Smoketown

by Mark Whitaker

  Five days later, a majority of blacks on the Lower Hill for the first time voted to send a Democrat to the White House. They brought Roosevelt within a hair of winning the Fifth Ward, despite a Republican registration edge of four to one. In the Third Ward, representing the Upper Hill, Negro support handed FDR a comfortable margin of victory in a district that had previously voted 80 percent Republican. Allegheny County went Democratic for the first time ever—by 37,000 votes, with 35,000 coming from Negroes. And while Vann failed to achieve his goal of tilting the entire state, the race across Pennsylvania was closer than it had ever been. Hoover barely held on to Pennsylvania’s thirty-six electoral votes, without which Roosevelt’s 472–59 vote landslide would have been an even more historic rout.

  A week later, the Courier went so far as to suggest that Negroes had tipped the race to Roosevelt. Based on the highly conjectural assumption that two thirds of registered blacks had gone to the polls, it estimated that two million Negroes had voted nationwide. More than half of them were in key states that had gone Democratic after voting Republican in 1928: New York, Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, New Jersey, California, Tennessee, Kansas, West Virginia, and Maryland. Given the scope of FDR’s victory, the Courier argued, those black voters represented a “determining factor” in securing the Democrat’s victory.

  In fact, the hard evidence of black contribution to Roosevelt’s win in 1932 was much less clear. When Negro ballots in the Northern cities with the largest black populations were officially tallied, they still tilted heavily toward Hoover. Roughly three out of every four Negroes had voted Republican in Chicago, Cleveland, and Cincinnati; in Detroit, it had been two out of three. Only in New York City, FDR’s home state, did he win a clear majority of Negro voters.

  Yet by making the case that the memory of Lincoln should not have a permanent hold on black voters, and by proving that he could shift Negro allegiances in one of the country’s most Republican states, Vann had begun to change the calculus of American politics. Once Roosevelt took office, he would go out of his way to court Negroes with relief assistance under the Works Progress Administration, and in the next campaign Big Jim Farley would give top priority to courting the black vote. The resulting Great Political Migration of blacks to the Democratic Party in 1936 would reshape its identity and gradually, over the next eighty years, transform the Electoral College map. By the late 1930s, no less an authority than Joseph Alsop, the widely read political columnist, would credit Robert Lee Vann as “the real originator of the Democratic Party’s celebrated capture of the Negro vote.”

  FDR didn’t need much persuading that he owed a debt to Vann. Two days after the election, Joseph Guffey traveled to Hyde Park and urged the president-elect to reward the publisher with a high-level appointment. When Roosevelt asked what he had in mind, Guffey suggested a post as special assistant in the Justice Department. Roosevelt’s only question was whether it would require Senate confirmation, since he didn’t want to risk an early fight with Southern Democrats. When Guffey replied that it would not, FDR grinned and agreed to the Vann appointment. “The job’s yours, Joe!” he said.

  The appointment, officially announced that summer, was big enough news to make the prestigious “The Presidency” report in Time magazine. As Vann prepared to depart for Washington, some of the most powerful men in the new administration traveled to Pittsburgh to pay him homage. At a Democratic Party banquet at the William Penn Hotel, Vann was seated at the head table along with Mike Benedum, Joe Guffey, Jim Farley, and Harold Ickes, the powerful FDR aide who had been named secretary of the interior. The next month, Guffey, his sister Emma, and David Lawrence all turned out for a banquet that Ira Lewis threw in honor of Vann at the Pythian Temple on the Hill. Vann was presented with an Elgin wristwatch; his wife, Jesse, received a bouquet of flowers; and Julia Bumry Jones declared that the event was “the finest, most representative affair of its kind every given in Smoketown.”

  After the testimonials from Guffey and Lawrence, Vann, clad in black tie and winged collar, rose to speak. He was effusive in his praise for the new president and for his political advisers, but as blunt as ever in insisting that Negroes should never again blindly serve any political master. “I came to the Democratic Party because the Republican Party no longer serves the interest of the people,” Vann said to murmurs of agreement and laughter, “and when this party gets to where they no longer offer my people any service, I’ll either go back to the Republican Party or to some other party.”

  Vann’s caveat would prove prophetic, but he didn’t know that yet. For one shining evening at the Knights of Pythias, the Big Chief was only too happy to bathe in the adoration of his colleagues and the five hundred other proud Negroes in the room. At long last, Vann was off to conquer Washington, just as a new King of the Hill—who had also risen from modest beginnings in North Carolina, but along a much less straight and narrow path—was reaching the height of his power.

  Gus Greenlee (center) at the Crawford Grill, his nightclub in the Hill District, with Courier sportswriters Bill Nunn and Wendell Smith (left) and Pittsburgh Crawfords pitching ace Satchel Paige (in suit).

  SPORTS

  4

  THE RISE AND FALL OF “BIG RED”

  IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of April 29, 1932, a rare joyful date in that dark year of Depression on the Hill, thousands of locals gathered at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Junilla Street to attend Dedication Day at Greenlee Field. When the gate opened around four o’clock, they pulled out the quarters, dimes, and nickels they had saved up to be among the first to enter the stadium’s brick walls. Inside, they took their places on new wooden bleachers supported by gleaming steel beams and braced by sturdy blocks of concrete. For the next hour and a half, they watched the visiting New York Black Yankees, then their hometown Pittsburgh Crawfords, take batting practice on a field as lush and manicured as any they had ever seen at a major league ballpark.

  Shortly before six o’clock, the teams lined up behind a marching band and made their way to a flagpole in center field. As Old Glory was raised, the band struck up “The Star Spangled Banner.” Robert L. Vann, the slender, abstemious publisher of the Courier, gave a short dedication speech, then he asked for a show of appreciation for the husky, high-rolling racketeer who had made the day possible by spending no less than $100,000. As the crowd of six thousand cheered and rose to their feet, a red Packard convertible made its way around the infield, with the man they called “Big Red” waving from the backseat, dressed in a white silk suit and smoking a Cuban cigar.

  The first game in the house that Gus Greenlee built turned out to be a classic pitching duel. Satchel Paige, the mercurial ace whom Greenlee had lured to Pittsburgh, was on the mound for the Crawfords. At the top of his form at age twenty-six, Paige hurled one fastball after another—no spitballs, grease balls, or brush-back pitches. He had no need to resort to “smoke at the yoke,” he liked to boast; he could get you all day with “peas at the knees.” Going into the ninth inning, Paige had struck out ten, and allowed only three hits and no runs. But he had been matched inning for inning by the portly ace for the Black Yankees, Jesse Hubbard, who had given up only three hits and kept the Crawfords scoreless.

  Stadium lights had yet to be installed and darkness was falling as the game entered the ninth inning. With one out and one on, Ted Page, the Yankees right fielder, hit a grounder and raced to first to beat a double play. Page promptly stole second, raced to third when the pickoff throw sailed past the second baseman, and scored when teammate Hawk Thomas hit a Texas Leaguer to right. With two out in the bottom of the ninth, Josh Gibson, the fearsome Crawford slugger, had a chance to even the game. All six thousand fans rose to their feet in hope that the man known as “the black Babe Ruth” might smack one of his mighty homers.

  Gibson hit a drive to deep center, and for a second it looked like the ball might go out. But Hawk Thomas snagged it out of midair, and the game was over. The Black Yankees had won, 1–0. As the drained Crawford fans filed o
ut into the night, they had to settle for the satisfaction of witnessing a game in their own ballpark, the first ever erected by a black man. Behind the dugouts, meanwhile, the players experienced another first. At Forbes Field, Yankee Stadium, and every other major league stadium where Negroes played, they weren’t allowed to use the locker facilities. But tonight the men of the Crawfords and the Black Yankees didn’t have to change at a boardinghouse or on a bus. Tonight, thanks to Gus Greenlee, they slipped out of their sweaty uniforms and muddy cleats in the dignity of their own locker room.

  Like Robert Lee Vann, William Augustus Greenlee was born in North Carolina, in a mill town at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains called Marion. Unlike Vann, his parents had some means. Greenlee’s father was a masonry contractor who made a tidy sum helping to rebuild Marion’s courthouse, hotels, and other buildings after a horrendous fire destroyed most of the town. His mother, the mulatto daughter of a black slave and her white owner, put great store in education: two of her sons grew up to become doctors, and a third, a lawyer. But Gus was a restless and rebellious child who disliked school and made it through only one year of college before dropping out.

  “On the dogs with father,” as one of his brothers put it, Gus hoboed his way north at the age of nineteen with nothing but some patched-up clothes and a pair of canvas shoes, making for a nasty surprise when he stepped off the freight train into the snow and cold of Pittsburgh’s winter. At six-foot-two, with a shock of red hair framing his wide, freckled face, Greenlee immediately cut a striking figure on the Hill, and he displayed drive to match. He shined shoes, worked in a steel mill, and chauffeured for a white undertaker until he had saved up enough money to buy his own taxicab.

  When America entered World War I, Greenlee enlisted. He was assigned to the 367th Infantry at Fort Dix, New Jersey, one of the Negro regiments that were assembled to form the 92nd Division and given the title of Buffalo Soldiers, after the all-black units of the Union Army and the Spanish-American War. In June 1918, the Buffalos set sail from Hoboken, New Jersey, for a training facility in the French town of Bourbonnes-les-Bains, known for its hot spring spas. From there, they were dispatched to an area in the eastern Vosges Mountains, which hadn’t seen much action and where the French generals under whose command they had been put thought it would be safe to park Negro servicemen for the rest of the war. But as soon as they arrived, the sector named for the town of Saint-Dié came under intense German ground and air attack.

  One morning in early September, the men of the 367th looked up from their positions, where Greenlee manned a machine gun, and saw German planes buzzing overhead. Round objects began to fall from the sky. At first the soldiers took them for gas shells. Instead, they were scrolls of paper with a message addressed “TO THE COLORED SOLDIERS OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.” “Hello boys, what are you doing over here?” the pamphlets read. “Fighting the Germans? Why? Have they ever done you any harm? . . . Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people do in America, the land of Freedom and Democracy, or are you rather not treated over there as second-class citizens? . . . Now, this is all different in Germany, where they do like colored people, where they treat them as gentlemen . . . . Come over and see for yourself . . . . Don’t allow them to use you as cannon fodder. To carry a gun in this war is not an honor, but a shame. Throw it away and come over into the German lines.”

  Far from answering the call to desertion, the Buffalos fought bravely, repelling several German advances and suffering dozens of casualties and scores of injuries. Their white American officers pleaded with the French commanders to let them go on the attack, but instead the French replaced them with white soldiers. General John Pershing, who had commanded the Buffalos in previous wars and knew what they were capable of, arranged to have them assigned to him, to help in the Grand Offensive to push the crumbling German army out of France. Although the official order of battle in Pershing’s advance through the Argonne forest region indicated that the men of the 367th were assigned to supply and field hospital duties, some must have found their way to the front as well, for machine gunner Gus Greenlee returned to America in the spring of 1919 with a shrapnel wound suffered in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel.

  Greenlee’s taxicab was waiting for him when he got back to Pittsburgh—and so was a new opportunity to use it. After “June thirsty-first,” as they called the July 1, 1919 implementation of the Wartime Prohibition Act, the first step toward banning all liquor sales in America—Greenlee became a bootlegger. Four Italian brothers named Tito used him to make deliveries of the illegal beer and whiskey they manufactured in a brewery in the town of Latrobe, southeast of Pittsburgh. Soon Greenlee’s cab was logging so many miles on his liquor runs that he acquired a new nickname: “Gasoline Gus.”

  Later there would be stories that Greenlee hijacked liquor trucks operated by the likes of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. But there is more evidence that the gangster wars of the Prohibition Era had the opposite effect, of encouraging the shrewd, entrepreneurial redhead to pursue less perilous enterprises than rum-running. By 1922, Greenlee had opened his own speakeasy in the Hill District, the Paramount Inn on Wylie Avenue. Police promptly raided it and closed it down, charging, according to white newspaper accounts, that the club was the site of “drunken orgies” where “blacks and whites mingled freely and danced together frequently.” Rather than give up, Greenlee took steps to make the Paramount more respectable, reopening the club with a full-time orchestra and forming a talent-booking agency that he ran out of an office upstairs.

  Legend also had it that Gus Greenlee brought the numbers racket to Pittsburgh. Some even said that he was the man responsible for introducing numbers to the United States, after traveling to Cuba and watching the locals play “la bolita,” a game where small balls inscribed with numbers were placed in a bag and gamblers bet on which ones would be pulled out. But more credible accounts suggest that the numbers first arrived in Pittsburgh from New York City, via railroad porters who took bets for Madame Stephanie St. Clair, the “Policy Queen of Harlem,” and other Eastern numbers bankers who were already in operation by the early 1920s.

  By the time Greenlee got into the game, a doctor on Centre Avenue who tried to start his own numbers racket had gone bust. So Gus took the time to study the details of the enterprise, soaking up the wisdom of a visiting numbers king from Philadelphia. In 1926, he began to organize his own racket, working with a partner named William Harris. Known as “Woogie,” Harris owned an ideal front for numbers running: the Crystal Barber Shop on Wylie Avenue, where scores of men came in each day to get a haircut and a shave and to swap tall tales under the French-paneled mirrors.

  It was slow going at first. One of the first “numbers runners” that Greenlee and Harris deployed was Woogie’s younger brother Charles, whom everyone called “Teenie.” (Teenie was indeed short of stature, but he acquired the nickname because of his good looks; when he was a child, a visiting relative took to calling him “Teenie Little Lover.”) Teenie was sent to collect bets in McKees Rocks, a mill town north of Pittsburgh, and some days he would return with less than $2 worth of betting slips. But gradually the business grew, and by the early 1930s Gus Greenlee and Woogie Harris were taking in as much as $25,000 a day in bets and employing five hundred runners across the city. Working as “cut buddies,” sharing financial gains and losses, they amassed enough money to buy side-by-side Tudor houses in the elegant Penn Hills neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Pittsburgh.

  Greenlee and Harris usually derived their numbers from the stock market, coming up with a three-digit figure every day based on the quantity of stocks that rose, fell, and stayed even. (Occasionally the number was also drawn from newspaper reports of commodity sales, or horse track results.) Between eight and ten o’clock each morning, their runners filled the streets of black Pittsburgh, in cars and on foot, collecting wagers that were recorded on slips of paper. While lookout men armed with guns under their topcoats stood guard outside, the runners delivered the slips to the
Paramount Inn and the Crystal Barber Shop, where women in back rooms tallied the day’s take on adding machines. The next day, a winning number was calculated from the morning stock market tables, and payouts were made to anyone who “hit the number.”

  For the gamblers, the bets bought a long shot at a dream, and a day’s worth of hope during a deepening Depression. Greenlee and Harris set their odds in advance, usually at 600-to-1. A hod carrier could bet a penny for a chance to win $6; a steelworker, a dime to make sixty; a Loendi Club man, a dollar to score $600. It was a game rigged in favor of the house, given the number of people who played every day, and the fact that most wagers were under a dollar. But it also meant that a banker had to be good to his word when lucky winners hit the number, an occurrence that Greenlee and Harris turned to their advantage one Thursday in the summer of 1930.

  Pittsburgh was in the middle of a brutal August heat wave. Weeks of 90 degree heat with no rain had baked the city streets and ravaged farmland for miles around. Water was being rationed, and the price of milk had shot up due to the drought. Too exhausted to come up with anything more creative, hundreds of Pittsburgh gamblers wrote the simplest number they could think of on their betting slips: the date, “805.” Usually it was a sucker’s wager, because betting the date was so obvious, but on that day the number hit. Suddenly racketeers across the city were faced with a huge payout. Most couldn’t cover it. Some paid only a fraction of what they owed. Others skipped town, fleeing to hideouts in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago. One banker became the object of a bitter ditty: “805 was a burner. Where the hell is Jakie Lerner?”