Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  Skinner prevailed 9–0.

  What most undermined Oklahoma’s sterilization law, Justice William Douglas wrote in the Court’s June 1, 1942, decision, was “its failure to meet the requirements of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and he specifically delved into the chicken-stealing/embezzling comparison. On this the Court was in general agreement. But Douglas thought it necessary to add the following:

  We are dealing here with legislation which involves one of the most basic civil rights of man. Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race. The power to sterilize, if exercised, may have subtle, far-reaching and devastating effects. In evil or reckless hands, it can cause races or types which are inimical to the dominant group to wither and disappear.

  Across the Atlantic, those evil and reckless hands were already hard at work. In the summer of 1942, the Nazis had constructed fewer than one hundred concentration, labor, and extermination camps. Within two years, there were thousands of them.

  Oklahoma v. Skinner did not officially reverse Buck v. Bell—which has yet to be overturned—or halt sterilizations in the United States, only “punitive” ones. But it represented the first major legal ruling against eugenics and lent enormous moral authority to its opponents. Along with the Court’s warning on how such practices could lead to wholesale genocide (the irrefutable proof of which was revealed to the world after Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945), it also fortified the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause and prompted certain legislation to be more “strictly scrutinized” to ensure that minority rights were being protected. As obvious as this sounds today, it was frighteningly less so generations ago.

  Any number of locations could have served as a springboard to tell Skinner’s story: his birthplace in Shawnee, Oklahoma; McAlester Prison; the county or state courthouses that first tried his case; or his grave in Tulare County, California, where he died at the age of seventy-seven, survived by six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. For me, the site of Skinner’s botched holdup, which precipitated the constitutional legal fight, seemed a more offbeat and memorable choice and no less appropriate than the others. When I arrived at 735 North Harvey, where the Paris-Cope Service Station had been in 1934, it became all the more relevant.

  Today, the site is a parking lot connected to a modern office building. Only three stories tall, the squat cement structure exudes a fortresslike impenetrability. The windows are thick and tinted green. Bulletproof. Brown metal poles topped with security cameras line the street. In front of the sleek all-glass entrance is a steel sign that reads GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION. But I know what this building is and why it’s here. Whatever its official name might be now, it is, for all intents and purposes, the new Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

  The old Murrah Building had, of course, stood across the street until the morning of April 19, 1995. At 9:02 A.M. a Ryder van packed with almost five thousand pounds of a diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer mix exploded outside the nine-story building, killing 149 adults and 19 children. More than 320 buildings within a sixteen-block radius were damaged, and the blast could be heard in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some fifty-three miles away.

  Coming two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was orchestrated and funded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Osama bin Laden’s partner in crime), the attack was initially blamed on Islamic extremists. But FBI agents traced the Ryder’s identification number from a mangled axle back to a twenty-seven-year-old American named Timothy McVeigh, and the manhunt for McVeigh was on.

  Incredibly, he was already in custody—for what began as a minor traffic violation. At around 10:30 A.M., a state trooper had pulled McVeigh over for driving without a rear license plate and ended up arresting him for possessing an unregistered gun. McVeigh was being booked when the Wanted bulletin came over the wires, and Oklahoma police, stunned that he was right in front of them, contacted the FBI.

  During an inspection of McVeigh’s car, detectives found, among a trove of incriminating evidence, photocopied pages from William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. Published in 1978, the novel glorifies overthrowing the U.S. government and inciting a race war by, first, blowing up federal buildings. Pierce’s description of an attack on the FBI’s Washington headquarters is uncannily similar to what happened at the Murrah Building, where the FBI had regional offices. Just as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was a “bible” to Hitler, The Turner Diaries is practically a sacred text to neo-Nazis and has been linked to numerous killings. McVeigh, who sold the book at gun shows, cited it as an inspiration.

  Whether or not Pierce ever read Grant isn’t known, though I’d be surprised if he hadn’t; The Passing of the Great Race is a classic among white supremacists. Regardless, the two men were kindred spirits who hated all the same people—blacks, Jews, immigrants, and most other minorities. Were he alive today, I’m sure Grant would be a dues-paying member of the National Alliance, the neo-Nazi organization Pierce founded in 1974.

  While the impulse to excise men such as Pierce and Grant from our national autobiography with a hearty “Good riddance” is understandable, there’s a risk in doing so. Sanitizing history prevents us from seeing the warning signs of another Haun’s Mill, Mountain Meadows, or Rock Springs. These incidents occurred so long ago they’re almost unreal now, and the idea that similar massacres and riots could take place in our own time seems impossible. Such atrocities always do—right up until the moment they happen again.

  The Oklahoma City National Memorial, directly across the street from the new Murrah Building, is a powerful reminder of this. Book-ending a one-hundred-yard-long shallow pool are two massive bronze walls, each about four stories tall, called the Gates of Time. Etched into one is 9:01 and the other 9:03. Between them, where the Murrah Building used to be, is a vast, empty space that forces the mind to reflect on what happened at 9:02. I begin walking the length of the pool to look at both gates up close.

  Most affecting, I think, are the memorial’s 168 chairs, arranged by where the victims were sitting when the truck exploded. Nineteen of them, for the children, are smaller than the rest.

  I absentmindedly step off the paved walkway and onto the grass, where the chairs are situated.

  “Oh, sorry,” I say to one of the park rangers, a guy in his twenties standing nearby. “Is it okay to walk on here?”

  “You’re fine.”

  While looking at the chairs more closely, I spot a discrepancy. “Why does that one have two names on it?” I ask the ranger.

  The answer comes to me before he responds, but his reply is still a punch to the gut.

  “There are three chairs like that,” he tells me, “for the women who were pregnant. The second names are for the babies.”

  Unable to say anything, I just keep staring at the chairs.

  “A lot of folks,” he continues, “walk right past them without even noticing, but when they do, it’s something I doubt they’ll forget. It’s the little things we almost miss that hit the hardest, you know?”

  I do.

  PART IV

  LANDMARK CASES

  Crimes and Lawsuits That Changed the Nation

  SLIP HILL GRADE SCHOOL

  I’m in the Jehovah’s Witness protection program. I have to go around knocking on people’s doors and telling them I’m somebody else.

  —Steven Wright

  My Avon lady just became a Jehovah’s Witness. That may not mean much to you, but it saves me one more trip to the door.

  —George Carlin

  What does Hannibal Lecter call a Jehovah’s Witness? Free delivery!

  —Jay Leno

  UNLIKE JACK SKINNER, Marie Barnett was not a hard-core convicted felon looking to break the law for personal gain but an innocent soul caught up in a legal battle that also made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Actually, I didn’t know all of this for certain before calling Marie at her home in
West Virginia, but I figured it was a safe bet that she didn’t have a criminal record when the Court took her case in 1943.

  “How old were you at the time you got into trouble?” I asked Marie.

  “I was nine.”

  “And you and your sister Gathie were in the fifth grade?”

  “Fourth.”

  “Fourth grade, at Slip Hill Grade School?”

  “That’s correct.”

  On January 9, 1942, the West Virginia Board of Education, like many other public school boards across the United States, had made it mandatory for students to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Marie and her sister refused.

  “It wasn’t that we weren’t patriotic,” Marie tells me. “Our faith teaches us to pledge allegiance only to God.”

  They, like other Jehovah’s Witnesses, adhere to a literal reading of the Bible’s commandment in Exodus 20:3–5 that states:

  Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

  Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:

  Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.

  “You and your sister weren’t arrested, though, right?”

  “No, but our father was—because we weren’t in school, even though it was the principal who kept sending us home. He wasn’t very nice about it.”

  Discrimination against Jehovah’s Witnesses (who, before 1931, were called Bible Students) dates back to the late 1800s, when their founder, a charismatic Pittsburgh haberdasher named Charles Taze Russell, preached that Armageddon was imminent and that Christ had already returned to earth “invisibly” in 1874 but would be back for real about four decades later. Russell also claimed that, due to divinely inspired climate change, global temperatures would rise and the world would revert to a balmy, Genesis-like state. Russell’s followers endured no end of insults, and this was before his successors encouraged door-to-door proselytizing, for which the Jehovah’s Witnesses are perhaps best known and most ridiculed.

  Beginning in the summer of 1940, mockery turned to bloodshed when physical assaults against Witnesses surged nationwide. Triggering the violence was the June 3, 1940, Supreme Court ruling against Walter Gobitas, a Jehovah’s Witness from Minersville, Pennsylvania, who had told his children, Lillian and Billy, not to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance at school. They didn’t, and they were expelled.

  Both a district judge and a U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Gobitas, but the school board continued fighting until the cases landed before the nine justices of the Supreme Court. When they handed down their decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (a lower court misspelled Gobitas, and the error stuck), the final tally wasn’t even close; 8–1 against Gobitas, with only Justice Harlan Stone dissenting. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the majority opinion. “National unity is the basis of national security,” he argued.

  The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment. Such a sentiment is fostered by all those agencies of the mind and spirit which may serve to gather up the traditions of a people, transmit them from generation to generation, and thereby create that continuity of a treasured common life which constitutes a civilization. “We live by symbols.” The flag is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution.

  Almost overnight, Jehovah’s Witnesses came under attack, vilified by their assailants as un-American. “In June a mob of Legionnaires dragged some of Jehovah’s Witnesses from their automobiles as they were sitting in the Court House Square at Jasper and beat them up,” John Adams of Beaumont, Texas, recalled in a sworn affidavit. “When some bystanders attempted to come to the rescue of these people,” he went on, “they likewise were beaten—two of them being a frail woman and her daughter. When the woman and her daughter appealed to the Sheriff and Deputy and Town Marshall of Jasper for protection, they merely stood by and chuckled while the mob continued their ‘dirty work.’ ”

  Hundreds of similar accounts were recorded throughout the country. Along with being punched, kicked, and shot at, Witnesses were jailed without cause, fired from their jobs, and run out of their homes. And this was all a year and a half before America declared war on Germany and Japan. Marie and Gathie Barnett declined to say the Pledge barely a month after Pearl Harbor was bombed.

  Thanks to Debra Basham and Midge Justice, who work for the State of West Virginia and tracked down the 1942 records, I had Slip Hill Grade School’s original address at 2389 Hampshire Drive in Charlestown. But street names have changed and the school was closed long ago, so I needed to get specific directions from Marie.

  “Is that far from where you live now?” I asked her during our first conversation.

  “Only a few miles away.”

  “Do you ever go back, like, for nostalgic reasons?”

  “No,” Marie replied without elaborating.

  I invited her to come along with me, but Marie politely declined, telling me she had to tend to her husband, who was recuperating from an operation.

  Marie’s directions are clear enough, and I drive up to what I believe to be 2389 Hampshire. But apparently it’s been so long since Marie has passed by here that even she didn’t know Slip Hill has been razed, and there’s nothing left but a gravel parking lot. I walk up to an AFL-CIO hall that sits close to where the school should be and ask a young woman inside if I have the right address.

  “That’s where the building used to be,” she says, “before they tore it down. People thought it was an eyesore.”

  I’m tempted to remark that the empty space there now isn’t exactly a thing of beauty, but I know it’s not her fault that the school was leveled.

  Marie couldn’t recall in detail what happened the first day she and Gathie refused to say the Pledge, except that her teacher was quietly supportive but the principal would have none of it. For almost a month Marie and her sister walked a quarter of a mile to school each day, only to be turned away when they confirmed that, no, they hadn’t changed their minds. “We were perfectly willing to stand there respectfully while the other students recited the Pledge, which we had done before,” Marie said, “but the principal ordered us home every time.”

  Stare decisis, from the Latin dictum stare decisis et quieta non movere (meaning “to stand by and adhere to decisions and not disturb what is settled”), is Supreme Court gospel. Constantly overturning precedents is unwise, the reasoning goes, because it leads to judicial mayhem, and justices are especially averse to rehashing recently decided cases. But in light of the violent aftermath of Gobitis, the Court believed a second look was in order, and West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette was their opportunity for another chance at bat. (The extra e in Barnette was a mistake; as with the Gobitas family, the lower courts botched the name. I asked Marie if she thought the misspellings were an intentional slight. “No,” she said. “I have relatives who write Barnett with an e at the end.”)

  Oral arguments were conducted on March 11, 1943, with Hayden Covington defending the Barnetts and two other families listed on the docket, McClure and Stull. Covington had served as lead counsel for several dozen major rulings involving Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of which had broad implications that expanded freedom of speech, worship, and assembly rights to all Americans.

  The Barnette decision came down three months later. Justices Stanley Reed and Owen Roberts saw no reason to overturn Gobitis, nor did they think it necessary to articulate why. Neither man contributed a written opinion.

  Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas had also been in the majority for Gobitis but reversed themselves in Barnette. “Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest,” they wrote in a joint opinion. “Love of country must spring from willing hearts and free minds, inspired by a fair administration of w
ise laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives within the bounds of express constitutional prohibitions.”

  Justice Robert Jackson, who had joined the Court only two years before, believed that Gobitis should be overturned, and he tackled Justice Frankfurter’s “national unity is the basis of national security” argument head-on.

  “National unity as an end which officials may foster by persuasion and example is not in question,” Jackson wrote. “The problem is whether under our Constitution compulsion as here employed is a permissible means for its achievement.” He then expounded on the slippery slope to which this coercion could lead:

  Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity.…

  Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

  Notoriously combative, Frankfurter dug in his heels, defended Gobitis, and responded with the longest and most impassioned of the Barnette opinions. Perhaps stung by criticism after Gobitis that, as a Jew, he should be more sympathetic to minority faiths, Frankfurter began on a rare—for any justice—personal note: