Title: Historical treasure purchased for just $10
Date: October 28, 2007
Carroll Scrogin-Brincefield noticed a listing in a flyer for one of Bill Griffin's estate auctions on some German prisoner of war photographs and letters being offered for sale.That was in the spring of 2006 at a time when she was thinking about working on a book about the German internment camps in Texas.
A resident of Hallettsville who is teaching government, economics and world history at Miller High School in Corpus Christi, she had no idea what a historical find it would be when she purchased the items on a winning bid of $10, even though it would turn out that none of the items pertained to German POWs.
What she found covered in cellophane in half of a cardboard box - the kind that canned goods come in - were mug shots taken by the Houston Police Department along with Federal Bureau of Investigation reports from agents in the Gulf Coast area on men who had been arrested and suspected of un-American activities during a time of labor unrest among sailors and longshoreman in the 1930s.
After subsequent contacts with the police department and using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information from the FBI, Brincefield managed to identify 11 men in the photographs from 1935 to 1938. Among the items there was also one group picture and two typed onionskin papers, one being an FBI report on NAZI sympathizers in 1939 and 1940.
Brincefield's research resulted in her writing a paper for the recent fall meeting of the East Texas Historical Association on the rounding up of suspects accused of un-American Activities on the Texas Gulf Coast in the 1930s. Written on the back of the photographs were such notations as "Commie," "Red" and "Red big shot," indicating some of the suspicions that the police had.
"There was not one picture of a German," she says. "All were American citizens, mostly in Texas."
She first contacted the Houston PD and got the arrest records, then went to the FBI for additional information where she had to provide proof of each one's death, information that she found in Social Security death records. The men had scattered about the country from Florida to New York, Texas and California.
Although she has been unable to find any record of convictions, she believes two of the men were tried for murder and that the rest were just released. All were involved in forming unions, in labor strikes, or other labor activities along the Texas Gulf Coast. That being during the bleak period of the Great Depression, she says many workers were feeling less secure in their jobs and some saw the Communist Party in the U.S. as a way to address their concerns.
"There was a great upsurge in communist participation," she further notes, "and influence in labor unions, especially in the maritime industry. Angry workers turned to radicals, men who had been active in the Industrial Workers of the World and in many cases who were now members of the Community Party, or they fell under the sway of gangsters who reflected the other side of the militant traditions on the docks."
What resulted, she explains, was a waterfront that became "more of a war zone than a place of work."
Of the 11 men in the mug shots, she says their records indicate not all were communists, nor did all of them engage in gangster activity.
Two of the men had connections to this part of the state.
A longshoreman, Sylvester P. Brown was born in 1891 at Victoria. He was arrested for allegedly shooting three men and wounding three others on Ship Channel Row. He is not listed as having been a member of the Communist Party.
Santos Garcia, a dispatcher from Baytown who was born in El Campo in 1910, was arrested for an attempted robbery of Miller's Café. The reports indicate he may have been part of a "beef squad" sent in to break the strikers' picket lines.
One of the men, Homer Brooks, a native of Pennsylvania who gave his occupation as an electrician from Houston, was known as organizer for the Communist Party. He was so devoted that Brincefield says he was known to talk so long and so hard to so many people that his jaw muscles were overdeveloped. He also ran twice for governor of Texas on the communist ticket.
Brincefield received more than 120 pages from the FBI on Brooks.
"In reading the reports and the comments," she says, "I have come to the conclusion that Homer Brooks was probably one of the few true communists in this group of 11 men."
It was a complex time in maritime labor relations in Texas and elsewhere in the United States, and she says regardless of their guilt or innocence, or whether they were communists or communist sympathizers, the men in the pictures had endured hardships from the working conditions onboard ships and the grueling workload on the docks.
What they could never have guessed is that their mug shots would turn up years later in an auction barn in South Texas, that for 10 bucks they would be a historical treasure.
Henry Wolff Jr. is a longtime Victoria Advocate columnist. He can be reached at wolfhaus@txcr.net.
Copyright, (c) 2007, The Victoria Advocate
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