* * *
In a fragment titled “The Old Man Himself,” dated 1891, Walt Whitman held forth:
Walt Whitman has a way of putting in his own special word of thanks, his own way, for kindly demonstrations, and may now be considered as appearing on the scene, wheeled at last in his invalid chair, and saying, propria persona, Thank you, thank you, my friends all.… One of my dearest objects in my poetic expression has been to combine these Forty-Four United States into One Identity, fused, equal, and independent. My attempt has been mainly of suggestion, atmosphere, reminder, the native and common spirit of all, and perennial heroism.
One of the last projects Henry Fonda considers, we’re told by one researcher, is a solo show about Walt Whitman. Picture it—Henry, “wheeled at last in his invalid chair,” wearing the full beard of his final months. The blue eyes have lost their focus, yet they appear winsome, content on other visions: shapes, faces, colors. He is winding down, like a tough old animal or exquisite timepiece, but he has long outlived his father to become what George Billings impressed him as being—the old man in the shawl, who wept tears of history into his beard.
How would Fonda have rehearsed his Whitman? In the mirror? In his mind? Who would his Whitman have been—the song-poet of democracy, or the lusty bard of the meadows? And what passages would he have chosen? Studying the preface to Leaves of Grass, scanning the words with the rheumy eyes and ivory fingers of the old man himself, would Henry have lingered on these lines—
Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is.
—or these—
He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet.
—or these?
He says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.
12
Omaha, 1919
Will Brown
It was hours past sundown, but the Omaha sky on September 28, 1919, was bright with light: The Douglas County Courthouse was burning.
Starting in the afternoon, a mob of thousands had been laying siege to the building with stones, bricks, and Louisville Sluggers. Some had begun firing guns at the windows. Eventually, the mob had penetrated the courthouse and taken over the ground-floor rotunda, driving police and other city employees to the upper stories. The lines of a nearby service station were tapped, and the first floor sprayed with gasoline. Someone lit the first match.
The courthouse held the county jail, and the mob was demanding the surrender of a prisoner—a forty-one-year-old black laborer, Will Brown, under arrest for raping a white girl. In his courthouse office, Omaha’s mayor, Edward P. Smith, had been trying to contact government officials and secure federal troops. As yet, no aid had arrived. In a show of resistance to the mob, Smith had refused to leave his office, but finally the fire made it unsafe to stay.
Near eleven o’clock, the mayor emerged on the eastern steps to plead restraint and reason. But few could hear him.
Suddenly, a gunshot cut the din of voices.
“He shot me,” someone screamed—and fingers were pointing at Smith, whose hands were empty.
The mob converged on the mayor, forced him to the corner, got a rope around his neck, and, tossing the free end over a traffic light, tried to hang him.
* * *
In late 1918, thousands of black veterans had returned from the war, dressed proudly in the uniforms they had earned. Cheap automobiles and rail travel offered hope of mobility to poor families trapped in racist backwaters, and northward migration, as John Hope Franklin wrote, “spread like wild fire among Negroes.… It was estimated that by the end of 1918 more than one million Negroes had left the South.” They left for the urbanized North and Middle West to survive, but also because they felt possibilities opening for the first time in their lives.
But often, what they found on reaching cities like Chicago, Kansas City, and Omaha was bigotry in new forms. Labor unions resented having to share a job market already crowded with foreign immigrants. The Klan, exploiting the feeling, spread its tentacles to the Middle West. In the overlap of economics and mass migration, America grew rank with racial violence, usually expelled upon blacks spuriously charged with crimes against whites.
Racial terror was widespread in the spring of 1919. Race riots in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago left hundreds dead in July alone. In Ellisville, Mississippi, John Hartfield was publicly burned at a predetermined hour, his mob execution announced ahead of time in the local paper. A number of lynching victims had served in the war. The murders were almost always preceded by drawn-out acts of torture, and medieval horrors committed by ordinary citizens became daily news. Writer-activist James Weldon Johnson looked on that season of blood and gave it the only name that fit: “Red Summer.”
* * *
Omaha had been Nebraska’s chief beneficiary of the northward migration, more than doubling its black population since 1910. The integration had not always gone easily, as striking white meatpackers were replaced by newly arrived black workers. An educated, activist black middle class was developing, but free intermingling occurred only in the bars and brothels of the city’s interracial underground.
Then, on September 28, at the climax of Red Summer, the mob lit up the Douglas County Courthouse and demanded Will Brown. At a window over the courthouse square, Henry Fonda, age fourteen, stood beside his father, William, and watched.
“It was so horrifying,” Henry would recall near the end of his life. “When it was all over, we went home.”
* * *
Three days earlier, Agnes Loebeck, a white girl who gave her age as nineteen, had filed a police report, claiming she’d been sexually assaulted by a gun-wielding black man on a street in South Omaha. The next day, Will Brown—identified as “an itinerant meatpacker” from Cairo, Illinois—was picked up on an anonymous tip, arrested, identified, and jailed.
The case was simple, yet it wasn’t. Whispers went round that Loebeck and Brown knew each other, in more than a passing way; that Brown had spurned her for another white woman; that a jealous Loebeck was taking her revenge. Brown was allowed a brief consultation with a black lawyer, H. J. Pinkett, who observed that the prisoner was hobbled by rheumatism—casting doubt on the feats of strength and speed attributed to him.
Men of power in Omaha saw the chance to exploit the case, for reasons that had little to do with the direct defense of white supremacy. John Gunther’s curious floating allusion to the city’s “lack of effective civic leadership” had its origins in this period, when the town was run by a ruthless political machine that made Omaha, in the words of a 1919 report in the black journal The Crisis, “perhaps the most lawless of any city of its size in the civilized world.”
* * *
Running the machine was a gambler named Tom Dennison, who had been in charge of graft in the vice-rich Third Ward since the 1890s. His front man was Omaha’s mayor, James Dahlman, known as “Cowboy Jim”—likewise a gambler, drinker, giver and taker of bribes, and for all that a protégé of Nebraska’s own William Jennings Bryan, presidential candidate and the era’s paragon of Christian piety. In their corner was the Omaha Daily Bee, most outspoken of the city’s three dailies, founded by Edward Rosewater in 1871. Conservative, Republican, and pro-Dennison, the paper was also antilabor and antiimmigrant—despite Rosewater’s being a native of Czechoslovakia, real name Rossenwasser.
Dahlman ran essentially unopposed for a decade, and Dennison’s “sporting district,” centered at Harney and Sixteenth streets, just blocks from the courthouse, thrived. But after statewide prohibition passed in 1916, the rhetoric of reform led to city laws that cut into Dennison’s power. Two years later, Dahlman was ousted by Democrat and reform candidate Edward P. Smith.
Ed Smith appointed as police commissioner fellow reformer J. Dean Ringer, who instructed his men to raid Dennison’s houses. Smith also embraced the NAACP, whose Omaha chapter was founded on his wa
tch. Such tolerance endeared him neither to the police nor to white laborers angry at black migrants who had taken their jobs during a recent meatpackers’ strike.
Dennison formed the strategy of subverting Smith by exploiting racial tension. Between June and September, the Daily Bee published twenty-one separate allegations of assaults on women; twenty of the claimants were white, with sixteen assailants identified as black. It also reported copiously on racial attacks around the country, giving them an alarmist, retributive spin: The riot in Washington, D.C., Omahans were informed, had begun as “retaliation for recent attacks by blacks on white women.” The paper also ran Chief of Police (and Dennison appointee) Marshal Eberstein’s warning to an NAACP gathering that if “the good colored people” of Omaha did not aid in the apprehension of “the negroes responsible for the numerous recent assaults on white women,” a deadly riot of the kind lately seen in East St. Louis, Illinois, might well occur in Omaha.
When Agnes Loebeck’s charges hit the city room at the Daily Bee, someone there may have paused to feel the weight of the moment: Red Summer had come to town.
* * *
Two afternoons later, a group of youths gathered outside a school in South Omaha and began marching to the jail. En route, adults, both men and women, joined in; by the time it reached the courthouse—protected by a meager ring of thirty policemen—the mob numbered in the thousands.
They began by shattering all the windows on the first two floors and storming the doors. Inside were forty-five additional policemen; when the main entrance was breached and the rioters took the rotunda, the officers retreated up the stairs. By this time, stones had been replaced with guns. Police at the third- and fourth-floor windows returned fire, killing a sixteen-year-old rioter in the rotunda, as well as a businessman a block away. A young man was seen riding a white horse in and out of the square, flashing a rope and exhorting the rioters.
Around eight-thirty, the ground floor was set afire. When fire wagons appeared, the crowd prevented them from entering the square; firefighters were forced back, and their hoses severed. City employees scrambled to higher floors. Some were seen phoning their families to say good-bye.
Near eleven, Mayor Smith emerged and shouted his appeal. A pamphlet printed locally soon after the riot described the next several minutes:
The crowd surged toward the mayor. He fought them. One man hit the mayor on the head with a baseball bat. Another slipped the noose of a rope around his neck. The crowd started to drag him away.
“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me,” the mayor gasped.…
He was carried to Sixteenth and Harney Streets. There he was hanged to a metal arm of a traffic signal tower.
Mayor Smith’s body was suspended in the air when State Agent Ben Danbaum drove a high-powered automobile into the throng right to the base of the signal tower. In the car with Danbaum were City Detectives Al Anderson, Charles Van Deusen and Lloyd Toland. They grasped the mayor’s body. Russell Norgard, 3719 Leavenworth Street, untied the noose. The detectives brought the mayor to Ford Hospital. There he lingered between life and death for several days, finally recovering.
It was the same basic American scene that Young Mr. Lincoln would, twenty years later, seek to mythify and make right. But that was Springfield, 1839, in the sheltering darkness of fable. In Omaha, 1919, in the real American night, nothing worked out that way.
* * *
No utterance is attributed to Will Brown in any account of the Omaha riot, save one. To the sheriff, he is supposed to have shouted: “I am innocent, I never did it, my God I am innocent.”
The police herded well over a hundred shackled prisoners—male and female, white and black—to the roof, which gave threat of collapsing. There the police decided on their last resort. The females were allowed to exit the courthouse safely, but the males were told to get ready to run. Led by the cops, they charged down the stairs and were met by the mob. The consensus account is that the prisoners, not the police, were responsible for the final surrender of the victim.
Will Brown was stripped and beaten—castrated as well, one historian claims, and there is no particular reason to disbelieve it. He was then dragged down the stairs to the south entrance. There his hands were tied and he was beaten further. He may have been dead even before the rope went around his neck.
Men scaled a ladder to the top of a lamppost at the intersection of Eighteenth and Harney. The other end of the rope was thrown over, and those on the sidewalk grabbed it and pulled. Will Brown’s body flew skyward, and as it spun, shooters riddled it with bullets. It was then tied to the rear of a car and dragged with raucous ceremony for four blocks, to the corner of Seventeenth and Dodge. A bonfire was built, and the body thrown on top. As it blackened to char, photographs were taken, men and boys jostling for position, their faces aglow in the flames.
Eventually, the burned thing was again tied to a car and dragged through the downtown streets. No record reveals what then became of it—where its parts were found, who disposed of them and how.
By “it,” we refer to the body, not the man. Will Brown was long gone.
* * *
Lt. Col. Jacob Wuest, commander of nearby Fort Omaha, belatedly dispatched over two hundred army troops. One company was stationed at the hanging corner, and another at the center of “Colored Town,” Omaha’s black community. The next day, the city was placed under martial law. Whites were told they would be arrested if found with guns; blacks were simply ordered not to leave their homes.
In a joint investigation by army and city officials, over one hundred men were charged with crimes ranging from disturbing the peace to murder. The investigation quickly focused on a plausible set of local suspects—among them, the brother and friends of Agnes Loebeck. In November, a grand jury blamed “a certain Omaha newspaper” for its smear campaign against the Smith administration, and asserted that the riot was “premeditated and planned.” Lt. Col. Wuest’s superior, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, likewise concluded that accountability rested with “‘the old criminal gang’ … and one newspaper.”
Not one of the grand jury’s 120 indictments was acted upon. According to an Omaha railway official quoted in the New York Times, two thousand blacks fled the city by train within days of the riot. Ed Smith ran in the next election, holding to his reform principles; opposing him was Cowboy Jim Dahlman. Invoking the courthouse siege as proof of Smith’s unfitness to lead, Dahlman regained the mayor’s office, holding it until his death in 1930. Smith died the same year, having retired from public life. Tom Dennison passed on four years later, wealthy and feted throughout the state.
With the Omaha lynching, the lid was off populist racism in Nebraska. In 1921, the state’s first Klan klavern was founded in Lincoln, and within two years, the KKK was active not just in the capital city but also in Omaha, Fremont, York, Grand Island, Hastings, North Platte, and Scotts Bluff.
* * *
In the years before his death, Henry Fonda’s witnessing of Will Brown’s lynching is regularly adumbrated in interviews and feature stories. It becomes a part of his template biography, along with the heartland boyhood, heroic roles, suicidal wife, and controversial offspring. Henry tells the story in his autobiography, and in the late Grobel interview. The lynching is invariably cited in obituaries, and after he is gone, both Peter and Jane reference it as a key to their father’s concern for social justice.
But Fonda seems not to have spoken publicly about the event before 1974, when he mentions it in connection with Clarence Darrow—which begins with a similar anecdote from the life of its subject. He describes it most fully on November 1, 1975, as a guest on Norman Parkinson’s BBC chat show during the London run of the Darrow play.
Parkinson runs a clip: the lynch mob scene from Young Mr. Lincoln. He suggests the scene might have been especially meaningful to Fonda: Didn’t he himself watch, as a child, a man being lynched?
Fonda says yes, he did, and begins to tell the story. His father had come home after a
day at the printing office, and told his family about the mob that was growing at the center of town.
After supper he put me in the car with him, and we drove back downtown. And it was very unusual for me for my dad to be taking me, at my age, and turning lights on and unlocking doors and going up the stairs.… It’s not like doing it in the daytime. I remember those physical things and walking across this empty office to a window that overlooked the courthouse square. This was where the riot was happening.
My father never talked about it. He never preached about it. We both just were observers. And I watched an out-of-control mob of several hundred men … drag a young black boy out of the jail in the courthouse. Overpowered the sheriff to get him out. Strung him up on a lamppost. Riddled him with bullets. Dragged him around back of a car, something like that. The mayor … they damn near lynched the mayor. That’s how out of control these … these bastards can get, you know.
Fonda returns to the scene in the Lincoln film. He wonders, as Lincoln had, how men who read the Bible, who were raised on Christ and pretend fealty to the highest morality, could commit such acts. Still there is no answer. Only the question; only the memory of the question.
“I’ll never forget it,” Henry says.
His father has imprinted him with a memory the weight of which will be his lifelong gift and burden. The darkness, the quiet, the odd sense of ceremony, an approach both solemn and ordinary: climbing stairs, unlocking a door. Something is opening before him in the dark. The boy is admitted to knowledge, knowledge he can never not remember, knowledge as horrible as any there is: Mobs kill, people disappear, and there is murder in the American night.
* * *
Parkinson asks Fonda why his father would have made him witness such a thing.
“He never told me,” Fonda replies, “but I would like to think he realized it would be a lesson. I had to grow up and move away from Omaha to appreciate that my father was a liberal Democrat in a hotbed of Republican reactionaries. That’s Omaha. And Nebraska still is. That’s another reason I feel you’re lucky to have the parents—”
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 36