by Alice Echols
The West’s vexed, sometimes hostile relationship to the federal government is of long standing. The 2016 seizure by a right-wing militia group of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is just the most recent example. And yet Westerners have depended upon the federal government in multiple ways—the conquering of native peoples, subsidizing (and then regulating) transcontinental railroads, and protecting the interests of cattle kings, to name a few. In the twentieth century, as public lands were set aside for national parks and forests, military bases and monuments, the government’s involvement in the region intensified. The government subsidized the construction and maintenance of huge reclamation, irrigation, and hydroelectric projects. Despite (or perhaps because of) the New Deal’s largesse toward the West, which received three times the national average of federal expenditures, Westerners all too often responded by “gnawing at the hand that fed them.”66 Historian Albert Hurtado has provocatively suggested that the West has so benefited from government largesse that the region might be better understood not so much as “the cradle of individualism” but rather as “the nursery of Big Brother.” Doubtless the West’s dependence on the federal government goes a long way toward explaining its twitchy, defensive relationship to it.67
It would take decades for the politics of these taxpayers’ associations to achieve legitimacy on the national stage. It began to pay off nationally in 1964 when the conservative Arizona businessman Barry Goldwater won the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency. It was the New Deal, which Goldwater opposed, that had gotten him started in politics. When he ran for the Senate in 1952 he sounded like Merrill Shoup: “Do you want federal bureaus and federal agencies to take over an increasing portion of your life?”68 Indeed, Shoup was one of Goldwater’s earliest supporters in Colorado.69 In 1968, four years after Goldwater’s failed presidential bid, Richard Nixon would strike a familiar chord of taxpayer rights in his appeal to the aggrieved “Silent Majority.” Even more aggressively than the taxpayers’ leagues of the thirties, Nixon’s pitch to the Silent Majority deployed what one historian calls a “populist discourse that obscured divisions between working-class and middle-class white voters.”70 Less than a decade later anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13 won over voters in California and radically changed property tax assessment there.71 In Colorado, where the seeds of tax rebellion had been planted in the twenties and thirties, taxpayers would once again organize in the 1980s. And then there was Ronald Reagan, who famously argued that, far from being the solution to our country’s problems, government was the problem.72
The Depositors’ Committee and the El Paso County Taxpayers Association show that anti-statist conservatism has a long history. They also exemplify the phenomenon at the very heart of this book—a kind of consciousness that was not peculiar to the American West but which thrived in certain communities there. Members of the Depositors’ Committee and the El Paso County Taxpayers Association opposed city-owned public utilities, and they never endorsed stiffer government regulation of the B&L industry or of the companies looking to scam desperate depositors, because all of these efforts involved imposing unfair limits on free enterprise. Keeping government out of one’s home and out of one’s bank account was a crucial component of their American dream. It was precisely this vision of getting ahead that had allowed my grandfather to pull off his swindle in the first place.
Where the depositors and Walter Davis parted company was on the question of the money and to whom it rightly belonged. However, this remained a moot point that fall, as the police were no closer to nabbing him or the money than they had been in June. Chief Harper had played a role in taking down the notorious Fleagle gang only five years earlier.73 Just as the scandal was unfolding he became president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.74 And yet when it came to knowing the whereabouts of Walter Davis, the legendary “manhunter” was clueless.
6
The Port of Missing Men
Three years into the Great Depression Americans learned that life could grow even bleaker. Economically, the winter of 1932–33 was the worst in all of U.S. history.1 In 1930 1,345 banks failed, a number that hit 2,000 the following year. But in the winter of 1932–33, there were ten bank failures a day in America and countless bank runs.2 By early 1933 between 25 and 30 percent of the country’s workforce was unemployed. Relief funds were pathetically undersized. With tax revenues sharply down, cities slashed services. City government in Detroit went so far as to close its zoo and slaughter its animals, which were then fed to the city’s hungry residents.3 Beyond the city, farmers were so desperate that the president of the American Farm Bureau, a conservative, warned Congress that unless something was done to alleviate the suffering of America’s farmers, the countryside would succumb to revolution.4 Businessmen in Muncie, Indiana, were likely not the only people who, in anticipation of widespread revolt, stockpiled large quantities of canned food in their cellars.5 And in rural Sikeston, Missouri, the local newspaper worried that Hoover’s attentiveness to big business over suffering veterans would lead to “riots next winter in cities and Socialists at the next election.”6
Shattered by bank runs, bankruptcies, and massive unemployment, Americans were no longer beguiled or amused by the excess and extravagance now associated with the twenties. Something else was driving this shift as well: revelations of widespread financial dubiousness and outright malfeasance in American banking and finance. The headlines that year included the likes of Chicago’s energy mogul Samuel Insull, who fled the country before he could be arrested on charges of embezzlement. Insull couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “What have I done,” he asked, “that every banker and business magnate has not done in the course of business?”7 Financial wrongdoing was hardly limited to tycoons such as Insull and Wall Street financiers, even if it proved especially lucrative for them. In New Mexico, seven bankers were sentenced to the state pen in October 1932 for a $73,000 shortage at the First National Bank of Santa Fe. Among those sentenced was the bank’s assistant cashier, Otis Seligman; his father, Arthur Seligman, was the bank’s president and the state’s governor.8 Months earlier, investigators found that the operator of twelve failed banks in Chicago, the Bain Banks, made $5 million in unsecured “character loans” to relatives and politicians with whom he was friendly.9
Prosecutors were aggressive in going after bankers. Sometimes they were playing to angry depositors; it was a get-tough stance that brought them favorable press and votes, even if the charges didn’t always stick. Even when bankers were vigorously prosecuted, vengeful depositors sometimes opted for vigilante justice. In Illinois, two men kidnapped a banker who had been sentenced to serve between one and three years in the state penitentiary. The men, one of whom had lost $6,000 in the crash, attacked the banker in his home, bound and gagged him, and took him for a car ride lasting most of the night. The sixty-five-year-old man was found the next day still alive but very badly beaten in a patch of weeds where his attackers had left him to die.10
In Colorado Springs the prevailing opinion about Walter Davis was that he had not made the cultural turn away from extravagance, that he remained his same old conspicuously consuming self. By mid-October 1932 the dailies were certain that the “master criminal” had been plotting his escape for years and that he was now living the high life somewhere enviably exotic. Perhaps he was on some South Seas island, the press speculated, or maybe he was in Greece, where the indicted Insull had fled to escape extradition. Almost certainly his “paradise” included female companionship. One thing was for sure—he had vanished into “the port of missing men.”
In fact, the only border that Walter crossed, and only very briefly at that, was the Canadian border when he visited Niagara Falls. The authorities were convinced he had fled the country, but the July 11 expiration date on his passport seems to have stumped him. He was also keenly aware that in much of Europe foreigners were expected to register with the police, who would have been al
erted to be on the lookout for an American fitting his description. Life on the lam for my grandfather did not match the outsized fantasies that people back home harbored. His nearly two-hundred-page FBI file offers a fairly detailed account of his comings and goings, provided by the one man with whom he spent time while he was on the run.11
A day after Lula left New York for Colorado Springs, Walter went to Broadway Drive It Yourself, a car rental outfit close to Central Park. Introducing himself as William Arnold, he arranged to rent a car for four days and, through the shop’s proprietor, hired a driver at $5 a day, all expenses paid. The man whose good fortune it was to be his driver was John Henry Bogans, a thirty-five-year-old African American. A World War I veteran, he lived at the coincidentally named Davis Apartments on 136th Street in Harlem. The two men traveled to Poughkeepsie, where they stayed for two nights, before heading off to Albany and coming back to the city via Yonkers.
Upon returning to Manhattan, Walter decided against going back to the Gramercy Park Hotel, even though he had paid for his room through the first week of July. Instead, he rented a room at the nearby Parkside Hotel, not the sort of luxury hotel where the police might have expected to find him.12 As soon as they returned to the city, Walter presented his chauffeur with a proposition: if Bogans became his personal driver, he would pay him $40 a week and front him the money for a secondhand automobile. Bogans accepted the offer and Walter advanced him $250 with which to buy a used Ford. He also agreed to cover the expenses of the road—gas, oil, repairs, and the man’s food and lodging. This was easily twice as much as many professional men were earning during the Depression.
From early July until sometime after Labor Day the two men were on the road together. They traveled to New London, then to Boston and Portland, usually stopping for one or two nights. Many of their visits included a five- to ten-minute trip to a bank, just long enough, presumably, for Walter to cash a Liberty Bond. After a quick stop in Northampton, Massachusetts, Bogans drove them to Albany, where they lingered for a full week. Once there, Walter took in the Seabury Commission hearings investigating corruption in New York mayor Jimmy Walker’s administration. From Albany, they stopped in Schenectady, where they toured an electrical plant. On their way to Niagara Falls their route would have taken them close to Cooperstown, where just three years earlier Walter had attended his daughter’s graduation. After stopping in Buffalo, they took in Akron, Pittsburgh, Cumberland, and Baltimore, Maryland. Finally, after five days in Asbury Park, where Walter declined to stay at a hotel that catered to Jewish visitors, they returned to New York City.
Hotels routinely practiced discrimination, usually against racial and ethnic minorities, and when they traveled Bogans had to locate lodging elsewhere for himself. Still, the two men spent a good deal of time in each other’s company. And in Albany, where Walter rented a hotel apartment with a kitchen, the two men cooked breakfast together every morning for a week. Back in New York, Bogans picked up Walter each day from the hotel around midday and chauffeured him around the city. His favorite destination was South Shore Drive in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. There he would take what must have been melancholy walks as he watched the ships passing through the Narrows on their way to sea or into the harbors of New York and New Jersey. Bogans noted that his employer seemed unusually well informed about the movements of cruise ships. Of course, he probably would have been knowledgeable about departure times if just weeks earlier he had figured that Europe offered the best solution to his dilemma.
Walter Davis, fall 1932. The September police circular advised that he might have lost weight during his time on the lam, and the suit’s baggy fit suggests he had. (Author’s archive)
Bogans was the only person with whom my grandfather had any meaningful, face-to-face contact that summer and fall. Hotel staffers considered him the “perfect guest” because he paid his bills in cash and on time and never made a fuss. They often ran into him because he frequently went out on walks all over the city, and when they saw him they tried to cheer him up. Likewise, guests there knew him as a “man with a haunted look.” Throughout his stay, he kept to himself and never spoke to anyone unless first addressed. But with his driver, Walter was uncharacteristically chatty. He gave Bogans financial advice, warning him against investing in first mortgages—the best mortgages in which to invest and the bread and butter of the soundest building and loan associations—steering him instead toward government bonds. It likely helped to forge something of a bond between them that Bogans was from a solid family. His uncle worked as a sales manager at an insurance firm in Chicago, so Walter could have talked with him about life insurance. The fact that Bogans also had spent time in Europe during the war meant that the two men could talk about their impressions of life abroad.13
My grandfather described himself, or the man he was impersonating, as a retired lawyer from Cincinnati, and on more than one occasion he boasted that he had enough money to last him the rest of his life. Bogans, who noticed that his boss’s left-hand coat pocket always looked to be full of money, believed this to be true. Walter also made a point of emphasizing that a friend with whom he said he sometimes met was an old college chum of his, although Bogans never saw this alleged friend.
In many respects, Walter’s narrative of this man’s life as a successful, college-educated lawyer matched the life he had wanted for himself. Curiously, he never mentioned having a wife, a daughter, or, for that matter, a mistress. There was one woman in his story—his mother, whom he claimed lived in Bermuda with her second husband. He would be living with her, he explained, were it not for his stepfather, whom he apparently disliked. Impersonating a bachelor from Cincinnati lessened the possibility Bogans might ever link him to the missing Colorado banker. But one wonders if remaking himself into a single man may have also reflected his weariness with romantic entanglements. As for his stepfather, perhaps he was a stand-in for Walter’s real-life brother Roy, who had taken on the role of the family patriarch after their dad’s death.
My grandfather may have been a lone wolf, but life as a fugitive was largely solitary and offered little by way of pleasure. He was especially lonely for his wife and daughter, but communicating with them was dangerous. Nonetheless, he began to telephone Lula in early August, about a month after she returned home. The calls became more frequent when he was back in the city. Once or twice a week he ventured into a drugstore in the Murray Hill district and called her from a phone booth there. While he was traveling in July and August he had posted letters to her, but once he was back in New York he had to abandon conventional letter writing. Aware that the authorities were on the lookout for any communication that would reveal his whereabouts, he developed an alternative method of staying in touch.
On three occasions that fall he visited the nearby branch of Brentano’s bookstore, at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street, and on each visit he purchased at least one book. (His choices were eclectic: Nobody Starves, Katherine Brody’s proletarian novel about striking Detroit autoworkers; British novelist Warwick Deeping’s Smith; a book of sophisticated cartoons entitled Virgins in Cellophane; New York: The Wonder City, an elegant book with photographs of many of the city’s best-known buildings; and Poems That Have Helped Me.) Each time he asked the store to mail the book, first class and special delivery, to his wife in Colorado Springs. Walter then accompanied the clerk to the mail department and waited while the book was wrapped and prepared for shipping. He made one further request—that the sales clerk paste a small card, which Walter himself provided, on the inside cover of each book. At least one sales clerk found his attentiveness unusual, but he attributed it to the fact that the method of shipping was both involved and expensive. If Walter got letters to Lula this way, it was trickier for her to get letters to him. However, beginning sometime in November Lula reportedly mailed letters to him, using the address “William Arnold, General Delivery, Yonkers, New York.” Bogans drove him to the Yonkers post office twice a week. Walter followed the same routine each time he was dropped off
there. Although the weather had already turned cold, he removed his muffler and overcoat upon exiting the car, as if to signal his arrival to someone.
As winter began to set in, Walter weighed his options. He told Bogans he was thinking of spending the winter in Agua Caliente, a gaming resort that had opened in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1927. Agua Caliente attracted Americans looking to gamble and drink, and its visitors included mobsters as well as Hollywood stars. “Where the rainbow ends” (and, by inference, the proverbial pot of gold awaited) was how the resort billed itself. What drew my grandfather to it, besides the weather, was that, as its advertisements stressed, passports were not required. He planned to travel to Agua Caliente by train, but he promised Bogans he would advance him money so he could drive across the country to meet him there. Then, sometime in March, he would depart Mexico for Los Angeles, he told his chauffeur.
Leaving the city he loved doubtless had something to do with the cold weather, but Walter was also growing more anxious. Certainly by October he knew about the wanted poster that featured his picture. He knew it contained a veritable laundry list of his habits, traits, and idiosyncrasies. Practically everything about him—from his prodigious consumption of apples and his sartorial preferences to his health problems and peculiar posture—was noted. That degree of detail would have required the cooperation of colleagues, friends, and perhaps even family members, which would have added to his uneasiness. Most nerve-racking of all was the fact that the poster featured that enticing $1,000 reward.
Walter was right to worry about the wanted poster, which by late September was making the rounds of police departments, newspapers, and detective magazines.14 Walter often walked in the park adjacent to his hotel. Manhattan’s only privately owned park, Gramercy Park was—and is—off limits to the general public. As a resident of the Parkside, he would have had a key to the park’s gates. It would seem that police detectives, or at least two such detectives, had ways of accessing the park, too. And so it happened that one day in October two detectives and my grandfather were walking at the same moment on the park’s bluestone paths. The detectives appear to have been enjoying a stroll, but soon they found their attention drawn to the well-dressed middle-aged man walking ahead of them. He was not the type of man who would normally arouse suspicion, but why was it, they wondered, that he kept looking over his shoulder in their direction? Each time he turned his head, he gave them more time to scrutinize his face. “That bird thinks someone is looking for him, all right,” muttered one to the other. Without anything more than his twitchy nervousness to go on, they shelved the idea of questioning him. In that neighborhood of well-heeled residents the presumption of innocence carried considerably more weight than in other parts of the city.15
