Massacre at Pottawatomie Creek

Eastern Kansas Territory, 1856

On Thursday, May 23, 1856 John Brown, his sons Owen, Frederic, Oliver, and Salmon, along with three local anti-slavers, Thomas Weiner, Henry Thompson and James Townsley set out by wagon on the south road along Pottawatomie Creek.  In their waistbands his sons toted the army surplus broadswords that Brown purchased a few months earlier on his way to Kansas. Brown the others armed themselves with pistols and knives. The swords contained a hollow bore filled with quicksilver. When brandished the quicksilver slid from the handle to the blade. The shifting weight added force to a blow. They were cruel weapons designed to mutilate and maim. The swords were ideally suited to Brown's purpose - to strike terror into the hearts of pro-slavers.

    Three days earlier a posse of 800 pro-slavers ransacked the anti-slavery town of Lawrence Kansas. The "Border Ruffians" from Missouri destroyed two anti -slavery newspaper offices; they leveled the house of anti-slavery leader Charles Robinson with cannon fire, and they burnt the Free State Hotel to the ground.  Despite an earthworks fortification and a trained militia the citizens of Lawrence stood by and did nothing to defend their town. Their inaction sacrificed the town but avoided bloodshed.  No one was killed.

    When the news of the attack reached Brown's encampment south of Lawrence he was outraged that the citizens of Lawrence did nothing to resist the pillaging of their town. He branded them cowards and he vowed pro-slaver violence would be answered in kind. As in many of his deliberations he leaned on Biblical verse for justification and an "eye for an eye" precisely fit his mood. He ignored his son John Brown Jr.'s warning, not to do anything rash.  Brown was set on revenge and no argument would dissuade him. Their response to the sacking of Lawrence, he said, must be swift and dramatic.  After a brief consultation with the members of anti-slavery militia the Pottawatomie Rifles Brown selected a small enclave of pro-slavers who lived in Shermanville for his revenge.  Pleasant Doyle, "Dutch" Henry, and Allen Wilkerson did not own slaves themselves, but they were active pro-slavers who hunted and captured run-away slaves. They also provided information "Border Ruffians" used to bully, rob and terrorize free-state people. John Brown had his targets.
  
    Clouds scudded by the three-quarter moon. The wagon was left behind at the previous evenings campsite. In single file Brown and his men trudged north along a seldom used wagon road that cut through woods. They moved quickly.  There was no talk, only the sounds of the night and the crunching of their boots. Each man was alone with his own thoughts. None had killed before, but before the night was over they all would have blood on their hands.  They crossed Mosquito Creek, a small tributary of Pottawatomie Creek and climbed an embankment.  In a clearing they spotted an outline of a cabin.  Brown held up his hand and the company halted two hundred yards from the home of Pleasant Doyle.  Crouched in the shadow Brown whispered his orders. He directed Townsley and his son Frederick to stand guard by the road.  He told Weiner and Henry Thompson to reconnoiter the road in the direction of their next target Allen Wilkinson.  Then Brown motioned his three sons to follow him across the clearing.  Suddenly a large dog sprang out of the brush. It halted barking, growling and snapping a few feet from the intruders  Frederick swung his broadside and killed the animal with one deep gash alongside the neck.

    The ruckus awakened Doyle and his wife, Mahala.  His three sons asleep in an adjacent room also were awakened.  Brown moved quickly to the door of the cabin and knocked.  Doyle jumped from his bed and grabbed a poker from the fireplace.  "Who is it?" he asked.  Brown replied that he was lost and needed directions to the Wilkinson house.  Doyle cracked the door to get a glimpse of the stranger.  Brown and his boys shoved the door and forced their way inside the cabin.  Brown pointed his pistol at Doyle and ordered him and his three sons outside. who had been asleep in an adjacent room, outside.  Mahala Doyle pleaded with Brown to release her youngest son who was fourteen.  Brown agreed.  Doyle and his two oldest sons twenty-two year old William and twenty year old Drury marched down the road towards the Wilkinson house.   When they were outside shouting range from Doyle's house Owen, Salmon and Oliver drew their swords and attacked the Doyles. In a matter of minutes Doyle's two sons were hacked to death. Doyle lay in a pool of blood, mortally wounded.  Brown aimed his pistol and shot him in the head.

    The band of men continued down the road to the house of Allen Wilkerson.  Brown knocked on the door and asked for directions to Dutch Henry.  The ruse did not work with Wilkerson and he refused to open the door.  Then Brown declared himself an officer in the anti-slave Northern Army.  Either come out of the house, Brown said, or we will come in to get you.  Wilkerson's wife was sick was measles.  He opened the door and walked into the gloom. A short distance from the cabin Weiner and Thompson cut him down with broadswords.

    Next Brown and his men crossed the Pottawatomie and headed for Dutch Henry's Tavern.  Several men were sleeping in the tavern. At gunpoint Brown forced them outside and interrogated them about their proslavery activities.  His primary target, Dutch Henry, was not among them.  Earlier in the day Henry had ridden out onto the plains to search for lost cattle. Brown released all the men except for William Sherman.  They marched Sherman down to the creek and where Thompson and Wiener split his skull with their broadswords.  After killing Sherman Brown and his men confiscated pistols, knives and saddles they found in the tavern.  They took several horses from Dutch Henry's stable and headed back to their encampment.  Along the way they washed the blood and gore from their hands and clothes in the Pottawatomie.  Owen Brown wandered off a short distance and began to sob. When they arrived at their camp Owen Brown looked at Townsley with red rimmed eyes and said, "There should be no more work such as that." Owen Brown's hope went unfulfilled. The violence that was to give the territory the name "Bleeding Kansas" was just beginning.
   
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The Execution of John Brown

John Brown, 1859

December 2, 1859 was a clear, unseasonably warm day in Charlestown, Virginia.  The bright blue sky infused the surrounding Shenandoah Valley with a warm and dreamy haze. On such a delightful day the shops lining the main thoroughfare, George Street, should have been bustling with activity.  But on the day John Brown, the leader of a bloody attempt to capture the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry Virginia, was to be executed the shops were closed and shuttered.  Women and children were nowhere in sight; General George Taliaferro commander of the Virginal militia had ordered them to stay in their homes. About a hundred yards from the red brick Jefferson County jail small groups of men milled about whispering and pointing.  Their view of the building was obstructed by a phalanx of six companies of infantry. The soldiers formed a cordon from the jail up George Street to a 40 acre field southeast of town. Amid the rye and corn stubble 2,000 Virginia militia with bayonets fixed formed two concentric squares.  On a small rise in the center of the formation a single trap door gallows struck a hideous pose.

     At 11:00 AM a farm wagon with two white horses in harness pulled up to the front steps of the jail.  In the back of the wagon a fine oak coffin rested inside a large  pine box. The front door of the jail opened. Abolitionist and convicted traitor John Brown appeared in the doorway.  He wore a wrinkled black suit over a white shirt. On his feet he wore faded red bedroom slippers. A slouched black hat, its brim turned up, gave him a strange jaunty look. His hands tied in front of him, Brown paused. With a quick glance his dark eyes surveyed the soldiers, the street, the wagon and the coffin.  Then with deputy sheriff John Avis on his left and sheriff John Campbell on his right he descended the stairs and climbed into the wagon. His long white beard billowed in a puff of breeze as he sat on the coffin. Avis and Campbell took up positions on either side of him. With a flick of the reins the wagon driver slowly guided the horses towards the field.  A file of 300 armed soldiers marched alongside the wagon. 

   Brown showed no emotion as the wagon trundled towards its destination.  The undertaker, seated in the front of the wagon, turned to him and remarked, "Captain Brown, you are a game man."  Brown replied, "Yes, I was so trained up; it was one of the lessons of my mother, but it is hard to part with friends though newly made." As the wagon passed through the field Brown gazed at the undulating farmland and gentle hills around him. The Blue Ridge Mountains shimmered in the distance.  He turned to Sheriff Avis and said, "This is beautiful country, I have never had the pleasure of seeing it before."  For the next few minutes they rode in silence.  Then the wagon stopped in front of the gallows. Escorted by Avis and Campbell, Brown climbed the steps and stood on the  trapdoor. Avis tied Brown's arms behind him and placed a hood over his head.  Sheriff Campbell placed a cotton noose around Brown's neck. No minister tended the condemned man. Avis asked Brown if he had anything to say. "I am ready", Brown replied, "but don't keep me waiting more than necessary."  However all the troops were not yet settled in their formations. Brown stoically stood on the trapdoor for 15 minutes while officers barked orders and soldiers rushed to their positions. A Virginia officer, Colonel Preston, watched Brown from behind the gallows.  Preston hoped to see signs of fear or cowardice. There was none.  Once he thought he saw Brown's knees tremble, but it was only the wind blowing his loose trousers.

    When the troops were settled Campbell descended the stairs. He walked behind the gallows, hefted the hatchet, and cut the rope that held the trap door in place.  Brown dropped three feet. The noose jerked. His  hands clenched and his body went rigid. After a few minutes his body relaxed and began to sway in a gentle breeze.  John Brown, leader of a bloody, ill conceived raid on the Harper Ferry Virginia arsenal was dead. No one cheered. No one jeered.  No one spoke.   Then Colonel Preston's voice rang out, "So perish all such enemies of Virginia!  All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!"

     Like many other Southeners Colonel Preston believed the execution of  John Brown was a righteous example for those who would free the slaves and in the process cleave the cultural and economic fabric of the south.  An editorial in the December 21 in the North Carolina Raleigh Register made it clear that for the South there would be no compromise on the issue of slavery.

    "The affair at Harper's Ferry marks a new and most important era in our country's history. It will bring to an immediate solution the question as to whether the Union can be preserved, and the right of the South to hold property in slaves be maintained. This is the issue to be tried now. The trial can no longer be deferred. The issue has been forced upon the South, and let the result be what it may, her skirts will be clear of all responsibility. There has been one gratifying fact developed by the Harper's Ferry raid. The promptness and ease with which large numbers of troops were brought together from different quarters of Virginia, and the alacrity with which the call to arms was obeyed, will prove to the Abolitionists at the North that although they make an occasional foray into a Southern State, and commit a few murders and arsons, they can never maintain a foothold on Southern soil for more than forty-eight hours. Virginia has showed conspicuously that she was able to take care of herself. Had she not been, had she stood in need of aid from her sister States of the South, she would have received it to an amount more than equal to her necessities, as the prompt tender of aid from all quarters of the South most abundantly proves."

To be continued

Happy Fourth of July

Iva and Fred Toguri

Iva Toguri was born on the Fourth of July, 1916

Iva Toguri's story is a captivating tale of isolation, persecution, and patriotism.  Throughout her "Tokyo Rose" ordeal she was steadfast in the belief that someday she would be vindicated.
Iva's story in total will appear in my soon to be released book "Scoundrels Who Made America Great".  I will post the publication date on this blog.  If you are disappointed that I am not continuing with Iva's story post a comment at the bottom of this page.  If I don't hear from my readers I am going to begin blogging the story of another "scoundrel" who made America great - his name is John Brown.  He was an abolitionist and one of the most controversial figures in American history. 
So let me know about your preference.  Iva Toguri "Tokyo Rose" or John Brown, the mystical abolitionist.    

Return to the U.S.

A GI's Fantasy of Tokyo Rose

Toguri thought that her troubles were over. She and Felipe made plans for their trip back to the States. But U.S. newspapers would not let go of the Tokyo Rose story. “Iva Toguri d’Aquino, one of four bedroom -voiced girl broadcasters the Allied soldiers called ‘Tokyo Rose,’ wants eventually to return to her native country, she said today,” warned the August 1, 1947, Long Beach Press Telegram. The November 6,1947, Cumberland Ohio Evening Times stated, “Tokyo Rose, the wartime radio broadcaster who sank more fleets that America built, wants to go home to the U.S.”

    Meanwhile, Toguri continued to be stymied in her attempt to get a U.S. passport. She was trapped in a revolving bureaucratic paradox. First, despite Tokko harassment, she refused to give up her American citizenship. Then American authorities imprisoned her for a year on suspicion of treason as a U.S. citizen—but Toguri’s passport application was rebuffed because she could not prove her U.S. citizenship. There seemed no end to this nightmare merry-go-round. Desperate, Toguri wrote a letter to the syndicated columnist Walter Winchell. She asked him to help with her passport application. When Winchell did not reply, Toguri believed she had run into another dead end. What she didn’t know was that Winchell was hell-bent on getting Toguri returned to the States, but not in the way she imagined.

    In 1947 Walter Winchell was one of the most powerful men in America. His newspaper columns, “On Broadway” and “Man About Town,” mixed right-wing political opinion with entertainment-world gossip. His Sunday evening radio show, which opened with the incessant tapping of a telegraph key and his trademark introduction, “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea,” had an audience of nearly twenty million. He was feared by politicians and admired by gangsters. President Roosevelt tried to stay on his good side. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was one of his best friends. Winchell’s favorite targets were liberals and communists, but what he loved best was a good crusade. After he read Toguri’s letter, Winchell launched a mission of righteous indignation. Winchell wanted Iva Toguri d’Aquino to return to the United States, but not to join her family. He wanted “Tokyo Rose” to stand trial for treason.

     On April 14, 1948, Winchell published an open letter to Tokyo Rose from Captain Frank Farrell, a veteran who had served in the Pacific with the 1st Marine Division. Saturated with sarcasm, the letter accused Tokyo Rose of convincing Marines that the atabrine tablets they took to prevent malaria made them sterile. Many Marines died of malaria, said Farrell, because of Tokyo Rose. The political pressure to prosecute Toguri gained steam when, in a public statement, James F. O’Neil, commander of the American Legion, demanded that the Justice Department prosecute Iva Toguri d’Aquino for treason. On June 9, 1948, Winchell claimed that Clark Lee had in his possession an eighteen-page document in which Iva Toguri confessed to being Tokyo Rose. In later years the journalist Bill Kurtis described the campaign to prosecute Iva Toguri d’Aquino as the persecution of a person in order to exact revenge on a myth. (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

    As far as the U.S. Department of Justice was concerned, the myth Tokyo Rose and the person Iva Toguri d’Aquino were one and the same. On August 26, 1948, Toguri was once again arrested for treason. Under military guard she was put aboard the U.S.S. General Hodges and transported to the United States to stand trial. Iva Toguri d’Aquino was finally going home. Three weeks later, her odyssey complete, Toguri set foot on American soil. Instead of the homecoming with family and friends that she had yearned for, she was whisked to the San Francisco jail, where she was incarcerated until the end of her trial

To be continued

Sugamo Prison

Behind Bars

Brundidge contacted his editor at Cosmopolitan. He told her he was writing a 5,000-word story about Tokyo Rose. Then he asked for the $2,000 to pay Toguri. His editor refused.  She wasn’t interested in the story. Stuck with a deal he couldn’t keep, Brundidge needed a way out.  He contacted Eighth Army intelligence and told the commanding officer that he had the signed confession of the traitor Tokyo Rose. The next day Toguri was arrested. Lacking hard evidence of treason, the army released her, but as the media spread the news of her interview, political pressure to prosecute Tokyo Rose increased. On October 18,1945, the U.S. Justice Department ordered General MacArthur to take Toguri into custody on suspicion of treason. She was arrested and taken to Yokohama Prison. Six weeks later she was transferred to the notorious Sugamo Prison.

Felipe was right. By passing herself off as “Tokyo Rose,” Toguri put herself squarely in the crosshairs of all those who sought retribution for  war crimes real or imagined. She gambled and lost and she never saw a dime of the promised interview payment.

Sugamo Prison was a dreary fortress of barbed wire and barracks, surrounded by concrete walls. It was spread out over twelve acres of center-city Tokyo. Built in the 1920s for political prisoners, it was untouched by Allied bombs. The U.S. Eighth Army took over the prison and incarcerated some 5,000 Japanese war criminals, including General Homma, the Japanese officer who had ordered the Bataan death march. Premier Hideko Tojo was hanged in Sugamo on December 23, 1948. In total 4,400 Sugamo prisoners were convicted of war crimes, 475 were given life sentences and 984 were hanged.

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Toguri was kept in Blue Block, a special section designated for women criminals. For a year she lived in a six-by-nine-foot cell equipped with a toilet, a water basin, and a straw mat. She was allowed to bathe every three days. The army considered her a Japanese national; as a result, she could not send letters to her family in the United States. Her only luxury was the steam radiator in her cell that helped ward off the harsh Tokyo winter chill. During her incarceration, she was denied her due process rights as a U.S. citizen - she was denied legal counsel lawyer, there was no indictment, and no bail was set.

Toguri kept telling herself it was all a mistake. She stubbornly clung to the belief that her Orphan Ann version of Tokyo Rose was a popular figure among American GIs. Her inability to grasp the severity of her situation led to some stupid mistakes. She signed autographs for prison guards “Iva Toguri/Tokyo Rose,” and she was flippant with FBI interrogators. Of course, she had no way of knowing how the U.S. media was orchestrating the legend of an insidious Tokyo Rose. In the States political cartoons, movies, and newspaper editorials embellished the myth of “Tokyo Rose” as a malevolent seductress who preyed on the loneliness of American fighting men. Her interview with Lee and Brundidge had sealed Toguri’s fate. As far as the U.S. public was concerned, there was only one Tokyo Rose, and she was Iva Toguri d’Aquino.

To be continued

 

Iva Toguri Becomes Tokyo Rose

Reporters Encircle "Tokyo Rose"

 

  

The cash-for-interview offer was stunning, but Felipe was dubious. He thought there was was something fishy about the offer. Why, he asked, were correspondents offering such a huge sum of money to interview a female radio broadcaster? He told his wife that the money might be a lure to snare a propaganda broadcaster. Maybe the American military did not view Tokyo Rose in the same favorable way Toguri thought of herself. Tokyo Rose was a melded personality made up of several different individuals, how could Toguri be sure that the reporters would accept her rather than June Suyama or Ruth Hayakawa? Despite Felipe’s concerns, Toguri was determined to do the interview and collect the money.  There were other female announcers who could claim the title “Tokyo Rose”.  As far as Toguri was concerned, there was no risk. She and Major Cousens had labored over scripts and her on-air delivery to mold Orphan Ann into a non-threatening buddy, who at worst teased GIs and at best boosted their morale.

    Toguri was wrong, and her husband was right. To some, Tokyo Rose was a propaganda caricature. On August 7, 1945, the Navy had issued a tongue-in-cheek citation to Tokyo Rose for entertaining American troops—for consistently providing “...excellent state-side music, laughter, and news about home.” (Duus, p. 11) But for every solicitous opinion of Tokyo Rose there was a counter sinister point of view. Toguri had no way of knowing that the legend of Tokyo Rose had morphed into a bigger-than-life siren who slept with Prime Minister Tojo, predicted Allied troop movements, and broke the hearts of young GIs with stories of wayward girlfriends. American correspondents scouring Tokyo for Rose weren’t searching for a wise-cracking comedian. They wanted a sensational siren of the Pacific like Mata Hari, the exotic dancer and German World War I spy.
    

Never the reflective sort, Toguri saw only the wonderful opportunity for her and d’Aquino to buy passage home, and they would have money left over to start a new life in the states. Naiveté and greed are a dangerous combination. Even though Toguri believed her broadcasts were harmless, she had been broadcasting enemy propaganda. Somewhere deep inside her, a caution light had to be blinking. But the hook was well-baited, and, suppressing any inner reservations, Toguri contacted the two correspondents, Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge. A meeting was arranged for the next afternoon at the swanky Imperial Hotel.
    

When the slight, decidedly unglamorous Iva Toguri walked into their hotel room, Brundidge and Lee were astonished. They were expecting a honey-voiced sexpot, and instead they got a chatterbox who wore her hair in pigtails tied with red ribbon. Years later Toguri said, “It should have been Ava Gardner, but instead it was me.” Disappointed but undaunted, the correspondents were not going to allow reality to spoil a good story. This was the scoop of a lifetime. Harry Brundidge, an associate editor of Cosmopolitan, and Clark Lee, a correspondent for the International News Service, were not about to let it slip away. Brundidge repeated the offer of a $2,000 contract for an exclusive interview with Tokyo Rose. She signed and spent the afternoon dictating her story. She talked about the subversive intent of The Zero Hour, smuggling supplies to POWs, and her experiences with the Japanese secret police.    

When Toguri left Lee turned to Brundidge and said, “This story is a bunch of baloney.” Nevertheless, the next day Lee cabled a story to the Los Angles Examiner. It was titled “Traitor’s Pay—Tokyo Rose 100 Yen a Month—$6.60.” The story was a sensation. 

"Tokyo Rose" now had a face and a name - Iva Toguri

Orphan Ann Scripts

Orphan Ann Broadcasts

 

 

 

 Orphan Ann, Sign In and Sign Off broadcast radio samples. 

Tokyo Rose (alternate spelling Tokio Rose) was a generic name given by Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of approximately a dozen English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda. Their intent was to disrupt the morale of Allied forces listening to the broadcast near the Japanese mainland. (source internet)

Orphan Ann (Sign In): Hello you fighting orphans in the Pacific. Hows tricks? This is 'After Her Weekend Annie back on the air strictly under union hours. Reception okay? Why, it better be, because this is All-Requests night. And I've got a pretty nice program for my favorite little family, the wandering boneheads of the Pacific Islands. The first request is made by none other than the boss. And guess what? He wants Bonnie Baker in "My Resistance is Low". My, what taste you have, sir, she says.

Tokyo Rose

(Sign Off):Thank you, thank you, thank you. That's all for now enemies, but there'll be more the same tomorrow night.Until then, this is Orphan Ann, your number one enemy, reminding you GI -- always to be good! Goodbye now. 





Orphan Ann (Sign In): Greetings, everybody! This is your No. 1 enemy, your favorite playmate, Orphan Ann on Radio Tokyo--the little sunbeam whose throat you'd like to cut! Get ready again for a vicious assault on your morale, 75 minutes of music and news for our friends--I mean, our enemies!--in Australia and in the South Pacific. [Well how are my little darlings, my little (unintelligible)... it poisons the whole system. What you need is a good day, I mean song]. Just relax, all set? Okay, here's the first blow at your morale, here's him singing and singing, "Hey, Pop, I Don't Want to Go to Work." Thanks for listening.

 

Orphan Ann (Sign Off):That's all for now enemies,but there'll be more the same tomorrow night.Until then, this is Orphan Ann, your number one enemy, reminding you GI -- always to be good! Goodbye now. 

This is your little playmate Orphan Annie, and by the way, wasn't that a lousy program we had last night? It was almost bad enough to be the BBC, or its little sister ABC. (Following the news section read by Ince)…Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now, let's have some real listening music - you can have your swing when I turn you over to Zero Hour. Right now my little orphans, do what mama tells you. Listen to this, Fritz Kreisler playing 'Indian Love Call'…..boy oh boy, it stirs your memories doesn't it? Or haven't you boneheads any memories to stir? You have? Well, here's music 'In a Persian Market' played especially for you by the Boston Pops Orchestra…Orphan to orphan-over'
 



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