UBC: Farrell, Swift Justice

[truepenny]

Swift Justice: Murder & Vengeance In A California Town by Harry Farrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Swift Justice is the dissection of a double-headed atrocity: the kidnapping and horrific murder of Brooke Hart, and the equally horrific lynching of his murderers by the citizens of San Jose. It's compelling, cleanly-written, and even-handed. Farrell offers as many perspectives as he can and is clearly doing his best not to pass judgment on the choices and ambiguous motivations that allowed the lynching to happen.

There isn't really much doubt that Jack Holmes and Harold Thurmond murdered Brooke Hart. The discrepancies in their stories are the sort of discrepancies that are bound to surface (each man insisted the other was the one who actually had the (missing) gun), and Jack Holmes' insistent claims that he was innocent and that his confession was tortured out of him are exactly the sort of thing a guy like Jack Holmes would say, especially to his father and (semi-estranged) wife. I'm not buying. And given the picture Farrell paints, I don't think Harold Thurmond was capable of the kind of sustained lying that would have been necessary to incriminate an innocent Holmes.

With all that said, and given that what Holmes and Thurmond did was unforgivable (kidnapping for ransom where the victim is dead before the ransom demands have even been made is peculiarly horrible, and the circumstances of Brooke Hart's death--the callous, deliberate brutality; the fact that it's impossible to tell whether the pistol whipping, the fall from the San Mateo Bridge into San Francisco Bay, or drowning was the actual cause of death; the horrible fact that Brooke Hart lived long enough to call for help but not long enough to be found and rescued--make it impossible to feel any kind of sympathy for Holmes and Thurmond), the lynching is unforgivable in its own right. Farrell's description of the death of Jack Holmes chilled me to the bone.

As Farrell points out, Thurmond and Holmes are unusual for victims of lynching in that they were white men. And--if proof were needed that lynching has nothing to do with justice--there was barely a whisper of a wisp of a question about what was going to happen to them if due process of law was served. These weren't men who had been pronounced innocent against a community-wide belief in their guilt. They hadn't been pronounced anything. They hadn't even been arraigned. And Farrell makes it very clear that there were back up plans on all sides to make sure that Thurmond and Holmes did not wiggle off the hooks the law had in them. The lynching came from a completely different set of motivations, ones which Farrell points to but never quite discusses when he talks about California history and the never quite articulated idea of "frontier justice." The people of San Jose--not a majority, but certainly a diverse cross-section from university students to pillars of the business community to roughnecks and petty criminals--were denying the right of the law to deal with Thurmond and Holmes. And the conspiracy of silence--a conspiracy that was so strong fifty years later that there were only four men Farrell could name as being part of the lynch mob: two teenagers who were stupid enough to brag about it, one adrenaline-junkie ("a man irresistibly drawn to any scene of violence, disorder, bloodshed, or fire--an affinity that would later make him one of San Jose's most visible news photographers" (220)) who simply admitted it, and Jackie Coogan, a friend and fellow student of Brooke Hart's, who was recognizable in photographs of the lynching--the conspiracy of silence denied the law's right to pass judgment on what the mob had done. What I found just as horrifying were the police chiefs and sheriffs who inexplicably failed to send back-up to the besieged sheriff of Santa Clara County, the journalists and radio newscasters, who not merely reported on the lynching but encouraged people to come join the fun, and--of course--Governor James "Sunny Jim" Rolph, Jr., who repeatedly and publicly gave the lynching his gubernatorial blessing. The idea that there was something inherently right and laudable in lynching--and not in the KKK's upside down morality, either--is something clearly present in the reactions of some (though not all) people to the ghastly deaths of Thurmond and Holmes, but something that I can't get my head around.

"An eye for an eye leaves us blind," Ron Perlman's character says in an episode of the short-lived Magnificent Seven TV series, and as I said in talking about the Hatfields and the McCoys, one thing reading a lot of revenge tragedy sensitizes a person to is the cold ugly truth that vengeance only makes a terrible situation worse. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice," Francis Bacon said, and he did not mean it as praise of wild things. The rest of the sentence reads, "which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." Vengeance only perpetuates the cycle of murder and counter-murder; it only turns human beings into beasts--not animals, because animals don't do this sort of thing--beasts, brutes, werewolves (the horror being that, as the etymology suggests, they are creatures that are neither man (Anglo-Saxon were), nor wolf, but some unnatural combination of the two), slavering Mr. Hydes smirking at the desperate rationalizations of Dr. Jekyll. Humans are worse than animals; lynching, like any other form of revenge, proves it.


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Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. (Matthew 5:38-41 KJV)




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Comments

[sovay]

As Farrell points out, Thurmond and Holmes are unusual for victims of lynching in that they were white men.

Thank you; this case makes sense of something that has always puzzled me about Fritz Lang's otherwise interesting Fury (1936), namely that it's a movie about the injustice of lynching whose victim is white (and not Jewish, otherwise I would have known to look to Leo Frank). I had always assumed it starred Spencer Tracy as a Code-compliant way of presenting the problem, but if there was a very recent example of a high-profile, white-on-white lynching in popular memory, then I can see how it was actually relevant (as well as more palatable to the studios than a picture that acknowledged the racial angle).