For the entire country, the twenties would become a period of extremes and contradictions. The Ku Klux Klan would gain strength; the bigots and hate-mongers who swelled their ranks would brazenly march down America’s main streets hidden beneath hoods and pure white robes. Women, long exploited at the workplace and in their own homes, would at last gain the right to cast votes in political elections. Children would continue to labor for pitiful wages at man-sized jobs. Good citizens as patriotic as any fourth-generation American would be ostracized because of their accents. Automobiles would roll off assembly lines at a record rate, allowing rural America to go to town like never before.
It would become a time for flappers, jazz bands, and vamps. For each sheba, there would be a sheik. Some people insinuated that this period was the grand orgy before the hangover known as the Great Depression crashed over the land. Others said the twenties merely roared. But not everyone would learn the Charleston or sip bathtub gin from a china teacup.
This new decade, one tempered by discontent and the remnants of war, slammed into the public’s consciousness with the shock of a sucker punch. Reform and revolution hung ominously in the air; so did fear. The nation turned inward to prohibit, preach, pray, proselytize, as well as lick its internal sores.
As a giddy America emerged from its twentieth-century puberty and tried to act grown up, Choc Floyd found himself ready to wander. Home and hearth were significant enough, but the young man’s sap was rising fast. He felt pulls and tugs within him. He had to struggle to keep his mind on chopping cotton, mixing mash, and cutting the piles of wood required to feed the constant home fires. He was weary of grubbing in the cotton patch, of seeing his neckerchief soaked with sweat. He no longer wished to wear mended overalls and boots caked with manure. A lifetime spent working land leased from another man seemed futile. He did not desire to become his father. Tenant farming meant there would be nothing to show but hands callused hard as hickory and a litter of children. Those prospects held no allure for young Choc Floyd.
Neither did occasional Saturday afternoons spent at the Wonderland Theatre in Sallisaw or the rare forays to Muskogee and Fort Smith. Those good times did not come often enough for Choc. He had heard about new and strange places from the boys who had come home from what was now being called the Great World War. For the first time in history, masses of Americans had been exposed to foreign lands through direct contact. They were changed by the experience. Farm boys had looked death in the face. They had bedded down exotic women, tasted cognac, and gazed at the Eiffel Tower. A popular song of the time said it best: “How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” Historian Henry May wrote that the conclusion of the war meant “the end of American innocence.” Veterans returned to Sequoyah County with bronze buttons in their lapels to show they had helped defeat the Boche, silver buttons if they had been wounded. They also brought back with them new ideas about people, politics, lifestyle, and just about everything else.
Stories about the fast-paced life in big cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, Kansas City, and St. Louis piqued Choc’s interest. He understood that city streets and sidewalks were paved, that the city girls were scented and saucy, and that every night was a cakewalk for a fellow with something more than a streetcar token in his pocket. Buildings, a few more than seven stories high, had elevators. Homes had indoor toilets and electricity, and eating places set tables with clean cloth napkins and pitchers of ice water. Choc itched to escape the confines of the crowded family house and the worn-out tenant farms. He longed to see the wide world beyond the Cookson Hills, to escape those interminable fields lined with row after row of corn and cotton.
Choc Floyd’s restlessness mirrored that of the entire country. Widespread strikes exploded throughout the land, combined with postwar unemployment and inflation. The economy began to decline just as the war drew to a close. More than half of Oklahoma’s farmers alone were of the tenant variety. When the war ended, all their hopes and dreams literally disappeared in the span of one year. In 1919, cotton prices first rose but then suddenly plummeted by almost 20 percent, tumbling to fifteen cents a pound. The cornucopia of plenty in Little Dixie withered like an old woman’s teat. Although the oil industry soared during the twenties, agriculture remained depressed and many marginal farmers began losing their land. The chasm between the oil men in Tulsa and the farmers elsewhere widened, only increasing the bitterness that was felt in rural areas. Life in the Oklahoma coal fields was pitiful, as well. Many mines closed or went bankrupt. Thousands of striking miners in eastern Oklahoma caused Governor James B. Robertson to call out two regiments of National Guardsmen. Business leaders in the big cities blamed the economic anguish and unrest on IWW agitators, who they said stirred up the people to protest the poor working conditions and unreasonable hours.
Hours traditionally had always been long for farmers and miners. Now for working stiffs in the cities, the shifts stretched from twelve to often fourteen hours a day and sometimes much longer in the steel industry. Wages, already reduced by the use of over 1 million children in industry, were cut even further and businesses started to fail. Hatred toward foreign immigrants, who were thought to take away jobs from native-born residents, increased, as did the apprehension of the Communist party. That fear of communism turned into a show of senseless action during the very first days of the new decade.
On the evening of Friday, January 2, 1920, mass arrests of thousands of suspected Reds occurred as the government carried out raids in thirty-three different cities. This campaign was orchestrated by U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, a Pennsylvania lawyer and politician, and the Justice Department’s William J. Flynn, former director of the Secret Service and, at the time of the raids, chief of the Bureau of Investigation, a precursor of the FBI in those years.
The previous year, Palmer had been one of several prominent Americans, including politicians, judges, and big-business magnates, apparently targeted by a ring of political anarchists. On the evening of June 2, 1919, a pair of would-be assassins ignited a homemade bomb on the front doorstep of Palmer’s Washington, D.C., residence on fashionable R Street. Palmer was not injured in the explosion, which badly damaged his house and shattered windows throughout the neighborhood, but the bomb did blow up the two revolutionaries who set off the device and sent shivers of fear throughout the land. Bloody chunks of flesh and bone mixed with burning bits of clothing scattered on Palmer’s lawn, and a smoldering body part landed on the front stoop of the house directly across the street where Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family resided. Another piece of flesh, like a grotesque projectile, shattered the window of the Norwegian Minister’s residence. Palmer was outraged by the attack, but he was also aware that he had found the cause he needed to establish himself as a visible political candidate for the 1920 presidential race.
Palmer and Flynn had already created the bureau’s General Intelligence Division (GID) to focus on what they called domestic radicalism. They appointed a twenty-four-year-old former file clerk from the Library of Congress named John Edgar Hoover to direct the GID and investigate anyone suspected of being a Communist, a subversive, or a part of the radical left. A graduate of George Washington University Law School, Hoover joined the legal staff of the Department of Justice in 1917, and had previously headed up the Enemy Alien Registration section. He tackled his newest assignment with a vengeance that would become characteristic.
Bureau director Flynn ordered Hoover to concentrate his efforts on uncovering “alien agitators,” and the young lawyer believed he knew exactly where to look. Hoover read everything about Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, and soon he became known as an authority on communism and the radical left. From his Washington, D.C., office on K Street, Hoover amassed impressive dossiers on suspected anarchists, as well as IWW members, alien radicals, socialists, Marxists, and Communists. In a brief he prepared about the American Communist party, Hoover warned that advocates of communism “threaten the happiness of the community, the safety of the individual, and the continuance of every home and fireside. They would destroy the peace of the country and thrust it into a condition of anarchy and lawlessness and immorality that passes imagination.”
Using information gathered by Hoover, Palmer announced that July 4, 1919, would be the date for the launch of a Communist revolution in America. Police chiefs from all major U.S. cities were briefed, state militias went on alert, and law-enforcement officers protected armories and auditoriums around the country. July 4 came and went with no more than the prerequisite displays of fireworks, however. The only notable act of violence took place in Toledo, where Choc Floyd’s pugnacious hero Jack Dempsey pulverized Jess Willard to take the world heavyweight crown. Nonetheless, the undaunted Palmer and his tenacious agents, including young John Hoover, were resolved to continue their warfare on suspected radicals and subversives. They even turned up the heat by several notches.
Hoover’s intelligence reports pointed to Communist involvement in the steel and coal strikes that plagued the nation. After reviewing the legal briefs prepared by Hoover and studying these meticulous reports, Palmer believed he now knew how to use the fear of the Red Tide to get elected to the White House. He immediately ordered the Red Raids, later known as the Palmer Raids, to commence. Bureau of Investigation agents, armed with copies of Hoover’s briefs and some with arrest warrants issued by the Bureau of Immigration, rounded up approximately 2,600 aliens for deportation hearings. Palmer emphatically agreed with Hoover that the problem was part of an international Communist conspiracy. He declared open season on “the IWW’s, the most radical socialists, the misguided anarchists…the moral perverts and the hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism.”
Similar raids had previously occurred in Oklahoma after the war. These actions, also associated with the Red Scare, destroyed the last vestiges of radical resistance organized by IWW militants in the oil fields and coal mines. The raids also virtually dismantled the once-powerful Oklahoma Socialist party.
In reality, of course, the mass chaos that resulted all over the nation was little more than a grab for power and position on the part of Palmer. Even though he remained a hero to many people, Palmer never realized his political dream of a presidential nomination. That was mercifully nipped in the bud. He was never able to achieve national credibility. Few of the government’s charges were ever substantiated, although the Communist party was driven underground. As it turned out, many of the thousands of suspects picked up by the Justice Department agents who stormed union halls, billiard parlors, and bakeries were actually innocent citizens arrested without any foundation. The clamor and protests surrounding the injustices of the Palmer Raids, like the Sacco and Vanzetti case a year later, lasted for decades to come. Palmer was never able to justify the severe abuse many of those apprehended suffered as a result of his overzealous actions. Nevertheless, paranoids throughout the nation, including John Edgar Hoover, would spend their lives peering over their shoulders, terrified of the Communists they believed lurked everywhere.
America’s moral crusade did not stop with the pursuit and persecution of Communists, however. Later that same month, a new era of self-righteousness and virtue, equally hypocritical, was officially ushered in, encouraging the very criminal behavior it was meant to prohibit. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the American Anti-Saloon League, and the other sanctimonious groups that had been crusading for more than a half century against what they perceived to be the insidious influence of alcohol on the country, finally won out.
At precisely 12:01 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the great experiment began. On that date, the manufacture or sale of all alcoholic beverages—except those for medicinal purposes—was made strictly illegal throughout the United States. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned intoxicating liquors, had been proposed by Congress in 1917. Then in 1919, despite the veto of Woodrow Wilson, Congress also passed the Volstead Act. Authored by Congressman Andrew J. Volstead, a Minnesota Republican, this enforcement measure put teeth in the prohibition amendment. In the first month of 1920, Prohibition became the law of the land. Fines and prison terms awaited those who transgressed. Like it or not, all of America was on the wagon.
For the next thirteen years—when lawmakers gradually came to their senses and repealed the amendment—this ludicrous attempt to legislate morality would result in rampant corruption. Prohibition would build a solid foundation for organized crime and spawn major racketeering. From the start, this constitutional amendment was controversial and despised. Robert R. McCormick, owner and editor of the Chicago Tribune, called Prohibition “an insult to American intelligence and maturity.” Nothing in the history of the nation was as unpopular, as violated, or as debated as this single law.
Prohibition was hardly new to the United States. The country’s first prohibition legislation had been enacted in 1851 in Maine, and within a few years, many more states passed similar laws. Most of those early prohibition acts were repealed during the 1860s, but by the end of the century, a renewed offensive against alcohol surfaced. Joining the temperance groups in the fight against liquor were the distinguished leaders of organized religion, especially the Methodists, and also social reformers who linked strong drink with poverty and prostitution. From 1907, the year Oklahoma became a state, until 1915, nine southern states voted in favor of temperance. By 1916, almost half of the nation’s population was governed by prohibition statutes, either on a statewide or local-option basis.
Oklahomans were used to being dry, or at least pretending to be. Since statehood, Oklahoma was thought to be as arid as the Sahara when it came to liquor. Of course, legions of moonshiners and bootleggers, along with their grateful consuming publics, knew better. Even after the rest of the country fell under the rule of the Volstead Act, it was business as usual in Oklahoma. A wink and a nod and some folding money slipped into the right hands could turn up a jar or bottle of hooch.
Out in the sticks, farmers increased their production of moonshine and choc beer to accommodate thirsty customers, including many who drove out from the larger cities. In Sequoyah County, out around Akins and Miller’s Ridge and the other small communities, the larger-volume whiskey makers continued their lively business with locals, but they also noticed a rise in trade with the lodge men, oil company executives, and others who came from Muskogee, Okmulgee, and Tulsa seeking liquid refreshments for their social functions.
The main concern for those enterprising farmers who cooked mash were the agents who snooped through the woods and creek bottoms searching for illegal stills and moonshine operations. Many of the local law-enforcement officers, especially deputy sheriffs and constables, were kinfolk or friends and looked the other way. Some of them even cooked wildcat whiskey themselves or else found ways to help make the bootleggers’ lives easier. A few of the “laws” were not to be trusted, however.
One of the most diligent at busting up moonshiners in the Floyd’s area of the Cookson Hills was Welborn Woodward. After a few years of Prohibition, Woodward, a local farmer who had worked for a short time as a streetcar conductor in Muskogee, hired on as a deputy under Sequoyah County Sheriff George Cheek. He soon got the name “Bone Dry,” due to his rigid attitude about bootleggers. Welborn’s coworker was Andy Edwards, who earned a nickname all his own because of the trick he used when he moved through the woods looking for moonshiners. He would ring a big bell like a lead cow from a herd so no suspicious farmer out working his still would be unsettled by the noise of someone approaching. Walter Floyd and the others who turned out illegal liquor hung the name “Cowbell” Edwards on the deputy, and it stuck.
Walter did not suffer intruders into his personal life lightly, nor did he have much tolerance for anyone who bothered him or his family. That included nosy law officers poking through the weeds hoping to uncover a cache of cooked corn liquor or a stash of choc beer. Like his sons, who mimicked him, Walter was not one to back down from conflict or confrontation.
Elmer Steele grew up in the twenties as a tough orphan kid on the streets of Sallisaw. He washed out chile bowls and did whatever he could to stay alive and out of trouble. He first witnessed Walter Floyd show his mettle at a Fourth of July celebration. The summertime shindigs were popular events that featured big tubs of lemonade, fried fish, deviled eggs, fireworks, and baseball games. On this particular day, Walter made the rounds of the picnics and parties on horseback, a much safer mode of transportation than his Ford when he was nipping moonshine.
“Ol’ Walter Floyd rode up and took his saddle off his horse and tied the horse up to a tree,” recalled Steele. “He laid the blanket on the ground and stretched out to enjoy all the doin’s at the picnic. He had a quart of moonshine whiskey under that blanket, and every once in a while he’d take it out and have a drink. He was just layin’ there with his head on the saddle, mindin’ his business and not botherin’ a soul.”
James Woll, the chief of police, better known around Sallisaw as J.C., and Bert Cotton, another city policeman, moseyed through the picnic grounds and stopped at Walter’s feet.
“They looked down at Walter,” recalled Steele, “and J.C. told him, ‘Hey, Floyd, get up and come on with us. You’re drunk and we’re takin’ you to jail.’ Mister Walter Floyd didn’t move an inch. He just kept layin’ right there, and he told those laws, ‘No. I ain’t drunk and I ain’t botherin’ nobody. Just go on and leave me be.’
“It seemed they just couldn’t do that. They gave his foot a nudge and told him again to get on up and come along to the jail house. He didn’t get up. He told them again to quit botherin’ him. Well, they came back at him a third time and said that he was to come with them, and that’s when Walter Floyd got plumb fed up. He reached under the blanket and pulled out a big ol’ pistol. He just looked right at those police and he said, ‘Now boys, I told you, I’m not drunk, so just keep right on walkin’ and let me be.’ And, that was just exactly what they did.”
Steele’s story was vintage Walter Floyd. During the turbulent twenties, Oklahoma dirt farmers might not have had a great deal of spare walking-around cash, flashy automobiles, expensive suits, or palatial homes like the oil barons and bankers in the big cities; but they did have their dignity. None of the Floyds and their Sequoyah County cousins were ever shortchanged when pride was being handed out. They stood their ground with the best of them. Backcountry folk like the Floyds saw their independence as a natural right. Their personal liberty was as important to them as it had been to old Patience Floyd and her sons. These forebears had relied both on the grace of God and their long rifles to survive in the wilds of nineteenth-century Georgia.
In 1920, Ruby Mae, the third oldest of the Floyd’s children, left the jam-packed family nest in Akins. Two years Choc’s senior, Ruby married Silas M. Spear, a hardworking young war veteran. Ruby and Silas staged a quiet marriage ceremony. The couple settled down in the area to begin their own family. However, Ruby’s big brother, Bradley, and her older sister, Ruth, already had a head start on her when it came to producing grandchildren for Walter and Mamie. On October 14, 1920, Bradley and Bessie became the parents of twin boys. A little more than a month later, Ruth and Tom Wofford had the first of their seven children, a daughter they named Frances. She was Walter and Mamie’s first granddaughter, and while everyone adored her, the twin baby boys living over at Walter Floyd’s place stole much of the thunder.
Bradley’s two sons were especially welcome. Twins had occurred throughout the Floyd family line, but these premature babies were a big surprise. Bessie Floyd had no idea she was carrying twins. “Why, the day they were born everybody was out working the cotton fields, and I stayed home and did the wash for the entire Floyd family,” recalled Bessie. “I sure wasn’t thinkin’ about two babies comin’.” Bessie’s parents got to the Floyd home in time to see the babies arrive. After the first one was delivered, Sam took Walter aside and suggested he fetch one of his nursing bitch hounds to help with the feeding. “There’s more on the way,” Sam Watson laughed. “We’re gonna have a bunch of ’em.”
Bessie and Bradley named their sons Bayne and Wayne. The arrival of his first grandsons tickled Walter Floyd. They provided him and his hunting cronies with a good reason to pause during the cotton harvest and break out new jars of ripened moonshine.
Life was generally bleak that autumn for ardent Oklahoma Democrats. On November 2, 1920, the Democrats got a sound whipping at the polls when Warren Gamaliel Harding, an Ohio newspaper publisher observing his fifty-fifth birthday, became twenty-ninth President of the United States.
It was a stunning landslide for the GOP. Harding and his running mate, the stoic Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, received the largest percentage of popular votes of any winner since the Civil War. They were victorious even in many traditional Democratic strongholds, including the home precincts of their opponents, Ohio Governor James M. Cox and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republicans won with the slogan “Return to Normalcy,” which appealed to both conservatives and isolationists. Considered generally inept and a poor judge of character, Harding, however, enchanted the common folk, who came to believe that he looked like a President. At the same time, his skill at backslapping and cutting deals played well to those who dwelled in the smoke-filled rooms where candidates were created and shaped.
In 1920, the Oklahoma voters were in a revolutionary mood. It seemed that Oklahomans were disenchanted with the Democratic party. In the general elections that year, with women finally allowed to cast their ballot, the state—for the first time in its history—voted overwhelmingly Republican. The election went to Harding over the Democratic candidate Cox, and Eugene Debs, the Socialists’ presidential choice, who languished in the penitentiary at Atlanta after being convicted in 1918 of violating the Espionage Act, came in a distant third. Incumbent Senator Gore had already been defeated in the Democratic primary by Scott Ferris, who then lost out in the general election to Republican John W. Harreld of Oklahoma City. Five of the state’s eight congressional seats were taken over by the GOP. The state senate remained Democratic, but Republicans won several state offices, including some supreme court seats and a majority in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. That body promptly launched investigations of Democratic Governor James B. Robertson and several other Democratic officials. Sacred cows were no longer safe. Like the rest of the nation, Oklahoma was in a state of turmoil.
Winds of change that swirled around the nation rushed across the southern plains. Those restless currents reached sixteen-year-old Charley Floyd, tucked away in the hills of eastern Oklahoma. As the new decade commenced, he stopped biding his time. That powerful impulse to move took control.
He laid down his hoe and picked up a grip packed with clean long johns, darned socks, and folded work shirts. He told his folks, brothers, and sisters so long and kissed their babies’ cheeks.
Charley set out for the distant harvest fields. He would hire on for the going wage and make his own way in the world. He hoped this change of scenery would be the route to help set him free from a lifetime spent as a tenant farmer’s son. Choc was now ready to see the country he had heard so much about. He headed west toward the great seas of wheat. The journey would change him forever.