of service begin.” Once he got rolling, he almost couldn’t stop himself. His own voice stirred him like a rhapsody. “Now, I’m not in the habit of making speeches,” he liked to say, but “on this one subject I have made many. I have gone among the farmers and I have preached the doctrine of Americanism, the doctrine of the flag, and the counteracting of communism. . . . We are opposed to all ‘isms.’ . . . We believe first, last, and always in pro-Americanism and support the Red, White, and Blue.”

Raised in poverty on a farm outside Evansville, Indiana, Lupp had made something of himself professionally. He had acquired money and land, only to lose them before the market crash. In Detroit he built a new life. For a while he served as a sheriff’s deputy. Now he worked for the city of Detroit as a health department milk inspector. Weeknights and weekends he devoted to the legion, planning, plotting, and recruiting. A letter to a Lansing man attests to his persuasive abilities. The man had promised to host meetings at his house but harbored second thoughts. He viewed the legion as a violation of his faith. Twice legionnaires drove two to three hours from Detroit to his home, only to find it locked and unoccupied. Lupp chided him:

I have had many disappointments in men during the last few years and still have managed to retain some faith in my fellow men. But when we find men who profess to be good clean Christian men and yet cannot be depended upon to serve their country, one loses faith. . . . Our boys are not all Christians but when we give our word we make every effort to keep in this fight for the preservation of our country, homes, and all the ideals of freedom and liberty. Sometimes we become even bitter at the thought of unreliable and incompetent men on every hand, but we must remember the father of our country also had the same things to contend with at Valley Forge and Denton. We too have leaders who can kneel in the snow if necessary asking help from above. But we must then be ready to fight. Prayer alone will not do the work.

Effinger and Lupp were two of three key figures at the Oxford muster. The third qualified as the least eloquent and the personally nastiest of the trio. His walk always drew notice. Low-level legionnaires might not recall his name, but they never forgot him. One Michigan man described him typically as “some one-legged fellow.” A chap in Indiana reported, “The speaker at the meeting was a peg-legged man.” Another related, erroneously, that the lecturer, a former Detroit policeman, had lost a leg in battle with the bootlegging Purple Gang.

Isaac “Peg-Leg” White, born in Canton, Ohio, had come to Detroit in 1911. He found work guarding the homes of the wealthy before being hired by city police. His law enforcement career did not last long. At age thirty tragedy struck White while on the job. A police car accident (not a gun-wielding gangster) cost him his leg below the knee. It also took one of his thumbs. The year was 1916. White retired with half pay and a lot of time on his hands. Over the next decades he kicked around as a carpenter and an odd-jobs man and picked up extra money offering security and information to manufacturers, including some targeted by mobsters in a Prohibition-era malt tax racket. Through the Ku Klux Klan’s boom decade of the 1920s, he devoted himself to the Klan. In his forties White remarried, this time to a woman twenty years younger from the hills of Pennsylvania. She and White had a son, Teddy, now a toddler. A confidant of Major-General Effinger, White had risen to become one of the top Black Legion recruiters in the Midwest. He remained active in manufacturing circles as an informant. Wherever communists or labor organizers surfaced in the Detroit area, White seemed to surface as well.