The Lynchings in Duluth. MIchael Fedo
that Murnian held him personally accountable.
During the past week, rumors had begun filtering back to the chief implying that Vuckidonyich was killed because he was muscling in on a major rum-running operation led by the chief who was supplying Canadian whisky to prominent local citizens. (The rumor would later result in a grand jury investigation that would indict the chief on charges of smuggling and bootlegging.)
But harassment or not, the chief had his orders, and he carried them out. At 3:30 that afternoon, Murphy checked out a car from the downtown police headquarters at Second Avenue East and Superior Street and drove to the Omaha yards in West Duluth, where the crews were unloading circus equipment.
He spent nearly thirty minutes reviewing the parade route with the circus manager and discovered at the same time that the circus employed about one hundred and twenty blacks as cooks and roustabouts. He received assurances that the blacks were quiet and mannerly and would pose no problems for Duluth police.
The chief told the manager that, perhaps, it would be best if circus blacks avoided going downtown or hanging around the West Duluth streets. Murphy emphasized that there was a bunch of toughs around who did not care for blacks.
Though he didn’t mention it, Murphy no doubt felt that if a group of blacks came swarming into the city, bitterness toward the slowly expanding black community in Duluth would intensify, especially if the blacks ran into some of the World War I veterans from West Duluth.
Veterans had returned to the city with tales of American black soldiers cavorting with white French women. These charges aroused hostilities among the Duluth whites. Within days after their discharges and return to jobs in Duluth, these veterans found blacks working at the steel plant and in the post office. A few of the more radical white spokesmen agitated openly for running the blacks out of town.
For many of these men, war had never really ended. There were always battles to be fought, injustices, as they perceived them, to be overcome. And the Great War remained constant in their minds. They were often seen on street corners swapping stories of battles at Château-Thierry or Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, where the Third Minnesota Infantry saw action. They still sang “Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo.”
By June of 1920, some of them talked hopefully of U.S. intervention in the Irish situation, or even the Russian Revolution. These were fretful times in the world, and such times called for active, dedicated men. The best they could do now was apply pressure to keep black people from white neighborhoods—an effort that was successful; black families lived in Gary, the westernmost tip of the city.
While there had been no fights, no open confrontations, the quiet on the home front was a restless quiet. What the anxious, bored veterans desired was a return to battle and another crack at heroism and its heady sensations—the hugs and kisses from girls, the tearstained faces of old men and women gratefully waving small American flags. Since Germany had been defeated and the jubilation of returning home victorious had faded, the glories of the war moved to the forefront of memory, diminishing its horrors.
For some veterans flushed with battlefield successes, working as teamsters, boilermakers, meter inspectors, railroad brakemen, or short-order cooks was rife with ennui. Duluth, after the ribald freedoms of Paris, was like a withered old woman with a terminal disease.
Duluth held no noble causes for these young men in their late teens or early twenties. Duluth demanded nothing of heroic dimensions; few who had not been overseas, who knew nothing of battle, seemed to remember or care about the sacrifices. The veterans remembered, though, that they left this city as boys and returned as men. Maybe boys could be content here, but a man who has seen Paris, who had spilled blood on the battleground, could not. Among these men were those itching for a cause.
Chief Murphy was aware of their feelings but believed they comprised no significant threat. They wanted a better life, he reasoned, and why not? They had fought for one. And if they occasionally got together to blow off steam, even drank a little hooch, Murphy had not, and would not, interfere.
What occurred to the chief, however, was that the young veterans seemed to be the only unified body in the entire city. And while citizens certainly came and went as they pleased in Duluth, the city had become compartmentalized into near-ghettos. There was little social mingling outside class or nationality strata—with the exception of the veterans.
Scandinavians comprised a plurality of Duluth’s working middle class, and many operated farms around the city. They were the only group not adhering to strictly ethnic borders. Few lived in the east end, though.
Duluth was divided by vaguely defined ethnic and economic boundaries which found most southern and eastern European immigrants living in western neighborhoods. This arrangement helped keep the city manageable. It was, perhaps, not without forethought that Duluth police had precincts in both the West End and West Duluth neighborhoods.
Financial status of residents mainly improved with eastward migration. And where there was wealth and status, the police seldom intruded.
The city had been properly sedate, caught up in the industrial boom, largely supported by industrialist Jay Cooke. But when that empire crashed in the 1890s, Duluth lost some vitality and spirit; its young grew disenchanted. Possibly, the U.S. entry into the war gave Duluth’s young men a sense of purpose.
By 9 AM on Monday, the early morning chill of thirty-five degrees had warmed to the upper fifties. People began lining the street for the circus parade, disregarding the threat of showers forecast for the day.
From his office, Murphy barely noticed the parade, or the thousands who looked on and cheered the four local bands playing patriotic marches, or the lumbering elephant herds, camels, horses, clowns, and trick riders. He was concerned about traffic moving normally when the parade ended. He hoped complaints of animal deposits would not inundate the department. It would be just like Murnian, he might have thought, to order police to clean up, arguing that droppings created a public hazard.
Duluthians for whom the parade and circus might have been considered bourgeois may have contemplated visits to the vaudeville houses. Mademoiselle Vera was starring in The Girl in the Basket at the New Grand, while the Orpheum featured a new comedy by Mark Swan entitled Parlour, Bedroom and Bath.
Cinema attractions included Betty Kilburn in Girl of the Sea at the Strand and Marion Davies in The Cinema Murder at the Zelda.
Throughout Duluth, old country burghers in wool caps and tobacco-stained walrus mustaches continued their mutterings over Prohibition. Though the city went dry for the first time three years earlier, national enforcement of the Volstead Act made it more difficult to obtain a brew, even in Superior, Wisconsin, just across the Arrowhead Bridge.
Baseball enthusiasts learned from the morning sports pages that Babe Ruth hit his seventeenth home run, proving he was perhaps worth the $125,000 the Yankees paid the Red Sox for his contract, as well as his whopping $20,000 annual salary.
The run on Tanlac at Duluth drugstores had not abated and had surpassed Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound as the hypochondriac’s delight. Tanlac’s healing benefits were praised daily in Duluth papers as the cure-all for influenza, grippe, post-operation malaise, typhoid, and pneumonia.
But the big topic in the city on June 14 was the circus, with two shows playing at the West Duluth grounds. By early afternoon, a sizable crowd of mothers had packed children into the Oneota streetcars and assembled to view a matinee performance.
The 7 PM Big Top show played to nearly eighty percent capacity. And hundreds more, not entering the grandstand, enjoyed the many sideshows and amusement tents. They would have chatted about the incredible snake handler, Madame X, or the Nelson Family bareback riders before leaving the grounds in an atmosphere pungent with odors of hot dogs, popcorn, and cigar smoke.
Some of these people paused just before nine that night to watch the striking of the animal tents and the loading of the animals and equipment into special boxcars as the circus prepared to move to Virginia, Minnesota, for two Iron Range performances.
Among this crowd were Irene Tusken, a nineteen-year-old stenographer, and James Sullivan, her eighteen-year-old