"It's always 1933 and 1940 and 1942 and 2024:" a perhaps timely Billy book excerpt
Here's a July 4th chapter from "A man or a mother," my book-in-progress about 1940s Florida's "Cross Creek" invasion of privacy lawsuit against famed writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
In 1942, a woman named Zelma Cason sued iconic Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings over how Marjorie portrayed her, using her real first name, in the ostensibly “non-fiction” book Cross Creek. Zelma alleged libel and invasion of privacy. My great aunt Kate Walton and great grandfather Judge Vertrees (J.V.) Walton represented Zelma.
Today’s chapter excerpt briefly considers the morale of “democracy” at the time the case was emerging, from the point-of-view of some of its main characters. The two reposted articles that precede the excerpt provide useful background to the Cross Creek case and the 1942 U-boat sinking of the Gulfamerica off the Jacksonville Beach pier, as part of the little known “Atlantic Pearl Harbor.”
Now here’s the chapter: “It's always 1933 and 1940 and 1942 and 2024.”
For someone living in north Florida, the Gulfamerica’s fiery death by torpedo and shelling –and the mocking impunity with which U-123 executed it for an audience of shore gawkers—likely delivered the bleakest vibe moment of the entire war.
But Marjorie Rawlings and her supereditor Max Perkins, by now dear friends and pen pals, were already deeply gloomy about the future of American self-government well before the Germans brought the war in sight of Marjorie’s Crescent Beach cabin.
Consider this bracing exchange from July 1940, just after the fall of France and a few days into the Battle of Britain. Marjorie had written a patriotic article; but she wasn’t really feeling it, as she told Max. Note the bold:
When your note came, saying that you liked the article, I was about to wire you telling you it wouldn’t do at all. I am not satisfied with it, yet it is the best I could do. There are so many things that I feel that had no place in such an article—that democracy, actually, is a failure—and the very individual and national and racial greed and selfishness make the whole outlook entirely hopeless.
The only point I could emphasize was that we do really believe, whether we practice it or not, in a basic kindliness, and consideration for the rights of the individual. It’s probably time to begin preaching, a la Ortega, the responsibilities and obligations of the individual! We’ve all been concerned with what we thought was coming to us, rather than what we could contribute to the general welfare.
Max wrote this back to her:
I must say I myself feel desperate about democracy. You cannot have it without a very strong sense of the thing now detested, “duty” and a sense that material success is a lower form than that of service. These things got to be regarded as hypocrisy, and I suppose the truth is people became hypocritical about them. But they were not that in my boyhood. The Yankees really believed them. We always were taught that in a community like Windsor, the truly important men were the school teacher, the newspaper editor, and the clergyman. The doctor too was more respected than the business man. These people were supposed to have made a sacrifice because they cared more to serve their professions and what they meant, than for money. I know that my father [a lawyer], who practiced in New York and never made more than a good living for a big family out of it, nor left a penny, always thought he was doing something more important than that, that he was advancing the idea of justice.
That came just weeks after this June 17, 1940 letter to Kate Walton from her cousin J.J. Gray Jr., a prominent lawyer in Nashville. He had been actively discouraging Kate in her frantic efforts to join the war effort before it even started. She had just bitterly surrendered to him in a letter I don’t possess.
Thanks for yours of the 13th saying I win – it seems the only reason I won was “no body” would have you… I suppose you wish you were in France today – some German would get you quick. Ain’t it just awful – we all must try our best not to think of these horrible things happening over there. They may be happening here in a year or so.
Marjorie and Max (and J.J. Gray) wanted to lament the deterioration of democracy; the younger Kate wanted to kill Germans or die trying. That’s a dynamic worth noting for the case and trial to come.
I transcribed those letter excerpts from 1940 on July 3, 2024, just days after the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court decreed that Americans have very few – if any – rights a president is bound to respect. I did not know at the time of writing if beleaguered Joe Biden would remain as the Democratic nominee or whether Donald Trump would ascend to the would-be dictatorship American lawyer John Roberts built for him.
A friend texted me on that day: It’s like a time machine. We are in 1932, but THIS time somebody has the sense to bump off Hindenburg before it’s too late.
In reply, I suggested it’s always 1932. Or 1933. Or 1940. Or 1942. Or 2024. Conditions are always desperate for democracy – assuming democracy has ever even existed. I’d argue it has not, at least as it’s commonly understood in the American imagination.
Forget “distant” history. Just consider our living memory of the supposedly democratic post-Civil Rights era. Has Black America experienced Drug War and mass incarceration citizenship as anything but 1933 or 1942? Was that the trade this democratic country made for ending the brutally-enforced social norm of daily black deference to white power? Who voted on that trade?
What about poor White America and opioids? School kids in the Test-and-Die era? Gay Americans and AIDS? White Trumpers can’t even vote to punish the Sacklers.
So when has America ever, as a country of individuals, concerned itself with “what we could contribute to the general welfare” through our supposedly equal votes, rather than grasping for “what we thought was coming to us?”
The unbinding of the Dred Scott decision is still very much in play. It always will be. It is the human instinct against which the idea and practice of representative self-government always strains.
And yet, somehow, the personal habits of interaction that have emerged from the 260-year illusion of pluralistic self-government in America have tended to advance – erratically, but consistently – the lived experience of personal freedom and street-level equality.
Undoing those personal habits and customs by force will be much harder than unbinding a corrupt and gross and unpopular president by decree and smashing institutions that have grown feckless.
But that’s a different book.
***
Marjorie sent her “foolish Zelma” letter from the deck of an oceanliner returning from England in the Fall of 1933.
After that, if you put aside World War II, not much happened to shape the case until Marjorie decided to include “The Census” as a Cross Creek chapter in late 1941. By then, more than a decade had passed since the explosive, unresolved personal drama of 1931 that ended Marjorie and Zelma’s intimacy – and took away Marjorie’s right to honestly call her a friend in print.
In the time between Marjorie’s personally momentous 1933 and the 1942 publication of Cross Creek, the women crucial to the life of the case pursued independent journeys to self-sovereignty without much interaction. We’ll refer to those journeys from time-to-time, particularly when they intersect with testimony or legal argument or narrative theme.
But you’re reading a biography of the Cross Creek case – not of Kate Walton, Marjorie Rawlings, or Zelma Cason, nor a history of World War II. So we won’t dwell in the 1930s.
Marjorie’s journey to fame and self-sovereignty is most well-known and iconic. You can read about it in a number of places. I recommend Ann McCutchan’s The Life She Wished to Live, an authoritative 2023 biography that, fortuitously for me, doesn’t spend much time on the Cross Creek case.
In very condensed form, Marjorie’s public hero journey goes like this: after reasonable success with her early stories and novels, she hit huge in 1938 with The Yearling, a “boy book” that really wasn’t. She won the Pulitzer Prize. She sold movie rights for $30,000. She became genuinely famous and reasonably wealthy. Thus, Marjorie became Marjorie for the American reading public in 1938.
But it was 1933, the year of Hyacinth Drift and divorce, that made Marjorie into Marjorie for herself – in a way that made what came afterward possible.
And 1933 is a particularly crucial year for the narrative arc of the case – not to mention the planet. So it bears spending a last extra moment more here – before we accelerate forward – to catalogue and contemplate this timeline of 1933 events:
January 17: South Moon Under, Marjorie’s first novel, chosen as “Book of the Month” selection for the March publication to come.
January 30: Adolf Hitler appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg
February: South Moon Under published, advance copies begin distribution.
February 27: The Reichstag Fire. The next day Hitler is given sweeping emergency powers in the name of fighting “communism.”
March 4: Franklin Delano Roosevelt sworn in as U.S. president.
March 5: Final elections ever held in Nazi Germany. The Nazis only get 43.9 percent of the popular vote, remaining in a coalition government.
March 9-11: Nazis get rid of state and local government under Reichstag Decree.
March 11~: Marjorie begins “Hyacinth Drift” trip with Dessie, decides to divorce Chuck.
March 14: Winston Churchill gives first speech on re-arming Britain in response to the Nazis.
March 19: Marjorie, home from the Dessie river trip, declares to Max Perkins: “I came in from the river trip really happy for the first time in months.”
April 10: South Moon Under has sold 6,000 books, good enough for third best-seller in New York Tribune listing, although Perkins laments how bad the Depression Era book business is overall.
Late July: Marjorie embarks on multi-week trip to England to do research for what would become her next novel, Golden Apples.
Fall: Kate Walton enters law school at the University of Florida.
September 21: Marjorie sends the “foolish Zelma” letter on her voyage home from England.
November 8~: Marjorie wins O’Henry Prize for Gal Young ‘Un, as best short story of the previous year.
November 11: Marjorie’s divorce from Chuck is finalized.
December 5: The 21st amendment, repealing the 18th amendment, ends constitutionally-mandated federal alcohol prohibition.
Prohibition repeal is the emphatic exclamation point on the year that truly ended the 1920s and the World War I era. And you can see for yourself how fundamental 1933 is to birthing arguably the most important Cross Creek case character: World War II.
Just as World War I and Prohibition created the context for the Klan battles that J.V. Walton fought in the late teens and early 1920s, World War II is the moral and personal soil from which the Cross Creek case grew.
FDR and Hitler assumed power in literally the same week that Marjorie floated along the St. Johns with Dessie, in search of her own assertion of power and sovereignty.
The juxtaposition from today, looking backward, makes my neck tingle.
***
The seeds of war, at home and abroad, planted in 1933, burst fully into poisonous bloom in 1942. We’ll get into all of this in chapters to come. But first, consider this timeline of events from 1942, both for the Cross Creek case – and the planet.
March 16: Cross Creek published.
March 20: Released as “Book-of-the-Month” for April.
Sometime in April: Marjorie brings a copy to Zelma in St. Augustine, who reacts badly. “Well, you have made a hussy out of me and a lady out of a hussy. I don’t appreciate the way you wrote about me.”
April 10: Gulfamerica torpedoed in sight of the Jacksonville Beach pier.
June 4-7: The Battle of Midway turns the tide of the war with the Japanese.
June 12: First four-man team of Operation Pastorius German saboteur operation lands via U-Boat in Amagansett, New York.
June 16: Second four-man Operation Pastorius German saboteur team lands in Ponte Vedra Beach, just south of Jacksonville.
June 17: Harold Henderson sends Kate a copy of a legal brief he wrote for J. Edgar Hoover claiming the FBI (then just the BI) had authority to investigate airplane sabotage as a federal crime.
June 19: Leader of the New York group of saboteurs walks into FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. to betray the operation. Over the next two weeks, the FBI would round up the saboteurs.
June 24: Henderson writes Kate a letter saying: “Katie, let’s make a deal. I will plan winning the war and you plan a new world. Is that a deal? I believe my part is the easier of the two.”
July 2: Roosevelt issues declaration establishing a military commission for the German saboteurs.
July 8: Military commission trial of saboteurs begins on 5th floor of DOJ building.
July 11: Henderson sends a remarkable letter to Kate Walton, describing his own opposition to military tribunals and a debate among DoJ lawyers he led from within the same building as the tribunal. The letter also analyzes the famous “ex-parte Milligan” decision from the Civil War.
July 29: U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments over legality of military tribunals, with lawyers arguing to transfer the saboteur cases to civilian court. The case is called “ex-parte Quirin,” named for one of the saboteurs.
July 31: Supreme Court upholds military tribunal for the saboteurs.
August 2: Saboteurs found guilty.
August 7: Guadalcanal campaign begins.
August 8: Six of the saboteurs are executed.
August 23: The Battle for Stalingrad begins.
Oct. 29, 1942: Supreme Court issues full ex parte Quirin opinion.
November 19: Soviets launch counterattack at Stalingrad that would lead to crushing, strategic German defeat.
December 4 or 11: Zelma Cason visits Walton law office.
December 9: Kate Walton writes to Harvard Law School asking for a copy of “The Right to Privacy” by Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren.
Then, on December 18, as that momentous year drew to a close, Kate Walton wrote to Zelma to confirm representation and set a compensation structure.
The Cross Creek case was on.