The event-filled and tragic life of Mobile newsie Charles Archie Johnson

This fading image, graciously provided by Heritage Auctions, HA.com, gives us an early glimpse of a well-known Mobile newsie, Charles Archie Johnson.

Johnson became a pawn in the struggle between Democrats and Republicans for control of Port City politics during Reconstruction. Mobile newspapers gave Johnson a lot of attention in their pages but so did other papers around the country. Newspapers on the Gulf Coast continued to follow Johnson’s misfortunes until he died in 1903.

Johnson poses in a photographer’s studio on this carte de visite, a photographic calling card, just 2.3 inches by 4 inches. I found the photo online in 2020. Unfortunately, it had been sold in 2017. It is heavily stained and has been folded in half, resulting in the deep horizontal crease. The photographer chemically treated the finish, giving the tone an altered color. I corrected the tone to improve the clarity of the image.

Johnson’s past before coming to Mobile is just as unclear as the image. One of two different stories may be true, or it also is possible to look at the two stories as parts of the same tale.

According to a story in the New Orleans Picayune, Johnson had been the slave of a Confederate army captain who was wounded during the battle of Murfreesboro. This is taken to mean the Battle of Stones River from December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863, in Middle Tennessee, and not the First Battle of Murfreesboro, a cavalry battle in July 1862.

This story, which may have been embellished, holds that while Johnson was carrying his wounded master from the firing line, he too was wounded in the right leg. Doctors had to amputate the limb above the knee.(1)

In this version of events, we don’t know if Union or Rebel doctors amputated Johnson’s leg or what happened to him before he showed up in Mobile after the war. Although Stones River was an inconclusive battle, the Confederates withdrew, making it likely that Union troops picked up Johnson from the battlefield and took him to their hospital for care.

As Heritage Auctions points out, the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System database lists a Charles Archie Johnson, apparently a liberated slave, as a veteran of Company D, 92^nd Infantry Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry. He appears to have mustered into service as a private on October 24, 1863, with the 22^nd Infantry Regiment, Corps d’Afrique, organized at New Orleans on September 30, 1863.

The regiment saw duty at New Orleans, Brashear City, New Iberia, and in the District of La Fourche until January 1864. The Army ordered the troops to duty at Port Hudson on January 4 and then to Brashear City in April. The Army took advantage of the move to reorganize the unit as the 92^nd Infantry. The Army discharged this Johnson after the end of the war on December 31, 1865.

It’s possible that the Johnson wounded at Murfreesboro somehow found his way to New Orleans and later enlisted with the Corps d’Afrique. Or these may be two entirely different men.

At any rate, the Johnson who sold newspapers in Mobile was suited only to menial labor, regardless of having only one leg. Most observers at the time seem to agree that Johnson was a “mental, intellectual and physical cripple . . . who can scarce distinguish between right and wrong, whose mind borders on idiocy. . . .”

That description may have somewhat exaggerated Johnson’s mental limitations as those who used him sought to present the newsboy as deserving sympathy. All newsboys also tried to look sorrowful in order to elicit larger tips from their patrons.(2)

The Johnson who sold papers in Mobile would seem, then, to have lacked the capability to shoulder arms and wasn’t the man who enlisted in New Orleans. But he still could have served as a teamster or other laborer with the Army toward the end of the war.

At some point, the news peddler Johnson, who was about 25 in 1865, found his way to Mobile. Union black troops were still stationed in Mobile and perhaps Johnson came to join friends or family. He earned a living by hawking newspapers along Royal Street for the Mobile Daily Tribune and blacking shoes. Johnson sold his papers wearing the outlandish costume he dressed in for the photo. It is an exaggerated military uniform with large epaulettes. It may have been a cast off band uniform.

Written on the back of the photo is, “Hon Archie Johnson Gentleman of Color / G. Horton's Friend / 1867 Mobile Ala.” The phrase, “G. Horton’s Friend,” was meant to be tongue in cheek.

In 1867, U.S. Major General John Pope had appointed Gustavus Horton mayor of Mobile. Before the war, Horton had been a successful and prominent businessman. During the war, Horton had remained a unionist and suffered persecution, even though two sons and a son-in-law served in the Confederacy. After the war, he became a Republican.

As mayor, Horton fired ineffective white policemen and hired black officers in their place. He also replaced some white laborers with blacks. Both moves angered white Democrats.

The Tribune may have hired Johnson just to torment Horton. As Johnson went about the streets selling the Mobile Tribune, he wore placards with the paper’s headlines, which were often critical of Horton and fellow Republican Frederick G. Bromberg, who was the city treasurer in 1867. On one occasion Johnson cried, “Here’s yer Mobile Tribune, wid all about Mayor Horton and his Bromberg rats.”

Written on the hat that Johnson is wearing in the photo is “Bromberg.” Another word, which may be “Horton,” is written below Bromberg.(3)

Among his duties, Horton presided over the Mayor’s Court to try cases for minor offenses. Police officers arrested Johnson at least three times during the summer 1867 for disorderly conduct, probably related to his frequent drunkenness. The court could fine offenders, order them to post a bond to insure good behavior, or order them to leave the city. Horton ordered Johnson to leave.

When Johnson didn’t leave the city, Horton had an officer put him on a steamer to New Orleans. But Mobile’s Democrats chartered a steamer and chased the boat carrying Johnson. Overtaking the other boat, the Democrats took Johnson aboard their steamer and back to Mobile. The steamer arrived with a band playing Dixie and banners flying. The Democrat partisans put Johnson in a carriage and paraded past large, cheering crowds.

Johnson’s days as a pawn in this political chess game weren’t over. Mayor Horton had an officer put Johnson on a train and escort him to Montgomery. Again the peg-legged veteran returned, no doubt aided by the Democrats. Policemen arrested Johnson again and Horton ordered him to post a $500 bond to keep the peace.

In a few weeks, Johnson was back in front of the mayor charged with disorderly conduct, drunkenness, and resisting arrest. Horton ordered the newsboy to pay a $50 fine or serve 30 days in jail, and pay a peace bond of $300.

Johnson undoubtedly was getting help and encouragement in his battles with the mayor from Democrats, particularly the owners of the Tribune, the Mobile Times, and the Mobile Register. Certainly, there is no way that Johnson made enough money selling papers and shining shoes to pay all his fines and return trips from banishment.

The editor of the Nationalist, a Republican paper, charged the Democrats with being behind Johnson’s antics. The newspaper said Johnson got drunk and allowed “himself to be tricked out by the Tribune buffoons and their allies in such a manner as to necessarily create an excitement upon the street, and endanger the public peace.”(4)

Horton’s opponents now snared mayor in the federal government’s own laws. They turned U.S. law aimed at securing black civil rights against the white unionist mayor. Johnson’s bosses and the other Democrat editors charged that Horton’s arrests and sentences of the street vendor were politically motivated and deprived Johnson of his civil rights. They charged Horton in federal court with violating the U.S. civil rights act.

U.S. District Judge Richard Busteed, although a fellow Republican, was an opponent of Horton. In Horton’s trial, Busteed excluded evidence that other mayors had commonly expelled troublemakers, often whites, from the city. A jury found Horton guilty. Busteed had the mayor briefly jailed before slapping him with a $250 fine.

With their point made, the Tribune and other Democrat newspaper editors apparently ceased using Johnson to torment the mayor. In 1868, voters elected Horton as probate judge of Mobile County, which took him out of Reconstruction political controversies. Archie Johnson, as he was usually called, continued to hawk the Tribune along Royal Street and to get into trouble with the law for many years.

On one occasion in January 1868, however, Johnson needed the help of the police. Johnson presented himself at Mobile’s guardhouse in such an excited state that it was sometime before police could calm him down enough to understand the problem.

Johnson’s Democrat patrons had favored him with numerous gifts, including a gold stud. He had a sentimental attachment to the gift and carried it with him each time he was expelled from Mobile. On one deportation to Montgomery, Johnson was broke but refused to sell the stud for the money he needed.

Johnson accused a fellow newsboy named Palmer of stealing the stud. Police arrested Palmer and put him under a $100 bond to appear in Mayor’s Court.(5)

But it was usually Johnson who was in trouble. In November 1874, a policeman again hauled the newspaper vendor into the Mayor’s Court, with Alderman Underhill presiding in the absence of the mayor. The officer explained that Johnson was drunk and disorderly all the time and that he made too little money to live on. Underhill must have taken pity on Johnson because he didn’t assess a fine.

In January 1875, Johnson was back in court, this time before Mayor Alphonse Hurtel. The Tribune reported that Johnson “got into a weaving way and became very noisy and abusive near the corner of St. Michael and Joachim” streets. The mayor fined Johnson $10 “and he will languish in durance vile unless some friend comes to his rescue,” meaning the newsie was stuck behind bars until someone paid his fine.

The Mayor’s Court must have sent Johnson again from Mobile at some point because in May 1876, he was in Pensacola and in trouble. The Pensacola Gazette reported that a photographer caught Johnson breaking into his studio one night. Deputies confined Johnson to the county jail.

The news stories don’t say so, but it seems likely that someone else directed Johnson in his petty criminal ways. Given Johnson’s limited abilities, he would have needed a Fagin, a fence, to tell him what to steal and to exchange the goods for shelter or cash. It also possible that Johnson simply didn’t know legal from illegal and right from wrong. Regardless of the reasons for his activities, Johnson paid the consequences.(6)

The Pensacola court found Johnson guilty of burglary and the judge sentenced him to 10 years in the state penitentiary. Johnson applied to the pardoning board in 1882 for a reduction of his sentence. Whether that happened isn’t clear, but whenever Johnson was released the veteran newsie returned to the Port City. By 1880, regular passenger rail service linked Pensacola and Mobile, making it easier and cheaper for Johnson to travel.(7)

The sound of Johnson crying the news could again be heard on Mobile’s streets. A correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Democrat in August 1897 recalled for his Crescent City audience the colorful cries of Mobile street vendors. These included the charcoal man or woman, ice man, butcher boy, fruit wagon driver, beer bottle collector, and, of course, one particular newspaper seller.

“In the past who does not remember ‘Charles Archie Johnson’ the one-legged negro, with a voice that equaled that of a bugle, and whose call, ‘Times-Democrat,’ could be distinctly heard for eleven blocks?” Mobile newsboys such as Johnson sold out-of-town newspapers such as the Times-Democrat as well as Mobile newspapers. “Archie is still with the gang, but his loud calls have grown to respectable limits, old age and a fast life having had their effect, but his voice is yet good for six squares.” The Mobile Register said Johnson had “stentorian lungs.”(8)

A year later, in 1898, an unknown photographer captured Johnson chatting with a passerby in Mobile. The photo, in the collection of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, had only identified the man as a “newspaper carrier.” (The department has since updated the identification.) News stories make it clear that Johnson was a well-known character in Mobile, which explains the photographer’s interest. Besides, how many one-legged, African American newsies could there have been on Royal Street in Mobile at that time?

In the photo, Johnson is resting the stump of his right leg on the steps of the U.S. Customs House at the southwest corner of Royal and St. Francis streets. He appears to be carrying on a lively conversation with the well-dressed older man wearing the derby. Judging from a number of photos of the Customs House, this area was a popular place for men to gather and talk. It would have been a good place to sell newspapers.

The state archives doesn’t identify which newspaper he is selling. It’s likely he’s hawking the Mobile Register, but it could have been the Mobile Daily Item or another newspaper such as the New Orleans Times-Democrat, which was shipped to news agents in Mobile.

In March 1899, Johnson was back in Pensacola and back in trouble with the law. He and a comrade, Charles Wright, were charged with petit larceny and held for trial. The jury found Johnson guilty, but acquitted Wright. The judge sentenced the hapless newsboy to 30 days in the county jail at hard labor.(9)

In January 1903, Pensacola’s opera house called the police to deal with rowdies, apparently newsboys, at the ticket box. When the police arrived, they caught Johnson crawling over the shoulders of those ahead of him trying to reach the box. The next morning, the police court judge sentenced Johnson to work 60 days on the city’s street gang.(10)

Not long after completing his sentence in Pensacola, Johnson was back on the streets of Mobile hawking papers. About April 9, 1903, Johnson fell seriously ill and was taken to the city hospital. He died 20 days later, never having recovered.(11) 

(1) “Mobile Negroe’s Adventure,” Pensacola News, April 29, 1903 3:4
(2) Harriet E. Amos Doss, “Trials of a Unionist: Gustavus Horton, Military Mayor of Mobile during Reconstruction,” 123-144, in Michael Thomason, editor, Down the Years: Articles on Mobile’s History. (Mobile: Gulf Coast Historical Review, 2001), 136; Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System, National Park Service. Online: https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-soldiers.htm. Accessed February 8, 2020.

(3) Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. (The Macmillan Company, 1905), 482. Online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41680/41680-h/41680-h.htm#f_1291. Accessed February 8, 2020.

(4) Harriet E. Amos Doss, “Trials of a Unionist: Gustavus Horton, Military Mayor of Mobile during Reconstruction,” 123-144, in Michael Thomason, editor, Down the Years: Articles on Mobile’s History. (Mobile: Gulf Coast Historical Review, 2001), 133-134

(5) “Charles Archie Johnson Robbed,” Mobile Daily Times, January 6, 1868 5:1. The Times gives the name of the thief as “Palmes,” but this appears to be a typographical error.

(6) Mobile Daily Tribune, November 6, 1874, 3; Mobile Daily Tribune, January 15, 1875, 3; Mobile Daily Tribune, May 13, 1876, 2

(7) Pensacola Commercial, April 1, 1882, 3:5

(8) “Record of happenings in the Gulf City yesterday,” New Orleans Times-Democrat, August 12, 1897, 9:3; “The Surrender at Montgomery,” Pickens County Herald and West Alabamian, December 14, 1870 2:6

(9) “The Criminal Court,” Pensacola News March 13, 1899 2:5; “The Criminal Court,” Pensacola News March 18, 1899 5:2

(10) “Rowdy opera house patrons,” Pensacola News January 29, 1903 1:6

(11) New Orleans Times-Democrat April 9, 1903 9:4; “Mobile Negroe’s Adventure,” Pensacola News, April 29, 1903 3:4

Socialists targeted Mobile newsies in their war on the free market

Seven-year-old Phares D. Beville sells the Mobile Item in Bienville Square
in 1914. Photo by Lewis W. Hine.

In the early 1900s, America’s socialists made the colorful newsboys on the streets of Mobile another exhibit in their campaign against youths working in paying jobs.

The activists especially disapproved of newsies. They said the youths were corrupted by profanity, gambling, fast women, and even “the dubious frankfurter,” which the authors of the 1914 book Children in Bondage claimed was the boys’ chief nourishment. And horror of horrors, “Frequently in one night a boy drinks from five to six cups of coffee.”

A group of wealthy and influential Northern leftist progressives founded the National Child Labor Committee on April 15, 1904, to campaign against children working such jobs. New York sociology teacher and highly talented photographer Lewis Wickes Hine quit his job at the Ethical Culture School in 1908 to become the committee’s official photographer. Hine traveled the country photographing children and adults at work.

Hine brought his camera to Alabama in 1910, 1911, 1913, and

1914. Alabama was an odd choice for Hine to spend so much time in. In 1903, the Yellowhammer State had made it illegal for children under 12 to work in factories. And Pennsylvania had more kids working in non-farm jobs than all the states of the former Confederacy combined.

In Alabama, Hine photographed youths servicing machines in cotton mills and laboring for coal mines. On the Gulf Coast, he took photos of boys working on oyster boats and girls shucking oysters for a canning company. In the cities, he shot images of boys delivering telegraphs and dry goods and selling newspapers on street corners.

Hine arrived in the Port City in 1914. Among other subjects, he photographed several newsboys, all of whom appeared to be selling the afternoon Mobile Item. This choice of newspaper street sellers likely wasn’t by chance. The competing morning Mobile Register was owned by Frederick I. Thompson, a leftist progressive Democrat. Although the Register also used newsboys, they don’t appear in Hine’s photos.

It seems highly possible that Thompson invited Hine to Mobile and helped him find subjects for his photo shoots. Hine needed some local contacts to acquaint him with places that employed the children he photographed. Not all of the locations were obvious or easy to find.

According to the National Archives, Hine recorded information about every photograph. He created a ruse to interview the children he photographed and then scribbled notes on paper hidden inside his pocket. He believed that he had to be “double-sure that my photo data was 100% pure—no retouching or fakery of any kind.” While Hine may not have faked his info, he wasn’t always accurate. Or his assumptions about his subjects didn’t accurately reflect the facts.

Of Hine’s four photos of Mobile newsies, he recorded the name of just one of his subjects, and then only a first name, “Ferris.” Thanks to the research of historian Joe Manning, who has been identifying the children in Hine’s photos and interviewing descendants, we know that “Ferris” is actually Phares Demoville Beville. Friends and family just called him “P. D.,” or Pee Dee.

Hine’s photo shows a 7-year-old Phares selling the Mobile Item on the sidewalks of Bienville Square on October 22, 1914. His caption read, “Tiny newsie who did not know enough to make change for investigator. There are still too many of these little ones in the larger cities.”

Hine photographed Phares and his other subjects sympathetically. He believed his photos would more effectively serve his cause if the children looked likable and deserving of attention.

Peter D. Beville, top left, father of Phares,

and a story about his International Motor Truck

company in Mobile.

Phares, and others like him, weren’t penniless orphans sentenced to living on the streets in dirty shirttails. At the time Hine took the photo, the Beville family was quite well off. In 1912, Phares’ parents moved from Florida to Mobile, where his father Peter founded the P. D. Beville Supply Co., an International Motor Truck distributor, in 1915. The Bienville Square corner where Hine photographed the young Phares was just two blocks north from his father’s business.

Peter Beville’s business merged with a competitor in 1918 and in 1922 Peter built a four-story building to house his dealership on the northwest corner of Government and Conception streets at a cost of $100,000, more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars.

The Beville family lived at a fashionable address, 902 Government Street just west of Broad Street. By the time Phares was a teen, his family had moved about a mile away to the just as fashionable western edge of the city to a large two-story home at 110 South Georgia Avenue.

The Bevilles paid pricey tuitions for Phares and his older brother Newell to attend the University Military School in Mobile and later to enroll in Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. So the Beville family wasn’t poor and dependent on the few pennies Phares brought in selling newspapers on downtown streets. And, even though at 7 years old Phares “did not know enough to make change” for Hine, the youngster’s education clearly wasn’t neglected.

Many of Hine’s other photographic subjects had similar stories. One of those other subjects was a 9 year old cash girl in Gayfer’s Department Store. Of her, Hine wrote, “At first glance the home conditions with a one-armed father and several children in the family would indicate that her small wages were needed, but when we found that the father is able to do certain kinds of work, and that they have relatives who are well-to-do, there was no doubt that the family could get along without her working. In almost all the cases investigated, the need for the child's earning was very small.”

In fact, that was the point that Hine and others of the NCLC wanted to make: The families didn’t need the income from their children’s work. Dad, and maybe mom, too, earned enough to sustain the family. Hine’s photos meant to evoke a Dickensian nightmare of greedy capitalists employing children for low wages. The photographer, as much as said so. “The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.”

Selfish employers were the only reason children worked, according to this view. Somehow, the children and their parents had been stripped of their free will by the free market. Hine and his socialist buddies never explained how low wages enticed children to work when families didn’t need their incomes.

Modern audiences are conditioned to reflexively reject any notion of children working. In the 1600s and 1700s, however, adults expected children to work. Until the 1940s and perhaps later, parents moving from rural areas to mill towns and cities believed children needed to help support the family, just as they had on the farm. Many other adults believed that disciplined work helped build an individual’s character.

As the U.S free market made families more prosperous, fewer kids worked. The number of U.S. children working reached a high point around 1910, not long before Hine came to Mobile. In that year, about 20 out of 100 kids worked. Of each of those 20, more than 14 worked on farms. Out of those 14, more than 12 worked on family acres. By 1930, just a little more than 6 out of 100 children worked. Of that statistical 6, nearly 5 worked on the family farm. Prosperity essentially allowed parents to buy their children’s education out their earnings, going without extra income brought in by their kids.

By 1938 when Congress passed the Fair Labor Act, the law against child labor that also gave us the minimum wage, it was mostly a symbol of a state of affairs that already existed.

In the early 1900s, Hine and his socialist allies had been in a hurry to create the impression that work was a form of exploitation from which children must be protected. The only way to do that was to place the government between parents and their children. The parents had to be prevented through law from letting their children work and then forced to send their kids to schools operated by local governments. Then the government would confiscate the parents’ hard-earned income to pay for the schools. Socialists never seem to worry about the government taking the income parents needed to raise their families.

Hine’s photos and the NCLC investigations unwittingly confirmed that newsboys and other working youths were growing up in good homes. In fact, P. D. Beville’s life after Hine photographed him was a testament to the solid family life his father and mother provided and to the fact that Phares’ work as a youth helped build his character.

Phares left Washington & Lee University in late 1929, a few months before he was to graduate and returned home because his 12-year-old brother Lewis had died. The Great Depression had started and Phares stayed in Mobile to help his parents. He sold trucks with his father and served as treasurer for the business. Apparently, Phares had learned how to make change. But they weren’t selling many trucks during the Depression and the family business eventually closed its doors in the early ’30s.

In 1934, the Mobile Press Register, successor to both the Item that Phares had worked for as a child and its Register competitor, hired Phares in the circulation department. After 18 months he entered the accounting department for a year before switching to the advertising department for nearly 17 years.

Not long after starting at the paper, Phares took to the petite and pretty Alice Barclay Lesesne, who worked for the Society Department. They may have known each other through their families’ social connections before working together. The couple announced their engagement in September 1939 and were married  on January 15, 1940. The Press Register provided a honeymoon cruise to Cuba.

Phares served in the Army for two years during World War II and returned to the newspaper at the end of the war. In Mobile, Phares and Alice raised two daughters, volunteered in community groups such as the YMCA and Kiwanis, and were active members in their Presbyterian Church.

From starting as an advertising salesman at the Press Register, Phares worked his way up to local display advertising manager and eventually became national advertising manager. He also was a major stockholder before the paper was sold to the Newhouse family in 1966. Phares worked until retiring in 1977 at age 70.

Phares died in 1991 at the age of 83. His wife Alice died in 2004 at the age of 92.

By the time Phares died, paperboys selling newspapers on the street had nearly disappeared from Mobile. Seven-year-old little merchants were long gone. Mobile had grown far beyond the compact small city it had been in Phares’ paperboy days. After World War II, newspaper carriers delivered papers to suburban subscribers from bicycles.

By the late 1960s, adults often replaced teen paper carriers as schools developed more programs that took up boys’ time. Supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, with better working hours and conditions, competed for the teen work force. The rising affluence of the general population also made it less necessary for many teens to go to work.

But what really brought an end to boys selling papers on the street were coin-operated newspaper vending machines, invented in 1947. Their use began slowly and then surged in the early 1970s. The vending machines were once a common sight in Mobile and every other American city. They lined railroad passenger platforms, airport concourses, stood outside hotels and restaurants, and could be found on almost every busy street corner.

As newspaper prices rose in the late 1990s, the vending machines began to lose favor with the public and publishers alike. The machines were mechanical and couldn't accept dollar bills, only coins. The only choice customers had was to carry a pocket full of quarters or dollar coins. At the same time, Sunday editions had become so bulky that only a limited number of copies could be placed in the boxes.

The few youths who still sold papers on the street could be found at busy intersections during rush hours. When traffic stopped for the red light, the youths rushed into the street to hawk papers to the motorists waiting for the light to change to green. Because of the danger of injury from moving cars, the city eventually cracked down on the practice.

By the time Phares’ wife Alice had died, people were switching to getting their news, entertainment, and other information online. The newspaper vending boxes, like the paperboys they replaced, became less and less necessary. The Press Register began pulling its vending machines from the streets and they have all but disappeared now as well.

Sources 

Edwin Markham et al. Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor-its Causes, Its Crimes, and Its Cure. (Hearst's international library Company, 1914) 223; Joe Manning, “Phares Beville, Mobile, Alabama,” Lewis Hine Project, Mornings on Maple Street. Online: https://morningsonmaplestreet.com/2015/01/01/phares-beville. Accessed January 13, 2020; “It’s His Castle of Achievement,” The Harvester World, Volume 14, number 12, December 1923, 5-6. Online: http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/ihc/id/11531/. Accessed January 15, 2020; Bill Kauffman, “The Child Labor Amendment Debate of the 1920's,” Mises Institute. January 29, 2018. Online: https://mises.org/library/child-labor-amendment-debate-1920s-0. Accessed January 12, 2020; Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Trouble With Child Labor Laws,” Mises Institute. February 11, 2008. Online: https://mises.org/library/trouble-child-labor-laws. Accessed January 14, 2020; “Teaching With Documents: Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of Child Labor,” National Archives. Online: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/hine-photos. Accessed January 9, 2020; Mobile Press Register, Inc., et al. v. Joseph F. McGowin, II, Individually and as Executor and Trustee under the last Will and Testament of Everette Leonard McGowin et al. 1 Div. 680. Supreme Court of Alabama. November 17, 1960. Online: https://law.justia.com/cases/alabama/supreme-court/1960/124-so-2d-812-1.html

Editors left their mark on American literature

Between about 1910 and 1920, the Mobile Register’s staff included two editors, Rice Gaither and Henry Herschel Brickell, who would become prominent in the Southern Renaissance literary movement that began in the late 1920s. Gaither’s wife Frances gained even more recognition for her fiction than did her husband for his. Brickell is considered one of the greatest literary critics of the first half of the 20^th century and his book reviews made the careers of many Renaissance-era writers.

Two other Register editors on the staff at the time, Garrard Harris and David Rankin Barbee, also became well-known writers. They don’t strictly fit the description for the Southern Renaissance, but they can be considered along with their colleagues. The roots of the Renaissance perhaps can be seen in Harris’ writing. Barbee, who went by his middle name Rankin, is best known for writing about Southern history. While the Southern Renaissance included historians, Barbee’s contempt for African Americans put him outside the character of the movement.

During the Renaissance, Southern literature gained considerable energy as writers, whose works would become American classics, began their careers after World War I. The period marked the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston among others.

Writers of the movement broke from common Southern cultural literary themes, notably glorifying the antebellum South and the Confederacy. They addressed the burden of slavery and racism. They were highly critical of contemporary life in the South. Their works concerned the loss of personal identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than a personal life. Here is a look at each of the writers:

Rice and Frances Gaither

Rice Gaither

Rice Gaither was born June 9, 1888, in La Grange, Tennessee. When Rice was about 12 years old, his family moved to Corinth, Mississippi. There his physician father opened a practice and his mother played organ for the Methodist Church.

The woman who would become Rice’s wife, Frances “Frankie” Ormond Jones, also was born in Tennessee, about 16 miles north of La Grange in Somerville, on May 21, 1889. Her family also moved to Corinth and in high school Frankie became attracted to Rice “because he too wanted to be a writer.” Frankie earned a bachelor’s degree from the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College, now the Mississippi University for Women, in 1909.

Frances Gaither

Rice, meanwhile, attended the University of Mississippi. There, according to the Ole Miss annual, he worked toward both a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Science. An active student, Rice joined Phi Kappa Psi Greek fraternity, the YMCA, and sang tenor in the Glee Club. He served as the editor of alumni news for Varsity Voice, a “weekly journal of college life,” in ’08 and a year later was the editor-in-chief. Rice graduated from Ole Miss in 1910.

Rice seems to have joined the Mobile Register staff soon after graduating from Ole Miss and he and Frankie married on April 25, 1912. Rice became city editor by 1914, and then the managing editor.

Though Rice worked in Mobile, he and Frankie invested in considerable tracts of land in Baldwin County, including a house on Pomelo Street in Fairhope that they called “home.” Rice’s job at the Register didn’t provide a salary that could afford those kind of investments, which indicated that the couple could call on a good deal of family wealth.

For many years, the Gaithers used their Fairhope home as a writing retreat. They wrote from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. A sign on the front door said “No visitors until after 4 p.m.”

But during the weekends and in the late evenings, the Gaithers opened their home to many of the South’s leading writers and artists. The Gaithers’ hospitality was the subject of the Register’s society editor Nettie Chandler in her popular column “Betty letters,” letters from the fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicling the goings on of Mobile society. The columnist wrote that the Gaithers were “really old timey in their congeniality,” meaning that they entertained people in their home rather than going out for excitement.

Those who visited with the Gaithers included artist and muralist John Roderick Dempster MacKenzie; popular journalist, novelist, and short story writer Roark Bradford; and successful businessman and author of numerous novels and short stories Williams March Campbell.

The Gaithers kept their Fairhope home even after Rice became the managing editor of the Meridian Dispatch in Mississippi in late 1916. In October 1917, Gaither became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and in 1929 the New York Times hired him as a reporter and feature writer. Gaither worked for the Times until his death in 1953.

The Gaithers’ move to New York was designed to aid their literary careers more than Gaither’s journalistic ambitions. While Rice reported widely for the Times and had his short stories published in leading literary magazines, it was Frankie’s writing that found the most success and notice.

Working as a freelance writer, she published many short stories and reviews, wrote one major biography, authored four children’s books during the 1930s, and three novels in the 1940s.

As a novelist, Frankie belonged to a school of white Southern writers who used literature to influence politics and advance black rights. They viewed black characters and themes as part of American history and literature and won praise for their sensitive treatments of these characters. One side of Frances Gaither’s family hailed from Maine and the other Tennessee, where her grandfather worked his cotton plantation with slaves. She pointed to this family mix as the reason for her deep concern for the plight of blacks.

Gaither’s novels portrayed the antebellum South without mint juleps, white columns, or contented slaves, a sharp contrast to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, which was published in 1936.

Reviewers for the New Yorker, New York Times, and the Saturday Review of Literature highly praised her novel Follow the Drinking Gourd, published in 1940, and re-issued in paperback in 1968. Her last novel, Double Muscadine, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and also garnered praise from reviewers. One of those reviewers happened to be the Gaithers’ old friend and former colleague, Herschel Brickell. In his review for the New York Times, Brickell proclaimed Double Muscadine “a novel of unmistakable  distinction.”

Frances Gaither died two years after her husband Rice at the home of relatives in Rockledge, Florida, on October 28, 1955.

Henry Herschel Brickell

Henry Herschel Brickell was born September 13, 1889, in Senatobia, Mississippi, but grew up in Yazoo City. With an insatiable appetite for reading, Brickell spent hours in the Ricks Memorial Library and consumed one or two books a day after the school year ended. In high school, he played right guard on the Yazoo Public School No. 1 football team and played in the state’s first interscholastic football match. He graduated valedictorian of his class.

Herschel Brickell

Brickell enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1906, the same time Rice Gaither was there, and majored in English. Brickell quickly became involved in the school’s Hermean Literary Society. In 1908, he became a member of Sigma Kappa Beta, composed of students awarded the Marcus Elvis Taylor Memorial medal. The medal is the university’s highest academic award, recognizing students with at least a 3.90 grade-point average.

In 1909, Brickell served as editor-in-chief of the University of Mississippi Magazine. Here he began encouraging such writers as Arthur Palmer Hudson, whose first poem appeared in the magazine. Brickell also reported “Locals,” one-sentence snippets on students’ comings and goings, for Varsity Voice. Brickell’s fellow students elected him as president of his junior class, but in 1910, after repeatedly failing math, Brickell left Ole Miss without graduating and joined his friend Rice on the staff of the Mobile Register. By 1914, he was the telegraph editor.

A battalion sergeant major of the 4^th Alabama Infantry, Brickell was called to Montgomery with 3,200 members of other units of the National Guard on May 18, 1916. The troops were nationalized in June and ordered in October to join regular Army troops along the border with Mexico to guard against the raids of Poncho Villa. The Alabama units didn’t fight or even cross the border.

[Note: Brickell’s biographers offer a confusing timeline of Brickell’s life. During this period, for example, the Lives of Mississippi Authors says that Brickell worked as a reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser after leaving Ole Miss and was editor of a paper in Pensacola, Florida, in 1914 before going with the Alabama National Guard to Mexico. None of Brickell’s biographers mention his time at the Register. Also Brickell wouldn’t have been in the Alabama National Guard if he was working in Florida at the time. Lives also says Brickell served in the First Regiment, but it is more likely he was in the Fourth.]

After the Mexico expedition, Brickell returned to Mississippi and became editor of the Jackson Daily News. In 1918, he married Norma Long of Jackson, and the following year the couple moved to New York where Brickell worked on the copy desk of the Evening Post. From 1919 to 1923 he reported news stories and wrote editorials.

He found his passion in 1923 reviewing new books by Southern authors in his daily column, “Books on Our Table.” Among the authors he encouraged were Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Margaret Mitchell, Stark Young, Langston Hughes, and William Alexander Percy. Over the next 30 years, Brickell contributed reviews and essays to the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Review of Literature, Atlantic Monthly, and many other major publications. Brickell became recognized as one of the country’s most influential book critics.

In 1928, Brickell became an editor for book publisher Henry Holt and Company, where he sought out new literary talent. Brickell returned to the Post as literary editor in 1934. He favorably reviewed Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. Taken with the book, Brickell traveled to Georgia that summer to meet Mitchell and they became friends, writing and visiting over the years.

Edwin Grandberry, Margaret Mitchell,
and Herschel Brickell

In 1939, Brickell received a Julius Rosenwald Foundation award to study the history of Natchez and a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Spain. Both projects were to lead to books, but neither did.

During World War II, Brickell worked as senior cultural relations assistant to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Columbia, returning to the States in 1943 and working for the State Department until 1947. His government service overlapped his literary work.

Brickell had his greatest influence on American literature as editor of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Short Stories yearly series from 1941 to 1951. These collections of the best short stories published in U.S. magazines introduced talented young fiction writers to a world audience. Authors Brickell presented included Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, and Ray Bradbury. Yazoo City historian Sam Olden said, “Eudora Welty once told me that the first real recognition she ever got was when he was editor of the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories and he selected her for an award.”

After a trip to research the state of humanities in South America for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952, Brickell and his wife returned to their home, Acorn Cottage, in Ridgefield, Connecticut. One of his fellow Mississippians, a fellow writer, and friend Stark Young lived nearby.

In 1952, Brickell and his wife Norma had begun preparing to edit the next O. Henry short stories anthology. When Norma awoke on the morning of May 29, she noted Herschell’s absence. She discovered their garage door closed and her husband’s pajama-clad body inside the running car. 

Brickell left no message. “Hard work and a tendency to despondency were the reasons suggested by police and physicians to account for Mr. Brickell’s death,” the Ridgefield Press reported.

At the 1938 Bread Loaf Writers Conference, from left in chairs, historian
Bernard DeVoto, poet Robert Frost, Herschel Brickell, and conference director
Theodore Morrison. On steps, Frost's secretary Kay Morrison
and writer Helen Everitt.

Garrard Harris

Garrard Harris was born May 14, 1876, in Columbus, Georgia. He attended the University of Georgia and North Georgia Agricultural College before earning a law degree in 1902 from Millsap College in

Jackson, Mississippi. He edited one of the capital’s newspapers for a time, married Mary Lou Sykes on November 14, 1906, and practiced law in Jackson until 1911.

Harris’ official biographies show a gap in his career between 1911 and 1914, which must have been the time he was the associate editor at the Register. He’s included among the staff listed in the One Hundredth Anniversary & Seventy-third Annual Trade Review of the Register issued in late 1914.

Harris also took on work with the government, some of which may have overlapped his job at the Register but at some point became full-time. He served as a special agent to Latin America with the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1914-1917. For two years after that he served as a specialist and editor with the Federal Board of Vocational Education, which had state offices. Then he became a commissioner with the U.S. Department of Commerce until 1920.

In the spring 1920, Birmingham News publisher Victor H. Hanson hired Harris as associate editor, a job he held until his death in 1927.

Harris had shown an interest in writing fiction from an early age. The magazine Short Stories published one of his stories in November 1893 and he continued writing short stories until his death. Argosy All-Story Weekly magazine also published his short stories. He wrote three novels, Joe the Book Farmer, Trail of the Pearl, and Treasure of the Land, all published by Harper and Brothers.

David Rankin Barbee

David Rankin Barbee was born on October 15, 1874, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His father, a Methodist minister, was the first chaplain commissioned by Jefferson Davis as Confederate president. It was highly unlikely, then, that Rankin would reject his rebel heritage. Barbee viewed himself as an “unreconstructed” Southerner.

Barbee attended Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia, about 1892 and studied medicine 1895-96 at Vanderbilt University, without receiving a degree. He once said he “never was graduated from anything from kindergarten to the university.” He also never stayed at any one newspaper very long:

• 1896-1899: reporter, Nashville Banner
• 1901: reporter, Nashville American
• 1901-1908: telegraph editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
• 1908: editor, Chattanooga Star
• 1908-1910: news editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
• 1910-1911: managing editor, Montgomery Advertiser
• 1911-1918: managing editor, Mobile Register
• 1918-1926: news editor, New Orleans States
• 1926-1928: managing editor, Asheville Citizen
• 1928-1932: feature writer, Washington Post

While at the Register Barbee found some time to get married to Elina Guzman in 1913, which may be why he lingered at newspaper longer than he did at most.

In 1928, the Washington Post hired Barbee as a feature writer. His column “Profiles” earned a large and loyal audience.

Barbee joined the Roosevelt administration in 1933 as a public relations writer and moved around in departments as he had newspapers. He started as an assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, then for the Federal Alcohol Administration, followed by the Treasury Department.

From his retirement in 1942 until his death in 1958, Barbee devoted his time to historical research. He had wide-ranging interests but mainly focused on Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, confederate spy Rose O'Neil Greenhow, and Southern history.

Barbee was a member of a generation of Southern historians and writers who took seriously the need to present their understanding of the South’s role in the growth of the national.

His articles appeared in such journals as Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine and the Southern Churchman. Barbee also wrote about his research in letters to editors of newspapers and periodicals. Barbee published two major works: Washington: City of Mighty Events and An Excursion in Southern History.

Historian Terry A. Barnhart found that Barbee sometimes confused different facts, indulged in hearsay evidence, and was prone to overstatement. Barnhart also thought that Barbee let his Southern loyalties cloud his judgment.

Barbee’s judgment embroiled him in controversy in 1935. Barbee claimed in an AP interview that Elizabeth Keckly, a formerly enslaved woman who became dressmaker to First Mary Todd Lincoln, wasn’t the author of an 1868 memoir about the Lincolns’ lives in the White House. Barbee had a deeply held belief that no black woman in 1868 “had enough culture to have written such a book.”

Further research by the AP and amateur historian John E. Washington proved Barbee wrong and resulted in Washington’s book They Knew Lincoln published in 1941.

Barnhart accurately observed that “Barbee had a journalist’s nose for a good story, wrote well, and compiled valuable source materials, but he was still fighting the Civil War—self-consciously and fearlessly.”

Barbee died in Orange, Texas, on March 7, 1958.

Auction sales put consumer goods on merchants' shelves and sale ads supported Mobile newspapers

Mobile Gazette ad 1819

Auction house advertising was an important source of income for the Mobile Register and other newspapers in the early 1800s. Auctioneers controlled vast amounts of credit and served as virtual banks. These roles gave auctioneers considerable influence in Mobile’s business community between 1815, when the War of 1812 ended, and 1837, when an economic recession began and the auction system started to fade away.

The War of 1812 ground U.S. commerce nearly to a standstill. The British blockade of Atlantic ports didn’t affect Mobile for most of the war because the town was a small Spanish outpost on the Gulf frontier and Spain was allied to Britain. The Americans took possession of Mobile in 1813. With the end of the war in 1815, Mobile folded into the American marketplace and began to grow as settlers poured into the Alabama territory.

British warehouses bulged with unsold goods during the war. With peace, English manufacturers soon flooded U.S. Atlantic ports with chinaware, textiles, hardware, and all manner of other goods. New York benefitted most from this trade. Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other Atlantic ports received lesser amounts of trade.

Mobile Gazette ad 1820

Enterprising American auctioneers at the Atlantic ports learned they could sell more of the goods faster than regular merchants and auctions became a major means British manufacturers sold their goods into the American market. Auctioneers sold their stock quickly for cash and restocked quickly with the newest and most stylish items. Because the Early Republic didn’t have a well formed wholesale distribution system, auctions helped fill the need of getting goods to retailers.

Mobile benefited from this import trade indirectly for the most part. Agents in U.S. Atlantic ports shipped the English goods to Mobile and New Orleans. Auctioneers, brokers, and commission merchants disposed of the goods from there.

Auctioneers could only sell at an open auction. Brokers brought buyers and sellers together and could make private sales. They were paid by either the buyer or seller. Commission merchants, also called factors, acted for the seller. They could receive goods for sale, exchange, or dispose of them by other means and were paid either by the seller or from a commission on the sales.

Mobile Register ad 1827

Even before Alabama became a state in 1819, the territorial government regulated auctions, unlike other forms of trade. The Territorial Legislature required auctioneers to have a license, issued for two years, from the governor. Auctioneers had to provide a surety bond, between $500 and $3,000, at the discretion of the governor. They paid to the county tax collector a $1 state sales tax on every $100 of goods they sold. The law limited auctioneers to a commission of $1 for every $100 of sales. The Mobile city government also licensed auctioneers, unlike regular merchant trade. The newspaper editor with the most political influence at City Hall usually obtained the profitable auction-room advertising.

Scholars have focused a great deal of attention on the auction system of New York City. That’s because there are extensive records and statistics regarding New York auctions, which dominated the U.S. market. Records for other cities, such as Mobile, are wanting and we know little about their auction systems. But some facts about Mobile auctions and auctioneers can be gleaned from advertisements and news stories on the pages of the Register.

George Davis, Sr., one of Mobile’s most colorful auctioneers, arrived in the Port City around 1824 from Tuscaloosa, where he had operated a store and hotel since 1820. His business interests in Mobile included an inn, a store, and a livery stable, and he also speculated in real estate. He served as the Mobile agent for New Orleans slave dealer Levy Jacobs. Because Davis was a common name, George gave himself the title of “the ORIGINAL George Davis.”

Davis lived up to his billing. “A quick shrill voice, a flexible manner, ready wit, and free and exhaustless humor, made his sales attractive as well as effective, and rendered him an agreeable companion for all the lovers of mirth and jovial social intercourse,” the Register said.

The paper noted of Davis that, “Large sums of money passed through his hands but they were always accounted for with scrupulous fidelity.” In their business, auctioneers mostly insisted on cash, but cash was hard to come by on the frontier. In its place, auctioneers accepted endorsed promissory notes. They might extend credit for 6 to 8 months to large buyers. A merchant who could establish credit with an auctioneer gained a solid business reputation. Davis reminded his customers that if they could not pay in cash, a promissory note “in case of mortality would save much trouble to Administrators. . . .”

These financial services made the auction houses a hub of commercial activities and gave auctioneers a great deal influence in the Mobile business community. The Port City in 1830 was still only a small town of about 3,200 people and many of those were slaves. By 1840, the population had grown to around 13,000, including about 4,500 slaves. Although Mobile’s population was more than four times larger, it was still a small community.

Auctioneers stood out for their wealth. They often served as bank directors and received extensive lines of credit. Philip McLoskey, a principal in McLoskey, Hagan & Co., served as president of the Planters’ and Merchants’ Bank in Mobile.

Auctioneers took part in the community in other ways as well. Davis performed comic songs on the Mobile theater sage. He sponsored Democrat Party gatherings and even ran for alderman in 1838, but then quickly withdrew. His candidacy may have been intended as a joke, as was the case when he ran for mayor three years later.

Auctioneer Solomon I. Jones volunteered in the Neptune Engine Company No. 2, served several terms on the Board of Aldermen, and became a lieutenant colonel in the Alabama State Militia. He joined the Odd Fellows fraternal organization and became a trustee of the Congregation Shaarai Shomayim.

Jones also served for a time as a port warden. This political appointment aided his business interests. Warden’s jobs differed from port to port and from time to time. They often examined vessels to make sure they were seaworthy. They also inspected cargo, which gave Jones some control over goods being sold in Mobile and an advantage over competitors.

Most of Mobile’s auction houses were located close to one another on Water Street, from Government Street to St. Michael Street, or on a side street. That was only about a block from the Mobile River wharves and within easy reach of any incoming vessel.

The auction and commission merchant firm of Robertson, Beal & Co. conducted its business from the corner of Water and St. Francis streets. John Wylie, also an auctioneer and commission merchant, operated from Water Street between Government and Conti streets. Davis, meanwhile, had his auction stand at the corner of Royal and Conti streets, a block west of Water. All of these businesses were within a block or two of the Register and other newspapers located around Royal and Dauphin streets.

Auctioneers could deal in all sorts of goods but after a while they tended to specialize. Davis handled livestock such as horses, mules, asses, and cattle, but also traded in humans—slaves. Still conducting auctions at age 70 in 1840, Davis said that the other auctioneers in Mobile, except for two, agreed to give him a monopoly on the sale of animals and slaves, “in consequence of the great age and exemplary character of the ORIGINAL.”

By the time Davis announced his near monopoly, the auction system had already declined as a distribution system. Auctions returned to their more traditional purposes and auctioneers branched out in their businesses.

In 1837, Sol Jones and his younger brother Israel Jones opened an auction house and store in Mobile. The brothers specialized in tobacco, but also offered general commission services. By the 1840s, the Jones brothers had higher dollar sales than Davis and had become wealthy citizens.

Ralph Canter moved to Mobile from New Orleans and in 1840 opened an auction and commission business. Along with his wife Sara and her widowed sister-in-law Jane Da Costa, Canter also opened a dry goods and fancy store on Dauphin Street, between Royal and Water streets.

The growing sophistication of the national wholesale distribution network, the rise in domestic importers, and new forms of credit proved more efficient than the auction system in getting goods into the hands of merchants. Auction houses could still make plenty of money, but they played a smaller part in the local and national economy.