In 1933, the Jesuit-run University of Santa Clara thought of itself as well-regarded, elite and intimate. Detractors thought of it as a rowdy football school. Its enrollment that year was a mere 450 students: white Catholic males where everyone must have known each other at least by sight.
In Gerald McKevitt S.J.’s The University of Santa Clara: A History 1855-1977, the school “remained aloof and protected, a quiet backwater in an agitated sea.” But, Fr. McKevitt stated that in 1933 there were two exceptions: obsessive about Communist subversion and the vigilante lynching.
To provide some context, the valley’s canneries were its economic engines, but poor working conditions at these canneries offered plenty of grist for the disaffected. In 1931, cannery wages had been cut sharply and the largely Italian female and seasonal workforce of 20,000 walked out.
In response, radical organizers formed the Cannery and Agriculture Workers Industrial Union located on Post Street close to Hart’s Department Store. CAWIU held a march that took place from St. James Park to City Hall Plaza. Twenty strikers were taken into custody as protesters came head-to-head with local police who recruited American Legion members. Both unleashed night sticks and batons on workers. There was a two-hour confrontation, and the Fire Department finally dispersed the crowd by using fire hoses in what became, as the San Jose Mercury reported, San Jose’s worst riot.
The next day the CAWIU held another rally in St. James Park where members protested wars in general and specifically wars on protestors. In reaction, the San Jose Evening News opined that “For more than a year there have been communists, agitators or whatever you have in mind to call them, in our midst of making speeches in St. James Park and sending circular matter to the discontented ones who have been out of work, for no reason than to try and create further discontent to the extent of bringing unnecessary strikes and, therefore, a revolution.”
Because of efforts to organize labor, Fr. McKevitt wrote that many Californians—and certainly many at the university—were led to believe “that the entire labor movement was Communist-inspired and that every strike was the work of Marxist agitators.”
Santa Clara’s administration purged of so-called radical views in its conservative Catholic school newspaper, The Santa Clara. Two editorials were deemed unacceptable. In the first, the student editor, Edward Horton, complained that a local congressman’s notion of pervasive Communist infiltration of the New Deal administration was a tendency “to drag everybody down who opposed him with the general term: “Red!”
The second voiced approval of a pacificist movement: “students have nothing to gain by war.” These mere words were enough to expel Horton from the university.
The other exception was student participation in the mob lynching of Brooke Hart’s kidnappers, Thurmond and Holmes. No doubt many of the students were enraged by the kidnapping of their recently graduated colleague, but it has always been unclear to what extent they had carried out the lynching. The Stanford Daily laid full responsibility on a “handful of Santa Clara students, roommates and buddies of the murdered Brooke Hart.”
The San Francisco Examiner wrote that “although conflicting as to detail, definitely rumors that the lynching had been organized and carried through by students at the Santa Clara University, the alma mater of Brooke Harte.” Since the school population was relatively small, it would seem that some must have known whether any student might have joined or led the mob, brought the ropes, bust down the county jail doors, and lynched the two kidnappers. However, none came forward.
After the lynching, Fr. McKevitt argued that “a pall of protective silence gradually descended around the entire episode.” No one wanted to confess about their participation of what had happened on that grisly November night in 1933. When Harry Farrell researched Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town, his comprehensive book of the lynching, nearly fifty years later, many interviewed still refused to reveal what actually occurred, who was to blame and whose reputations would have suffered.
Protective silence indeed.
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