“What you don’t know and need to find out . . .” Research and Writing

A lot of people think fiction writers have it easy. Pick a plot, have a set of characters, go for it.

Having written fiction, I know better. But somehow, people do think it’s easier to write fiction than nonfiction. Having written nonfiction, I think so, too.

I’ve written before about my obsession with the disappearance of George Kimmel (see past posts ad nauseum; I’ll post links at the end of this one), but in the past few months, I’ve actually started drafting some chapters. It’s not that I’m done with the research; not by a long shot. Never, in fact, probably, will I be done with the research. But it’s because of something historical writer David McCullough said in the introduction to his book The Johnstown Flood.

He said: “At the beginning of the work, I had thought the best procedure would be to do all the research necessary, then write the book. Quite soon I had come to realize that, for me at least, it was best not to put off the writing, but rather to begin sooner than later, because it is then, in the writing, that you begin to see more clearly what you don’t know and need to find out.”

Also in his introduction, McCullough discusses his research, noting that it’s a dangerous downhill slope sometimes. “The more you know, the more you want to know. So the research went on right to the end.”

After reading this, I suddenly realized that I had two shelves full of research – and that’s what I had printed out; that didn’t include what I still had on my computer, or the newspaper.com articles I had yet to print, and the hundreds I had yet to even look for – and every time I put this project down and picked it back up again, I was retreading the same territory over and over.

It was time to start writing.

So I started. The first chapter, as it turned out, wasn’t even about Kimmel; it was about another banker, a guy named Stevenson from Nebraska, who disappeared about a decade before George did. Because the similarities were so striking – a bank president who takes out insurance on his life, then disappears – I wanted to follow it, especially since it was cited by the insurance companies in their arguments. Like George, Stevenson was never found. So I spent abut a month researching and drafting that chapter. It turned out well, so I turned next to the chapter that most fascinated me, the one about John Boone Swinney and his fantastic tale of gold and murder along the Oregon coast. That one isn’t done yet – it’s based on Swinney’s deposition, and since he also gave testimony in court, I want to be sure to add things from those articles – but it is drafted.

Then, I drafted another chapter, and . . .

Now, there’s about 40 pages that didn’t exist eight or nine months ago.

Of course, I’m starting with the easy things. As I explained to a friend last night, I had to start with the things that I didn’t have a ton of research for. For the early chapters about Arkansas City and George Kimmel’s life here, there just wasn’t that much information. I had a limited number of newspaper articles that detailed a little about his movements (a buggy wreck; starting a new grain elevator; Masonic gatherings), and bits from depositions and affidavits from his friends and family that talked about his life here. Pulling together that information into a coherent chapter was tedious, but not that difficult. It would obviously be better if I had more sources. It would obviously be fantastic if I had letters from George to his family, for example. But as I don’t, I have to make do with what I have. If the universe decides to be kind and let me find them one day, I will certainly add them in!

It’s the later chapters that will be the toughest ones, but I am not thinking about them quite yet.

But as McCullough said, you don’t know what you don’t know until you start writing. For example, today I wrote about the Midland Hotel in Kansas City, which was the hotel George always stayed in while in Kansas City, and the hotel from which he disappeared. I wanted to describe it. There are very few photographs of the Midland available online (as it was in 1898), so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. I found an article about its design and building. I found a huge article from the Kansas City Times detailing every single amazing thing about the hotel, from when it first opened. Do I need all of that? No. But I can pick and choose my details now. I can talk about the pure white marble columns and floor that would have greeted George every time he walked into the front lobby. I can talk about the shops that occupied part of the first floor (including the Palace Diamond Parlor, which sold diamonds that cost “from $10 to $5,000”). If I pick the right ones, readers should figure out quickly that this hotel was not just expensive; it was exclusive. Now. I spent so much time researching that today that very little writing got done. But. Again, like McCullough said, you don’t know what you don’t know until you start writing.

Fiction writers need to do this, too. Some novelists think they need to have all their research done before they start writing. WRONG. Sure, there are some novelists out there who can probably do that – the ones who write from formulas, the ones who know from the time they first put fingers to keyboard what will happen on every single page. For the rest of us, figuring out what we may need to research ahead of time is difficult, if not impossible.

Start writing.

Will it be good? Well, maybe not all of it, not at first. That’s what rewrites are for. And you may put things in those drafts that are erroneous. You may think one thing is correct, then find out later it isn’t. Been there, done that. But you can fix it later.

The one bit of advice I have is to be sure to cite everything in that draft! Don’t think you’ll remember where that quote or information is from. You won’t. Cite it in the text (or if you prefer, in end notes or footnotes), but don’t leave a single paragraph without citations. Believe me, you will not magically recall where you got it from later! If you have a lot of different sources, you can create shorthand for them (NYvR is New York v Rankin 1908, for example, so a shorthand citation for me might look like this: (NYvR MH testimony 83). That tells me it came from Margie Hunt’s testimony, in that case, on page 83. Don’t stray too far from MLA or Chicago (or AP) formats; know what you’re talking about.

Just start writing. Until you do, you don’t know what you don’t know.

When a (historian’s) dream comes true

When a Historian’s Dream Comes True, part 2

When Research Becomes Obsession

Memory and History: What do we really remember?

“I don’t recall.”

“I don’t remember.”

“If you give me a minute, I might be able to think it up.”

“Not that I can recall just now, no.”

“I refuse to answer that.”

Me:  ANSWER THE F-ING QUESTIONS ALREADY, YOU BLEEPING BLEEP BLEEP!

No, I didn’t travel into the future and bring back the transcript of Donald Trump’s treason trial – though if I had, I’d also (spoiler alert!) tell you he’d been found guilty. No. This? This is a micro-sample of what I encountered this week, slogging through the deposition of the man who claimed to be George Kimmel.

Any wonder why I started writing OMFG on nearly every page?!

If you don’t remember (hah), George Kimmel disappeared without a trace in 1898. For the past ten years, I’ve been researching his disappearance. Why ten years, you ask? Well! See, the case went to trial several times over a decade, because there were several life insurance policies, and because every time one court made a decision, an appeal was filed the next day by the losing side. It dragged on until, I think, 1917 – and part of the reason it dragged on for-ev-er was because of this guy. This claimant. Whose real name I don’t even know.

All I know is, he was NOT freaking George Kimmel.

In the very first episode of the Serial podcast, Sarah Koenig discusses the problem of memory. Can you recall a day six years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you? Who were your friends? Where did you work? Did you work on that particular day? This is often the problem with solving cold cases – or any cases, for that matter. How can you prove that what you think happened, really happened? Today, we could probably check our Facebook pages, or Twitter. But what if I asked you to recall a day before social media? Could you do it?

That’s the problem I face with this case. Some memories are good. Some are not. Some can’t be trusted. Can any of them be trusted? Who’s telling the truth? And that’s why I have to keep an open mind, even when my knee-jerk reaction is to throw everything The Claimant says out the window.

The dude’s totally infuriating. He spent most of his time either refusing to answer questions, claiming he didn’t remember things he bloody well ought to have remembered, or arguing with the attorneys. How many times did he say “I don’t remember,” or some variation thereof, you ask? My best guess is somewhere around 80-90% of the time. The Claimant claimed that it was because he was hit on the head and thus his memory was impaired. Well, he was hit on the head, that’s true. In fact, he wasn’t just hit on the head; from the description, someone tried to take his head off, possibly with an ax. Having read 657 pages of the claimant’s testimony, I am in complete sympathy with that person.

I think anyone who’s seen a few episodes of Matlock would probably join me in saying, after just a few pages, that this guy is a total fraud. Some things, he’s completely lucid and detailed about – for instance, the crazy story he tells about being kidnapped in Kansas City and held hostage in St. Louis. He can recall that with perfect detail. No problem whatsoever. But ask him to identify people in photos, people he ought to know, like his family? He can’t – and won’t – do it. In fact, at one point, the bum even turned his head away and refused to look at them. The things he should know, he doesn’t. The things he does know, are things that were either published in the papers and readily available, or are things that he has made up in his own mind.

And yet. This deposition was taken in 1908 – ten years after George disappeared. Can you remember what you were doing ten years ago? In 2010, I was an adjunct instructor. I was in my first year of teaching for Newman University, and my work load was really picking up. I think that was the year I taught for Butler, too. That was the year I got my cat Angel. But as for specifics? Students in my classes, books I read? You do it. See how far you get. Because I can only give you generalities.

Big ticket items, we tend to remember. I will always know that 2019 was the year I saw Hamilton live. Just like I will always know that 2020 was the year that the entire world went to hell in a handcart. But ask me to get more specific than that . . . and without some frame of reference, I don’t think I could do it. So why do I – and why do these attorneys – think The Claimant should be able to do it?

A proverbial Catch-22.

Do I believe he’s George Kimmel? No. Absolutely not. For starters, they look nothing alike. See here:

The one on the left is The Claimant. The one on the right, George Kimmel. The nose, the eyes, everything is different. Even their eye colors are different! The Claimant has gray-blue eyes; Kimmel, dark brown.

If I didn’t know this story as well as I do, if I hadn’t read hundreds of newspaper articles and studied the earlier trials, I might be swayed by his arguments. I might say, “But look! He knows all of this stuff! And of course the men who kidnapped him are going to keep quiet about it!”

BUT. I have to admit, there are moments that give me pause. Things I can’t quite explain away – except by remembering that The Claimant is a con artist, and this is a con.

For starters, he clearly lived in St. Louis at some point, or was being fed information about the city by one of the lawyers, for he could pinpoint streets and intersections and locations that actually did exist in 1898. And there are other things, things that aren’t quite as well known, things he would either have to know, or have to have learned from someone. In the deposition, for example, he finally says that his grandmother’s names are Desire (pronounced, I believe, Desiree, but spelled Desire in the parish register and in his testimony), and Ethelina. Seriously, NO ONE could make those names up! And what about the fact that he says (after a great deal of back and forth and refusals) that his paternal grandfather lived on Hickory Lane – and he did? 

Those are the kinds of things that throw me for a loop, every time.

I want to get to the truth. I want to remain unbiased. But I’m not. No historian is, not really. No writer is. I have never known what to think about this story. I have never truly been able to form an opinion about what happened to George Kimmel. I have half a dozen theories, each as realistic and probable as the others. But what I do not think is that The Claimant is him. I believe he’s nothing more than a con artist. A good one, but a con artist nonetheless. Because this is how con artists work. Pick out a few key, important details . . . stand fast behind a facade of “I don’t have to prove anything to you,” and “I don’t remember” . . . and voila! You’re someone else, and no one can quite prove you’re not – especially in an age where fingerprints weren’t even in use yet, and DNA, for all we knew, didn’t even exist. (In case you’re wondering, fingerprints were actually first used to solve a crime in 1892, in Argentina. But in America, the first case that used them to convict someone wasn’t until 1910.) And even if someone had thought to use fingerprints – where could they have gotten a sample of George’s? By 1908, when this deposition was taken, all of his belongings were back in Niles, possibly in storage, possible destroyed, possibly scattered. There was no way to control that sample. No lawyer worth his salt would have allowed that into evidence!

Which, I had to remind myself repeatedly by page 400 or so, was precisely what the claimant was doing. Wear down the lawyers. Wear down the family. Wear down the idiotic historian who decided 100 years later to become obsessed with the case. You know. This is what con artists do. 

And yet . . .

Even I can’t quite shake the doubts.

 

If you’ve never heard Serial before, OMG, where have you been? A link to Season One:  https://serialpodcast.org/season-one

For more information on that first case of fingerprint use, see:  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-bloody-fingerprint-elicits-a-mothers-evil-tale-in-argentina

And for more information on the first American case:  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-case-where-fingerprints-were-used-evidence-180970883/

An Evening With Erik Larson

“Courage is infectious. He taught people the art of being fearless.” 

This is how Erik Larson summed up the subject of his latest work, Winston Churchill, two weeks ago in Wichita. I was lucky enough to get to see him live in Wichita, on what was probably one of his last stops for a while on his tour to promote his new book, The Splendid and the Vile (which focuses on Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister). It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to go see an author, and I bought my ticket as soon as they went on sale last December (birthday present!). Thank goodness we were still able to get to see him.

Larson is the author of several works, including probably his most famous, Devil in the White City, and Dead Wake. It may surprise you – it did me – to learn that Larson isn’t a historian. He’s a reporter by trade, who started out working at small papers, got hired by the Wall Street Journal, and then one day, “hit on something I absolutely love – which is writing about history.” He refers to himself as an ‘animator of history’ – “My job is to produce a historical experience.”

Larson was interviewed by Ed O’Malley, local politician turned nonprofit starter, and the interview was charming and affable. So was Larson. 🙂 He spoke for a while about his first breakout book, Devil in the White City, a dual-narrative book about the building of the White City for the Chicago World’s Fair, and the work of serial killer H. H. Holmes. Because of the subject matter and the dissonance between those main subjects, Larson said he was sure the book wouldn’t sell. In fact, he admitted that on the eve of the book’s publication, “I was convinced my career was over.” No one, he was convinced, would even like the book, let alone read it.

Of course, we all know differently. But it surprised me to learn that Devil in the White City was a story that took a while for Larson to warm up to. The idea started when he first read Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, and fell in love with how evocatively Carr wrote about New York City in the 1890s. He also liked the serial killer aspect of it, and decided that he might like to write about a well-known murder, so he started to research (literally went to the library and got a copy of an encyclopedia of murder) and came across Holmes. But, he says, he didn’t want to do what he calls “crime porn,” and so he set the idea aside, wrote another book.

But the idea hadn’t left completely. One day, he realized that when he’d read about Holmes, he’d also read about the World’s Fair. In fact, he’d read a book about the World’s Fair that he described as dry and boring. “But sometimes the most boring history can yield the best stuff – if you read the footnotes.” In this case, the footnote he read was about Juicy Fruit gum. Yeah, that Juicy Fruit. It was first introduced to the public at the World’s Fair of 1892. And since he knew Holmes was working in Chicago at that time, the two narratives began to work together in his mind for the first time. Dark and light, he called it.

The inspiration for The Splendid and the Vile came when Larson and his wife moved to New York, specifically, Manhattan. After moving there, he realized that New York had experienced 9/11 in a much different way than the rest of the nation. Of course, that seems obvious – but to the rest of us, watching the wall-to-wall coverage on TV, it was more that our nation had been attacked. For New Yorkers, though, the reality was this:  their city had been attacked. They had been attacked. They had lived it. Breathed the ash. Walked the empty streets. Felt the rumble as the towers collapsed – and the piercing heartbreak of knowing that hundreds of their own were still trapped inside. They were the ones walking home at midday, and the ones who saw the Missing posters for days and weeks on end, until winter finally took the last of them. (Okay, Larson didn’t actually say all that; I did, sorry. New York is my city, too.)

But New York – and more specifically, Manhattan – had lived through the worst. And it made him think:  what would it have been like to live in London during the Blitz – those terrifying nights when the Luftwaffe seemed unstoppable, dropping incendiaries and regular bombs not only on London itself, but across the major cities of Britain? How would you deal with what were essentially fifty-seven September 11’s in a row?

So he began to think about how to frame it. He wanted to do it differently – through the lens of a family living in London at the time, perhaps. And the most famous family living in London at the time, aside from the royal family, was the Churchills.

Of course, there are hundreds of biographies of Churchill, and more about World War II itself. Where do you even start a project like that?! Larson realized that “if I set out to read them all, it’d be a fool’s errand. I had to address that early on.” So he decided to approach the research strategically – his word, not mine – and to read just enough about Churchill and the war to ‘get it.’ Then, he’d “jump into the Archives and get my own personal Churchill.”

I’m reading the book now – nearly done with it, in fact – and what I love is that he does indeed focus on the family. While Larson does, of course, tell us what life was like in London during the Blitz, he does so mainly through the eyes of Winston, Clementine, and Mary Churchill; Pamela Churchill is there too, along with Churchill’s other family, his ‘military’ or ‘political’ family. And by doing this, he also makes us feel how Churchill managed to walk an icy razor’s edge of military and political danger. One wrong step, and the world today would be a much different place.

Towards those ends, Larson was lucky enough to be able to use the diary of Mary Churchill; he petitioned for permission to read and use it. Luckily, Mary’s daughter had read Dead Wake and had liked it, so permission was granted. Mary was seventeen when the war started; she turned eighteen during that first year. “Fatherhood informs this book in so many ways,” Larson said; Churchill not only had to worry about the day-to-day running of the war, but also his family. “Mary Churchill kind of makes the book for me,” Larson said. “She’s smart . . . she adored her father, and (she’s) in a situation that is dissonant – she wanted to be part of the war, but they (her family) wanted her in the country.”

Another major source of information for Larson was the diary of John Colville, one of Churchill’s secretaries during that crucial first year. Colville’s diary is published – but while he was at Cambridge doing other research, Larson decided, almost on a whim, to compare the published and original versions of the diary. What he found were massive omissions, and “these were not trivialities.” First, Colville wrote about things in his diary that were top-secret; he worried about what would happen if it ever fell into the wrong hands, but he didn’t stop. Second, Colville was desperately in love, “and the object of his desire,” Larson said, “was not interested!” So this became another theme of the book. Other authors, using his published diary as a resource, have kept Colville in the background, Larson said, but “I felt he wanted to step forward.”

Obviously, even for a seasoned writer like Larson, taking on a challenge like the Churchills was daunting. “Along the way, I found myself . . . I could stand before a mirror and ask myself, ‘If not you, then who?'” Asked how good he is at murdering his darlings, Larson laughed. “I am not good at killing my darlings,” he said “I rely on my wife to kill them for me.” And for those of us who drone on and on and on in that first draft, take heart! Larson’s first draft of this book was 800 single-spaced pages. After revisions, it’s 500 pages. “I feel comfortable if i have 100% more than I need,” he said.

One of the best things about going to see published authors is the sense of camaraderie they instantly give us. Even if we’re not yet published, or if our books sold four copies, it doesn’t matter. They know. They understand the process, and the difficulties and doubts, and knowing that they got through them to the other side is comforting to the rest of us. So thank you to Watermark Books, and to Erik Larson, for making this evening possible.

“Can This Story Be Told?” The limits – and frustrations – of historical research

“It’s not a case of should this story be told; it’s a case of can this story be told?” – David Grann, 2017.

This quote, more than any other, was my takeaway from seeing David Grann two years ago on a nationwide tour for his new book, Killers of the Flower Moon. This book details a little-known aspect of history:  the murders of several wealthy and prominent Osage people during the 1910s and 20s, murders committed by the whites who were supposed to be working in the best interests of the very Osage men and women (and children) they killed. It’s a gripping story, and I reviewed the book here https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/killers-of-the-flower-moon-a-review/ (along with the experience of being able to see author David Grann talk about it).

But since then, the thing I’ve heard over and over, on countless Facebook pages and discussion groups, is this:  why were’t we taught this in school? 

Well, as a history teacher, I can tell you that one reason is that we have too much ground to cover in class. In an Oklahoma history class? Sure, this should be discussed. In a general survey of US History, however, it’s impossible to cover everything. We want to. As teachers, we want to so much, because it’s these kinds of stories that pique our students’ interest, keep them listening, and might even convince them that history isn’t so bad. The best we can sometimes do, however, is mention them in passing, in support of some other Big Important Topic we have to cover. Then, if students are interested, we can discuss it in more detail, either during class (yes, I will sometimes jettison other things to talk about smaller, but equally important, topics), or after class.

But there’s more to it. As historians studying the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 know, the truth can be buried. It can be buried so deeply, so thoroughly, that bringing it to light is a miraculous thing – if it can be done at all. When people want the truth to be buried, it’s easy to make it happen. Particularly if they are the people in power. And believe me, the people who committed the Osage murders had a reason to bury that truth. So did the perpetrators of the Tulsa Race Riots. But bringing it to light can be done – if the story is there. 

And that’s the question I face now.

As David Grann said, for him, it was never a case of should the story be told; rather, could he tell it? Did the evidence exist? It’s one thing to know something happened; proving it, telling that story, is another. One is easy; the other is not.

Grann was both lucky and good. He walked into the right museum, asked the right questions. He’s a good journalist; he followed his instincts. But he was also lucky – because in this case, the evidence was there. It wasn’t gone, just buried. It was just that no one else had ever asked the questions, followed the leads, gone to the lengths he did to find the truth. No one else had picked up the scattered remnants of this story and pulled them together into a coherent narrative.

But what do you do when, in fact, the truth is gone? Or, at least, you suspect it is?

Right now, I’m simultaneously reading Ron Chernow’s Washington and Alexander Hamilton (my second time). In these books, Chernow is upfront about what we do and don’t know about these men and their lives. We are lucky that Eliza Hamilton made it her life’s mission to collect every document Hamilton ever wrote, to gather as many stories about him as possible, to document his life so thoroughly, that historians have been able to mine that rich lode of information for two centuries. But even then . . . we don’t know the whole story. We don’t know what she burned. What was lost by other people. Likewise, Martha Washington burned most of the letters she and George Washington wrote to each other. What did these two have to say to each other? What insights into their marriage did they provide? What would Washington have told her in confidence that he’d not have told anyone else? We’ll never know. (Soapbox:  STOP BURNING LETTERS, LADIES! WE NED THEM!)

I’m absolutely in awe of the work Chernow did on both of these biographies. His task was downright herculean. From Washington’s diaries, to Hamilton’s letters, to the recollections of Jefferson and Madison and the diaries of others who knew them, he is able to sort and sift through it all to provide us with masterful biographies of both men that also give us insight into all of those around them. The treasury of information is almost bottomless. Like Grann, the story could be told. He had the information. Documents measured not by number of boxes, but by linear feet.

But . . . what if neither Chernow nor Grann had had that?

Historians don’t refuse to tell stories because we don’t care. Ask any historian – we care about everything! But we have to pick and choose our battles. And sometimes – as with the Tulsa Race Riot – the evidence doesn’t come to light for decades. The stories might exist – but the evidence might not. Without evidence, it isn’t history. It’s an anecdote. The problem is, how far do you dig before you accept that the evidence isn’t there? How much evidence is enough – or not enough? Can you tell the story right, if you’re missing key elements?

That is where I am now.

For ten years, I’ve been chasing the ghost of a story. I am, without a doubt, the world’s leading expert on George Kimmel. I’ve spent years tracking down every single court case. All the appeals. Looking at thousands of pages of depositions and testimonies. Reading hundreds of newspaper articles. I know the ins and outs of the cases. I know the theories about his disappearance.

What I don’t know, however, are the people involved. 

There are times when I think I do. When I get an insight into them via their depositions, or their behavior in court, and I think okay, I’ve got them now! I understand this person. And then . . . I realize, when I turn the page, that I really don’t, not at all. I’m not seeing them through their own words and actions. I’m always seeing them through a veil of secondary sources and hidden motives.

I’ve spent so much time tracing their footsteps – the lawyers Bacon and O’Brien, Kimmel’s sister Edna and his mother Estelle and his uncle Charles Johnson, his friends in Niles, Michigan and here in Arkansas City – that it’s easy to think I get this case. That I get all of their motives and know exactly what happened.

After ten years, I can honestly say I don’t have a damn clue about any of it.

Who were they, really? How did they really feel about Kimmel? How did they deal with his disappearance, and the subsequent trials? Where are their letters and diaries? Where are their conversations with others? Where are they in this narrative?

The truth is – they are nowhere. Because I don’t know them. Because I don’t have the very things that would let me know them. Diaries. Letters. Records of conversations. Memories from those who knew them. Things that could clue me in as to their motives. Things that could tell me if my suspicions are on track – or hopelessly off base.

As I said a couple of weeks ago in this blog, when you write history, you have an obligation to your subject and your readers to be fair, honest, and objective. When you haven’t got the sources that would enable you to be those things, how far can you morally go? How do I bring these people to life when they are little more than shadows moving through newspapers, or across the pages of depositions? How do I get at the truth of who they were and what they did?

That is why some stories are never told.

When I started this research, I had no end goal in mind. I just wanted to follow the story and see where it led. And then, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I wanted to know what really happened to George Kimmel on that July night in 1898. And when I did that . . . it changed everything. In part because of all the twists and turns the trials took, I never knew what to make of anyone involved in the case. How, for example, could you possible explain a woman who would sign away nearly $1 million in life insurance money just because her uncle told her to? There had to be more. I had to know why. 

This is not a biography; I get that. This is a mystery story, at heart. But in fiction, we say that there are no plots, only characters that want things. That’s what I’m missing here. It’s like I’m working backwards, precisely counter to where I would start if this was a fictional story. What did these people want? And what were they willing to do to get it? And it brings me, sadly, back around full circle to David Grann’s question:  can this story be told? 

This is the crossroads I find myself at now. Having gone so far, have I gone too far to go back?

Can the story be told – or at the very least, can it be told right? 

I honestly don’t know.

* For more on the Kimmel case and my research into it – including numerous times I’ve had my head meet my desk in frustration! – see these posts:

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2018/03/10/when-research-becomes-obsession/

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/digging-deep-the-perils-of-historical-research/

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/when-a-historians-dream-comes-true/

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2016/05/29/when-a-historians-dream-comes-true-part-2/

When Research Becomes Obsession

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know that one of my obsessions is with a disappearance that occurred in 1898 – that of George Kimmel.

And it is an obsession. I freely admit that! For about ten years, I’ve tried to discover what really happened to this guy. Here’s the bare-bones of the case:

• On July 29, 1898, Kimmel took school bonds to Topeka, deposited them, and then went to Kansas City.
• On July 30, Kimmel checked into the Midland Hotel. He withdrew precisely $530.20 from his accounts, got into a cab . . . and disappeared.

That’s it. That’s what I’ve got. After  that, there are at least five different options. Sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Sadly, at least three of those options end with Kimmel being murdered on or just after July 30, 1898.

Okay, there’s more. I didn’t tell you about the fact that Kimmel had worked with his uncle, Charles Johnson, in Niles, Michigan, at the First National Bank of Niles, or that Johnson asked Kimmel to come to Arkansas City, KS (my home town) to become cashier at a bank Johnson managed here. I didn’t tell you that Johnson was later found guilty of purposely failing and defrauding banks, possibly to cover gambling debts. I didn’t tell you that somewhere along the line, someone – Kimmel? Johnson? – insured Kimmel’s life for nearly $30,000. (In today’s terms, this is hard to convert, but is somewhere between $850,000 – $970,000. In short, the guy was insured for nearly a million dollars.)

And I didn’t tell you about the court cases – three of them – to decide if Kimmel was alive or dead, because I didn’t tell you that in 1905, a man in Matteawan Asylum in New York suddenly announced that he was the missing George Kimmel.

And then . . . It never ends! That’s why I have to take so many breaks from this research, because it literally never freaking ends!!!!! I’m a historian. I’ve done loads of research. Written loads of papers. None of it ever prepared me for the sheer lunacy of this project.

What makes it more difficult is that I’m sort of feeling my way in the dark, on several levels. First – I don’t have colleagues who care about this. I teach at a community college. What that means is that my colleagues don’t do research. It’s not even encouraged by the administration. So when people come into my office and see the big pages tacked to my wall that have calendars and bubble charts and a Who’s Who of confederates and allies and possible suspects . . . they just sort look past it, like it doesn’t exist. I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. I’m not sure if they resent that I am doing it, or if they are afraid of guilt by association, or if they’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that I’m a bit of a freak. But it’s hard not having anyone to bounce ideas off, to brainstorm with, or just to commiserate with. I hate that. A lot.

It’s not just that the research itself is difficult, although it can be. Documents disappear – sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposely. For example, I discovered that if a case did not go to appeals, all supporting documents, testimonies, evidence – everything! – was discarded when the case was over. So although I had the summary and sentence for Charles Johnson (for failing the Niles bank), I had nothing else. Whatever evidence was entered into the record, whatever he might have said on the stand that may have shed some light on my own mystery – it’s all gone. Nope. That’s tough enough to deal with. It’s also the fact that every single time I turn on my computer, look at the court documents, read the newspaper stories, it all changes. 

Questions never get answered. Literally. Questions. Never. Get. Answered. They just beget more questions! I’ve been researching this, off and on, for years, and every single time I pick it up again, I find new things that put a new spin on what I’ve learned before, or take my research into a totally different direction. It’s not a cut-and-dried thing, and I keep wanting to put a ‘villain/victim’ spin on it, like we would in fiction. But I can’t. Every stone I turn over reveals a new clue, something else that changes how I see this case. For instance:  did Charles Johnson pay off Kimmel’s debts and hide the fact that he was missing because he was covering up crimes of his own . . . or because he was trying to protect a wayward nephew? Two days ago, I would have absolutely told you the former. No question. But after reading some testimony last night, I’m no longer so sure.

Yet another reason for the long breaks!

The obsession is tough. I’m following in the footsteps of a very good lawyer, a man named Ed O’Brien. Every single suspicion I’ve had about Kimmel’s disappearance, he had. Every single question I have asked, he’s asked. I find myself staring at the charts on my wall, trying to piece it all together, wondering if O’Brien ever did the same. Wishing I had access to his private notes, his papers, anything he might have collected about the case. Sure that the answer might be in there. Somewhere.

But there’s other things about it that make me – hesitant.

For starters, I am never immune to the fact that these were real people, and they have real descendants somewhere. Well, George doesn’t, not direct descendants, anyway. But his sister does, and Charles Johnson does. One of the potential main players, Robert Snyder, was a major figure in Kansas City. How can I even begin to talk to them about the things I need to ask? “Hey, I’m researching your great-great uncle’s disappearance. I suspect it might have something to do with your very corrupt great-great-great uncle. Can we chat?”

Yeah. Probably not.

And again . . . part of the problem is simply that . . . the documents, I highly suspect, simply don’t exist. Even things that should exist, I haven’t been able to locate. For example, Johnson hired the Kansas City branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate. But those records have evaporated. They are not housed with the official Pinkerton Archives at the Library of Congress. No one can tell me where they are. Did they get submitted as evidence, and misplaced? Were they destroyed? I’ve no idea. I also have yet to locate Johnson’s deposition, which should have been taken in 1905, while he was incarcerated. There’s no way O’Brien wouldn’t have done that. But where IS IT????

I can’t explain why this case obsesses me so much. But I need to figure it out, because I’ve been asked to present on my findings in May.

If they want answers . . . I’m afraid they’re going to be as frustrated as me.

 

For more on my research into George Kimmel, see these posts:

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/when-a-historians-dream-comes-true/

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2016/05/29/when-a-historians-dream-comes-true-part-2/

https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/digging-deep-the-perils-of-historical-research/

 

 

 

Thoughts on “The Man From the Train”

Sometimes, we miss things.

I don’t mean the things we lose. I mean the things we don’t chase. The things we see, think oh, that’s interesting! in the back of our minds, and then bypass them because we don’t have the time or inclination to do more.

A few years ago, when I was reading about twelve years’ worth of local newspapers to find out all I could about George Kimmel and his case, I kept stumbling across unusual stories. Specific stories. Families murdered. Entire families. By an ax. I remember thinking to myself, after about the fifth or sixth one, what the hell is going on here? A serial killer? Or were people just plain freaking crazy in the early 1900s? I jotted down notes about most of them – they’re still in my notebook, along with dates and page numbers of Kimmel-related stories. But I forgot about them.

Most people did.

However, in his new book The Man From the Train, Bill James (and his daughter Rachel) put those bloody drops into a coherent, and disturbing, pattern. Bill James is a baseball writer and statistician; he sees patterns in things. Like me, he saw a pattern in these grisly murders. And he decided to see if the pattern was for real.

James relies predominately (as far as I could tell) on newspapers as his sources. He admits this is problematic upfront – newspapers in the early 1900s were – well, they needed readers. The more sensational the story, the more papers they could sell. And I’m sure there were reporters and editors who weren’t above manufacturing details to make a story more salacious.

You’re probably familiar with at least one of the murders in this book:  the vicious ax murders of the Moore family (and two young neighbor sisters) in Villisca, Iowa in 1912. Made famous by the widespread press it got at the time, the fact that the house is now a museum, and the numerous paranormal groups that have done work there, the Villisca murders are almost legend today. How could someone have broken into a house in a town and murdered eight people, with an ax, and no one heard a thing? 

James wondered the same thing. The precision of the murders, the professionalism, led him to believe Villisca was only one of many. Thus, this book was born.

It’s a book I have severely mixed feelings about.

I downloaded it to my Nook last Saturday, and could not put it down for the first 75-100 pages or so. James has a great writing style – it will probably grate on professional historians, and it did grate on me by the end, but he makes little side comments and addresses the reader one-on-one, so it’s almost like you’re having a conversation with him. As you can tell from the title of the book, James believes that a.) there was a serial killer on the loose in America between 1898 and 1912, and b.) he knows who it was.

That’s fabulous. But one of the reasons I have decidedly mixed feelings about this book is that James spends most of his time trying to prove that some – not all, but some – of the murders in the book were committed by the Man From the Train (MFT) by reiterating things we, the readers, already know. Once James laid out the criteria by which we could judge whether a crime was committed by MFT, he seriously needed to trust the reader to remember them. Like any serial killer, MFT had a pattern to his kills. I can recite them off the top of my head:

• Near the tracks – within a mile, typically, and often at the junction of two tracks.
• Families with young girls were most often the targets.
• Houses were usually isolated, or in very small towns.
• They were killed with the blunt side of an ax, usually with a single blow to the skull. The ax was usually one the family owned, and it was always left at the scene.
• Lamps were moved, and left without their shades (which I don’t get, and James never explains).
• Bodies were typically moved after death – into other rooms, into piles in a single room, and other creepy ways.
• Like most serial killers, he got off on it.

But James insisted on doing this for every single crime he thought was committed by MFT. After a while, I got the point where I wondered if he was trying to convince himself that MFT had done this – or that MFT existed at all. He also noted that up until 1907, the pattern was consistent – and that after 1908, the pattern changed. He thinks it’s due to a change in the man. I wonder, however, if it is even the same man. Serial killers often take on accomplices. Could the original MFT have died between 1907 – 08, and his apprentice or accomplice taken over? James never entertains this idea.

James also spends entirely too much time on things I felt were trivial, like the feud that occurred in Villisca between a local citizen and a detective. I think that took two chapters. None of it, in my opinion, was necessary for the book he was trying to write. He also talks about crimes that sound as if they were committed by MFT – only to reveal, at the end of the chapter, that for X and Y reason, they weren’t.

The Man From the Train is a popular history. I have no problem with that – I’m sure there are hundreds of historians who do, but as a lower-level college instructor, I want to see books that make history interesting. Anything that draws in readers is a good thing. What I NEED to see in a nonfiction work, though, is sources. There is a point to a Works Cited or bibliography – it lets others follow in your footsteps, look at the same sources you did, and see if they come to the same conclusion or not. But in this book, most sources aren’t cited at all (not properly, anyway). Often, we’re left with, “newspapers said that . . .” and leaves us wondering which newspapers, on what day. (I also take issue with his dismissal and rudeness to Beth Klingensmith and her MLS graduate paper on this very topic. I don’t know Beth, but I can tell you that if she wrote this as a grad student, her paper, at least, is cited!)

It’s also clear he’s no historian – for instance, while discussing murders that took place in Louisiana, he talks about a black woman and says, “Many stories about her claim that she was only one-eighth black, which cannot be true” (p 334). I do not understand this statement at all. It is absolute plausible, especially in the bayou region of Louisiana, for this to be true. Whites were enslaved all the time (for a good treatment of this, read the awesome book The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey); white masters raped (and sometimes had consensual sex with) their female slaves, and then enslaved the resulting children. New Orleans was under the control of the French, Spanish, British, and Americans at varying points in time. Women who ‘passed for white’ were prized in the brothels. So yeah, this woman could very easily have been one-eighth black.

Yes, mixed feelings indeed. I wanted to see how James had handled the thing I’d missed. I wanted to like it. I had great hopes for it. I just – at the end, I just didn’t. I think James has a great voice, and I think he definitely found something. Of course, he’s in the same fix I am – more than a hundred years on, it’s hard to fit the puzzle together. And James does deliver on the promise to tell you who he thinks the killer is, and why.

If you like true crime, this one is probably up your alley. I was hoping for a great deal more, myself.

 

Those who ignore history . . .

As I’ve been working on my young adult historical, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the local area. This includes reading the local paper for 1924 – the year that most of my novel takes place. Since my protagonist, Nicky, is a bootlegger, I’m focusing especially on any articles that have to do with those issues – local stills being raided, etc.

But the KKK was also active in this area. There were, as far as I can tell, chapters of the KKK in Winfield (approximately 15 miles north), Newkirk (about 10 miles south), and Blackwell (about 35 miles southwest). I suspect there were numerous other small chapters for which there’s not much documentation. Heck, I even found this rather creepy advertisement in the Winfield paper: 

(This is actually pretty typical of Klan advertisements. A student even told me that there’s an abandoned building in her hometown that used to be a grocery store that still has a sign in the door that says “Klan Friendly!” I admit, as a historian, part of me wants to salvage it. Part of me wants to burn it at a crossroads.)

But there was one article that has continued to haunt me. I know it well; it features prominently in a major scene in my book. On February 7, 1924, Z.A. Harris, a ‘Klan lecturer’ (who knew there was such a thing, right?) appeared at the Fifth Avenue Theater to a “capacity crowd” and gave a rousing speech. The Fifth Avenue Theatre was THE theatre of Arkansas City in 1924 – it was the most upscale, the most lavish. Or, as my protagonist Nicky says, “Only four theatres in town, and I knew they wasn’t gonna be at the Rex. The Strand – maybe. The Isis – not big enough. That left the Fifth Avenue Opera House, and it was the biggest and nicest theatre in town and I reckoned the Klan didn’t do nothing by halves. They wanted to recruit people, they’d get the best.”

Though the article doesn’t quote Harris verbatim all the time, it gives enough quotes to get the majority of the speech. So I want to post parts of this here. I put the actual quotes in italics. As you may pick up, the reporter wasn’t terribly keen on the guy. 🙂

“‘Like any other secret society there are restrictions placed on membership. We have a right as Americans to form such an organization. Our membership is confined strictly to white, native born, gentile, protestant American citizens.’ He spent twenty minutes or so in defense of the organization . . . In his defense of the United States constitution and Americanism he directed his shafts, by innuendo or inference only, against Catholicism, the Jews, and another clement ‘constituting a membership of one and a half million,’ which probably alluded to the IWW or the Bolsheviks or perhaps the socialists.”

So far, not so bad. But! Wait for it . . .

“He pictured a big task which is to engage the attention of the Klan organization – ‘the preservation of American nationalism, American ideals, American institutions, the preservation of the flag and the liberty, freedom, and manhood for which the flag stands, as understood by the founders of the American government.’”

AHA! Here we go! The usurpation of ‘American ideals’ and God help me, the ‘founders of the American government.’ Written clearly by people who don’t understand a bloody thing about the founding of America. I’m waiting for someone in Trump’s campaign to find and plagiarize this.

But it goes on!

“In the last twenty years we have been taking in more immigration than this country can assimilate. We have, according to the last census figures, 94,820,915 white inhabitants. Of these, only 58,421,987 are of native born parentage. There are nearly 15,000,000 of foreign born parents, 6,991,665 had one parent born abroad, while 13,712,754 were foreign born.

“He pointed out that laws passed to restrict immigration were evaded by reason of the fact that the nations restricted did not include Mexico and Canada. ‘Something like 750,000 foreign immigrants have found their way into the United States by the Canadian or Mexican route, being “bootlegged” into the country by law evaders for profit,’ Harris charged.”

See? Not much has changed. ‘Coyotes’ still charge outrageous fees to bring people across the border. Sometimes, those people are left to die in the deserts. But back to the program:

“‘Of these hordes who come, speaking a foreign language, many of them are so ignorant that they would never be able to learn the English tongue. The east is overflowing with foreigners. Eighty percent of the population of New York is made up of foreigners. To get into America, in fact, it would be necessary to come west of the Allegheny Mountains.'”

Harris claimed that in 1924, the Klan had membership of 5 million. That number might seem high, but it certainly was over 3 million members by 1923, so 5 million might not be too far off the mark. Today, we might think that these people were whites against blacks, but that’s actually not entirely true. As you can tell from this lecture, the Klan of the 20s was against everyone who wasn’t Just Like Them. Catholics, Jews, divorced people, men who were unemployed, Eastern Europeans (Commies, you know!) – and, of course, bootleggers. Sure, they lynched blacks as well, particularly in the South, and burned black churches and homes – but the major push of the Klan was pretty simple:  enforce Prohibition, keep ‘undesirables’ out of America, and keep America as white and Protestant as possible.

What scares me the most is not that we still have this crap going on – of course the Klan still exists, and so do neo-Nazi and white supremacy groups, each one as hateful and ignorant as the next – but that we have a presidential candidate that is spouting the same godforsaken nonsense.

Now Trump is encouraging his followers to go to the polling places on Election Day and ensure that there is no voter fraud. Hmm. The Klan did this, too, in the 1860s and 70s, and again from the 1920s – 60s. To ensure there was no ‘voter fraud.’ Dressed in their hoods and robes, grabbed their shotguns, and stood in front of polling booths. Imagine you’re a black man in the 1920s coming to vote for the first time, and that’s the first sight you see when you get there. Of course you’re going to turn around and go back home.

Because if you don’t, you’ll get a cross burning on your front yard – or worse.

What strikes me as I watch Trump and listen to his ignorant, fictional rhetoric is how very, very close he comes to being Z.A. Harris. How very, very close he comes to being the spokesperson for hate. You can tell from the original speech that Harris 100% believed every word he said. Though the Klan of the 1920s attracted all kinds of people for all reasons, one thing remained the same:  the purpose of the organization. Which, of course, boils down to just one thing:

Hatred.

The same hatred Trump shouts in every single speech.

The same hatred his followers seem to embrace.

Just like people did in 1924.

 

 

 

The Dangers of Minimalism (to a historian)

I adore The Diane Rehm Show. Not only does she always have interesting and timely topics to discuss, but she has the most fascinating guests and panels.

Today’s topic was Minimalism. I didn’t get to hear the entire story, but I heard one short bit that REALLY freaked me out. See if you can guess why:

The guest practices minimalism – the art of decluttering. Living with as few possessions as possible. I’m all for it. I’m a bit of a ‘collector’ myself, but if you can do it, more power to you! Of course, most of mine is vintage and antiques, stuff for my online shop, and things that have personal meaning. They admitted that it’s hard to get rid of those kinds of items but you should – take photos of important things like report cards, awards, and personal letters and then throw them away.

Yeah. Now you see why I got a bit upset.

Look, I get that everyone’s different. I understand that to some people, inheriting a house full of cool stuff is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. That they may feel zero connection to the boxes of newspaper clippings, letters, photos, journals and memorabilia in the garage or attic.

But PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. Don’t throw it away.

I’m a historian. Right now, I can tell you that the story I’m working on – the Kimmel case – may never get solved to my satisfaction because key players in the case threw stuff away. Admitted it on the stand. Of course, that’s a bit different – that was more about self-preservation than decluttering – but the fact remains that there will always be those holes in my research because those primary sources burned more than a hundred years ago. Think how much more heartbreaking it would be to find a treasure trove of sources – only to find that they had been thrown out just days before I discovered their existence!

I love antique shops. Haunt them, really. I’m always amazed by the family histories I find there. The photos, especially. Most of them have no identification, no names or locations; I can well imagine that after a generation or two, no one has any idea who those people were. But once, someone did.

Trust me. Those family Bibles and old letters and photographs and advertisements and whatnot may not seem very important to you, but they are important. To someone. Maybe your kids, or your grandkids. Or maybe to someone like me. There’s loads of people out there who collect vintage and antique photographs. Who collect vintage letters and other things you may want to throw away. AND VINTAGE CLOTHES. NEVER, EVER THROW AWAY THE FREAKING VINTAGE CLOTHES. PLEASE.

So what can you do with them besides take them to the dumpster? Here’s some ideas:

• Call your local historical society and see if they’re interested (I bet they are!).
• Call your local antique shop and see they’ll take things on consignment (they often do, or they might just make you an offer then and there for it).
• Contact a local historian. Every town has at least one. They might not pay you anything, because they’ve got to store it, but if all you’re going to do is throw it away anyway, so what?
• Call the history department at your local college or university. It’s a long shot, but there could be a historian there who can give those items a good home, or knows someone who can. Often, historians at universities are interested in research into that town or area.

Please. Stop throwing away your family’s history. Maybe you don’t want it – but someone else might.

And if it’s got anything to do with George Kimmel, Edna Kimmel Bonslett, John Boone Swinney, Andrew J. Hunt and his wife Margie, or Charles A. Johnson of Niles Michigan, PLEASE, I WANT IT! 🙂

A link to the story:  https://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-07-28/the-lure-of-minimalism

 

Buried: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

It’s Memorial Day.

And in Tulsa today, they are remembering one of the worst incidents of the 20th century – the Tulsa Race Riots.

In fact, it got started just about the same time as I’m writing, late in the evening of May 31, 1921. But let’s back up for a second, because I’m pretty sure most people have never heard of the Tulsa Race Riot. And that’s because for years, it was kept under wraps as much as possible.

This is a story I never heard until I started to teach US History. As I was preparing to teach the 1920s, I kept running across the race riots of other places – like Rosewood – and of course the KKK. But then I stumbled across a website that discussed the Tulsa Race Riot.

Greenwood, before the Riot. From hoodline.com

After World War II, Tulsa was actually two cities:  Tulsa proper, which was predominantly white; and Greenwood, known as the ‘Black Wall Street of America.’ A beautiful African-American community, it boasted a thriving business district with theaters, shops, restaurants, milliners, clothing stores, banks – everything a city needs. Tulsa had a population of more than 100,00 at that time; an exact census for Greenwood is difficult to find, but certainly at least 20,000.

But all that changed. Because of one man and one woman and one scream.

According to the story, Dick Rowland worked in Tulsa as a shoe-shiner. Sarah Paige operated the elevator at the Drexel building in Tulsa. Stories vary, but the fact is, at some point that day, they were alone in that elevator together. Since she was white and he was black, this was already an issue.

Then she screamed.

If Sarah Paige ever said why she screamed, it’s not recorded. By all accounts, she refused to explain. It didn’t matter. Whites immediately jumped to one conclusion:  a black man tried to rape a white woman. Rowland was arrested, and on the night of May 31, a white mob gathered at the jail. Leaders from Greenwood went to the jail to help protect Rowland, but the sheriff told them to go home; when they tried to leave, the mob attacked them. They fled to Greenwood, with the mob in hot pursuit.

I think the caption speaks for itself. This image is found all over the ‘net; probably in the University of Tulsa Collections.

Over the next fourteen hours, thousands of whites, probably led by the local KKK, systematically destroyed Greenwood. Blacks were rounded up and kept in ‘concentration camps’ while houses were searched, robbed, and burned. Those who tried to escape were shot. They even set up a machine gun on a grain elevator at one end of Main Street. At dawn on June 1, airplanes dropped homemade bombs on Greenwood. There was even an effort to go through the wealthier areas of Tulsa and force white home owners to send out their black servants – which, thankfully, most refused to do.

It wasn’t until noon that the state troopers arrived – but by that time, it no longer mattered. The riot had fizzled.

And Greenwood was gone.

Thirty-five square blocks had burned to the ground. More than a thousand homes, 21 churches, and 600+ businesses were gone. The Tulsa Fire Department had tried to get through all night long, but were held at gunpoint  by the attackers. Likewise, anyone trying to get through to give first aid to the blacks was held at gunpoint.

Now, there were whites who tried to help. A family outside Tulsa hid more than thirty people in their barn for a week. One woman at the local YWCA saved their porter’s life by hiding him in the walk-in freezer and then standing up to the whites chasing him with shotguns. Red Cross workers moved in as soon as they could to help the wounded and bury the dead.

Because there were dead.

But the sad thing is, we have absolutely no idea how many died that night.

Most who fled Greenwood never returned, so just doing a census doesn’t help. For decades, it was known that somewhere between 39 and 55 graves were dug in cemeteries for riot victims – the lucky ones who got headstones, anyway. It was also known that there was at least one mass grave, but as one Red Cross worker admitted, they were told to bury the bodies as quickly as possible, and didn’t keep track. Then in the early 1990s, another mass grave was discovered in a vacant lot that is presumed to be from the riot as well. So estimates range between 55 and 300, with many believing that number to be much, much higher.

The Tulsa Race Riot was, we know now, the worst of the 1920s. An entire town, destroyed in less than 24 hours. All because one woman screamed. All because some people thought they were better than others.

Tulsa buried this story. Who can blame them, really? It was never discussed. Never published. The KKK still had enough sway in the area to keep it hushed up, and the city officials swept it under the rug. Later, reporters who tried to tell the story said they were threatened. It wasn’t until 1997 that Oklahoma finally published a report on the riots, and today, a small museum in Tulsa commemorates the event.

And, because I know you’re dying to know:  the charges against Dick Rowland were dropped. He left Tulsa, never to return. And as far as I know, Sarah Paige never told what happened on that elevator.

One thing I always ask my students is do you think this could happen today? Before Michael Brown, they always said NO. They always said that America had grown beyond this, that such wanton destruction would never be allowed to happen.

Now? Now they look at me with eyes that say otherwise. Now, before they speak, they remember Michael Brown, and Freddy Gray, and all the riots that have ensued over the last two years. They think about all the Trump rallies where minorities are beaten for daring to protest his policies. And they hesitate.

Because they know the truth.

 

More on the Tulsa Race Riots:

http://tulsahistory.org/learn/online-exhibits/the-tulsa-race-riot/ – the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum’s site for the riots

http://www.tulsaworld.com/app/race-riot/timeline.html – The Tulsa World’s page dedicated to the riots

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/19/survivors-of-infamous1921tulsaraceriotstillhopeforjustice.html – from Al-Jazeera America, a story about the riots and the survivors still seeking justice

 

 

 

When a Historian’s Dream Comes True, part 2

For the first time in a LONG time, I’m not teaching face to face classes this summer. And after the year I’ve had . . . yeah. Let’s just say it’s better that way.

But it gives me the chance to catch up on things I’ve had to abandon this year, and one of those is my research into my nonfiction historical project. I’ve written about this before (https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/when-a-historians-dream-comes-true/ , https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/digging-deep-the-perils-of-historical-research/), but to recap:  about 10 years ago, I started to read in our local paper’s ‘100 Years Ago Today’ column about a man named George Kimmel, who disappeared from my home town of Arkansas City in 1898, and then mysteriously reappeared some eight years later . . . or did he? At the time, no one was quite sure if the man who claimed to be Kimmel was really Kimmel or not. And the testimony from the trials didn’t make it any clearer.

I spent days photographing some 3,000 +/- documents from just one of the trials, and some of the things that I found astounded me. I thought I had a good handle on the case and on who Kimmel was, and how things would turn out. Turns out, I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did.

This week, I started on the testimony of a man named John Boone Swinney, who was a surprise witness in the 1911 trial. And when I say surprise, I mean full-blown, people popping out of cakes with machine guns, kind of surprise. See, before Swinney, everyone assumed that what ‘Kimmel’ said was true:  that he’d been kidnapped from Kansas City, taken to St. Louis, and beaten up. He then lost his memory and had only recently regained it. But Swinney came in with a totally different story, one that for most, put that entire St. Louis story out to pasture permanently.

But this is what I love so much about this case. Every single time I go back to it, there’s a surprise. Not Easter eggs; Easter bombs. 🙂 I’m not finished with Swinney’s testimony – I have more than 200 pages to print and read – but I’ve already got two pages full of notes of things I have to chase down.

I think what I love most, though, is that through this testimony, I can see the trial. Hear these people. I know precisely what kind of gun Kimmel was carrying (a 32 caliber designed by Otis Smith, if anyone cares). I’ve even laughed out loud in a couple of places – for example, Swinney said he was in Utah, ‘doing nothing’ and staying in hotels. Of course, I’m thinking in the back of my mind:  Wait. You’re a part-time farmer, you’ve been convicted of attempted railroad robbery . . . um . . . where was the hotel money from again? The attorney must have wondered the same thing, because he finally asked:

“What were you doing?”

Swinney:  “Nothing.”

Attorney:  “Well, did you commit any train robberies out there?”

Swinney:  “I – at least, I wasn’t charged with any.”

I’m so mad at the attorneys, though!!!! So many places where I want to go back in time and beat the crap out of them! I want to know what the hell happened to George Kimmel. That’s it. I want to know. So when I see testimony like this:

Q:  “Well, how long did you talk with him there?”

A:  “Maybe he was there half an hour. He told me to take this (valise) and meet him . . .”

Q:  “I didn’t ask what he told you; how long did you talk with him there?”

SERIOUSLY????? You can’t wait FIVE BLOODY MINUTES for this guy to tell us WHAT WAS SAID BETWEEN THE TWO OF THEM???? He never does let Swinney tell what Kimmel told him. So I have no idea – yet – why Kimmel was brought in on this ‘treasure hunt’ or what was said between them or why he was convinced to go. I have my suspicions, but as of yet, nothing to back them up. Very frustrating.

Another frustrating thing, for me, is the knowledge that I’m dealing with real people here. Yes, they are all dead now, but – in Arkansas City history, men like Albert Denton and A.J. Hunt are practically paragons. One of the men Swinney incriminates in his treasure hunt story is R.M. Snyder, a banker in Kansas City – and yes, another freaking paragon. What do you do? How do you reconcile what I think they did in 1898 with what they did later?

I’m hoping, in cross-examination, that the other attorney will let Swinney tell more about his interactions with Kimmel. Because so far, this bloody idiot has led us through 20 pages of Swinney being part of an attempted robbery in Oklahoma and a bunch of other crap that has no bearing whatsoever on George Kimmel. I still have about a hundred pages to go. So here’s hoping!

Man. I am so glad I don’t have any classes this summer. 🙂