Harriett wasn’t sure what to do. It was 1936, and the Great Depression had only just begun to plateau, with nearly ten million Americans still out of work. Jobs were still almost impossible to find, and drought was gripping the Southeast again. In her native Franklin County, money was so scarce that a farmer’s choices were to make whiskey, steal, or starve. Many made whiskey, judging from the ongoing conspiracy case that had swept up fifty-five of the county’s moonshiners and haulers, plus dozens of sheriff’s deputies, Prohibition agents, and even the commonwealth’s attorney—who were all thought to be on the take.
Though Prohibition ended in 1933, the multi-tentacled case extended back to 1928 and drew national attention. Between 1930 and 1935, local still operators and their business partners had sold a volume of whiskey that would have generated $5.5 million in excise taxes. Juries were tampered with, bribes offered, and a deputy who happened to be a key government witness was gunned down in his car on a country road, along with a prisoner he was carting to jail on unrelated business—all to keep the deputy from testifying.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had pushed to end Prohibition for good. It hadn’t kept people from drinking anyway, judging from all the swinging nip joints in Jordan’s Alley alone. But money trumped morals when politicians finally conceded that the new liquor taxes were helping fund federal jobs projects. (One such program, the Federal Writers’ Project, employed writers to collect oral histories from across the country—including, for instance, some stories of the Franklin County ex-slaves drawn on earlier in this book.)
Roosevelt himself came to the Roanoke Valley, visiting nearby Salem to dedicate a huge new Veterans Administration hospital complex in 1935. But Harriett Muse, now in her early sixties, had no way of getting to a VA cleaning job even if she’d been lucky enough to land one.
She missed the country. She missed her sons.
And she was dead broke, now dependent on her daughter and son-in-law—who had mouths of their own to feed.
The checks sent home by Ringling Brothers had stopped coming in the early 1930s, according to court records. Though Ringling did swing through Roanoke in the fall of 1935—the local newspaper described it as a “clean show”—there was no mention of Eko and Iko, which we now know was because they were no longer part of the lineup.
Harriett had no idea where or how Willie and George were, and no real way of finding out. In a repeat of what happened to them in their early careers, Candy Shelton had switched the brothers to another show, abruptly cutting off their paychecks—and all contact with their mother.
Having abandoned the contract Warren Messick had negotiated as part of the 1928 settlement package, he was also avoiding the ire of Ringling’s lawyers by finding them all a new employer who played looser with contractual details than Ringling did.
In circus lingo, he had blown the show.
But Shelton had forgotten what a worthy adversary Harriett Muse was. Even her descendants had no idea how consistently fierce she’d had to be, the stories of her heroic actions in 1927 eclipsing any reports of her subsequent battles.
Though the voluminous documents don’t relay her precise motivations, they do reveal that every time the money stopped coming home, Harriett took forceful legal action. While we’ll never know where Willie and George preferred to be as they aged, or how much oversight they had over their earnings—including their mother’s cut—it’s clear from the records that their family connection remained strong.
She had risked her life in 1927, standing up for her sons against lawyers, circus showmen, and the police. That was all true. But her bravery then was simply a prelude to what she would spend the remainder of her life doing: holding the showmen legally accountable. The next case became so convoluted and so protracted that it would persist longer, even, than the moonshine-conspiracy trial.
Harriett hadn’t seen George and Willie for “three to five years,” according to court documents filed in the fall of 1936. The brothers were performing in a carnival called Beckmann and Gerety Shows now, working for a sideshow operated by the Greek-born Canadian Pete Kortes, whose name was pronounced, maybe ironically, “courts.”
If Shelton had dominated the first half of the Muse brothers’ careers, Kortes would dominate the last. And so would the courts.
About a third the size of Ringling, the B&G carnival still was not a small operation. Described as a “Stupendous Spectacle of Inconceivable Magnificence,” promising “Fun and Thrills for the Entire Family,” the traveling show had enough performers, rides, and animals to fill thirty train cars. Major acts included the Singers Midget Band, John Ruhl’s Flea Circus, and Marjorie Kemp, a curvaceous brunette daredevil who rode the pitched walls of the motordrome in a tiny race car—with a lion seated next to her.
Run by Fred Beckmann, a longtime showman with deep jowls, the show was visited by twenty-five million people annually. It traversed eighteen thousand miles a year, mostly in the midwestern, central, and southwestern states, where its stops lasted five or six days. Among the larger traveling carnivals, B&G was sizable enough that it issued its own “brass,” or scrip—tokens performers used as part of their pay to buy food and other items on the show lot.
Kortes ran the sideshow, paying rent to Beckmann for his exhibit space, which he grandly titled the Kortes World’s Fair Museum. Along with myriad showmen of that era, Kortes routinely ripped off the World’s Fair moniker, hoping to profit from the association with wildly popular and much grander events and harking back, most notably, to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a six-month exposition that drew twenty-seven million visitors and heralded America’s emerging prowess in science, technology, and anthropology.
But whereas the nineteenth-century presentation of exhibits was rooted in the flawed, xenophobic science popular at the time—people actually believed Zip might have been a member of a brand-new species combining elements of human and ape—Americans were increasingly familiar with medicine and more knowledgeable about people living on the other side of the world. Accordingly, the sideshow began to reflect a more comic, almost tongue-in-cheek view of human differentness.
Kortes’s 1935 version of a world’s fair featured Barney Nelson, the Colored Armless Wonder and the Most Amazing Man You Ever Saw, and the sixty-pound Shadow Harrow, the Thinnest Man in the World, placed alongside Tiny, the World’s Largest Girl. It was fronted by Miss Gibbons, whose back featured a giant tattoo of The Last Supper.
The once-heralded space travelers were absent, though, having been replaced by Eko and Iko, the Sheep-Headed Men from Ecuador. Why, for ten years, bragged a newspaper in Rockford, Illinois, they had even been “one of the ace attractions” of Ringling!
Working alongside his brother, George Kourtis (who refused to Americanize his surname), Pete Kortes had started out in the business as a fire-eater during World War I. George had been the manager for Schlitzie, the microcephalic performer (or pinhead, in offensive showman parlance) featured in the film Freaks, and he later managed Athelia, another microcephalic, believed to be Schlitzie’s sibling. Unlike Harry Lewiston, who admitted to binding the limbs of two microcephalics—so they couldn’t masturbate—George treated them relatively well, providing a nurse to supervise them and manage their hygiene. They were incontinent, which is why microcephalic males were typically presented as females. When they wore dresses, it was easier to change their diapers.
For a time, Pete Kortes also managed Schlitzie. “But he didn’t need both of them, and as he became older, Schlitzie was a little rangy and hard to get along with,” said Ward Hall, who eventually bought Kortes’s show.
While the Muse brothers abhorred Shelton, Nancy Saunders recalled, they were quite fond of Kortes and his wife, Marie, who cooked meals and planned off-hour outings for the performers. Kortes was a fun-loving, friendly sort, Willie told her, a heavy drinker but not abusive when drunk. His trips were more relaxed, and it was he who would make possible one of their favorite experiences: swimming with dolphins.
In a picture of the Kortes gang taken in Honolulu, the Muses pose happily for a group sideshow portrait, the clenched fists and nervous glances of their earlier photos long gone. George has his arm draped over Athelia’s shoulder. The group is at a restaurant, with Pete at the head of the table, wearing thick black-framed glasses and holding a cigarette. He’s seated next to the “fat man” Jack Connor, who required the extra space at the table’s edge. As the Muses entered middle age, their hairlines seem to retreat in direct proportion to their expanding waistlines.
As one writer of that era described them: “Their hobby is music, and they play it on their platform, softly practicing on saxophone and guitar, hour after hour, when not called upon by the inside talker to stand up and be seen.”
It was the life they were used to.
But the happy-go-lucky sheen of the photographs and news clippings belies the seamier side of the business arrangement with Shelton and, likable or not, with Pete and Marie Kortes.
According to dozens of court documents filed on the Muse family’s behalf in the mid-to late 1930s, Shelton was back to his old tricks and had been for several years: he was stealing the brothers’ pay again and keeping them as far away from Roanoke as possible.
Harriett had no idea where they were. Again. But period documents show they were all over the place with Kortes, after Shelton joined forces with the sideshow carnival showman in 1931. Two years later, Shelton switched back to Ringling, and it was business as usual with the Big One again, though he and the Muses still traveled annually with Kortes in the off-season: with the tacit approval of both Ringling and Kortes, Shelton continued stealing their earnings. No money was sent home, nor was any news about the brothers, including their whereabouts.
Harriett would strike back legally in 1936. But by that time, Ringling wasn’t as invested as it had been in 1927 in holding on to its sideshow stars. The Big One was preoccupied with turbulence of a much bigger sort throughout the 1930s, extending from its biggest big-top performers to the men putting up the tents.
The opening salvo hit in March 1931, when Leitzel, the most beloved circus performer of all time, fell to her death in Copenhagen. The brass swivel on her performing rope had snapped, and she shot from her trapeze, landing on a floor protected only by a thin rubber mat. Just moments before, a crowd of hundreds had been applauding so wildly for her that the crystals on the performance hall chandelier shook.
The news devastated the circus community, especially John Ringling, who considered Leitzel and her husband, Alfredo Codona, dear friends. He used to chew his cigar to bits during their most dangerous routines.
A few years later, Codona was still mourning Leitzel and in the midst of the breakup of his second marriage, to Vera Bruce, a circus bareback rider who’d frowned on the shrine he maintained to Leitzel—in their bedroom. “I am going back to Leitzel, the only woman who ever loved me,” he wrote in a suicide note. Then he shot and killed Bruce before turning the gun on himself.
Leitzel and Codona had been the glimmering showstoppers adorning the cake, but the foundational layers, too, were beginning to cave. A power grab orchestrated by lawyer John Kelley against John Ringling had wrested the circus out of the potentate’s hands, crippling his finances, which in turn—aided by decades of late-night meals and myriad poor lifestyle choices—crippled his health.
The takeover was payback for a poor business decision Ringling had made in 1929, when he took out a $1.7 million loan to buy the Peru, Indiana–based American Circus Corporation. Ringling purchased the company purely out of spite after Madison Square Garden changed the terms of his opening-day contract, eliminating Friday shows for the circus, which the Garden now wanted to devote to the more lucrative spectacle of prizefighting.
According to his nephew Henry Ringling North, John Ringling initially responded by telling “them with anatomical exactitude precisely where they could put their contract, and announced that the circus would open at the 22nd Regiment Armory.”
When the Garden promptly contracted with Ringling’s only serious rival, ACC, “John Ringling was thunderstruck,” his nephew recalled. Some form of the family circus had been opening at Madison Square Garden for more than fifty years. “His rage consumed him. And destroyed his business judgment.”
Ringling tried to trump the deal the only way he knew how. He bought the American Circus Corporation for $2 million.
But putting his circus into so much debt proved to be unduly risky in 1929.
With only a little cash down, he’d taken out the note for $1.7 million from the Prudence Bond and Mortgage Company, which financed the deal. His plan was to incorporate a new company and sell its shares to the stock-frenzied public, thus paying off the note, according to his nephew.
But before he could sell an issue of circus stock, the market crashed.
The ACC purchase had been childish, and it was, ultimately, Ringling’s undoing. By 1936, his competitors had filed an antitrust lawsuit, and his real estate holdings were so entangled that almost every lawyer in Sarasota was engaged in a suit either for or against him. (There were at least one hundred lawsuits pending against him.)
After his own family members and many longtime associates—including lawyer Kelley—had taken control back to save the debt-plagued circus, John Ringling was now simply a figurehead, forbidden from making any commitments in the name of the circus. His personal life was equally fraught. After his beloved wife, Mable, died in 1929, Ringling had married a sophisticated (and very spoiled) socialite. So tone-deaf was Emily Ringling to the needs of Depression-starved folks that she went to a Sarasota country-club party themed “How to Have Fun Though Broke” costumed as she imagined the poor might dress—wearing a native Cuban outfit with a string of new potatoes around her neck.
In the months leading up to his death, in 1936, Ringling wasn’t even allowed to mingle with the crew at the circus. Employees were forbidden to speak to him, and he was mostly alone in his rapidly deteriorating Florida mansion with only his private nurse, who stayed on to work for him—though she hadn’t been paid since 1933—and his yacht captain from happier days, who now “did his best to keep the grounds and gardens from going back to the jungle,” according to Henry North. North (whom Ringling dubbed Buddy) also filled in gratis as his uncle’s business agent, chauffeur, handyman, cook, and butler. To keep Ringling’s art collection from deteriorating in the sea-damp climate, he borrowed library books and Harvard University technical papers and gave himself a DIY course in art restoration.
In 1938, Henry and his brother, John Ringling North, took over management of the Big One, determined to restore its reputation as the greatest show on earth. But labor disputes were raging across the country, and that June, in one twenty-four-hour period in Erie, Pennsylvania, sixty-seven crewmen walked off the job. John Ringling North had announced that everyone, executives included, would be taking a 25 percent pay cut. Aggrieved employees responded by sabotaging the brakes on twelve train cars. Delayed train departures created delayed performances, in turn creating mayhem under the tents. Pinkerton detectives were called in to guard the trains.
A falling tent pole shattered a spectator’s shoulder. Then the North brothers’ latest menagerie star, a gorilla named Gargantua they’d bought from an eccentric woman in Brooklyn (and managed to get featured on the cover of Life magazine), turned on his keeper, attacking him in front of the crowd.
Circus managers, who had historically responded to roustabout wage demands by simply replacing the men, could no longer ignore workers’ pleas. The rousties had recently organized for the first time ever as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, so when John Ringling North decided to cut wages, a full-on strike was called.
The show went on. In Janesville, Wisconsin, managers broke picket lines with elephants. In New York City, John Ringling North himself helped clowns and midgets hoist ropes and rig performers’ nets. At another stop, the cage serving as the panther’s arena was moved and reassembled by Clyde Ingalls and Jack Earle while Harry Doll assisted by securing the trapdoor ropes—and the audience assumed it was all just part of the show.
During a late June stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Norths could no longer finagle a work-around. As Henry North described it, “We were in considerable danger” from labor activists, some of whom were pelting performers with rocks. “For five days we were besieged in the Casey Hotel, with the circus stalled on the lot. We could not move it out, and the left-wing mayor of Scranton was disinclined to help us or offer protection.”
This time the North brothers couldn’t round up enough strikebreakers to move the circus out, not even with the elephants on standby. At the end of the standoff, Henry paid $12,000 in “strike costs” to the union before taking the circus back to winter quarters midseason.
To save the show, John Ringling North, thirty-four at the time, had the moxie to talk the best performers into moving west and switching to the Ringling subsidiary, Al G. Barnes-Sells Floto Combined Shows, whose employees were not unionized. Its workers had already agreed to accept the 25 percent pay cut.
Even Gargantua the Great, the World’s Most Terrifying Living Creature, joined the twenty-one railcars leaving Sarasota for South Dakota. Adding the Ringling performers doubled the size of the Barnes-Sells Floto show, which pushed the media superlatives into overdrive as the circus publicity machine tried to overshadow news mentions of labor struggles. The gorilla performed alongside Mabel Stark, the World’s Only Lion and Tiger Trainer, and along with aerialist Janet May, who could pull off one-arm flips from her rope but “lacked the polish of the celebrated artist” she was trying to evoke—Leitzel. Or maybe it was still too soon after Leitzel’s death for critics to fully embrace May’s efforts.
The gorilla’s backstory grew more elaborate as the train made its usual fall journey south: captured at the age of two, traded by a sea captain, five feet six and “growing more evil tempered” by the moment—with a daily diet that included sixteen bananas, twelve oranges, three milk shakes, and a half-pound of calf liver brought to a boil.
“We yielded, but we made the most of it,” North wrote. The brothers called in press photographers to record John Ringling North handing over a wad of cash to union leader Ralph Whitehead, under the caption “Whitehead Getting His Pound of Flesh.” Republicans blamed the closure on the New Deal, with one congressman declaring, “Not even this great circus can compete with the circus the New Deal is giving us.”
With movies and radio threatening to eclipse the circus in cash-strapped Americans’ eyes, the big top struggled to maintain a luster of novelty. As one longtime showman described it: “The kids of today ain’t so wide-eyed and amazed at what they see at a circus as they was a quarter of a century ago. So many marvelous things goes on all the time in this day and age that kids probably expect more from a circus now than it’s humanly possible to give.”
Maybe the Muse brothers’ next act would add some drama, if not in front of the stage, then certainly behind the scenes.
Attorney Warren Messick had not been available for Harriett’s hire this time around. Wrapped up in the multifaceted moonshine-conspiracy trial, he was representing two West Virginia moonshiners in an ancillary case connected to the Franklin County trial: the men were accused of murdering a sheriff’s deputy as payback for his role in the death of their brother in a whiskey-running car chase. Messick, ultimately, lost the murder trial, though his defendants’ sentences were considered light.
It isn’t clear how Harriett found her way instead to the downtown law offices of Roanoke lawyer Wilbur Austin. But she did, sometime in the early fall of 1936, around the time her sons were being photographed outside a sideshow tent in Lincoln, Nebraska. In a backyard candid shot—“caught by the cameraman here sunning themselves,” as the local newspaper put it—George and Willie sit next to a tent with Athelia perched on their laps, her long dress draped over their knees. The splendor of their pre-Depression tuxedos has been replaced by simpler white blouses and loose, looping ascots.
Austin’s personality mirrored the economic mood, too. He was not nearly as flashy as Messick. “Compared to Squeak, Mr. Austin was deadly dull,” according to Harvey Lutins, Messick’s longtime coworker and protégé. Lutins strenuously and repeatedly tried to steer me to write more about Messick, who still fascinated him fifty years after Messick’s death.
Unlike the disheveled Messick, the buttoned-up Austin had no oratorical flair for fallback. He had to pay attention to every detail. And he did.
Descended from a prominent family in nearby Botetourt County, Austin was politically connected in the state capitol of Richmond—his sister was married to the man who advised several Virginia governors of that era. His father-in-law’s family included a governor and several influential Virginia lawmakers.
Austin may have been dull, but he was also the perfect person to come up with a permanent, court-approved solution for getting Candy Shelton out of the Muse brothers’ lives. The fix would take care of Harriett Muse—and her sons—and reward Austin, too.
In an extended guardianship case called Harriett Muse v. George and Willie Muse, Harriett petitioned a Roanoke court to have her sons declared “practically imbeciles,” though the ploy was likely Austin’s idea, according to scholars and lawyers who analyzed the legal records at my request. The “boys,” as the petition called them (though they were now in their forties), “are not mentally capable of entering into a contract or attending to business for themselves,” the petition stated.
It was a cruel-sounding but pragmatic legal maneuver that guaranteed every paycheck would henceforth be monitored by a court and divvied up accordingly. At Austin’s request, the Roanoke judge and future Virginia governor Lindsay Almond appointed Austin to be the committee (pronounced “com-a-TEE”), in charge of their financial affairs. (The term today would be “conservator” or “guardian.”)
The judge then ordered Austin to negotiate with Ringling lawyers, winning the brothers a three-year contract that began in November 1936. As far as the money was concerned, Shelton was bypassed entirely now.
The circus would pay the Muses $115 a month, including during the off-season. Harriett would get $60 of their monthly salary, set aside “for her care and maintenance,” and Austin $15 for his monthly legal fee.
The rest, or about a third, would go into a savings account established for the brothers, reserved as a kind of retirement fund—a novel idea, considering that Social Security payments for retired Americans were still four years away.
The case would spawn ongoing filings for more than three decades. Financial records, called settlement accounts, would be filed regularly with the courts, documenting every dollar earned and every dollar spent on the brothers’ behalf, from groceries to expenses for trips home to visit family to property, including, even, their grave sites.
Austin was also court-ordered to track down, if he could, the back pay owed by Kortes during the Beckmann and Gerety stint. And if Shelton tried to insert himself into the pay process—they had reason to believe he would—judicial repercussions would be triggered. Austin would eventually talk the judge into decreeing that George and Willie “could not be taken from the jurisdiction of this Court by J. H. Shelton or anyone else” without Almond’s permission. All future showmen seeking to employ the brothers had to be approved, in person, by the court.
It was an astonishingly twisted legal end run, unusual if not singular among sideshow performers of the time. “The judge did it because I’m sure it was the only way to get justice for them,” said Richmond lawyer Tom Word, who writes about Virginia legal history. He doubted the court even had a doctor present to weigh in on George’s and Willie’s alleged imbecility.
Indeed, the files contain no medical evaluation from a doctor or any professional testimony about the brothers’ mental status. Their illiteracy, combined with their near-blindness and dancing eyes, was probably convincing enough. They were likely led into the courtroom by relatives, judging from another photo from this period that shows them being flanked by circus minders outside a tent: George and Willie are squinting in the late-day sun with two men and a woman clutching their arms, presumably so they won’t stumble or trip over the nearby tent ropes.
The agreement was probably a backroom deal between Austin and the judge. “It allows the person to have control of them physically but, more importantly, to collect the money on their behalf,” said Paul Lombardo, a Georgia State University law professor and bioethics expert who reviewed the filings. “It’s about creating a conduit for the money because the guardian has a motive for collecting: he gets paid, and the mom gets paid.
“It’s weird… but what else did she have the power to do?”
It was also illegal, by today’s standards, from the rubber-stamping of the brothers’ mental status to the payments to Harriett Muse, whom Austin described in a subsequent legal filing as “a very good old colored woman.”
In a 1938 letter, Austin called Harriett “penniless and absolutely dependent on the stipulation allowed by the Court each month.” Unemployment was back on the rise, after slight declines in 1936 and 1937. And though members of the Roanoke Country Club were delighted to learn that a swimming pool would soon be constructed for their recreation, people in Jordan’s Alley were none so fortunate.
Those who couldn’t pay their rent were beholden to white landlords who refused to fix broken fixtures or repair structural flaws and sent their collectors out to terrorize renters in arrears—some of whom were forced to pay in sexual favors, recalled multiple elderly residents who grew up in Roanoke’s West End in the 1930s and ’40s.
There were no real protections in place for low-income renters. It would be five more decades before Roanoke hired adequate rental-property inspectors, and only in the wake of an elderly resident freezing to death just a few yards from Harriett’s house, on Ten-and-a-Half Street. “I can remember as a kid, riding on that old narrow Tenth Street trestle bridge,” said Dan Webb, the city’s current code-compliance coordinator. “You’d look over to the side and see those shotgun shanties with no paint and no front yard, all crammed together.”
The rail-yard bridge that Harriett’s grandchildren had to cross, along with Sweet Sue and Mother Ingram, to get to the all-black Harrison School? Webb described it as wooden planks topped by asphalt. He remembered hearing the ka-clunk, ka-clunk of the boards when his father’s car crossed the bridge. “You smelled the creosote, and, as a kid, to me, that was the smell of poverty.”
V. Anne Edenfield, a Roanoke lawyer who handles guardianship cases, also reviewed Austin’s filings at my request. “It’s a huge breach of fiduciary duty to use a ward’s money to pay a family member,” absent court approval, she said. “You could not get away with that now.” The guardianship would also be legally impossible to obtain without proof of incapacity presented to the court, she added.
Considering that getting the circus to pay up regularly had already proven impossible, though, the ploy was “not so horrible,” Edenfield conceded. She thought that paternalism, more than greed or self-interest, motivated Austin to keep the case going. “My hunch is that Austin was probably a decent guy trying to do good for his client.”
Besides, as she pointed out, the likelihood of an illiterate George and Willie Muse demanding their own pay, given their lack of social capital in the circus hierarchy, was minimal.
From his office in Roanoke, Austin not only managed the paperwork; he also won the court’s authority to seek legal restitution the minute the checks failed to appear—or to clear the bank. Most years, Austin seemed to earn every penny of his monthly fifteen bucks. Adjusted for inflation, in today’s money, his salary from the case typically amounted to about $2,000 annually.
Frugal his entire life, Austin never learned to drive. He raised his family in the side wing of a sweeping Roanoke mansion owned and occupied by his in-laws. In 1925, his father-in-law, Samuel Harris Hoge, had lost the governor’s race to Harry Byrd of the Byrd Machine, which dominated Virginia politics for much of the twentieth century. It was Byrd and his minions who would go on to godfather Virginia’s “massive resistance” scheme to protest the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. They forged new state laws and policies in defiance of the decision, and many Virginia schools were closed in an attempt to block desegregation.
Austin was no champion of civil rights, according to his grandson, Robert M. Brown, a lawyer in Newport News, Virginia, who writes crime fiction on the side. Brown preferred his great-grandfather Hoge to his grandfather Austin, who seemed to live under the elder man’s shadow.
Wilbur Austin “lived rent-free, no utilities or anything, in this giant house owned by his father-in-law,” Brown said, along with other members of the extended family. “I can remember they had a black maid, Bessie, a large lady, and she would ring the dinner bell, and everybody would come down from their rooms in coats and ties, and they’d all eat together at this massive dining room table.”
Hoge, Austin’s father-in-law and law partner, was a friendlier and more socially savvy man. When his clients couldn’t pay during the Depression, he accepted homegrown tomatoes as compensation. “It got to the point where he had to ask [his] children to help pay for their own food,” Brown recalled.
But Austin refused to contribute. “So here’s this lawyer, and his law partner is his father-in-law, and my grandfather started ‘taking his meals out,’ if you can believe that,” Brown said.
It was cheaper, Austin believed, to forgo the family meals and eat in diners.
According to his family, Austin was an odd man with no sense of humor. He was super-meticulous with his clients’ money—and quite stingy with his own. After his death, in 1972, the family learned he’d hoarded away money in accounts strategically placed with several different banks.
A Civil War buff with a Mathew Brady photograph collection, Austin was more comfortable among his legal books than with members of his own family, relatives said. He was not warm toward Brown’s mother, Austin’s only child, to the point that Brown’s father later had him banned from their home.
“But as standoffish as he was with his family, he took his profession very seriously,” Brown said. “I can see how he would have done everything within his power to help his client.” Especially a very good old colored woman.
Though he was never revered by his family, on the red-dirt streets of Jordan’s Alley, Wilbur Austin was something of a miracle worker.
It was not so difficult to have people declared mentally incapacitated in the 1930s, a period when Virginia had one of the nation’s most active eugenics programs. Between 1924 and 1979, the state forcibly sterilized more than eight thousand Virginians on the alleged grounds of mental illness, physical deformity, “feeble-mindedness,” or even just homelessness—to keep them from procreating and to protect the “purity of the American race.”
Virginia was in the vanguard of a national movement promoting the so-called science of racial superiority and inferiority. With broad support from the federal government, prominent jurists, research scientists, and the Carnegie Institution, the Eugenics Record Office was initially formed in 1910.
For four decades, the office was the nerve center of a nationwide campaign to promote sterilization for ostensibly inferior genetic stock and strict laws against racial intermarriage, and to quell the immigration of Jews and others from Southern and Eastern Europe, all deemed racially inferior to their whiter-skinned Northern European counterparts.
Such sentiment explains the 1939 appearance of George and Willie’s photo—courtesy of Ringling, of course—in the textbook You and Heredity. As the author notes, clinically, in his caption, “They have white skins (note their throats), pale blue eyes and flaxen hair (the odd effect produced by combing out the woolly strands and letting them grow for exhibition purposes). They also have nystagmus (oscillating eyeballs) and teeth defects, characteristic of many Albinos.”
The author writes, “By sterilization and birth control we might reduce somewhat the proportion of the ‘unfit,’ and by stimulating births in other quarters we might increase somewhat the proportion of the ‘fit.’”
But how to measure who is “fit”? Some eugenics victims were criminals, and some were mentally incapacitated.
Many were just poor.
Nazi war-crimes defendants, on trial in Nuremberg after World War II, claimed that Virginia’s eugenics law had been the model for a German program that sterilized thousands. The practice is sometimes said to have declined in the wake of Nazi revelations, but Lombardo says that in fact Virginia sterilized more people in 1949, ’50, and ’51 than it had in the mid-’30s. “There were lots of reasons for that, but the most important point is that people in Virginia may have been shocked by the Holocaust, but not necessarily by German sterilizations,” he added.
In 2015, finally, the Virginia General Assembly voted to compensate victims who had been involuntarily sterilized at six institutions in the state with payments of $25,000 each. Only eleven were still alive.
Such was the legal backdrop for having two illiterate circus freaks declared “practically imbeciles” in 1936 at the request of their destitute mother and her nervous but well-connected lawyer. The State of Virginia’s definition of an adult imbecile was a person “with the mentality of a normal child six or seven years old; can do little house errands such as washing dishes and dusting.”
The statute does not mention the ability to play music on multiple instruments fabulously well while pretending to be cannibals from Ecuador or ambassadors from Mars.
“In those days it was pretty easy to get this done,” said Lombardo, who wrote the definitive book about Virginia’s role in the eugenics movement, centering on the landmark Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell (1927).
“I’m sure it was all the lawyer’s idea.” Given the money being set aside for the Muse brothers’ retirement, Lombardo said, “the support for the mom and the fee for the lawyer do not seem excessive. Fifteen a month would have been generous, but not unconscionable, for the lawyer.”
Everything went according to Austin’s plan for getting Ringling Brothers to pay up per the new contract signed in 1936. The checks arrived monthly, with Harriett and Austin getting their allotments and the rest piling up in savings accounts for Willie and George. Then in the fall of 1938, Shelton took full advantage of the tumultuous, strike-filled Ringling season by blowing the show, again, without a word to Harriett or Austin.
It took months for me to suss out Austin’s response to that move. First I had to locate all the court files, two of which had been misfiled in an off-site storage facility, far from the Roanoke courthouse. But when the first of the missing documents was finally unearthed, the whole of Candy Shelton’s quarter-century of mistreatment came into focus. So did the enormity of Austin’s influence—and the astonishing persistence of Harriett Muse.
For the remainder of the brothers’ careers, chauffeurs were hired to accompany the nondriving Austin to various locales to bring them home. New contracts had to be renegotiated when the checks coming in from Kortes bounced.
More than once, Austin hired Pinkerton detectives to track the missing brothers down.
More than once, he coached Harriett and her Roanoke relatives to call him if Shelton showed up during their visits home, trying to whisk the brothers away. He ordered them to “refuse to let [Shelton] in the house.” In November 1938, at Austin’s request, Judge Almond even issued a temporary restraining order against Shelton.
“My grandfather did that?” Brown said, astonished and, seemingly for the first time in his life, impressed by Wilbur Austin.
When the last missing court file from 1938 still hadn’t turned up after multiple searches by myself and a hired researcher, I asked the clerk of the Roanoke City Circuit Court to intervene. Brenda Hamilton accompanied me on a walk down the paneled, third-floor corridor that borders the courtrooms. Along the walls hang large oil paintings of Roanoke judges dating back to 1880s-era Roanoke.
I was also hunting for a portrait of the man behind that file, Wilbur Austin, who, following his work with the Muses, had become a traffic-court judge and, later, a juvenile and domestic-relations judge.
It was beginning to dawn on me that stalking the Big One was probably the most exciting work of Austin’s life.
I described the case to Brenda as we walked. When she reminded me she’d been the first African American ever elected to the Roanoke position of clerk of courts, I pointed out that we were standing directly in front of Judge Lindsay Almond’s portrait. As Virginia governor in the late 1950s, a Byrd ally, and a chief defender of massive resistance, Almond was the judge who handled the Muse brothers’ case.
Brenda was all too familiar with Almond’s defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court orders, his insistence on closing, rather than integrating, many Virginia schools. In 1959, she was seven years old and living in the Prince Edward County seat of Farmville, where the school board had closed the county schools for five long years. Wealthy whites in the region built private, whites-only academies.
As Almond put it in a 1959 radio address, his baritone drawl reverberating:
To those who [support] the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere… Let me make it abundantly clear for the record: As governor of this state, I will not yield to that which I know shall be wrong and will destroy every rational semblance of public education for thousands of the children of Virginia. Be not dismayed by recent judicial deliverances.
Brenda missed the entire first grade.
During what should have been her second year of schooling, her parents arranged to drop her off at a family friend’s home in the next county, where she was then put on a bus headed to a one-room school. It was a shack with a tar-paper roof that leaked when it rained and had no space for quiet learning. There was only one teacher to accommodate scores of black students ranging from grades one through twelve.
“I used to cry every day,” she said.
When her father died the following year, the family moved to Roanoke. As massive resistance began to collapse, Brenda was one of a handful of blacks in a newly integrated Roanoke County school, where attendance was now booming due to white flight.
I told her what Almond and Austin had done for the Muses. That their legal maneuver had ultimately helped the Muse family but that the ploy was also racist, patronizing, and illegal. It was one more of the thousands of stories, told and untold, that illuminated the brutal legacy of 250 years of slavery and a half-century of Jim Crow.
Having located no pictures of the mousy and bespectacled Wilbur Austin that day in the Roanoke courthouse, I was still eager to find that missing file, hoping it contained more clues about the case.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Brenda said. “I will find that file.”
In her forty-two years of working for the city, Brenda had often walked past the portrait of the man responsible for her patchwork education. When I offered her my copy of a book on massive resistance in Prince Edward County, by journalist Kristen Green, she was eager to read it.
The following week, she e-mailed to say she’d already had to walk away from the book, twice.
“It’s like pouring gas in an open wound,” she wrote.
It was the spring of 2015, the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War. And yet racial wounds seemed to be growing deeper by the day: police shootings of unarmed black men occurred in so many cities, it was hard to feel one had been mourned before another happened.
A crazed gunman hoping to incite a race war killed nine worshippers inside a historic Charleston, South Carolina, church.
Then outside the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, the Confederate flag would lower for the last time. Closer to home, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe ordered the flag’s removal from a specialty state license plate.
And Brenda was still contending with the regal portrait of the man who’d stained her childhood—not twenty paces from her door. Outside her office window in downtown Roanoke, a pickup with giant white poles erected on the rear corners of its truck bed sported twin flags, the Rebel Stars and Bars snapping in the summer breeze.
Brenda called the day after our courthouse stroll with information that not only filled gaps in the Muse timeline but also must have sparked interest under the sideshow tent in the late fall of 1938. She had found the missing case file. Signed by Lindsay Almond himself, a petition inside it described a courtroom gathering on November 2. The Muse brothers and their mother were there with Wilbur Austin.
And so was a very unhappy Candy Shelton.
As Austin argued in his petition to the court, Shelton “has been availing himself of the services of the wards of this court without making just compensation to this Committee, and without any express or implied authority from this Committee, by reason of which he is indebted to this Committee for the services of said wards.”
The court records don’t say where exactly Shelton had taken the brothers after Ringling ended its season following the Scranton standoff in June. But judging from his 1938 employment card and other circus records, Shelton had been among the scores of Ringling staffers who switched midseason to the Ringling-owned Al G. Barnes affiliate, and he took the Muse brothers with him. (I also found a bally photograph of Willie on guitar and George on the ukulele during a 1938 Barnes stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin.)
The checks from Ringling abruptly had stopped going to Roanoke, again.
In a September 1938 letter, Ringling auditor J. F. Wadsworth indicated that the Muse “twins,” as he called them, were working with the Barnes circus in Texas. Austin was stirring up trouble, Wadsworth explained to the Barnes circus assistant treasurer: “From the letter of Austin, you will notice that he expects us to continue the payment of their wages each month and that he suggests it is up to us to get them back on the job.”
Wadsworth conceded that it was the company’s responsibility to return them to Austin after the contract expired. “At any rate, this should be taken up with Mr. [John Ringling] North and whatever action, if any, is necessary to protect us should be taken at once.” The contract for the “imbeciles” and “rope-haired wonders,” as Wadsworth called them, was once again in flux.
Wadsworth looped in Ringling’s legal adjuster, John Reddy, and made a point of telling the treasurer that he should return the “file of legal papers connected with this case” to Ringling offices, pronto.
I found no such file attached to the Ringling papers archives on file at Circus World—only a brief exchange between Austin and Wadsworth—but Brenda’s court records were now reassembled and could tell their story.
If the kids of the time expected more from a circus than it was humanly possible to give, how convenient that the Ecuadorian cannibals were ready to morph back into their Ambassadors from Mars attire.
Just three days before Austin’s November 2 petition to the Roanoke court, Orson Welles had terrified the country with his radio drama, War of the Worlds, a simulated newscast that suggested an alien invasion from Mars was in progress—landing in New York and New Jersey.
RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT blared an above-the-fold headline on the front page of the New York Times, which described household disruptions, interrupted religious services, and communication-systems logjams. This scene unfolded in a single block of Newark:
More than twenty families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture.… Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.
A Syracuse reporter who happened to have the radio beat bundled his family into the car and headed north for Watertown, New York, “about the time the Martians were wading the Hudson and starting upstate,” Variety magazine reported. He’d stopped en route to rescue his mother-in-law when he learned that it was not a real attack.
Calls from more than 350 readers flooded the switchboards of the Roanoke Times: “So frantic were some of the callers that the entire matter soon ceased to be funny, even for the newsmen, who were kept busy, jumping from one telephone to another, and back again.”
Austin was no Messick, but he was savvy enough to make extraterrestrial hay out of the biggest entertainment snafu in radio history. I can just envision him in the courtroom: a champion fidget, running his hands through his hair, nervously adjusting his necktie, removing his Coke-bottle glasses in the middle of an argument only to put them back on again a few seconds later.
I can see Shelton there, dressed in his bally best, his mangled hand tucked into the pocket of his suit pants.
Austin pointed out that Shelton hadn’t paid the brothers in more than two months, the last time wiring the $115 payment via Western Union. He pleaded to the judge:
Your Committee would further show that George Muse and Willie Muse are known to the public of North America and the Continent of Europe as “Eko and Iko, the gentlemen from Mars,” and are Albinos of such similar appearance, and such freakish nature as to make them particularly desirable for public exhibition at this time, due in part to a widespread public interest in all Martian affairs, a hoax concerning the Planet Mars having recently been perpetrated upon the American public.
Orson Welles could not have had better timing.
The following week, Almond ruled that no one—including Shelton—would be permitted to remove Willie and George from the jurisdiction of his court until a proper contract had been written, signed, and approved.
Six weeks later, Pete Kortes sent his company treasurer—his wife, Marie—from their home in California to Roanoke to offer Austin a deal. The Kortes show would match the Ringling salary, and to prove they operated in good faith, they proposed something unheard of in the circus world of the 1930s: they would pay six weeks in advance. The Korteses would also cover all food, clothing, and travel expenses for the brothers.
More meaningfully to Harriett Muse, from now on she would know where her sons were performing.
Marie promised to mail regular letters to Austin, who would read them to Harriett when she came to the office to retrieve her monthly checks.
After more than two decades of being in the dark, Harriett would now receive monthly updates advising her “where George & Willie Muse are, and how they are.”
Shelton would never come in contact with them again.
The gentlemen from Mars were now under the “exclusive custody and control” of Pete and Marie Kortes.
Marie signed for her husband in his absence. Below her loopy cursive, Wilbur J. Austin Jr. signed the contract for Willie and George, who were present but could not write their names.
On February 20, 1939, the contract was initialed by Lindsay Almond Jr., then stamped with his official seal. And so was finalized the ruling of the racist, benevolent judge.