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One
American Soil
Bourgeois
society stands at the crossroads, either transition
to socialism or regression into barbarism.-FRIEDRICH
ENGELS
When James Riddle Hoffa was born in
Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913, American
socialism had reached its apex. Just twelve years
after its founding, the Socialist Party could boast
of a membership of more than 100,000, the election
of 1,200 party members to public offices across the
United States, and the ongoing publication of more
than 300 periodicals. Most impressive was the
widespread popularity of another native of
west-central Indiana, Eugene Debs, who received more
than 900,000 votes as the party's nominee in the
1912 presidential election. But over the next
several years, during Hoffa's childhood, the United
States provided a stark answer to the query posed by
Friedrich Engels at the close of the nineteenth
century. Jimmy Hoffa's America crucified Eugene Debs
and set fire to his world.
In the fall of
1925, Debs wrote a letter to his local newspaper in
Terre Haute bitterly lamenting the fate of both his
hometown and his country. Debs had returned to live
in Terre Haute after his release from the Atlanta
Federal Penitentiary, where he had served three and
a half years for violation of the Espionage Act-the
penalty for having given a series of antiwar
speeches during World War I. The leader of the
Socialist Party of America saw a new world when he
moved back to the town of his childhood. The party
he had spent much of his life building was nearly
destroyed, the victim of government repression and a
postwar right-wing resurgence. Most painfully, he
saw that America, and even Terre Haute, had been
fully transformed by modern industrial machinery.
Aged and depleted from his years in prison, Debs
lacked the energy and spirit to renew the fight for
socialism but held out hope that others might take
up the work of redeeming what he saw as a fallen
America. Gone were the "simplicity and
beauty" of pioneer life in the Wabash Valley,
he wrote to the Terre Haute Tribune. "This is
predominantly a business age, a commercial age, a
material and in a larger sense a sordid age, but the
moral and spiritual values of life are not wholly
ignored by the people." Having never moved from
Christian socialism to the "scientific"
doctrine of his immigrant comrades, Debs looked not
to objective conditions for salvation but to what he
believed to be the God-given moral sensibility of
human beings. "Sentiment, without which men are
lower than savages, is still rooted in and flowers
in the human soul and makes possible the hope that
some day we shall seek and find and enjoy the real
riches of the race."
The socialist
utopia that Debs imagined closely resembled his own
memories of the "beloved little community"
of Terre Haute during his youth, "where all
were neighbors and friends." While this surely
was a romanticized description, the small Indiana
city in the late nineteenth century did offer
sources of inspiration for a communitarian such as
Debs. Established at the intersection of the Wabash
River and the National Road and promoted as a
railroad link between the eastern markets and St.
Louis, until the turn of the century Terre Haute
developed slowly enough to allow it to remain an
exemplar of small-town American republicanism.
Despite the presence of the Terre Haute and Indiana
railroad and the Vigo Iron Company, the
predominantly native-born and Protestant white
population enjoyed the close social relations of a
decentralized economy. Most businesses employed only
a handful of people, and even the railroad
maintained a personalized work environment by
limiting its hiring to familial and friendship
networks. Workers were more likely to identify with
their employers than to feel class antagonism
towards them. Added to this was a pervasive
Christian evangelicalism, handed down from the
Second Great Awakening, that imbued the community
with the ethics of self-sacrifice and social
responsibility.
As an adult in a rapidly
changing world, Debs was motivated by a longing for
his "beloved little community" and a fear
that it would be buried under the advance of
industrial capitalism. But unlike most workers who
shared these feelings, Debs's intellectual training
enabled him to articulate them. His father, the
product of a wealthy Alsatian family, introduced him
to the works of the greatest French writers and
social theorists, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and
Victor Hugo. From his early immersion in
Enlightenment thought Debs developed a view of the
world as a single community, which, paired with the
lessons of Terre Haute's culture of social
obligation, created in him a sense of responsibility
for the entire human race. He aspired to be a
manager of others, to correct the human impulses
that threatened social harmony. A teenage friend
expected him either to become the owner of a large
business or to join the railroad and "step into
a Master Mechanics job in charge of all the engine
men." Indeed, as a leader of the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Firemen-whose motto was
"Benevolence, Sobriety and Industry"-Debs
viewed the trade union as an instrument of moral
discipline. "It is no small matter to plant
benevolence in the heart of stone, instill the love
of sobriety into the putrid mind of debauchery, and
create industry out of idleness," he wrote in
1881. "These are our aims, and if the world
concedes them to be plausible, we ask that they find
an anchoring place in its heart."
As
smokestacks grew higher, railroad lines stretched
longer, and moral depravity sank deeper in Terre
Haute and the rest of America, Debs's inclinations
naturally turned him toward socialism. Flowing
directly from his yearning for the classless
Christian community of his imagined youth and his
ambition to oversee it, Debs's socialism shared the
basic principles of socialists around the world, but
it bore his own distinctive mark. Within a
collectively managed political economy, workers
would organize, discipline, and regulate themselves
and thereby "work out their own salvation,
their redemption and independence." But to
transform workers into responsible social managers,
socialism would have to be above all a moralizing
mission. "What is Socialism?" Debs
rhetorically asked a crowd of party members.
"Merely Christianity in action." And who
would bring it about? "The martyred Christ of
the working class."
Twenty years later,
in prison, his movement crushed, his health
shattered, and the world outside lost to capitalism,
Debs wrote a letter to a friend that described a
troubling dream he had had: "I was walking by
the house where I was born-the house was gone and
nothing left but ashes. All about me were ashes. . .
. The house was gone-and only
ashes-Ashes!"
Rising from those ashes
was not the phoenix of socialism or a new Christ of
the working class, but something else altogether.
The fuel for the railroad engines and blasting
furnaces that incinerated Debs's Terre Haute came
from coal mines a few miles away, in the towns where
Jimmy Hoffa spent the first eleven years of his
life.
In the late nineteenth century, Clay
County accounted for more than half of Indiana's
coal production. Much of that coal was put on
railroad cars in Brazil, the county's seat and
largest town, and shipped sixteen miles west to
Terre Haute. In 1910 John Cleveland Hoffa and Viola
Riddle Hoffa moved to Brazil from nearby Cunot, a
farming town where Viola was raised. The relocation
was necessary for John, since the headquarters of
his employer, Ben Mershon, an independent coal
prospector, was in Brazil. John Cleveland Hoffa was
a member of the third generation of Hoffas in
Indiana. His German ancestors had immigrated to
Pennsylvania, then moved west along the National
Road, ultimately settling in Indiana in the early
nineteenth century. John and Viola, who was of Irish
descent, moved themselves and their newborn
daughter, Jenetta, into a house in
"Stringtown," the neighborhood in Brazil
with the highest concentration of miners. In the
front room of the house, Viola gave birth to their
second and third children: William Henry in 1911 and
James Riddle, on St. Valentine's Day,
1913.
By 1913 Brazil had reached its peak as
a boomtown. After a geology survey in 1871 revealed
that the land around the town contained two trillion
tons of coal, the little stopover along the National
Road took off. Within three years Brazil's
population grew from a few hundred to a few
thousand, and by the time of Jimmy Hoffa's birth it
topped out at 11,000. Like most fast-growing mining
towns during this period, Brazil was a world apart
from Debs's Terre Haute. The prospects for upward
mobility and workers' identification with employers
had been greatly diminished by the concentration of
the mining industry into the hands of a few
companies. State regulations and contracts won by
the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) had raised
wages and improved working conditions for coal
miners, but the deep-shaft mines surrounding Brazil
were still deadly. Explosions, fires, and cave-ins
were commonplace, as were less spectacular
fatalities caused by intense heat, poisonous vapors,
pneumonia, and black lung.
The culture of
Brazil expressed the pain and desperation created by
its economy. Violence, suicides, drunkenness,
prostitution, and gambling were common features of
everyday life. In the 1910s, Brazil featured one
saloon for every 500 residents. Most were
concentrated on Meridian Street, a few blocks from
the Hoffas' home, which was known as "Bloody
Row" for the frequency of its drunken brawls
and homicides. Battles between white and black
miners were especially vicious in a town that had
attracted significant numbers of African Americans
from the South. The rest of Stringtown was dotted
with brothels and gambling houses, including one
operated by Hoffa's uncle and namesake,
James.
Of course, all this sinning prompted a
great amount of repentance. Like other Indiana coal
towns, Brazil had almost as many churches as
saloons. One of the largest was the First Christian
Church, which the Hoffas attended every Sunday.
Their participation, however, came more from a sense
of obligation than from belief. "We weren't a
very religious family," Hoffa later recalled.
This attitude is evident in his bored, mechanical
account of a typical Sunday morning:
Dressed
starch-white-clean, we trooped off to the Christian
Church of Brazil to attend a rather formal service
patterned after the eastern Congregational Church
order of worship. The standard operating procedure
was to begin with the singing of a hymn, followed by
a prayer, with the congregation still standing, then
the singing of the doxology, 'Praise God from whom
all blessings flow. . . .' Then came the reading of
the Scripture lesson, to which, ultimately, the
sermon made reference. That was followed by a choral
selection and the offertory, the taking of the
collection.
Through indifference, both Hoffa
and his brother, who later followed him into the
Teamsters, escaped the Christian sense of duty that
had defined Eugene Debs's life:
Mother went
home after church services, but we had to remain for
Sunday school, a session lasting nearly an hour in
which we learned the meaning of some passage in the
Bible, customarily based on a little
"Reader" that was handed to us each week
by our Sunday-school teacher. . . .
All told
it made for about two and a half hours of
inactivity, and I am grateful that neither Billy nor
I was ever graded for our attentiveness or
application to the subject matter under
consideration.8
Hoffa's father spent much of
his time traveling to surrounding counties on
prospecting trips with Mershon. One day in 1920 he
returned early from one of these trips, disoriented
and exhausted. About a week later he died of unknown
causes, just short of his fortieth birthday. Viola
Hoffa was now forced to support the family, which
had added a fourth child, Nancy, in 1915. She washed
and ironed laundry for coal miners, cleaned houses
in the town's wealthy neighborhood, and cooked in a
restaurant, but the amount of money she received for
these jobs was too small to sustain five people. By
1920, wages in Brazil had begun to decline,
especially for women. The town's economic growth
ebbed during the war as several of the local mines
were found to be "worked out." Hoffa's
mother decided to move the family to Clinton,
located eleven miles north of Terre Haute on the
Wabash River, which had surpassed Brazil as the
boomtown of the region and where several relatives
from the Riddle family lived.
Clinton was
even further removed than Brazil from Debs's vision
of producer republicanism. In 1920, the town's
thirty-two mines were producing nearly two million
tons of coal annually but not much republicanism.
Like Brazil, Clinton had grown quickly, fallen under
the domination of a few companies, and suffered all
the social destruction attendant upon coal mining.
But Clinton's population was far
different
from Brazil's, and light-years from Debs's
Protestant, Anglo-Saxon neighborhood. The separation
between workers and employers was especially
pronounced. Beginning at the turn of the century,
family networks brought thousands of Italian
immigrants to work in the mines. They filled the
north side of the town, creating the largest
concentration of Italians in Indiana. Viola Hoffa
moved her family into a small house near her
sister's home on North Third Street, in the heart of
"Little Italy." There, with the help of
the three children, she operated the "Hoffa
Home Laundry," washing and ironing the
coal-blackened clothes of mine workers. Jimmy and
Billy picked up bundles of laundry from customers,
gathered wood to fire the laundry tubs standing in
the yard, delivered the clean clothes, and collected
the money.
Having moved to Clinton the year
Prohibition was put into effect, the Hoffas saw the
birth and growth of an industry that became second
only to coal in the area. In the 1920s, Clinton
quickly gained notoriety as one of the bootlegging
centers of Indiana, with illegal stills in the
surrounding forests supplying the speakeasies in
Little Italy and other towns in the coal belt. The
Hoffas also witnessed the transformation of Clinton
into one of the roughest towns in the Midwest, where
violence often moved out of the mines and into the
town's streets. Police raids on bootleggers
frequently resulted in shoot-outs, federal attacks
against the town's sizable Socialist Party branch
were equally fierce, and strikes called by the
United Mine Workers were typically met with armed
resistance from scabs and cops. Stirred into this
explosive mix were various Italian criminal
organizations and a highly visible local chapter of
the Ku Klux Klan, which held marches down the main
streets in Little Italy to intimidate the Catholic,
"un-American" immigrants.
For four
years, the Hoffa family managed to eke out an
existence in their turbulent neighborhood, but by
1924 Clinton's economic base had begun to wither.
The mechanization of mining and a declining demand
for coal closed several mines, depressed wages, and
squeezed the already meager profits of the Hoffa
family business. Viola was forced to move again, and
this time she chose the biggest boomtown in the
Midwest. In 1924 the family packed up, left the
relatives, and headed for Detroit...
Excerpted from Out of the Jungle by
Thaddeus Russell
Copyright 2001 by Thaddeus Russell. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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