Summer Sunday (June 1964 | Volume: 15, Issue: 4)

Summer Sunday

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Authors: Eric F. Goldman

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June 1964 | Volume 15, Issue 4

The grim and vivid account which follows may strike some of our readers as a frightful fantasy. Unfortunately it all took place, detail for detail, in the year 1911. Since we believe, as this magazine regularly testifies, that the good in our past generously outweighs the bad, we never shrink from chronicling cruelty and rascality. Yet we might hesitate, even so, to print this unusually ugly story of racial violence long ago if it did not lay bare so much that lies dangerously hidden in the folk memory of the white man and the black, if it did not help in some way to explain some of the bitterness and guilt which presently afflict the two races, if it did not admonish us so powerfully—if, in short, good did not sometimes spring out of evil.

This article will form the first chapter of Eric F. Goldman’s book revolving around Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in this century, to be published under the title, Incident in Coatesville, by Alfred A. Knopf. Its theme is the racial crisis which came to America shortly before World War I and its meaning for our own day. The book is the result of painstaking research by Mr. Goldman, who is Rollins Professor of History at Princeton, a member of the Advisory Board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, and president of one of our two sponsoring groups, The Society of American Historians. He has been a writer for Time Magazine, a State Department lecturer, and the moderator of the intellectual television program, “The Open Mind.” He has won many awards, including the Bancroft Prize for “distinguished writing in American history,” on the basis of his book, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Knopf, 1952). In February he was appointed an aide to President Johnson, charged with “channelling the nation’s best thinking to the White House.”

—The Editors

 

Zachariah Walker had a few drinks of straight gin and felt good. He drank some more and felt even better. Now he poured the gin in quick spurts, his aim half missing the glass, and the world of here and now was racing away.

That evening, Saturday, August 12, 1911, everybody in Coatesville could use less of the here and now. The overgrown town, population about 11,000, lay thirty-eight miles west of Philadelphia in the trough of the Chester Valley, and the heat of the eastern seaboard hung over it dank and steaming. The discomforts nature did not bring, Coatesville managed itself. The town’s life centered in two sprawling iron and steel corporations, the Lukens Iron and Steel Company and the Worth Brothers Company. Any day or night the furnaces sent up clouds of soot. This Saturday evening, like all Saturday evenings, was the time for blowing the waste boilers, and great billows of dirty smoke, stirred along by desultory tufts of wind, kept drifting through the valley.

Most of the well-to-do of Coatesville, the steel executives