Smoketown
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By 1903, when Vann arrived, Pittsburgh was very different from the place Cap Posey had first encountered only two decades earlier. It was a year after Andrew Carnegie sold his mills to J. P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel Company, making U.S. Steel the world’s largest producer of the globe’s most desired industrial product. With steel, coal, gas, aluminum, glass, and pickles all in record demand, as many as fifteen thousand new immigrants a year were arriving in Pittsburgh to look for work. Poles, Lithuanians, Croatians, Slovaks, and Hungarians joined the Jews, Italians, and Irish of previous waves.
By 1907, the black population surpassed twenty thousand when Pittsburgh merged with Allegheny City, the town to the north where Andrew Carnegie lived as a child. Only a small fraction of the city’s Negroes now inhabited the elite world of the Poseys and the rest of the city’s eighty-five black business owners and roughly 150 professionals. Blacks who found work in the steel mills and the coal mines still numbered in the hundreds. Of the new arrivals, more than half of the men and almost all of the women had to settle for more menial jobs—as maids, laundresses, and janitors, or, if they were lucky, as shop clerks, railway porters, and brick-toting hod carriers.
A majority of the new Negro migrants settled on the Hill, boarding with white immigrants or crowding one family to a room in rickety, unpainted frame houses. Erased were all traces of the old Arthursville farms. Coal dust covered the streets. Sewage ran through the back alleys. Greenery had disappeared. Typhoid fever and respiratory disease were spreading. So were crime, prostitution, and cocaine use. During her visit in 1909, Helen Tucker, the writer who heralded the opportunities for the “industrial Negro” in Pittsburgh, winced at conditions on the Hill. “The poorer Negroes live in a network of alleys on either side of Wylie Avenue,” she reported. “In some alleys there were stables next to the houses and while the odor was bad at any time, after a rain the stench from these and from the dirt in the streets was almost unendurable.”
Yet if Vann had been born just as poor as the new migrants, no one would have guessed that now. When he presented himself at Western University, the registrar took one look at his elegant suit and copper complexion and asked if he wished to enroll as an Indian. No, Vann replied with a mixture of pride and practicality, he was a Negro who was there to claim his Avery scholarship. That stipend and a part-time job waiting tables at a white boardinghouse allowed Vann to rent a spacious second-floor room in a home in Allegheny City. The owners, the Moore family, were members of the tribe of “Old Pittsburghers,” or “OP’s,” as the families who had settled in the city before the Great Migration were known, and they introduced Vann to their world.
Soon Vann was worshipping with the Moores at the Brown Chapel AME Church, the second oldest west of the Allegheny Mountains, at the brand-new gold-brick chapel the congregation had erected on the North Side. He was also invited to lunch at the Loendi Club, where his elegant looks and erudite demeanor drew admiring attention. He grew friendly with William Nelson Page, the private secretary to the assistant manager of sales at the Carnegie Steel Company, and became a frequent guest at the Page home. Vann also made the acquaintance of Cap Posey, then the club president, and learned of his remarkable rise from steamboat engineer to one of the richest Negroes in America, a story that can only have confirmed Vann’s belief that Pittsburgh was a place where a man bent on emulating Abe Lincoln could seize opportunity at its flow.
At Western University, Vann studied literature, excelled at debate, and wrote for the school journal, The Courant. In his senior year he was elected editor-in-chief, the first Negro to hold the post. As graduation neared in 1906, he briefly considered heading east to study at a new school for journalists that Joseph Pulitzer had endowed at New York’s Columbia University. But worries about the cost held him back. Instead Vann stayed true to his boyhood plan and moved on to Western University’s School of Law, where he was the only black face in his class. To pay his tuition—and his tailor bills—he worked as a sleeping car porter. On many days, he would race to Union Station as soon as he was done at the law school, don a porter’s uniform, board an overnight train to Ohio, and then return to Pittsburgh the following day in time for his next class.
It was a satisfying time for Vann, marred only by the sorrow of losing his mother. The spring after he arrived in Pittsburgh, he received word that Lucy Peoples was ill. After traveling back to Red Hill to see her, he returned to Pittsburgh with a bout of pneumonia that kept him in bed for months. Before he could visit his mother again, he received a letter from one of her neighbors informing him that she had passed away. With no siblings, a father who had abandoned him, and a stepfather he detested, Vann now had only a souvenir to connect him to his North Carolina past: a gold watch that his mother had given him to celebrate his graduation from the Waters Training School.
Then, in the fall of his senior year of law school, Vann found someone to fill the void left by his mother. He went to a dance and met a nineteen-year-old girl named Jesse Matthews. Like many of the women of the “OP” elite, she had light skin and a dignified manner. She had come to Pittsburgh to live with her aunt after being orphaned as a young child and passed around among relatives in her hometown of Gettysburg. Touched by her story and taken with her bearing, Vann suggested that Jesse move in with the Page family. Soon she and Vann were courting, meeting for tea, and taking long walks during which they shared their common bonds of hardship, loss, and aspiration.
After just a few months, Vann proposed—in his no-nonsense fashion. “My intentions are serious,” he told Jesse. “If yours are not let me know. I don’t want to waste your time and I have no time to waste.” Though startled at his bluntness, Jesse accepted. They agreed to marry—once Vann passed his bar examination. After graduating, Vann sent Jesse back to Gettysburg, telling her “courting and studying do not mix.” Six months later, he sent a telegram with the good news—“Passed O.K.”—and soon afterward she returned to Pittsburgh where they were wed in the home of William Page.
As only one of five Negro lawyers in all of Pittsburgh, Vann wanted to make a good impression. He decided to set up shop in the white business district downtown. He found a building on Fourth Avenue that would rent to a Negro tenant and filled an office with secondhand furniture. But business was slow. Vann’s dream was to argue criminal cases, but no whites and few blacks believed that they stood a chance before the white judges and juries of Pittsburgh with a Negro advocate. Instead, Vann spent most of his days processing wills and property claims.
In his free time, Vann began submitting items to The Pittsburgh Courier, the little pamphlet of verse and community news that had begun to appear around town. He befriended the poet who had founded the publication, Edward Nathaniel Harleston. One day, Harleston confided that he had run out of money and told Vann that he was seeking new backers. Vann suggested his Loendi Club acquaintances, and when they agreed to invest he was offered five shares of stock in lieu of a legal fee to draft incorporation papers. All at once, Vann was no longer just a protégé of William Page and Cap Posey; he was their business partner.
At the same meeting in Vann’s office, Harleston argued that he should also get stock in payment for his work as editor. But the four businessmen refused. It was a recipe for friction—and tension soon ensued. The new shareholders pressed Harleston for changes, and he balked. By the fall, they insisted that Vann join the paper as treasurer. Within a year, Harleston quit in a fit of anger. Weary of his moodiness, the investors did nothing to keep him. Instead, they offered the job of editor to Robert L. Vann.
The job paid only $100 a year, which Vann also agreed to take in the form of Courier stock. But the money wasn’t important to him, at least for now. Here, finally, was the opportunity he had foreseen since his high school days would “inevitably come his way”: to pursue his passion for journalism as well as law, and to join the club of Negro businessmen and community leaders that he had circled and admired since first arriving in Pittsburgh. And while he didn’t yet have a plan fo
r making The Pittsburgh Courier a financial success, Vann could see from reading the city’s white newspapers what kinds of stories attracted readers.
• • •
“CORPSE AND PISTOL FOUND IN BASEMENT OF PALATIAL HOME” shouted a front-page headline in The Pittsburgh Press on the 13th of March, 1910, the same month that Robert L. Vann, Cap Posey, and the others met to incorporate The Pittsburgh Courier. The Press reported that Thomas Laughlin, the heir to one of Pittsburgh’s largest steel fortunes, a man said to be worth $20 million, had committed suicide in the basement of his East End mansion after a long bout with “melancholia.” He had put a bullet through his brain while his wife was in Washington, D.C., visiting her sister, the wife of President William Howard Taft. The story, accompanied by a photo of the mansion and a family portrait with Laughlin’s rotund brother-in-law, was the sort of tabloid fare that made the Press the most popular newspaper in Pittsburgh at the time, ahead of its more dignified morning rival, the Gazette. Returning home from long days in the factories, mines, and shops, the city’s new immigrants (and more of its old guard than would have admitted it publicly) turned to the afternoon tabloid to revel in the particulars of murder trials, divorce proceedings, natural disasters, and financial scandals.
In the five years before Robert Vann became the Courier’s editor, one story more than any other had obsessed papers like the Press. Two Pittsburgh natives happened to be at its center. Harry Kendall Thaw was another East End heir, to a coal and railroad fortune, and a psychotic spoiled brat. As a child, he hurled china at the servants. As a Harvard undergraduate, he waved a shotgun at a cab driver and was expelled. Thaw abused drink and drugs and sexual partners of both sexes, while his doting, widowed mother kept him in allowance and paid off anyone who threatened to expose him.
Evelyn Nesbit was a working-class girl from outside Pittsburgh with doe-eyed beauty and limited talent. Along with her meddlesome mother, she moved to New York City in her teens and became a showgirl and artist’s model. Stanford White, the famous architect and notorious roué, became her lover and relieved her of her virginity. But it was Harry Thaw, after seeing Nesbit in a chorus line, who determined to marry her. Thaw wined and dined Nesbit and took her on trips to Europe until she agreed to be his bride. Then he set out to destroy his romantic rival.
On a June night in 1906, Thaw and Nesbit were in New York en route to another European vacation. They decided to attend a revue called Mam’zelle Champagne at Madison Square Garden, then still at its original location on Madison Square. The production had been moved to the rooftop, because the night was so warm. When Stanford White appeared shortly before midnight, Thaw became agitated and began circling White’s table. As the cast sang the finale, “I Could Love a Million Girls,” Thaw pulled a pistol from his overcoat and fired three shots. A cloud of black gunpowder exploded in White’s face, incinerating the architect’s handlebar mustache and covering him in blood. “He had it coming!” Thaw cried as he stood over the dead man’s body, before police arrested him and took him to The Tombs prison.
But that was only the beginning of the story. A three-month murder trial gave newspapers sordid new details of the love triangle to report, embellished by tipsters hired by both sides. White had kept a suite of rooms above his apartment full of mirrors and erotic furniture that he used to seduce Nesbit and other conquests. A red velvet swing was among the contraptions. On a trip to Europe, Thaw had imprisoned Nesbit in an Austrian castle for two weeks and repeatedly whipped and abused her. With his fortune, Thaw was also buying royal treatment on “Murderers Row.” He was allowed to sleep in a brass bed, eat steaks from Delmonico’s, and drink wine and champagne with his meals. Promised a payoff and a divorce from Thaw by his mother, Nesbit testified on her husband’s behalf, and a split jury failed to reach a verdict. But the saga didn’t end there. A second trial, a guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict, an escape, a manhunt, and a recapture all followed before a third jury acquitted Thaw eight years later and set him free.
When Robert Vann took the helm of the Courier, he claimed that he didn’t want to go “yellow” like the tabloids. He was critical of The Pittsburgh Press for its demeaning caricatures of black people. He also looked down on the luridness in The Chicago Defender, the leading Negro newspaper at the time, with its screaming headlines in bright red type. Nor did the Courier have anything like the resources that the white press devoted to the “crime of the century” saga of Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit. Only eight pages, it did little more than record the comings and goings of Negroes in the Pittsburgh area. The paper was produced out of a storeroom above a Wylie Avenue funeral parlor, with a staff of only four employees: a reporter, a sports editor, a secretary, and a proofreader who also served as a mailing clerk and messenger. Yet as soon as Vann took over the Courier, the first noticeable change was an increase in coverage of crime stories of interest to Negro readers.
In August 1911, in another steel town in eastern Pennsylvania called Coatesville, a black migrant named Zachariah Walker was returning home from a tavern one afternoon when he got into a drunken brawl with white workers from a local mill. A security guard for the mill tried to break up the dispute. In the ensuing tussle, Walker shot the guard dead. Later Walker was found hiding in a tree; he tried to shoot himself, but he survived and was taken to a hospital. That night, a group of men broke into the hospital, unchained Walker from his bed, and took him into the woods, where they lit a bonfire and burned him to death. Hundreds gathered to watch the spectacle, pushing Walker back into the flames as he tried to escape. The next morning, dozens of men and boys picked through the ashes, and later parts of Walker’s body were sold in town as souvenirs.
For the next six months, the Courier gave front-page coverage to each new twist in the savage Coatesville lynching case. It ran stories on the arrest of fifteen men and boys for the brutal act, and on debates among Negro leaders in Pittsburgh about how to press for justice. The Courier’s owners started a fund to send a delegation to Harrisburg to lobby the governor. When all fifteen defendants were acquitted and the state did nothing to retry them, Vann wrote a mournful editorial. “There is no escaping the shame,” he lamented. “The whole state should shoulder the curse.”
Vann also awarded banner treatment to crime stories in which blacks were acquitted, particularly if a Negro lawyer handled the case. In one front-page story, New York attorney John Frank Wheaton was celebrated for convincing a jury that a black man named William Simms had killed a white Schenectady resident in self-defense. In another, Scipio Africanus Jones, Esq. of Arkansas was hailed for doing the seemingly impossible—clearing a black man charged of rape by a white woman in the Deep South—by proving that the suspect was at his lumber factory job a hundred miles away. Presenting “possibly the most complete, the most sweeping and the most irresistible alibi that has been produced in the court in recent years,” the Courier cheered, “[Jones] utterly annihilated the state’s testimony, forcing the state to an unconditional surrender, with the result of ‘Not Guilty’ by the jury.”
Vann’s coverage of criminal justice stories also allowed him to advertise his own legal services. A front-page story in 1912 chronicled the case of Thomas Cash, a suspect for whom Vann had been appointed court’s attorney. Cash was charged with a murder that had taken place fourteen years earlier. Two railroad construction workers in Unity, Pennsylvania, had gotten into a fight over a crap game. One pulled a gun and shot the other. While serving time for another crime in New York, Cash was said to have confessed to a fellow inmate. Yet despite testimony from that prisoner, Vann persuaded a white jury that Cash was innocent. According to the Courier’s melodramatic account, it took the jury just eight minutes to reach its verdict. When it was announced, a crowd of Negro spectators shouted in triumph and carried Cash out of the courtroom on their shoulders. Vann bought Cash a new overcoat to replace his soiled blue jumper coat, put him up in hotel for the night, and accompanied him to the train station the next morning. Not surprisingly, after t
he story appeared, demand for Vann’s legal help grew.
By 1913, the Courier’s readership was inching upward, but the paper was still in dire financial straits. Printing costs exhausted a third of its tiny budget. Advertising—from a handful of black-owned businesses and mail-order products with names like “St. Joseph’s Liver Regulator” and “The Original Poro Hair Grower”—brought in as little as $15 a week. Gimmicks to build circulation had gone awry. One promised a car to the reader who sold the most new subscriptions. When a well-known local clubwoman named Daisy Lampkin won the contest, the Courier’s board was forced to confess that they couldn’t afford an automobile. Instead, they gave Lampkin a check, which promptly bounced. Finally, they had to pay up in stock (beginning what would eventually blossom into a valuable partnership when Lampkin became a vice president of the Courier as well as the local chapter head of the NAACP).
The Courier’s financial prospects began to look up, however, after Vann made a fortuitous hire a year later. He brought on Ira Lewis, a small but inexhaustible young clerk from his law office. Explaining how tight his budget was, Vann offered to pay Lewis $3 a week plus a 25 percent commission on any ads he sold. Lewis pulled out a sheet of paper. “I’ve already started to work,” he said. “There’s my first ad and I’ve got the payment in my pocket.” Hired as a sportswriter, Lewis quickly became the paper’s business manager as well. In one year, he doubled the paper’s circulation and began expanding its base of advertisers beyond mail-order charlatans. Around the office, Courier staff started referring to Vann as “the Big Chief” and Lewis as “the Little Chief.”
By the second half of the decade, Vann had concluded that the Courier needed more than just better business management to succeed. It had to develop a more powerful voice. As the United States entered World War I, the Great Migration began. A new wave of Negroes—not just from border states like Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, but increasingly from the Deep South—were heading north in hopes of taking the place of white factory workers who had gone to war. In Pittsburgh, the black population would increase by half before the end of the decade, to 36,000, and its labor force would double to more than eighteen thousand. To attract the new migrants as readers, brief stories on crime, sports, and local church and society news wouldn’t be sufficient. The Courier needed to crusade on their behalf.