Never Been a Time (13 page)

The
St. Louis Republic
was a struggling morning paper that was owned by a Democratic politician—David Francis, Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to Russia during the upheavals of 1917—and was old-fashioned in that it often
seemed to parrot the party line, racially and otherwise. The
St. Louis Star
and the
St. Louis Times
were lavishly illustrated populist afternoon papers that stressed sports, entertainment, and local human interest stories.

For African Americans in both St. Louis and East St. Louis, the most important source of news about black affairs was the respected black-owned weekly, the
St. Louis Argus
.

In the summer of 1916, a brilliant young reporter named Paul Y. Anderson wrote a series in the
Post-Dispatch
excoriating the administration of Mayor Fred Mollman and police chief Ransom Payne for permitting illegal gambling and prostitution all over the city, including a couple of notorious vice dens virtually across the street from the city hall-police station complex on Main Street in the heart of downtown. Anderson reported that, in 1915, after Mollman had been elected on a “reform” ticket, he placated his more moralistic supporters by issuing an order closing the red-light district, an order that, after a brief flurry of token closings, was widely ignored by police and city officials, including Mayor Mollman himself. After utterly failing to get legendary cigar-chomping
Post-Dispatch
managing editor O. K. Bovard to fire Anderson for sullying the name of his fair city, Mollman, who was in his mid-forties, spotted Anderson, who was twenty years younger, near city hall one day and took a wild swing at him. He banned Anderson from the press
offices in city hall and the police station, which didn't stop the tenacious young reporter from coming in and badgering recalcitrant city officials until cops shoved him out the door.
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Paul Y. Anderson

Mayor Fred Mollman

Late in the summer of 1916, after Anderson's articles put pressure on the mayor to clean up open gambling, a member of the police vice squad named H. F. Trafton took it upon himself to close a downtown bookie joint. It happened to be owned in part by Frank Florence, the assistant chief of detectives. Florence walked in on the raid, pulled his service revolver, and told Trafton to put his hands in the air. Trafton complied, giving the assistant chief of detectives a clear shot at his vitals. Florence shot him dead. There were several witnesses who swore in court that they had seen the whole thing and that Florence was guilty of gunning down a man with his hands in the air, but after a year of legal maneuvering and backroom threats and dealing, Florence was acquitted of the charge of murder, confirming the general feeling that the police were among the last people in East St. Louis you would trust to enforce the law.
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In July of 1916, three dozen men were fired from National City's three largest meatpackers—Swift, Armour, and Morris—for trying to organize a union, and more than four thousand workers went out on strike. Management
announced it would not negotiate with the strikers, and would only consider hiring them back if they left the union. “There will be no union at this plant,” said the head of one large meatpacker. The meat companies brought in strikebreakers, including between eight hundred and fifteen hundred blacks. The hard stance of management quickly broke the back of the strike. Men began deserting the fledgling union in large numbers and going back to work. The strikers, except for union organizers, were rehired, at least for the moment.
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In August, management began a new wave of firings and replaced experienced men, some of them with many years of seniority, with cheaper untrained workers, some of them black. Earl Jimmerson, an official of the butchers and meat-cutters union, became alarmed at the potential social cost of continually bringing in black replacement workers. Jimmerson, who had political clout as a member of the St. Clair County Board of Supervisors, told Mayor Fred Mollman that trouble lay ahead unless something was done about “employing Negroes in place of white men … and throwing these [Negroes] right amongst these foreigners … You know what a foreigner is; he will fight at the drop of a hat and if you go to take his job he'll kill you if he gets the opportunity to do it.” The mayor told Jimmerson to calm down, things weren't as bad as all that.
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Blacks were also used to break a strike against the streetcar monopoly in that period.

On Saturday, October 7, 1916, about six hundred workers walked off the job at the Aluminum Ore Company in protest against arbitrary pay cuts. On Monday, hundreds of strikers blocked rails and roads leading into the plant. The Aluminum Ore Company easily obtained a federal injunction so the plant could operate—there was a war in Europe, and aluminum was a vital raw material. The Aluminum Ore Company Employee's Protective Association, a local organization that was not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor—it was little more than a company union, other labor leaders charged—thrashed out an agreement with plant officials to return to work by the end of the week. As soon as the men came back, the company began getting rid of them a few at a time, laying off union men and hiring newcomers, some of them black, to replace them. By late fall two hundred men of a once
union-friendly work force of about nineteen hundred had been replaced, and the firings continued into the winter. Workers became discouraged, or afraid, and left the union. Membership dwindled from a peak of about one thousand to a couple of hundred by the end of 1916.
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According to Aluminum Ore Company statistics, the number of black employees rose from a dozen in 1915 to 280 in November of 1916 and to 410 in December. Management was clearly aware of the effect black strikebreakers crossing picket lines had on white workers, and hoped that some of the anger focused on management would be redirected toward the blacks. That was part of the plan, as was evident when R. T. Rucker, assistant superintendent of the Aluminum Ore plant in St. Louis, spoke frankly of the racial attitudes of East St. Louis whites when he said that “Labor unrest … engendered bitterness against the negroes who came in here.”

“The natural antipathy of a white man to a colored man … inherent in each of us,” Rucker said, “was accentuated and exaggerated” by the arrival in East St. Louis of so many blacks.

Also, he said, in cities farther north, “an individual Negro on a streetcar caused no comment,” but East St. Louis was more Southern in its attitudes, particularly when blacks on streetcars “voiced their privileges” and “made themselves nuisances.” Rucker explained that he was talking, in the main, about black men taking empty seats next to white women, and even saying “good morning” to them.
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Most of the blacks hired by the aluminum company in 1916 had lived in East St. Louis for at least a few months, some for years. The aluminum workers union was able to break through racial suspicion on both sides and persuade a few of the new black employees to join the union. Then, according to the union, management changed its tactics. At the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, the company began giving preference to blacks who had just arrived from the South and were without jobs. The newly arrived blacks had been lured to East St. Louis with false promises, union leaders charged, were desperate for work, and would be disinclined to join any white-run labor organization, or afraid to.
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In early October of 1916, a month before the voters would choose between the incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Charles Evans
Hughes for president of the United States, Democrats in St. Clair County charged that the Republicans were importing thousands of itinerant blacks into East St. Louis to vote the party line in what was described as “Negro colonization.” The Republicans replied that the charges were spurious and purely political, but Democratic poll watchers appeared at all fifty-four polling places in the city and challenged the residency of all blacks trying to register to vote, even those who had lived in East St. Louis for many years. Something similar, it turned out, was going on across the lower Midwest in areas of recent black migration.
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The
St. Louis Argus
argued that the widespread challenges to black voters were yet another sign of the enmity toward blacks held by the Democratic Party and President Woodrow Wilson, who had received a significant minority of the black vote in the 1912 election. “Negroes who were seduced into supporting Wilson for President in 1912 are amazed at their own stupidity,” the black weekly declared, “and all but those who are Democrats for revenue only have long since repented and returned to the Republican fold and are working hard to undo the harm they did four years ago.”
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Wilson's numerous black supporters in 1912 had included W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. Du Bois had met with Wilson and had been won over by his promise to be the “president of all the people.” But after Wilson took office, he replaced a number of relatively high-ranking black officials left over from his Republican predecessors with white appointees, and he permitted his cabinet members—who included Josephus Daniels, the openly racist North Carolina newspaper editor—to segregate federal departments, creating separate black and white toilets and cafeterias. In many cases, blacks who supervised whites were demoted and replaced with white bosses. Wilson presided over the resegregation of federal Washington, which under his Republican predecessors had been a racially mixed haven for educated blacks.
¹⁴

The
Argus
advised blacks to vote the straight Republican ticket. And justly wary of drawn-out challenges at the polls it also urged its readers, “Take no chances, vote early.” W. E. B. Du Bois, disgusted with both Wilson and the Republicans, recommended that African Americans either vote for the Socialist candidate or stay home.
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Wilson's particular version of what later came to be called the Southern Strategy depended in part on minimizing the black electorate and arousing white voters in swing states like Illinois with the notion that blacks were trying
to steal the election. The president personally stoked the fire by warning against vote frauds “perpetrated by conscienceless agents of the sinister forces.” Racial antagonism already burned intensely in the border states and the lower Midwest and sometimes flared into deadly conflagration. For example, three weeks before the November election, in Paducah, Kentucky, little more than the width of the Ohio River from southern Illinois, a white mob of six thousand men and women lynched two black men—an accused rapist and a companion—and burned their bodies.
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As the election approached, the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
, which was backing Wilson, blasted its readers with a series of lurid stories about crimes committed by “black colonizers” who were in East St. Louis without jobs, supporting themselves by breaking into railroad cars in the flood plain that once had been Bloody Island. A white watchman for the Mobile and Ohio was shot dead, apparently by a black man looting cars, and police chief Ransom Payne blamed a recent rash of crime on “Negroes [who] come into East St. Louis, are not known, shoot or rob someone, and get out before we know who they are.”
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Ironically, in the midst of this supposed black crime wave, the suburban
Belleville News-Democrat
reported that blacks “must be behaving very well this fall.” Population at the county jail in Belleville, black and white, was actually lower than it had been in recent years. The editor speculated that blacks didn't need to rob people because “it's election year and the negroes in East St. Louis are being pretty well taken care of.” He added, “Jailers expect the rush to begin after Nov. 7.”
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In mid-October, a strong rumor swept through East St. Louis that a large group of blacks was planning on voting in Chicago at dawn, catching a train south and stopping at some town along the way to vote again, and arriving in East St. Louis before the polls closed to vote a third time. Another battalion of blacks was allegedly going to make the same journey in reverse. In charge of the scam, according to Democratic state prosecutors in northern Illinois, was East St. Louis's own Dr. Leroy H. Bundy, a prosperous black dentist and entrepreneur who was the leading civil rights advocate in St. Clair County, a leader in the local chapter of the Afro-American Protective League.
¹⁹
(Although a branch of the NAACP had been founded in St. Louis in 1914, East St. Louis would not have one until 1924.)