Whether or not he took a payoff from the Pullman Company, owning a printing press had become Vann’s top priority by the end of the 1920s. At long last, he was determined to free himself from the $25,000 a year he paid to a white-run printing company that counted a Ku Klux Klan newsletter among its accounts. Yet even after the 1926 stock offering, the paper was still short of its goal. Then, out of the blue, an East End tycoon came to the rescue. His name was Michael Late Benedum, and he had made a fortune drilling wildcat oil wells in West Virginia. After moving his headquarters to Pittsburgh, Benedum began donating to Negro causes, and in 1928 he loaned Vann enough money to buy a residential plot on Centre Avenue on the Hill to build a new headquarters for the Courier, combining a newsroom and a printing plant.
A year later, on December 14, 1929, Vann and his staff gathered to watch the first issue of the Courier come to life in their new home. In the printing annex, dozens of linotype operators clacked away on the towering machines that cast lines of hot type. In the center of the room stood an enormous multilevel press built by R. Hoe and Company, the inventor of rotary printing technology, and designed to print up to twenty-four pages at once. As the press roared into action, cylinders covered with hot type spun at dizzying speed. Wide swaths of paper swooshed through their teeth, emerging covered with densely packed stories and advertisements on both sides. Other parts of the contraption sliced, folded, and stacked the paper into bundles, all at a rate of 250 copies per minute. It was a wonder to behold, and it hadn’t come cheap. The Courier’s new facility had cost $104,000, far more than Vann had first anticipated, and more than he would have dared spend if the project hadn’t already been under way six weeks earlier, when panic seized Wall Street and caused American business to lose a quarter of its value in two days.
To reinforce the message of investing in the future, Vann turned the job of writing about the new press over to a student intern. Ramon Clarke was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, the name that Western University had taken shortly after Vann’s graduation. In a star-struck story, Clarke praised the printing plant as “the greatest inspiration the youth of this community have ever been afforded.” He compared Vann to such Negro pioneers as George Washington Carver, Paul Robeson, and mathematician Benjamin Banneker. Echoing Vann’s lecturing editorials, Clarke held up the printing press purchase as “an economic challenge to every potential Negro enterprise to become more productive, for in productivity rests the economic salvation of the Negro as a group. The Pittsburgh Courier steps out into a new field of activity—can others be far behind?”
Yet as a new decade dawned, Vann’s mind wasn’t only on economic advancement. After a decade of hard work, the Courier was selling sixty thousand copies a week across America, just as the post–World War I phase of the Great Migration pushed the size of Pittsburgh’s black population past that same number. Its talented writers and colorful crusades had no less than H. L. Mencken praising the Courier as “the best colored newspaper published.” With a powerful new press, Vann had the ability to meet new demand for the paper as far into the future as he could imagine.
Now Vann could afford to turn his attention back to the one territory that he had yet to conquer: politics. And in Michael Benedum, he had a new benefactor—“the Great White Father,” as the oilman was jokingly referred to around the Courier offices—to whom he owed a huge debt.
• • •
MIKE BENEDUM HAD ALWAYS had a nose for untapped resources. Growing up poor in Bridgeport, West Virginia, he quit high school to work in a gristmill. In his early twenties, he became intrigued by talk of prospectors looking for oil in the river basin around Parkersburg. He saved up enough to buy a train ticket, and on the way there he met an oilman who offered him a job negotiating leases with farmers. Benedum showed a knack for shrewd bargaining and “creekology,” as the locals called it, or the art of reading creek beds to determine if there might be oil in the area. He went into business with a geologist named Joe Trees, and several years later they hit their first gusher. Soon they were drilling wildcat wells across West Virginia and as far away as Louisiana and Texas, and Benedum was on his way to amassing a fortune in the hundreds of millions. He was also fighting a battle with the Internal Revenue Service over unpaid taxes that would drag on through three Republican presidencies and turn Benedum into an ardent supporter of the Democratic Party.
As the 1932 presidential race approached, Benedum was working to drum up support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he sensed a political wildcatting opportunity in the Negro vote. One day Benedum asked his black valet, Joseph Howard Gould, what he thought it would take to win support for the Democratic candidate among Pennsylvania’s registered Negro voters, who after three decades of northern migration now numbered more than 180,000. Gould, who belonged to a professional association of Pittsburgh butlers and maids that had been formed with the help of Robert Vann, suggested that his boss talk to the Courier’s Big Chief.
After the loan for the printing plant, Vann was only too happy to meet with Benedum. And when the oilman made his pitch for FDR, Vann was ready to listen. “What has the Negro ever gotten by voting the Republican ticket?” Benedum asked, to which Vann had a glum one-word reply. “Nothing.”
It was a bitter conclusion that had taken Vann several decades to reach. Like most blacks of his generation, his devotion to Abraham Lincoln, the hero of his high school graduation speech, had long made Vann a loyal Republican. Since moving to Pittsburgh, he had taken pride in the city’s place in Republican history: the first party convention had been held there in 1856, and Lincoln had passed through Pittsburgh and spent a night at the Monongahela House on the way to his first inauguration. At the Courier, Vann had reliably thrown the paper’s support behind Republicans at the city, state, and national level. But he had grown progressively disillusioned by what he saw as a lack of quid pro quo, for his people or for himself.
In 1920, Vann attended his first presidential convention in Chicago, as an alternate delegate, and watched Warren Harding get nominated on the fifth ballot. He gave Harding the Courier’s enthusiastic endorsement only to see the new president offer up no political spoils and refuse to sign an anti-lynching law for fear of offending Southern “lily-whites” in the party. After Harding’s sudden death, Vann had such high hopes for his successor that the Courier endorsed Calvin Coolidge for election in 1924 in his first days in office. Yet despite serving as vice chairman of a committee to get out the Negro vote, Vann was again denied any kind of appointment after Coolidge’s victory. Instead, he watched a plum patronage job go to the editor of a rival black paper in Philadelphia.
In 1928, Vann was impressed enough by Al Smith’s anti-lynching stand that he flirted with endorsing a Democrat for the first time. But when he put out a feeler to Jim Farley, the Democratic boss, Farley snubbed him, believing that Pittsburgh didn’t have enough black votes to justify Vann’s request for “appreciation” should Smith win. In the end, the Courier backed Herbert Hoover and denounced the Democratic Party convention in Houston as proof of the sway of its racist Southern wing.
In November 1928, Pittsburgh’s black vote went overwhelmingly for Hoover and helped him sweep Pennsylvania on the way to a huge Electoral College victory. But yet again, the only thanks Vann received was a token appointment to a World War I memorial committee, which he turned down in a sarcastic editorial. Judging by another item in the Courier, he placed part of the blame for the patronage slights on Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banking giant who served as treasury secretary under both Coolidge and Hoover. “The Mellons just won’t give employment to a Negro,” sniped a Courier gossip column.
By 1932, Vann had seen enough. Two years earlier, he had helped turn out enough black votes to help Gifford Pinchot, a reform Republican, win a tight Pennsylvania governor’s race, and still he had received no reward. Meanwhile, he had watched the deepening Depression under Hoover ravage the city of Pittsburgh and its Negro residents. Shares in the U.S. Steel Corpora
tion crashed. Mills all but ground to a halt. The jobless now numbered more than 75,000. More than a third of the black population was in need of assistance, and the Courier had begun organizing a “Neediest Family Drive” with support from everyone from the mayor and the City Council to Gus Greenlee and his lieutenants in the numbers racket.
Yet if Vann was going to defect, he wanted assurances that the Democrats would make it worth his while. He decided that the man to see was Joseph Guffey, the tough Irishman who ran the FDR campaign in Pennsylvania. But Vann didn’t want to make the overture directly. Better, he decided, to go through Guffey’s closest adviser—his sister, Emma Guffey Miller, the most influential female Democrat in the state.
Through Vann’s contacts in the butlers and maids society, he knew that Mrs. Miller had her toenails and fingernails trimmed and painted by a Hill resident named Eva DeBoe Jones. A former servant to the wife of Pittsburgh’s mayor, Jones had learned the art of manicuring and was now a favorite with the matrons of the East End. Summoning Jones to a meeting, Vann asked if she could pass along a message to Guffey’s sister, and at the next opportunity she did. “Mrs. Miller,” Jones said as she tended to her client’s cuticles, “Mr. Vann’d like to see your brother.”
Mrs. Miller passed on the message, but at first Guffey wasn’t interested. His cynical response was that Negroes needed to be bought, and that the Democrats couldn’t afford them. (Along with playing on the legacy of Lincoln, Republicans had a long history of passing around cash to secure the black vote.) But Miller persisted and eventually Guffey relented, as he was known to do when his sister demanded her way.
When Guffey finally met with Vann, he was struck by the depth of the publisher’s disaffection with the Republicans and by his vision of the impact that the Courier could have. There were now more than a quarter of a million Negroes of voting age in Pennsylvania, Vann argued—more than any other Northern state—as well as hundreds of thousands more in other states that were likely to be closely contested. If he could swing enough of them to the Democratic ticket, it could make the difference on Election Day.
Guffey was persuaded. With the help of his young Irish protégé, David Lawrence, he even arranged for Vann to travel to Hyde Park to meet with FDR. Roosevelt turned on the charm, and Vann returned to Pittsburgh more motivated than ever to help him win the White House. With the blessings of campaign bosses “Big Jim” Farley and Louis Howe, he formed a “Colored Advisory Committee” to the Roosevelt campaign. Vann was named to a “Big Four” leadership group along with black FDR backers from Boston, Kansas City, and Ohio. In western Pennsylvania, he recruited two hundred members to the Allied Roosevelt-for-President Clubs. To the east, he convinced the editor of a leading black paper in Philadelphia to endorse FDR, a major coup given how many Negro voters that city had and how loyal they had been to its Republican machine.
But Vann was determined to do more. He wanted to show that he could have an influence beyond his home state, by framing the choice that blacks faced in a way that would echo across the country. And as the fall campaign began, he was presented with just such an opportunity “to seize at its flow,” in the form of an invitation to address the St. James Literary Forum, a prominent public speakers program in Cleveland.
For weeks beforehand, Vann labored over a speech that was as polished as any closing argument he had made before a jury. In this case, it might have been called the Negro People v. the Republican Party. Vann titled the address “The Patriot and the Partisan,” and he began it by explaining why love of country trumped devotion to party. Then he launched into a historical review of Republican betrayal of black loyalty.
In a passage drawn from his childhood memories of the Askew farm, Vann argued that Northern Republicans who took control of the vanquished Confederacy did so with no regard for “the human kindness that had been woven between the aristocratic whites and the subjugated blacks of the South.” Driven only by their interests, the carpetbaggers pushed through Reconstruction laws and placed Negroes in political office with a haste that was bound to antagonize Southern whites, and then offered no support once the Jim Crow backlash began. In another passage dripping with personal bitterness, Vann pointed out how quickly GOP enthusiasm for awarding patronage to Negroes had vanished with the Harding presidency, once Republicans took the black vote for granted.
Next Vann introduced examples of Herbert Hoover’s treachery into evidence. There was Hoover’s order to disband the 24th Infantry and the 10th Cavalry Regiments, the Negro divisions that had fought for their country from San Juan Hill to World War I. There was the case of the “Gold Star Mothers,” the program that invited mothers of war dead to visit their children’s graves in Europe but required that black participants travel on a separate ship. There was the slighting of Negroes in Hoover’s relief and home lending bills, and the insult of his failed nomination of Judge John J. Parker, an avowed Southern foe of black enfranchisement, to the Supreme Court.
But like any good courthouse lawyer, Vann didn’t just want to argue facts. He wanted to appeal to the heart. And when it came to Negroes and the Republican Party, nothing was more emotional than their devotion to Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator whose picture so many black families still kept in a place of honor in their homes.
September 11, 1932, was a warm Sunday in Cleveland. A capacity crowd filled the St. James AME Church in the city’s Fairfax district to hear Vann’s afternoon address. He began slowly and deliberately, waiting until he was halfway through the speech before making his first reference to Lincoln. “So long as the Republican party could use the photograph of Abraham Lincoln to entice Negroes to vote a Republican ticket,” Vann argued, “they condescended to accord Negroes some degree of political recognition. But when the Republican Party had built itself to the point of security, it no longer invited Negro support. It no longer gave Negroes political recognition. It no longer invited the black man into its councils.”
From there, Vann veered off on several long tangents before circling back, in a rousing close, to Lincoln’s photograph. “As for this year of our Lord, Negroes everywhere I have seen are aroused,” he proclaimed. “They are determined. They are dissatisfied. They are patriots, yes; but not monotonously partisan . . . . I see in the offing a horde of black men and women throwing off the yoke of partisanism practiced for over half a century, casting down the idols of empty promises and moving out into the sunlight of independence. I see hordes and hordes of black men and women, belonging to the army of forgotten men, turning their faces toward a new course and a new party. I see millions of Negroes turning the picture of Abraham Lincoln to the wall. This year I see Negroes voting a Democratic ticket.”
Vann knew that he had conjured a memorable image, and he wanted to make it stick. In its next issue, the Courier printed Vann’s entire speech under the banner headline “This Year I See Millions of Negroes Turning the Picture of Abraham Lincoln to the Wall.” Other black newspapers across the country reprinted the address, and Vann paid to have pamphlets of it distributed in cities where the Courier was sold. For the next two months, Vann continued to barnstorm, expounding on the theme of Republican betrayal wherever he went. Meanwhile, the Courier pounded away at Hoover and mocked his eleventh-hour bid to shore up black support by inviting a group of Negro leaders called “the Committee of One Hundred” to the White House.
When Roosevelt traveled to Pittsburgh three weeks before the election, Vann was given his first reward for the support. He was invited to be part of the public welcoming committee for what would be one of FDR’s most memorable speeches of the campaign. For months, Hoover had tried to scare voters with the prospect that the profligate Democrats would make the free-falling economy even worse. But before a raucous crowd of 32,000 at Forbes Field, Roosevelt turned the tables and argued that it was Hoover and Mellon who had been reckless, by refusing to cut spending and raise revenues once the crisis began. Sensing that he had an attentive audience in Pittsburgh, a city built on business, Roosevelt offe
red a detailed (and remarkably conservative, by modern standards) lecture on the dangers of government deficits. If elected, he vowed to cut the cost of the bloated federal bureaucracy by a quarter—while slyly leaving himself a loophole for new programs aimed at “the direct relief of unemployment.”
During a fifteen-minute pre-speech rally, the normally reticent Vann threw himself into whipping up the crowd, which he had made sure was full of black faces. One of them was gossip columnist Julia Bumry Jones, who gushed about the speech in her “Talk O’ Town” column later that week. “For the first time in my young life, I am voting with the Dems,” Jones confided. “Franky Roosevelt impressed me heap much as he propounded under the clear, blue skies at Forbes Field the other night.” Then Jones dropped a hint to her readers that a powerful Republican ally on the Hill might also be warming to the Democratic cause. “I believe it was Gus Greenlee,” she wrote, “who told me a LONG time ago that ‘a change of pasture is good for the cow.’ ”
Two weeks later, on the Friday before the election, scores of the black residents of Pittsburgh’s Fifth Ward, representing the Lower Hill, filed into a cold high school auditorium to hear a last appeal from Republican leaders. Many of the Negroes were janitors, cleaning ladies, and other laborers on the payroll of the city political machine, but they were in a sullen mood. They barely responded when ward chairman Harry Feldman took a shot at Vann, who as a resident of Homewood would be voting in the Thirteenth Ward. “Why should a citizen from the Thirteenth Ward tell you what to do?” Feldman barked. “We will not let this ward go Democrat because of one man!” Then the atmosphere abruptly shifted as a W. T. Poole, a black mortician, rose to speak. “We are tired of being used and not considered!” Poole shouted at the ward bosses. “The reason for so many Negro Democrats is because they don’t feel they have had a just deal!” Suddenly all the blacks in the room broke into wild cheering that lasted for two minutes and was carried by loudspeakers out on the streets of the Hill.
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