Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939-1946
352
Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939-1946
352eBook
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Overview
The war affected every segment of Montgomery society: black and white, rich and poor, male and female, those who fought in Europe and the Pacific and those who stayed on the home front. Newton follows Montgomerians chronologically through the war from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima as they experience patriotism, draft and enlistment, rationing, scarcity drives, and the deaths of loved ones. His use of small vignettes based on personal recollections adds drama and poignancy to the story.
Montgomery in the Good War is an important reminder that wars are waged at home as well as abroad and that their impact reverberates well beyond those who fight on the front lines. Those who came of age during the war will recognize themselves in this moving volume. It will also be enlightening to those who have lived in times of relative peace.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817384876 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Montgomery in the Good War
Portrait of a Southern City ? 1939â"1946
By Wesley Phillips Newton
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2000 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8487-6
CHAPTER 1
The City at the Start of the War
The Advertiser headline of September 1 struck the reader with explosive force: "HITLER UNLEASHES 'WAR DOGS' ON POLAND; GUNS ROAR ON THE BORDER." The event that triggered the twentieth century's second world war had taken place at 5:30 A.M. European time, or 10:30 P.M. on Thursday night Montgomery time. Bicycling paper boys threw the news onto lawns and porches as September 1 dawned in Montgomery.
City residents with particular reason to fear the turn of events in Europe included Selma Wampold, the German-born wife of Charles Wampold, Sr., an insurance agent, and their son, members of Montgomery's Jewish community. Selma's parents had moved to Montgomery in early 1939, after SS thugs had trashed their home in the lovely Bavarian countryside near Stuttgart. Selma's son, Charles, at the age of ten had accompanied his mother on a trip to visit his grandparents in 1935. Crossing Germany by train, mother and son had seen anti-Semitic slogans on buildings as they passed through cities and towns. Young Charles had endured anti-Semitic remarks made by a young German girl in his grandparents' village.
Many Montgomery adults with access to a radio had tracked the gathering storm before the war's outbreak. Germany and Europe were far away, however, and two local events competed with the war for residents' attention in September. One was the beginning of the football season. The other was relocation (moving), for which the end of summer was the peak season.
In 1939, movers declared that there were more people departing for new domiciles, and more vans and trucks stuffed with furniture and other household items, than they had seen in years. Such activity indicated that the economy was rising, if slowly, from the doldrums. According to an analysis in the Advertiser, people were "turning to permanent residences and home ownership." Members of the incoming class of the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), the army's advanced school for air officers located at the area's army airfield, Maxwell Field, competed for rental property. The real estate situation augured the beginning of a housing shortage in Montgomery.
Known locally as the Tac School, ACTS was part educational institution and part think tank for airpower theory, strategy, and tactics, a place of intellectual ferment unique among the world's air forces of the day. ACTS was to influence the army's waging of air warfare profoundly in the future. Most of the senior army air officers in the coming conflict were alumni of ACTS.
Few Montgomerians knew precisely what went on at Maxwell, but the field's contribution to the Montgomery area's economy had been a rare bright spot in the decade-long depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, popularly known as FDR, called in 1939 for an increase in spending on the military. Congress, in response, reluctantly authorized expenditures to invigorate the armed forces, which had been greatly neglected since the end of the Great War in 1918. The majority of funding went for airpower, which FDR viewed as decisive in future wars. By September 1939, Maxwell Field was beginning to enjoy some of the recent congressional largess. Work began on twenty-six barracks for enlisted men. The economic focus of Montgomery, however, was still overwhelmingly downtown, as it was in practically all cities and towns of the time.
Residents who did not live within walking distance of downtown or who did not own a car — and most Montgomerians did not own one — used the relatively cheap public transportation system: the yellow-painted buses of the Montgomery City Lines, Inc., a private concern that operated with a municipal subsidy. Buses had replaced streetcars in 1936. In line with the hub-and-spoke principle, the buses on regular routes passed through downtown on their way to and from all outlying and suburban areas of the city. Each outward bound bus bore the name of its destination above the windshield — Cloverdale, Oak Park, Capitol Heights, Cleveland Avenue, Day Street, and so forth — changing its label when it headed back downtown. In 1939 the one-way fare from Cloverdale to Day Street was five cents and included one transfer.
By city ordinance blacks were required to take seats in the rear of the bus, while whites occupied seats in the front half. If a bus was nearly filled, with standing passengers clinging to the upper safety bars, a black person at a bus stop passed in his or her fare at the front and then hurried to the back entrance, where the doors were opened. A particularly mean-spirited driver might shut the doors prematurely and take off, leaving the black person behind to fume helplessly. Eventually the Montgomery city bus figured in the black reaction that gave rise to the national civil rights movement.
In the daytime Montgomery's downtown streets were often clogged with passenger cars, trucks, and taxis (Yellow, Black-and-White, red-painted Dime, and various usually individually owned taxis that served the city's black residents). Statistics for the year 1939 show that the city had 16,000 cars in a population of 78,000. Buses, which did not require tracks to cross the city, enabled many whites to move to the suburbs and also transported black labor and servants to these suburbs as well as to menial jobs downtown. Buses allowed shoppers to visit stores downtown and return home, especially on Saturdays and holidays.
Downtown Montgomery had several distinctive features that impressed passing strangers as well as natives. Dexter Avenue, one of two east-west boulevards that formed the main street, swept downward from the august white state capitol to the central plaza. This area, called Court Square, was graced by a fountain whose classical Greek figures, cast in dark metal, sprayed water into a basin surrounded by a metal fence. Traffic swirled constantly around the basin during busy hours, fed by Dexter and several other major streets such as Court Street, a thoroughfare that ran north-south. Pedestrians hurried across crossways when traffic lights afforded them the opportunity.
Viewed from Court Square, the capitol gleamed in the sunlight like a Roman civic building. Nearby stood other state government buildings, also white. The state government was one of three chief employers in the city. The other two were the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the municipal government. In 1939 Maxwell Field was not yet a major employer. The three other government bodies were consequently essential to the city's economy in the lingering depression.
Montgomery, founded in the early nineteenth century, had been built, like Rome, amid seven hills near a river. Also like Rome, Montgomery — and indeed Alabama as a whole — had sanctioned slavery. Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery's capitol in 1861. The city of Montgomery had served as the Confederacy's first capital. Although the Confederacy, unlike Rome, had not triumphed militarily, state and capital retained a martial spirit.
In the waning months of 1939, members of the four local chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) opposed a move to place a bronze statue of Davis in front of the capitol on the broad knoll called Goat Hill. The Daughters argued that this particular statue by a Yankee sculptor looked too much like one he had made of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. The women charged up Goat Hill in a last-ditch effort to sway Governor Frank Dixon and the legislature, but it was as futile as Pickett's charge. The statue was erected over their objections.
The only nearby structure in direct spiritual conflict with Davis's statue was an unpretentious church constructed from red brick and timber that stood a block away on Dexter's south side. The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had been founded by former slaves and other blacks in 1879. Its members were not involved in any controversy in 1939, however. Most whites were oblivious to them; only occasionally did a white person send a letter protesting their presence to the editor of the Advertiser. In time the church became the center of the black protest that gave rise to the national civil rights movement.
Another noteworthy downtown feature was Union Station. This magnificent Romanesque structure, built in the 1890s, overlooked the Alabama River several blocks north of Montgomery Street, which formed the other stretch of the main street and, like Dexter, merged with Court Square. A long shed attached to Union Station's terminal building protected trains and people from the elements. Through the clouds of steam drifting back from idling engines one could gaze down from the shed at the muddy river and across to the wooded shore opposite. In the nineteenth century the river had played a key role in the city's commerce as steamboats carried cotton from Montgomery markets to Mobile.
Montgomery's downtown area included the city's chief locus of black enterprise and entertainment. The district centered around Monroe Street, running parallel to and just north of Dexter, and Monroe's intersection with North Perry Street. Perry was one of several north-south thoroughfares that had been named after American naval heroes of the War of 1812 and that intersected Dexter consecutively from the capitol to within a block of Court Square.
The district had originated before the Great War and included the Peking Theater, the only motion picture theater for blacks; pool halls; a dance hall; the offices of most of the city's black medical doctors and dentists; the offices of black-run insurance agencies; Dean's, the largest black-owned drugstore; barbershops and beauty parlors patronized by blacks; and the only downtown hotel for blacks. In a society where people were segregated even after death, the district contained Ross-Clayton, one of the oldest black-owned funeral homes.
Lonnie Coleman, a white Montgomerian, writing of a young black man in his 1944 novel Escape the Thunder, described the district's lure for blacks. Recently paroled from Kilby, the principal state prison, which was located at the northern reaches of the city, Coleman's hero "wandered about the streets he loved. ... They were the streets of his people." He absorbed "the calm, lazy snip-snip of the scissors from the barbershops ..., the sharp click of billiard cues against balls from the pool halls ..., the laughter in the streets ..., the earnest bargaining of the street peddlers."
The black district was bounded by white commercial enterprises. These included fruit stands and secondhand clothing stores owned by immigrants or their second-generation relatives, stalls that stood close together and sometimes mingled with the enterprises of black citizens. Some of the newcomers had come from the Mediterranean area. Others were Jews from Europe and the Middle East who had left Europe to escape persecution. The two most prestigious restaurants downtown had been founded by immigrants with Mediterranean origins. Greek immigrant Pete Xides had founded the Elite (pronounced locally with the accent on the E) on Montgomery Street in 1910 and in 1939 still managed it. The Elite stayed open all night, serving guests at local balls or parties and concertgoers at the city auditorium. The Ridolphi family, with roots in Corsica, ran the Pickwick Café on Commerce Street, where police tolerated double parking by customers waiting for take-out food.
A fruit stand shaded by a large umbrella on Dexter Avenue stood in marked contrast to the shops and stores in the last few blocks as the street leveled out before merging with the Square. Here too could be found the two most prestigious and oldest jewelers and some of the most upscale men's and women's clothing stores. Also here were the leading florist, rubbing shoulders with an immigrant-owned café named Cris's, famous for its gourmet hot dogs, and a cluster of five-and-dime stores — Woolworths', Silver's, and Kress's. Kress's impressive four-story facade had Corinthian columns.
On the north corner where Dexter merged with the Square, a huge, round clock with four dials advertised Klein and Son, Jewelers. On the adjacent corner stood the Winter Building, where in 1861 a telegraph had been sent ordering troops to fire on Fort Sumter. In 1939 most Montgomerians were unaware of the building's historical significance.
Emerging at a northwest angle from the Square was Commerce Street, running three long blocks to the railroad yards, and beyond the yards lay the former steamboat landing on the Alabama River. As the street's name implied, it was the city's most commercially important artery. Commerce was known as "furniture row." In the blocks nearest the railroad yards stood wholesale cotton and other warehouses and the largest hardware stores and office supply firms. Two eight-story hotels rose above all the street's other structures except the First National Bank Building, one of the city's two structures locally regarded as skyscrapers. The bank building soared twelve stories on a corner where Commerce merged with the Square. First National and two other banks on the street defined Montgomery's financial district.
The second twelve-story "skyscraper," an office building known as the Bell Building, towered over Montgomery Street. With the three leading hotels, the Exchange, Whitley, and Jefferson Davis; the two leading motion picture theaters, the Paramount and the Empire; and the two radio stations — CBS affiliate WCOV in the Exchange Hotel at the corner of Montgomery and Commerce and NBC affiliate WSFA in the Jefferson Davis — Montgomery Street constituted the hotel and entertainment district. In 1938 a young "hillbilly" singer and guitar picker named Hank Williams had won an amateur hour contest at the Empire, launching his career. In 1940 WSFA sponsored a radio program featuring Hank and his band.
The Whitley was the scene of excitement on the night of December 13, 1939. A rumor circulated that Clark Gable and his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, had checked into the hotel, stopping over on their way to Atlanta for the premier of Gone with the Wind. Reporters hounded the hotel manager for interviews with the famous couple. The hotel had 256 rooms, and the manager refused to say which room they occupied. The couple escaped early the next morning, eluding the reporters waiting at the elevators and other exits. Attendants at the Montgomery municipal airport claimed that the two stars had left on a special flight to Atlanta.
The Alabama premier of Gone with the Wind occurred a month later, in January 1940, in the Paramount Theater. The Paramount was not as grandiose as Birmingham's Alabama Theater, but it was dignified. The Advertiser reported that would-be viewers "formed a constant line that snaked at times from Court Square to Jesse French, Inc. in quest of tickets." The Jesse French Piano Company on Montgomery Street set up three ticket windows to handle the advance sales. The usual Paramount fares were $0.25 for adults and $0.10 for children under twelve years, but for the gala opening all seats were reserved, and all tickets, whether for children or adults, cost $0.76 for the matinee performance and $1.12 for the night showing. The depression notwithstanding, the house had been sold out in advance wherever the film played a six-day engagement. Several months later, Gone with the Wind was shown for blacks at the Peking Theater. There were no long lines to purchase tickets.
Away from entertainment and more consumer-oriented commercial activity, the city had an industrial park in 1939 that lay north of Madison Avenue, a thoroughfare one block north of Monroe and running from downtown eastward to the Atlanta highway. The industrial park had lumberyards, construction companies, coal companies (the gas space heater was just beginning to compete with the fireplace), moving companies, petroleum product headquarters and distributors, soft drink bottlers, and alcoholic beverage wholesalers.
The local Coca-Cola bottler had opened its new plant in 1938 behind one of Montgomery's most historic churches, St. John's Episcopal on Madison Avenue. St. John's with its spire was best known as the church where Jefferson Davis had worshiped. Other historic churches downtown included the Reform synagogue Temple Beth Or, the First Presbyterian Church, and St. Peter's Catholic Church. Each dated to before the Civil War.
Most black and white Montgomerians, however, did not belong to the Catholic, Jewish, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormon, or other churches or sects considered peripheral in this center of the Bible Belt. Many were mainline Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Christian Church, or African Methodist Episcopal. Others belonged to the Protestant Pentecostal or fundamentalist Church of Christ, the Church of God, Holiness, and various other faiths. No one questioned the propriety of starting the public school day with a prayer, and it was almost always a Christian prayer. High school and college football games at Cramton Bowl, out Madison Avenue, opened with a prayer, for which the unusually large "congregation" stood, with few, if any, exceptions. The prayer predictably ended with the phrase "in Christ's name, Amen."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Montgomery in the Good War by Wesley Phillips Newton. Copyright © 2000 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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