Harry Farrell’s death last weekend from cancer raised up an
ominous ghost from our region’s history.
Harry Farrell’s death last weekend from cancer raised up an ominous ghost from our region’s history.
For 44 years, Farrell was a well-respected reporter and popular columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. In 1992, he published his definitive book about the Brooke Hart kidnapping-murder of the 1930s. His true-crime chronicle, “Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town,” takes a hard-edge look at a cold-blooded killing and its shocking aftermath.
The tragic story is largely forgotten now, but it was revived locally this week by Farrell’s obituary. It has important lessons for us today.
In 1933, 22-year-old Brooke Hart was the oldest son of Alexander Hart, the owner of San Jose’s popular Hart and Son Department Store. The good-looking and intelligent young man had recently graduated from Santa Clara University and was being groomed to take over the profitable family business.
On the evening of Nov. 9, 1933, Brooke had just closed the store for the day and was stepping into his Studebaker roadster in a downtown garage. That’s when Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes, both residents of San Jose, pointed a gun at him. It was the start of a kidnapping.
The men drove Brooke in his Studebaker to what’s now Milpitas. They then changed cars and started driving north with him toward San Francisco. At some point during the drive, the kidnappers realized they hadn’t thought out their plan very well. The scheme began to go awry when they realized that Brooke could easily identify them.
They drove to the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge and tied up their victim with wire. They then hit him on the head with a concrete block and threw him over the railing. Hart plunged to his death in the San Francisco Bay.
Thurmond and Holmes returned to San Jose and calmly called Hart’s parents to make arrangements for the ransom. They demanded $40,000.
On Nov. 15, police traced a ransom call to the Sabette Brothers Garage on South Market Street in San Jose. Law authorities soon apprehended Thurmond at that location. After Thurmond confessed and named Holmes as an accomplice, police arrested his partner in a downtown hotel a short time later.
On Nov. 26, two Redwood City duck hunters discovered Brooke Hart’s body badly decomposed and being eaten by crabs. The news of his death rocked the Bay Area. Later that day, an angry crowd started gathering in San Jose’s St. James Park, outside the jail behind the courthouse. Farrell’s book describes the 10,000 residents – one-sixth of San Jose’s total population – who had gathered around the town square to partake in the drama.
As the crowd began turning into a violent mob, the nervous Sheriff William Emig ordered his deputies to barricade the jail. He phoned California’s Republican Gov. James “Sunny Jim” Rolph and asked for National Guard troops to help in protecting the prisoners from the angry mob. Rolph refused.
Provoked by the mob’s cries of “string ’em up!,” a gang of men grabbed pieces of pipe from the construction site of a new post office next to the courthouse and stormed the jail. Sheriff deputies shot tear gas into the advancing throng, but that only served to infuriate them, leading to a two-hour battle between the law and the citizen. During this time, the terrified Thurmond and Holmes huddled in their jail cells.
The mob reached Thurmond first. He passed out, but they stripped him naked, slung a rope from one of the park’s mulberry trees, and hanged him as his mother pleaded to spare his life. Holmes battled desperately for his life, but eventually he swung from an elm branch.
The crowd then attempted to burn the bodies but soon gave up and dispersed. Limbs and leaves were taken as souvenirs from the hanging trees. Park gardeners cut them down a few days later.
Rolph praised the mob’s action as “a fine lesson to the whole nation.” He vowed to pardon anyone involved who might be prosecuted. Newspaper editorials across the nation both condemned and praised the lynching. In his widely read daily column, Will Rogers wrote: “All the Californians I have met are going around proud today.”
Seven people were arrested for the lynchings, but despite photographs and eyewitnesses, no was ever convicted.
San Jose was so proud of its brand of frontier justice that it published a booklet of photographs of the lynching to sell to tourists.
The lynching brought worldwide notoriety to the city. In Germany, the Nazis used photographs of the two naked men hanging from the trees as political propaganda to show America’s lawless mobs. Even Hollywood cashed in. The 1936 movie “Fury,” starring Spencer Tracy, was a fictionalized version of the story. A remake titled “The Sound of Fury” was released in 1950.
Today, people still live in the South Bay region who participated in California’s last public lynching. The incident shows human nature has an extremely scary dark side.
Vengeance is a powerful emotion in the human animal. It responds to our most primal fears. In mobs, it’s magnified overwhelmingly as vigilantism takes over reasonable thinking.
Unfortunately, that sinister spirit of vigilantism still lives on in our modern world. I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about the ongoing criminal trial of Saddam Hussein. My friend told me he thought the widely publicized trial was a waste of time and money. He vehemently told me the former dictator of Iraq should be lynched as fast as a rope can be found.
I consider Hussein’s butchery of thousands of his own people far more heinous than Holmes and Thurmond’s murder of Brooke Hart. But we must also remember that frontier “justice” is justice denied. Vigilantism destroys the intent of law and puts in jeopardy our constitutional right to due process.
In a sense, all vigilantes – including those at St. James Park on Nov. 26, 1933 – are no better than the people they lynch. To satiate their thirst for revenge, they spit in the face of justice.
