OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: The people's press

I want to thank Patrick Keck of Maumelle for sending me a Little Blue Book. The 3.5-inch by 5-inch 64-page pamphlet was published in late 1927 and the cover has come off, but looking online I see that Little Blue Books were not always blue. They came in rainbow colors. They were sold by mail-order, at franchise stores in larger cities, and in subway vending machines.

The particular title Mr. Keck sent me (and which I am returning, these Little Blue Books are now worth considerably more than the nickel they sold for during the 1920s) is called The Story of a Lynching: An Exploration of Southern Psychology. It was written by Marcet Haldeman-Julius, who was married to the publisher and main editor of the series, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, who started it in 1919 to raise money for the socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason.

This couple is fascinating. Emanuel was an ethnic Jew whose parents emigrated from Odessa, Russia, fleeing religious persecution, though they themselves were "indifferent" to religion. He was born in Philadelphia and received no formal education. As a teenager working in a textile factory he became enamored of socialism which, he wrote to his friend Jack London, "lifted me out of the depths and pointed the way to something higher." He began writing articles for socialist newspapers in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Los Angeles before in 1915 assuming the editorship of The Appeal To Reason, based in tiny Girard, Kansas.

That was where he met Marcet, the daughter of the town's wealthy Republican Presbyterian banker and the niece of social reformer and "public philosopher" Jane Addams, to whom she was close. Marcet attended Addams' alma mater, the Rockford Female Seminary, then went on to Bryn Mawr, where she befriended Marianne Moore (and once advised the aspiring writer in a letter to "try poetry"). After her junior year, she left to pursue a career on the stage. In 1915, she was performing in a company in Chicago when her mother died. She returned to Girard to help her father manage his bank and met Emanuel. (Actually, it would be her bank--she would inherit it on the condition she returned to Girard.)

They were married in 1916; Aunt Jane suggested they each adopt the other's surname. It was a "companionate marriage," a radical (at the time) view of the institution in which neither party had any financial or economic claim on the other and where procreation was seen as less important than affection, friendship, and mutual sexual gratification. (Though they would divorce in 1931, they would continue to live together until Marcet's death in 1941, even though Emanuel remarried. This could be an HBO mini-series.)

Also, in 1916, they would buy the failing The Appeal to Reason.

They would go on to write together--they co-authored the 1921 novel Dust--and separately. They also began publishing what became known as the Little Blue Books, which were mostly reprints of classical, educational, biographical, and other literature. One early ad promised "a high school education for $2.98." Later, they'd be advertised as "a university in print." Most of what they published--Shakespeare's sonnets, Euripides' plays, the Bible--was in the public domain, though Emanuel often fiddled with the original titles for marketing purposes: Guy de Maupassant's The Tallow Ball sold far better when published as A French Prostitute's Sacrifice.

They published original material too, usually paying their authors a flat $50 fee. To keep costs down, they did not pay royalties. They started out selling the books for 25 cents each, but as they refined their marketing and began to see greater sales volume, the price came down. From 1919 until 1951, the Haldeman-Julius Press of Girard printed more than 6,000 different titles with total sales of more than 500 million copies.

The Story of a Lynching was one of them.

It is an extraordinary document, an extended reported essay reminiscent in some ways of the work of Joan Didion, about what is generally acknowledged as the last lynching in Arkansas, the mob murder of John Carter in 1927. Marcet traveled to Little Rock in the immediate aftermath of that atrocity and interviewed several people in positions of power, including Governor John Martineau and, most remarkably, B.E. Stewart, husband and father of the white woman apparently accosted by the black Carter on the morning of May 4, his last day on earth.

Stewart gave Marcet an unrepentant account of how Carter was hanged and his lifeless body riddled with hundreds of rounds. Stewart says he fired a final shotgun blast at Carter's corpse and was the one who suggested the body be dragged through the streets of Little Rock and set afire at the intersection of Ninth Street and Broadway, the heart of the city's black community, as an object lesson to the black citizenry of Little Rock.

For the next several hours, as many as 5,000 white people, "many with babies in their arms," according to the Arkansas Democrat, "danced in a circle and howled and jeered. At intervals the mob, unable to express its contempt as loud and vociferously as it wished, resorted to firearms."

Three hours after the rioting began, the governor deployed the Arkansas National Guard. When they arrived, they found a member of the mob directing traffic with a charred arm that had been broken off Carter's body.

You should probably know all this; it's been recounted in books by Jay Jennings, Grif Stockley, Guy Lancaster, Stephanie Harp and others, all of whom read Marcet's account. (Like me, they probably viewed Stewart's account a little skeptically. His need to be perceived as important cuts through the near century of foggy history that intervenes. Mr. Stewart might find himself right at home on the Internet, where he might join the tribe of self-valorizing pissants who instinctively know they're a better sort of beast.)

It's rattling how near and simultaneously remote all this is; some of those babies that witnessed the burning of John Carter's corpse may still be alive. Yet the 1920s feel as distant as ancient Rome; if we think of them at all we think of them as roaring, of the escapades of Babe Ruth and Al Capone and flappers. We don't think of an America where 40 percent of the country lived in economic and intellectual poverty, where people were every bit as ignorant as they present today.

Where the notion that education might save us didn't seem so quaintly naive.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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www.blooddirtangels.com

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The Story of a Lynching: An Exploration of Southern Psychology

Editorial on 05/31/2020

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