That was eight years before he was elected Fairmont’s first Democratic mayor, thirteen years before his first term in Congress, twenty-three before he went to the Senate. He was then a young veteran of the Spanish-American War, a brilliant campus orator who had just been expelled from the university for his role in a now obscure student prank. (The Senator later said he had defied a Yankee college president by singing “Dixie”; Morris, a fellow student, recalled that some cadavers were involved.) Neely asked for a writ of mandamus compelling the regents to take him back, and, as usual, he won.
Now, a half-century later, in a courtroom crammed with townspeople and students, he rose and stalked the all-male jury—a chunky, jut-jawed figure in a double-breasted suit and blue suede shoes, crouching over the jury box, delivering his opening statement in phrases redolent of the days of William Jennings Bryan.
For over an hour he paced before the awestruck twelve, delivering a thundering defense of the Board of Education’s right “to purge its school of teachers it believes incompetent, atheists, Communists, horse thieves, murderers, or just too ignorant to teach children.” He called for “teachers without any high-falutin ideas about not being able to prove there is a God”—teachers who would not corrupt the minds of students “in the sunny morning of life” by “making kindling wood out of their little hopes”—“teachers who believe in the old-fashioned American way our forefathers handed down from the time the barefooted soldiers of Washington stained the snows of Valley Forge with their precious blood.”
“I’m for them,” he vowed, “A to Z. I’m not for teachers tainted with foreign isms.”
He indignantly attacked critics of the American Legion—of “those boys in the first world war” who “left their last best hope on the altar of their country” and “fought to the death in the Argonne Forest and the Belleau Wood, with death and barbed wire around them, where exploding shells and campfires gleamed.”
Luella Mundel, he declared, was a woman who would “tear down the man of Galilee from the Cross”—a woman who “boasted of painting pictures which arouse sexual desires in men.” The Senator said he stood foursquare against any school which “tolerates Communism, atheism, or any other godless philosophy in its halls” and wound up with a plea to the jurors to “burn incense on the altar of almighty God, asserting the right of every American to sing such songs of gladness as ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’ and ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’” He illustrated by reciting the choruses of these in a quavering voice.
“If that’s reactionary,” he cried, “make the most of it!”
Meldahl, himself a Legionnaire, protested he couldn’t make anything of it at all, except perhaps an attempt to prejudice the jury. The Senator objected: he didn’t know how they tried cases where Mr. Meldahl came from, but this was Fairmont, West Virginia. Meldahl came from Charleston, West Virginia.
The outsider began his parade of witnesses with Dr. Hand. His client was absent. She, shaken by Neely’s references to her art, was in the women’s lounge, weeping inconsolably. She therefore missed a further development of this theme in the Senator’s cross-examination of the college president. Dr. Hand, it turned out, had admitted to the board at one of its meetings that he thought his art chairman sometimes used poor judgment. Under Neely’s skillful probing, he first confessed this meant the use of “crude language”; then, squirming under the frozen stare of a thousand eyes, he reluctantly specified this.
The specifications were highly damaging. In their entirety they were not: Dr. Mundel had merely repeated to the Hands a locker-room joke Dr. Rogers had made about one of her abstract paintings, which Jones, the librarian, had purchased. But the whole story—the fact that a psychologist had taken an earthy dig at modern art, and the artist had been amused—did not come out until the following day, when Meldahl got another crack at his witness. The gist of Dr. Hand’s answers, under Neely’s careful questioning, was that Dr. Mundel had given Jones one of her pictures and told him it would “make him masturbate.”
The impact of this on the spectators was electrifying. For a long moment they huddled in stunned silence; then a woman in the rear of the courtroom jumped up, clutching a scarf and galoshes, and darted out, throwing quick, frightened looks behind her. That night a knot of Fairmont men gathered before a magazine store two blocks from the courthouse, telling one another they “sure would like to see that picture.” The display window behind them was choked with such books as The Loves of a Harlot, Passion C.O.D., Free Lovers, The Affairs of a Mistress, and Women of the Night (“No Matter How Hard She Tried She Couldn’t Be Good”).
The following morning Meldahl appeared carrying masked examples of his client’s painting, specimens of extreme cubism, scarcely comprehensible to the untrained eye. When he removed the masking, everyone enjoyed a disappointed laugh—everyone, that is, except the jurymen. At Senator Neely’s insistence, the pictures were not immediately entered as evidence, and the frustrated twelve craned their necks over the jury box, unsuccessfully trying to peep. The only frame within their line of vision was still covered with newspaper, a page from the New York Herald Tribune bearing a photograph of nine Long Island drum majorettes, legs rampant.
Later, when Dr. Mundel was on the stand, Neely seized one of the paintings and thrust it at the jury, asking her if her work consisted of “teaching pupils to draw pictures like THIS thing.” The jurors then passed a pleasant ten minutes twisting the frame at various angles and nudging one another. The Senator also attempted to elicit from the witness an opinion on “what color excites the sexual faculty or passions.” She answered dryly she did not know, but thought the matter proper study for a psychologist.
***
Beyond certain veiled references to the “propaganda” of the American Civil Liberties Union, the only nonprofessional organization to which Dr. Mundel belonged, Senator Neely did not attack her patriotism, and except for her retirement to the women’s lounge that first day, she held her own very well, until he led her down the dark and tortuous lanes of theology. Until then she sat erect in her slack woolen suit—not so poised as Thelma Loudin, who smiled supreme confidence at her husband and counsel, but certainly composed—and answered all questions in her terse, starchy Iowan accent. No, she had never been a Communist, a fellow-traveler, or a Russian sympathizer. No, she was not an atheist.
This last inspired a torrent of senatorial questions: What was her attitude toward the Supreme Being and the Creator of the universe? Had she ever admitted there was a God? Just what was an accurate statement of her religion?
She survived the first such session with the help of Noah Webster. Webster, she pointed out, defines God as something man worships, and she worshipped truth. If the Senator preferred, he could call her God a belief in the order of the universe. The Senator preferred no such thing: he didn’t want to degrade Him and himself by expressing a scintilla of doubt in His almighty existence. What did the witness mean? What about those old Aztecs, praying to the sun and stars, and the Japs, prostrating themselves before Buddha? Did she mean to stand on her oath and say whatever man worships is God? She did. If they deify it, she said, it’s God to them. Of atheists, she observed that Webster defines them as denying the existence of a Supreme Being, and she did not do that. Dr. Mundel rather thought she was an agnostic.
Long after judge, jury, and principals had left that afternoon, spectators stood in the darkened courtroom, arguing obscure ecclesiastical points. The following morning Mr. Loudin toiled behind his wife with an armload of Biblical encyclopedias, closely followed by an eager mob carrying lunch boxes. They were disappointed: Dr. Mundel was at home, ill, and Meldahl proceeded to examine a half-dozen of her former students on her teaching competence. His most spectacular motion that day was his least successful. He proposed to enter in evidence excerpts from the U.S. Constitution, certain sections of the West Virginia Code, and a passage from the Supreme Court decision in the famous West Virginia flag salute case. Neely protested this was unprecedented
, and Judge Meredith agreed. The motion was denied.
Article 3, section 11 of the state constitution provides that “no religious or political test oath shall be required as a prerequisite or qualification to vote, serve as a juror, sue, plead, appeal, or pursue any profession or employment.” Section 15 of the same article specifies that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever… but all men shall be free to profess, and, by argument, to maintain their opinion in matters of religion; and the same shall, in no wise, affect, diminish, or enlarge their civil capacities.” After Meldahl’s attempt to read this into the record, a courthouse regular was found on one of the elevated porticoes outside the building, leaning against a fluted column, overcome with laughter. “Read the code to Neely?” he choked. “He wrote the damned thing!”
The Supreme Court decision, which the Senator did not write, said, among other things, that “if there is any fixed star in our constitution constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”
***
On December 27, when the court reconvened after a Christmas recess, Meldahl lost another round, this time a move to inform the jury on tenure regulations of Fairmont State’s accrediting organizations, and Dr. Mundel, pale and shaky, remounted the stand. Neely crouched over the counsel’s table. Upon her last appearance, he recalled, she had testified she worshipped truth. He now asked her to define truth. She told him she could not: that truth was relative to the information on hand at a certain time. Once people accepted the premise that the world was flat; now they knew better. “I suppose,” she said, “I am a relativist.”
The Senator did not care what she supposed—he wanted to know what it was she worshipped. Her answer, she said, indicated a principle that she worshipped. “Does that mean you have two Gods, truth and principle?” Neely snapped. She asked him to rephrase this. “What I am asking you to do,” he asked her, “is distinguish between your God truth and your God principle.” There was no answer; she sat in one corner of the witness box, as far from him as she could get, with her chin in her hand, looking directly downward. The stenographer read the record back to her and the court asked if her answers were as read. Still she did not reply. “Do you understand what the Senator is trying to get at?” asked the judge. The answer was barely audible: “Not very well.”
“Did you—” asked Neely, “Did you—”
Dr. Mundel turned to the bench. “You must excuse me,” she said. “I am ill.”
Before she reached the rear door she was crying violently, and her sobs, coming from the corridor by the judge’s chambers, echoed in the vast courtroom. The Senator told the court that although he had the greatest sympathy for the sick, he felt his questions were merely embarrassing to one who “doesn’t want all the truth to come out.” He said he considered it a duty “to my client and my country” to make the cross-examination “pitiless and as thorough as possible.”
Dr. Mundel was sent home under sedation. That night, in the square, shingled home where she roomed, she threatened suicide. She told her doctor she was broke, had no way of earning a living, and had nothing to live for. She said she had eaten nothing for several days and asked him to commit her to a mental hospital, where she would be fed. Eric Barnitz, a young sociology instructor, and his wife stayed with her through the evening. On one occasion she ran into her bedroom and tried to lock the door. Another time she announced she was going to slash her wrists, ran into the kitchen, and grabbed a carving knife. Mrs. Barnitz disarmed her. She told the couple she was “caught in a trap,” saw no way out, and had “no reputation left, and no profession.”
“May God have mercy on her,” said Neely, when all this came out in court the following morning. “No one has pity for her as much as I have.”
He declined, however, to accept Meldahl’s suggestion that the defense proceed with its case pending the plaintiff’s recovery. The Senator said his obligations to his client were clearly defined, and he declined to cross the line binding them “by the diameter of a single diminutive hair.” He reaffirmed his duty to protect “parents and teachers and little ones from godless and unAmerican philosophies.”
Meldahl accused Neely of “browbeating” his witness. “That’s a barefaced lie!” Neely shouted, waving a fist. “If you’re a man you’ll come outside and say that! You’re a filthy, lousy liar when you say it!” Judge Meredith made a soft, pawing motion with his hand, much like a football referee’s signal for unnecessary roughness, and the Senator quieted down. Later, however, when Meldahl offered to shake his hand, he refused the gesture.
The trial was at an impasse: Dr. Mundel was her own last witness, and nothing further could be done without her. The issue was resolved by taking a deposition in her home, with the necessary officials present. The transcript of this was to be read in court the following Monday, New Year’s Day, but the jury never heard it, for on Sunday the case blew up.
The demolisher was Fairmont’s Episcopalian minister, the Reverend F. Graham Luckenbill, an Episcopalian clergyman with a reputation for independence. Mr. Luckenbill, addressing his congregation from his lectern, described the trial as a “farce” comparable to “all the bad traits of the Inquisition and the Crucifixion.” As long as a teacher in a state institution makes no attempt to teach his religious or political beliefs, the minister argued, those beliefs are his own and should not be considered by his superiors. Actually, he suggested, when Dr. Mundel said she worshipped truth she was considerably closer to God than Senator Neely, since God is Truth.
The clergyman’s statements were carried in Monday’s Fairmont Times, and the Senator strode into court that morning brandishing a copy of the paper. He demanded a mistrial and got it, over Meldahl’s strenuous objections. Judge Meredith ruled the minister’s comments “improper” and, because of his influence in the community, prejudicial. There was some talk of haling Mr. Luckenbill into court on a contempt citation. Nothing came of it, but the Fairmont Ministerial Association, representing twenty-four local clergymen, issued a statement disassociating themselves from him and denouncing the trying of court cases in the pulpit. The association president, pastor of the Central Christian Church, explained that Mr. Luckenbill did not belong to the organization. Membership, he said, is reserved to those clergymen “who desire to co-operate.”
***
For one reason or another—lack of news enterprise being one reason, the holidays another—the metropolitan press was poorly represented in Fairmont Christmas week, and that pleased no one there. Dr. Mundel’s supporters were hopeful of finding an audience in urban communities, and a reporter for the Fairmont West Virginian, which supported Mrs. Loudin in its news columns, expressed chagrin at not seeing representatives of “the New Republic, the Daily Worker, and the rest of the New York papers.” The Associated Press dealt by telephone with a highly reliable reporter on the Fairmont Times, but it dispatched no staff men to the scene, and its editors sent out a wire photo of the defendant bearing the name of the plaintiff. The Columns, the college’s student paper, carried nothing during the trial. “Our paper,” it explained in a post-trial editorial, “is distributed each week among most if not all high schools in the state. Our purpose in doing this is to advertise Fairmont State as a suitable school where high-school students may continue their education. We feel that if emphasis were placed on any conflict, of any nature, our purpose in distributing this paper among high schools would be hindered.”
The accounts which did appear were eagerly read in Fairmont, however, and Senator Neely, in a sharp allusion to Dr. Hand, deplored the “disgraceful publicity” which had “probably wrecked” the college. It certainly wrecked Dr. Hand locally. Although he had friends well placed in the state, the Board of Education dismis
sed him on March 27. Six members of the faculty then resigned in protest. Adlai Stevenson found a place for the former president at Southern Illinois University. The six protesters drifted off to other campuses. Dr. Mundel remained in Fairmont, hoping for a favorable resolution of her suit.
The city continued to be in a state of trauma. Mr. Luckenbill’s telephone was still ringing constantly when Senator Neely gave the local newspapers a copy of the deposition taken in Dr. Mundel’s home. In it, outraged defenders of Mrs. Loudin read that although the art teacher thought the local school too small to represent all shades of opinion, she did believe that “one good Communist on a large university faculty might be very useful to the student body.” She went on to explain that his ideas could easily be discredited by the other professors. She declined, under the Senator’s continued questioning, to recommend Earl Browder as a desirable addition to the faculty of Fairmont State College.
Her mail was heavy all spring. Support, some of it financial, came from various university professors, lecturers, lawyers, and editors, and from two Unitarian ministers, two Catholics, and a Christian Scientist. She also received three shipments of religious tracts, an anonymous card from a sex crank, and a card informing her that “God has allowed you to live long enough. Now He is about to destroy you.”
The second trial opened on July 7, 1952, with Mrs. Loudin’s defense bolstered by a $2,500 contribution from the treasury of the local Legion post. She firmly denied every charge against her, and her colleagues on the education board paraded to the stand to support the thesis that Dr. Hand had been responsible for the whole mess. It turned out that she had little need of their support, for the judge ruled that her statements as a board member were privileged, unless, of course, they had been malicious. In his closing address Senator Neely, who referred to the plaintiff as “Mrs. P. H. D. Mundel,” said the question was whether schools should be operated by men and women of good will or by “agnostics, Socialists, and screwballs.” The jury deliberated less than two hours and then announced for the defendant.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 32
