THE FREE STATE OF GALVESTON

Chapter Five

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1920

While Galveston put its urban energy into erecting defensive structures, Houston used its resources to construct a port. In 1896 Congress approved the idea of digging a channel up Buffalo Bayou, like that at Manchester, England. There were delays, but dredging began in 1902. In 1908 the engineers achieved a depth of eighteen-and-a-half feet and built a turning basin at Harrisburg. Houston leaders created a navigation district which sold bonds to the local banks in order to match federal funds and hasten the work. During 1914 the water course reached a depth of twenty-five feet, and the daughter of the mayor, while dropping white rose petals into the water, pronounced, “I christen thee Port Houston; hither the boats of all nations may come and receive hearty welcome.”1

This was no surprise to Galvestonians. They had watched Houston’s deep-water ambitions for half a century, and when a blue-water vessel traversed the ship channel in 1915, the Galveston newspaper grudgingly admitted, “Well, one thing about that ship—it did turn around in the ship channel; they didn’t have to unhinge it to get it through.”² By using engineering technology, as Galveston had done, the Bayou City canceled Galveston’s age-old natural advantage. Others did the same thing. Texas City, across the bridge from Galveston, dredged a passage in the bay and received its first ocean-going vessel in 1904. Houston passed Galveston’s tonnage in the 1920’s, and by 1937 the island port had been left behind by Corpus Christi, Beaumont, Texas City, Port Aransas, and Port Arthur. In the 1960’s Freeport joined the Texas ports ranking ahead of Galveston.3

Oil was an important factor. The gusher at Spindletop, near Beaumont, opened the rush to Southeast Texas in January 1901. Houston, because of its railroads, became the jumping-off place for Beaumont and a center for speculation in oil stocks. In 1905, with oil discoveries around the Bayou City, pipelines began to snake toward the Houston rail terminals. Oil companies in the next two decades established offices and facilities in the Houston area, and the Houston ship channel was made to order. The young Texas Company (Texaco), for example, required for its refinery large acreage, fresh water, protection from storms, and deep water. It rejected Galveston and Texas City because of the hurricane potential. World War II provided a catalyst for the industry, and afterward a wide-ranging petrochemical complex bloomed in a “golden triangle” between Houston, Beaumont, and Orange.⁴ Galveston shared little in this industrial boom.

At first, advertisements for speculative stocks in the Beaumont field listed leading Galvestonians as directors—Walter C. Jones, J. S. Lobit, Isaac H. Kempner, William L. Moody, Jr., Leon Blum. A count of oil company charters filed by mid-April 1901, furthermore, gave Galveston twelve, Houston five, and Beaumont fifty.⁵ But this situation did not last. Capital in Galveston was already tied up in commerce, or absorbed in the cost of building defenses against the sea. The Galveston economy, consequently, stagnated, and the city changed in a surprising way.

It became the sin city of the Gulf Coast, based upon a triad of prostitution, gambling, and drinking. All of these activities were illegal in Texas, yet they flourished in Galveston under the benign eye of the local authorities. There is no simple explanation for this phenomenon, but vice in Galveston was the chief feature of its history in the first fifty years of the twentieth century.

To be sure, Galveston as a port city had always had a rough side. There were saloons, “soiled doves,” and gambling from the beginning. The first settlers, after all, were pirates. A vice area began after the Civil War and continued as a mixture of bars, bordellos, and sporting houses. With sailors, businessmen, and soldiers passing through, there was always a vigorous, transient population with an appetite for illicit pleasure. Old-timers have stated that Galveston never changed into an open city; it had always been that way. The morality of others shifted, and Galveston stayed the same.⁶ Maybe so.

The Confederate States of America established forts on Galveston, and the federal forces took them over after the war. The impact of modern military activity, however, started in 1897 with the authorization of Fort Crockett for the coast artillery and the placement of a Coast Guard station on Pelican Spit. In the excitement of the Spanish-American War the Army put mortars and cannons at old Fort Point on the eastern tip and assigned soldiers to protect the island. About a thousand men stayed for five months camped in tents along the beach and at the bicycle park. The old social-military units of Galveston refused the required two-year enlistment and returned their arms to the state. A Galveston regiment called the Immunes (immune to yellow fever), nonetheless, formed, but got no closer to Cuba than New Orleans before the fighting ended.7 It was a short war.

In 1903 the federal government began to rebuild Fort Crockett, which had been damaged by the 1900 storm, and also to work on Fort Travis at Bolivar and Fort San Jacinto beyond the seawall in the east end flats. The Army built a seawall at Fort Travis, thirty buildings at Fort Crockett, and brought in a garrison. Because of trouble along the Mexican border, Galveston became a mobilization point with about four thousand soldiers and sailors present in March 1911.⁸ The men played baseball, football, and soccer; welcomed visitors to camp; fought with Hispanics and blacks in the red-light district; and rattled windows by firing the ten-inch guns of Fort Crockett. “With a clang the breech is closed and slowly the big gun rises with its muzzle pointing out to sea. A blinding flash and a deafening roar and the projectile is on its way, its passage marked by a loud rumbling noise ending with a thud as it strikes the water.”⁹

By March 1913 there were seven thousand soldiers in Galveston and another eight thousand at Texas City. This meant a $450,000 monthly payroll. In April 1914 they embarked from Pier 14 for Vera Cruz on large white transport ships, but returned in November when the Mexican imbroglio ended.¹⁰ Symbolic of Galveston’s decline, is the fact that the Army selected the upstart town seven miles across the bay as the headquarters for this mobilization.

Texas City was the project of a Great Lakes shipmaster from Duluth, August B. Wolvin. With others, he bought seven thousand acres on the edge of the mainland across from Galveston in the 1890’s. He was attracted to a ten-to-twelve-foot ridge which extended from the shore back into the prairie. It was well drained and protected from storms by its height. In addition, there was a natural channel, six to eight feet deep, that coursed along the shoreline to Virginia Point. To the surprise of the Galveston representative to Congress, a Cleveland, Ohio, lawyer persuaded the chairman of the Rivers and Harbors Commitee to insert $250,000 for the dredging and survey of the Texas City channel. The reason given was that the port of Galveston was congested and high priced. Even Mark Hanna, the confidant of President William McKinley and a national political boss, expressed concern about the matter.11 Wolvin, obviously, possessed friends in high places.

Colonel Henry M. Robert laid out plans, and dredging commenced in 1899 for a channel twenty-five feet deep, one hundred feet wide, and seven miles long to connect with the main channel at Bolivar Roads. In six years, starting in 1904, Wolvin opened harbor facilities, railroads, a grain elevator, an oil refinery, and steamship service to Mexico and New York. He also planned and constructed a townsite. In 1904 the “Port of Opportunity” handled cargoes worth $998,000; in 1910 it was $47,114,000. Galveston, with its own deep-water port and its problems with nature, took the development of Texas City calmly. “It should mean a greater Galveston,” said the News, “a New York of the gulf with a Brooklyn and a Jersey City.”¹² Texas City would be Galveston’s industrial arm according to this reasoning, and to a certain degree, that is what happened.

Wolvin, meanwhile, put one past Galveston. He called upon the War Department while it was planning the mobilization against Mexico, told the officials about the advantages of Texas City, and offered three thousand acres for a campsite. The Army agreed, placed its headquarters at Texas City, and sent six thousand men in three days. Shortly thereafter, Congress appropriated $1,400,000 to deepen the Texas City channel to thirty feet and widen it to three hundred. Later, Congress added a 28,200-foot dike to protect the work from shoaling. The Galveston Commercial Association tried to discredit the site in a telegram sent to Washington, D.C., but Chief of Staff Leonard Wood said, “The Texas City camp, from a military standpoint is fine. The work that has been done is wonderful . . . I can see no necessity for removing the camp to any other location.”¹³

It was, however, a temporary installation, fragile, and the hurricane of 1915 destroyed it. Twenty-five people died at Texas City, and under martial law the town with the help of the soldiers cleaned up the wreckage. Because of the storm, however, the secretary of war refused to re-establish the camp, and in two weeks ordered the troops to Florida.¹⁴ The soldiers never returned to Texas City, but a small number remained at Galveston.

During World War I the military men continued to scrap with blacks in the “segregated district” of whorehouses and saloons from 25th to 30th and A to Broadway. In April 1917 fifteen blacks and twenty-five soldiers from Fort Crockett exchanged gunfire. Police tried to stop it without much success, but the rioters stopped using guns and resorted to fists. One black and one doughboy had been shot; the black died.15 Marines and blacks fought the next year and scattered glass along the 400 block of 25th Street.¹⁶ Galveston, however, experienced nothing like the riot of black servicemen in Houston in August 1917, when forty people died. Troops from Galveston helped suppress that outbreak.¹⁷

The soldiers also drilled and trained. Once, by error so it was claimed, artillerymen from Fort San Jacinto shelled the Bolivar lighthouse with twenty-five dummy projectiles. One of them tore a hole twenty-five feet up, but no one was injured. The citizens for their part of the war effort bought Liberty bonds, registered for the draft, marched off to fight, and installed engines in wooden steamships built at Orange. In 1927 the Army built an airstrip at Fort Crockett and the Third Attack Group under the command of Major Frank D. Lackland came to stay until 1935. Then, in 1940, with the rumbles of World War II in the distance, the fort began to receive more men for training in coastal defense. Most of the soldiers who came to the area, however, as many as 10,000 at a time, stayed at Camp Wallace on the mainland near Hitchcock. Although Galveston did have a 2,500-man Army airfield, the island was still considered vulnerable to bad weather and to enemy attack. German U-boats roamed the Gulf and during the course of the hostilities sank thirty-three ships.¹⁸ In the folklore of the island there is a story that German submariners landed secretly on the beach and walked to town to enjoy the illicit pleasures of the red-light district. There is no proof that this actually happened.

As in the previous world war, Galvestonians were as patriotic as everyone else. They bought war bonds, built transport ships at Gray’s Iron Works, joined the military services, practiced blackouts, set up receptions at the U.S.O., rationed food and gasoline, sacrificed the metal light-poles to the scrap drives, respected price controls, and mourned the dead. They did not take too seriously the 650 German prisoners of war at Fort Crockett, and they broke out in spontaneous celebration of V-J Day. People honked their horns, rang bells, shook hands on the street, and approved as a small Hispanic boy ran down the street shouting, “My brother’s coming home!” Gas stations proclaimed, “No Coupons,” and drivers who pulled up to the pumps said, “Hallelujah, fill ’er up!”¹⁹

Fort Crockett was used as an Army recreation center for a while following the war, but it was finally dismantled and sold at public auction in 1957. Fort Point endured as a Coast Guard Station of 150 people with access to an array of cutters, patrol boats, and helicopters. It became the main installation between New Orleans and the Rio Grande.²⁰ The long presence of military personnel in and around Galveston not only helped the economy, but also provided customers for the bawdy houses. This created a major problem for the military health officials.

A venereal infection took a soldier out of action for thirty days, and the Army had to pay the cost of treatment. In August 1917 national law banned houses of prostitution within five miles of a military base. This officially closed the brothels in Galveston, although the inmates were permitted to stay in the houses if they wished. The law, of course, did not stop sex, and the next year the War Department complained that Galveston was the worst city in Texas for venereal disease, that penalties rarely exceeded one dollar plus court costs, and that prostitutes were not given medical exams. The Galveston Ministerial Association investigated the charges and found no basis for judging their city any worse than others. The police did admit, however, that they readily released offenders because it cost too much to keep them in jail, and promised to require treatment of infected whores in the future.21

In June 1918 Texas law required free curative measures for VD, and city officials wondered where to get the money. The Army, however, threatened to place the entire city “off limits,” and the local government quickly opened a clinic in October. It serviced 116 patients in the first five months, and 721 in the first year. The most common ailment was gonorrhea, and second was syphilis. After the war the clinic continued to operate on a limited basis, and the houses of ill repute continued wide open.²²

Before the modern Army arrived in 1897, Fat Alley in the block of Market, Postoffice, 28th, and 29th was notorious. Ten years earlier the police arrested twenty-five to thirty women of “disreputable character” in the vicinity and charged them with vagrancy. In 1899 the police found the body of a man, never identified, who had been murdered with an overdose of drugs, robbed, and dumped in the alley. Jewish prostitutes in 1905 made the area of 28th and Church a “Port Said in miniture [sic].” A police raid at 2610, 2701, and 2727 Postoffice netted seventy people, including three madams who were accused of running whorehouses.²³ By the time of World War I, the several blocks of Postoffice, Market, Church, and Mechanic between 26th and 27th had evolved into the red-light district, although there were still some higher-class houses elsewhere. The most exclusive bordello was adjacent and to the rear of the Artillery Company clubhouse.²⁴ By the late 1920’s no one could recall a time when the district had not been there; it was an established part of the community.

In 1930 Granville Price, a student at the University of Texas and a former police reporter for the Galveston Daily News, presented for his master’s thesis “A Sociological Study of a Segregated District.” It provided a close look at Galveston prostitution in the late 1920’s and is one of the most remarkable documents on the subject in the history of the state. Price visited the bawdy houses, asked fundamental questions, interviewed people, and reported it all in a straightforward manner.

The red-light district (“red light” is used here in a generic sense; in Galveston they used plain, clear light bulbs) was a former residential area with two-story, narrow-front, box-like frame houses that had front porches and lattices to screen the customer from the street. The structures lacked paint, and there were shacks scattered about. In the area, which was near the docks, YMCA, churches, and Ball High School, there were fifty-four brothels with an average of six prostitutes per house. Counting casual whores, Price estimated that there were between eight hundred and nine hundred prostitutes in Galveston in 1929. For comparison, Rhoads Murphey in a study of Shanghai listed the ratio of prostitutes per population for the following cities in 1934: London, 1:960; Berlin, 1:580; Paris, 1:481; Chicago, 1:430; Tokyo 1:250; Shanghai, 1:130.25 For Galveston the ratio was 1:62. As loose as these statistics may be, it is certain that the number of prostitutes on the island was extraordinarily high. In this respect, Galveston was world-class.

The property was owned by a variety of people including widows, a fireman, a barber, a manufacturer, a policeman, the wife of a butcher, a grocer, the manager of a piano company, the owner of a black mortuary, and a guard in the U.S. Customs service. To enter a house a man would go behind the lattice and knock at the front door, which would be answered by a maid, or by the madam. The interiors showed signs of hard wear, but the parlors would have settees, bare floors for dancing, papered walls, maybe some obscene pictures, subdued lighting, and the strong odor of perfume. A customer would be asked to buy drinks, dance, and play the electric phonograph or piano. In due course, he would be urged to go upstairs with one of the women to a private bedroom, and after an indecent interval, encouraged to leave.

The standard price in the late 1920’s was three dollars for a younger woman, one dollar for an older one. In the 1950’s the usual price in a better white whorehouse was five dollars; somewhat less in black places. The “ladies,” according to Price, were mainly Americans, and they followed their free will. The causes of their choice of profession were desertion, family problems, bad company, and desire for money or pleasure. They had poor educations and spoke mainly in obscenities about the weather and solicitations. The men who visited were of various classes: sailors, longshoremen, soldiers, clerks, gamblers, bootleggers, conventioneers, waiters, students from the medical school, policemen, and young men on a toot. When business was slow, the women solicited by telephone or called out to passersby from an upstairs window.

The red-light district was not a political issue and was seldom discussed in public, or in the newspapers. The police kept order, informed parents of wayward sons, and responded to the madam if she called for help. About the only law consistently enforced was that against miscegenation, and the houses were accordingly segregated by race. It was a female business, female run. The madams owned the enterprises, and there is no indication of organized vice lords in the profession. The whores had to pay for room and board, medical inspections, bribes to the doctor when they failed, dresses, boyfriends, new cars, and periodic fines. It was an expensive life, but some managed to save money. One madam, for example, bought a $50,000 hotel and remodeled it. Hundreds of prostitutes, however, simply drifted, their lives impossible to trace.

While other cities eliminated their vice districts during World War I and before, Galveston floated on, seemingly with little concern except for a few crusaders. Mrs. Ardie Smith, proprietor and madam of the “Brick House,” said, “I have something that men want and are willing to pay for. It’s my property, so why shouldn’t I sell it? Your goody-goody wives that try to drive us out make me tired. Why can’t they see that Galveston’s better off because of us?” The police, politicians, and ministers said that it was realistic to expect prostitution and better to keep it segregated than to try to suppress it. Bishop Byrne commented, “We segregate mental and physical diseases. Let us do the same for moral sickness, for soul sickness. . . . As long as man has free will some of us will fall into impurity.”26 So it was. Citizens were willing to let it be, but the Army still had its problem of disease.

Concerned with the same difficulty, the city in 1936 required VD inspections for prostitutes every two weeks and set up a card file to keep track of them. The police imposed a charge of vagrancy for violators, and periodically raided to check the cards. In the spring of 1941, for example, they arrested thirty-two black women who had not secured health certificates after being warned to do so. “The arrests were a precautionary measure,” said the police chief, “preparatory to the movement of some 2,000 negro soldiers to Camp Wallace.”²⁷

Authorities at Fort Crockett and Camp Wallace warned Galveston in April 1941 that “commercial prostitution is a detriment to national defense” and that unless it ended the city would be off limits to the soldiers. A nervous city commission met and declared the red-light district closed for the duration of the war. This did not end prostitution, of course, but drove it underground and scattered it across the city. In a May 1942 roundup of harlots the police discovered that 53 of 206 were infected with syphilis, gonorrhea, or both. The commander of Camp Wallace complained of the high VD rate at the camp, and both municipal and military police concentrated on arresting and treating the whores. There were eleven houses operating in 1943, and an estimate of 800 prostitutes working the city along with countless amateur “victory girls.” Bishop Byrne protested the sale of prophylactics and the distribution of “impure” literature at the bases, while the U.S. Public Health Service pointed to the high VD rate in the civilian population. At the time of induction Galveston draftees revealed an incidence of syphilis at 148 per 1,000. The normal rate elsewhere was 48 per 1,000.28 Galveston was a moral mess.

The police forces maintained the pressure, John Sealy Hospital opened a VD clinic, and penicillin became available in May 1944. The disease rate dropped to acceptable levels for the Army, but still one in ten Galveston draftees carried syphilis.²⁹ Following the war the madams reestablished the district and again ran wide open. There were sporadic, small-scale forays by the police, rumors and some court testimony about payoffs, and protests by the churches. State Representative William H. Kugle counted forty-two brothels in the district, but a madam said there were only fifteen. Under pressure from the Galveston County Citizens Committee for Law Enforcement led by Kugle, the police commissioner, Walter L. Johnston, reluctantly closed the area in 1953. This did not end prostitution, and Johnston warned, “I therefore ask the people of Galveston to remember that when they suddenly discover vice conditions next door to them, they have the members of the citizens committee for law enforcement to blame for it.”³⁰

The issue of prostitution reached a high point, or low point depending on one’s view, in 1955 when George Roy Clough first became mayor. He felt that prostitution was a biological necessity for a seaport, publicly declared his support for a wide-open town, re-instituted the district, and initiated a systematic raid program in order to collect fines. “I am keeping my eyes on city payrolls and with raises granted recently it is more important than ever that these people pay their share of the cost of municipal operation,” he said.³¹ Time, however, was short for open prostitution in Galveston, and it ended along with widespread illegal drinking and gambling in the late 1950’s through the determined efforts of the state.

The other parts of the triad of vice in Galveston—drinking and gambling—developed together, with many of the same persons involved. Like prostitution, drinking and gambling had always been present in Galveston, but they had not always been illegal. There had been minor sentiment against liquor since the Reverend W. Y. Allen gave the first temperance lecture in Galveston in 1839.32 Much later, the country’s most flamboyant anti-liquor crusader, Carrie Nation, paid a visit to the isle. She pushed open the door to a Strand saloon and said to the barkeeper:

This is a mighty bad business you are in, an awful business. . . . Do you suppose your mother raised you to stand behind that bar and sell whisky? I see behind you there a picture of a woman half naked. When I see such pictures as that around I know it is a very bad place. There you go pouring out some of that slop. Men, you ought not to drink that stuff; it will ruin your liver and damn your souls.³³

It was World War I, however, not lectures, that gave the movement against liquor the push it needed. Everywhere through the country there was a strong urge to protect the youthful servicemen, and Texas adopted a law forbidding saloons within ten miles of a military base. At the same time the state endorsed the Prohibition amendment, and in April 1918 Galveston became legally dry.³⁴

As it turned out, Galveston became very illegally wet. It was geographically in the correct spot to develop as a major entry point for smuggled liquor, and the contraband flowed like water through a sieve. Federal agents, for instance, discovered one stream when they opened a railroad car labeled “junk” in Cleveland. It was filled with liquor from Galveston. The shipment originated in Canada, went by ship to British Honduras, and then traveled aboard a large freighter to “rum row,” forty miles at sea off Galveston Island. Here, the liquor ships waiting outside American jurisdictional waters met the small, fast boats of the bootleggers. The racketeers slipped the alcohol into the city in small quantities and loaded it on railroad cars outside the yards where the cars moved to pick up junk. The smugglers sent the rail cars off to Cleveland, Detroit, and Pontiac. Officials estimated that $500,000 worth of liquor had been transported that way in six months before being stopped.³⁵

The Galveston bootleggers operated as wholesalers, and two major groups emerged—the downtown gang and the beach gang. Although facts and figures are understandably shadowy, the federal agents figured they formed the major smuggling ring on the western Gulf Coast. The beach gang, led by O. E. “Dutch” Voight, acquired its name by using Galveston’s western beach for its landing point. At one time the Coast Guard, on foot, captured two trucks, an automobile, three men, and a shipment worth $25,000. The boat lay three hundred yards offshore and loaded the cargo on dories. The men rowed to shore, put the dory on a trailer, used the car to haul the trailer out of the water, and transferred the cases to one of the trucks. In this instance the boat escaped in a hail of gunfire.36

The downtown gang was led by George Musey and John L. “Johnny Jack” Nounes. “Johnny Jack,” also known as the “Beau Brummel of Galveston,” wore a diamond stickpin, gave toys to children at Christmas, supposedly had a bank account of $1 million, and spent money quickly. He started with a keg of expensive liquor found on the beach, and was caught in 1924 taking delivery from a two-masted British schooner loaded with 4,200 cases of assorted liquor. Nounes was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth and given a $5,000 fine. Caught again in 1928 with Musey while smuggling into Seabrook on Galveston Bay, he commented while leaving for prison in Atlanta, “It’s in again, out again, caught again. Just the same old story. It’s too tough a racket to continue.” Perhaps—in 1940 he was arrested for robbery.³⁷

George Musey, convicted at the same time in 1928, chose to skip his $10,000 bail and flee to Canada. His contact there was Marvin J. “Big Jim” Clark, and with Musey and Nounes restricted, Clark took over the operation. According to the stories, Clark and Musey, who was in Montreal, argued over money, or perhaps a woman. Clark, in anger, tipped off the rival beach gang about a $210,000 shipment belonging to Musey. The beach gang hijacked it at Beeville in February 1931. Supposedly, the crooks made peace and settled the matter, but three weeks later, four of the gang members, two from each side, got into a blazing gun battle in downtown Galveston.

It started in Kid Backenstoe’s cigar stand at 413 Tremont and moved onto the sidewalk. Kye Gregory, with an old-fashioned six-gun in his hand, hit three times, fell mortally wounded to the pavement. Mitchell Frankovich, with a slug in his chest, crouched between parked cars and exchanged shots with Theodore “Fatty” Owens, who was in a nearby alley. Pedestrians scattered in panic, and an errant bullet shattered the glass window of the Mainland Motor Company. When the police arrived and ordered the gangsters to stop shooting, however, they did. Frankovich staggered out and asked to go to the hospital. At the subsequent hearing a reporter observed that the approach of the court was to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings. “In fact,” he wrote, “the general attitude seemed to be that it was all a regrettable incident, troublesome, of course, but best forgotten.”³⁸

Owens came to trial for murder. “I don’t even like to kill a bird,” he testified before an audience of racketeers. He just pointed his .45 automatic, he said, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. The police chief and one of the city commissioners confirmed that Owens was a law-abiding man, but he drew a two-year sentence anyway.39 Federal agents, meanwhile, arrested Voight, Musey, and Clark. This left the Galveston gangs without direction, but the remaining members merged and followed a new, dynamic leadership.⁴⁰

The Maceo family immigrated to the United States from Palermo, Italy, in 1901 and settled in the lumber town of Leesville, Louisiana. Rosario (Rose) Maceo and his younger brother Sam, who attended barber school in New Orleans, moved to Galveston in the years shortly before World War I. They established a barbershop and after the war began giving some “Dago Red” (cheap red wine) to their customers at Christmastime. Their friends wanted more, and the brothers drifted into bootlegging. According to one version, Rose Maceo agreed to hide a load of liquor at his house for a dollar per case. He was nervous about the deal, but when the smuggler moved it out and offered to pay, Maceo said, “I don’t want the money. When you buy the next load of booze, you put my “$1,500 in it and let me go with you.” His action was understandable; he was making twenty-five cents per haircut at the time.⁴¹

In 1921 the Galveston city directory listed the brothers as barbers, but not after that date. Shortly, they became bootleggers allied with the beach gang and Dutch Voight. Sam Maceo opened a “cold drink place” in 1921 to sell liquor, and Ollie J. Quinn, one of the older leaders, agreed to share his downtown gambling territory. Rose Maceo was one of the cosigners of Quinn’s $10,000 jail bond in 1928, after Quinn shot and killed a gangster who had given him a bad check. At the trial, where he was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, Quinn was asked his occupation. “Well, judge, nothing in particular. I deal in a little real estate once in a while.” His attorney prompted him. “Be fair with the jury. Is that all?” Quinn replied, “I gamble a little bit.”⁴²

For the Maceos, gambling was most important, and they brought genius to its functioning in Galveston. Gambling, of course, was illegal; the city council had passed an anti-gambling ordinance in 1884. It was also illegal throughout Texas, so, like prostitution and drinking, gambling could find no comfort in the law. It went on, anyway, at Galveston in many forms. There were lotteries, poker games, crap shooting, slot machines, policy tickets, keno, monte, bingo, and horse betting. Policy tickets, or “numbers” gaming, was a home industry, primarily for local consumption. A person bought a ticket for a nickel and then designated a “gig” (three numbers between one and seventy-eight) or a “saddle” (two numbers). At a designated time and place the players gathered and twelve numbers on wooden discs were drawn out of a “wheel” which looked like a bushel basket. A winning “gig” paid nine dollars, a “saddle” less.43

It has been a long-standing myth that the Maceos and others protected the local people from too much gambling. The numbers racket, however, drained $300,000, mainly from blacks, in 1939. It was estimated at the time that 60–70 percent of the numbers players were on some kind of relief. Organized gaming penetrated to the level of the junior high schools, and when gambling finally ended on the island, there was an immediate and sharp drop in the numbers of neglected and dependent children on the relief rolls.⁴⁴ It is simply not true that gambling did not hurt the local population; the gambling establishment was not that altruistic. Except for entertainment and employment for people in the business, gambling produces nothing of economic value. It builds nothing, and adds nothing to the strength of the community. Gambling is like a diet soft drink—filled with fizz and excitement, and no nutrition. This was the world of the Maceos.

In 1926 Rose and Sam Maceo, with the backing of Dutch Voight and Ollie J. Quinn, opened the Hollywood Dinner Club, which became one of the famous nightclubs on the Gulf Coast. They built it on the western edge of town at 61st Street and Avenue S, and marked it with a searchlight beacon. It had Spanish architecture, a hardwood dance floor for five hundred, crystal chandeliers, rattan furnishings, an elegant menu, and gaming tables. The affable Sam Maceo greeted his customers at the door and brought to the club the top entertainment of the day—Guy Lombardo; Ray Noble with his first trombone player, Glenn Miller; Sophie Tucker; Joe E. Lewis; and Harry James.⁴⁵

In his first appearance outside of California, Phil Harris arrived in 1933 for a one-month engagement at the Maceo club. He enjoyed it so much and became such good friends with Sam Maceo that he adopted Galveston as a second home. One of his band members wrote “My Galveston Gal,” which he played over the KPRC radio broadcasts.

You can have your shuffle off to Buffalo,

Picture me beside the Gulf of Mexico,

With the only one who really gets me,

My Galveston Gal.

This song helped identify Galveston to the nation, as did a later song, “Galveston” by James Webb, popularized by Glen Campbell in the late 1960’s.

Harris returned repeatedly to the island and once played a free concert to twelve thousand people at Murdoch’s Bath House. Taking off his coat in the August heat, the man with “a mouthful of the South” sang to the crowd “My Galveston Gal,” “Three Little Fishes,” “Sleepy Time Down South,” and his trademark song, “That’s What I Like about the South.” In 1941, after marrying Alice Faye, a former singer with the Rudy Vallee band, in Mexico, he came to Galveston to marry her again in Sam Maceo’s suite at the Galvez Hotel. Maceo served as best man, and the reception guests included the mayor and the police chief.46

Harris also testified for Sam Maceo in a narcotics trial. Federal agents in a 1937 roundup of suspects in New York, New Orleans, Houston, and elsewhere picked up Maceo and accused him of being involved in drug traffic. He claimed innocence and said, “I believe there is nothing lower in the scale than handling dope.” Dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, blue tie with small white dots, white handkerchief, and white carnation, Maceo with sixteen others pleaded not guilty. He gained freedom with a $10,000 bond and fought extradition to New York, where the trial took place five years later. The case for the government consisted of the testimony of a criminal and a prostitute. The U.S. attorney said, “We didn’t pick the witnesses. They had their dope runners, their prostitutes, their thugs and their gangsters. We hold no brief for them. We took our witnesses where we found them, in the gutters and in the sewers.”⁴⁷

The case was too weak, and Sam Maceo sobbed with both hands over his eyes at his acquittal. “There could have been no other verdict, because Maceo is an innocent man,” said his attorney. “Thank God, the jury saw the truth.”⁴⁸ The judgment seems just; there is no evidence in the historical materials to indicate that the Maceo brothers were involved with drugs. They had enough problems, in any case, with illegal gaming and drinking, and protecting their territory.

Between 1929 and 1937 there were a series of gangland slayings, and although some of the events are murky, the Maceos were in the middle of what was happening. At midnight, October 10–11, 1929, gunmen in a light-colored sedan killed James Clinch with a shotgun blast in the back. The killers left Clinch sprawled face down on the sidewalk with his car still running and its lights off. In the prior year there had been four attempts to kill him, and he had told his mother that the Musey gang was after him. Police Chief Tony Messina said, “This is not the type of crime that can be solved in twenty-four hours time.” It never was solved.⁴⁹

Two years later, in 1931, Sam Lachinsky’s bullet-riddled body was found, still warm, dumped from a car on West Beach. No solution; the Galveston underworld remained silent.50 In 1933 Lee Hausinger, a young aviator, apparently robbed Frank Fertitta, an employee of the Sui Jen nightclub, of $900. This was a Maceo enterprise, and two hours later Hausinger died on the operating table at Sealy Hospital with a bullet in his heart. Before death, he whispered the name of his assailant—Rose Maceo. The police arrested Maceo, but a Galveston jury acquitted him.⁵¹

In 1935 George Musey, the former leader of the downtown gang, met death, supposedly through Maceo orders. Musey, after release from prison for bootlegging, had returned to Galveston, where he began operating a successful marble machine business. He was moving in on Maceo territory, and early in the morning at a saloon at 24th and Church, O. J. “Windy” Goss called Musey to a side door. Goss was an underling in the Maceo operation and connected with the pistol-whipping death of another shady character, Pee Wee Ellzey, who had been caught stealing money from slot machines. Goss had talked to Musey earlier, and Musey went to the door. There, Goss shot him five times.

Musey fell in the doorway and said to a friend, “Ed, they got me.” The police arrested Goss one block away with a .38 caliber pistol. At the trial a Houston ballistics expert said that a bullet taken from Musey’s neck matched another fired from Goss’s gun. Goss confessed, but said that Musey had threatened him earlier and that he thought Musey was reaching for a handgun. There were no eyewitnesses, and Musey had no pistol in his possession. After sixteen hours’ deliberation the jury declared Goss not guilty.⁵²

Early in 1937 witnesses heard Theodore G. Kirchem, who had been associated with “Johnny Jack” Nounes, beg for his life before being shot in front of his house. He staggered to his door, rang the doorbell, and fell dead at the feet of his wife and daughter. The murder went unsolved, as did the killing of Maxie Parsutte several months later. The rumor was that Parsutte had ejected an influential man from a beer parlor. Be that as it may, assassins awaited him as he returned to his rooming house. As he approached, car doors silently opened and gunmen fired three blasts from shotguns as Parsutte unsuccessfully tried to flee. The cars raced away, and the case remained a mystery. An old man who had been sitting outside said he could not see what was happening; he was busy lighting his pipe.⁵³

The most important incident occurred in 1938. On Christmas Eve, Harry T. Phillips, a decent young man who was the assistant chief engineer for the Galveston Ice and Cold Storage Company, took his fiancee, a student nurse, to a bar on the seawall to celebrate their engagement. After a period he took her to the nurses’ residence and returned to his friends at the bar. Phillips was leaning on a chair when a man, Mike Calandra, came up and said, “This is my chair, Buddy. Do you mind?” Phillips released the chair and replied, “I am sorry about that.” Calandra then hit Phillips in the face with his fist. Phillips’ friend, John Miranda, rushed in and grabbed Calandra. Leo Lera, Calandra’s friend, then pulled out a .45 caliber gun with a hair trigger, shoved Calandra aside, and fired four times. Three of the shots went into the ceiling, but the fourth struck Phillips below the left ear and went out the top of his skull.

Lera worked for one of the Maceo enterprises, the Little Turf, and that night was driving a car which belonged to Dutch Voight. Vic Maceo, a cousin of Sam and Rose Maceo, was there at the time, and the police asked him to deliver Calandra and Lera to the police station. He did. Before the hearing, barmaids received telephone threats, “Pack your clothes and get out of town.” The police laid in an extra supply of tear gas in anticipation of mob violence, and looked for witnesses. Lera’s comely girlfriend said she was there “reaching for a pickle from a dish on the bar, heard a noise like firecrackers and looked around to see a boy lying on the floor.” She then left because she “didn’t think it was any place for a lady.”54

Enough was enough. The city roused in protest, and friends of Phillips visited the ministers to gain support for an anti-vice crusade in Galveston. They urged people to vote for reform in an upcoming election, and a leader of the group, Herbert Y. Cartwright, Jr.—ironically, a defender of the vice system later when he became mayor—said, “We felt that the death of Harry Phillips was a challenge to the good people of Galveston from the underworld.” Of more importance, George Sealy, R. Lee Kempner, and Walter Kelso, three leaders of the elite of the city met as “private citizens to discuss local matters with the municipal heads.” The session was secret, but Police Chief Tony Messina, who had been the head of the department for a decade, immediately resigned “for the best interests of the police department and of the city.”⁵⁵

At the trial Lera, accused of murder, said that it was an accident and that he was not guilty. There was a question of malice, but on January 26, five days before the election, to the cheering of the courtroom the jury pronounced Lera guilty. Through appeals Lera received two more trials, one of them in Richmond, and each time he was sentenced to death. He even attained two stays of execution, but at last time ran out. “God bless each and every one of you,” he said as he died in the electric chair at Huntsville four years and two months after the killing.56 There was no anti-vice reform. Messina and Lera had been sacrificed, and the power structure remained in place.

Following recovery from the great storm, the Galveston elite remained active in politics, usually one step removed from the hustings. Isaac Kempner, however, was a long-time commissioner and served as mayor from 1917 to 1919. George Sealy, too, was a commissioner from 1915 to 1919. The Kempner and Sealy families supported the City Club, a political party formed at the time of the first commission government, and following its demise they backed the City Party in the late 1920’s and 1930’s. With a few exceptions their side dominated Galveston politics through World War II.⁵⁷

The Kempners and Sealys constituted two of the three dynastic families which composed the power elite of the city. John Sealy, one patriarch, was born in Pennsylvania in 1822, moved to Texas before the Civil War, and made a fortune in commerce, banking, railroads, and the port. When he died in 1884, he designated $50,000 of his $1 million estate to build a hospital for the new medical school of the University of Texas. His younger brother, George Sealy, who followed him to Texas and who continued to expand the estate, was distinguished for his work with the Deep Water Committee, grade raising, and seawall. He died in 1901 on a train to New York to negotiate lower bond rates for his city. Other family members remained active after this, including R. Waverly Smith, who married into the second generation and helped write the charter for the commission form of government. George Sealy, Jr., a city commissioner of the second generation, formed the Cotton Concentration Company in 1910 which set up vast warehouses and provided services for the efficient handling and storing of cotton. It helped maintain the vitality of the port. This generation also created the Sealy and Smith Foundation for the philanthropic use of family monies; most of the donations were given for the building of the University of Texas medical center.⁵⁸ The members of the second generation lived into the 1930’s and 1940’s. By then the family money was bound legally into the foundation, or had been dispersed among the third and fourth generations.

The port and the Wharf Company were the special province of the Sealy family. Upon the death of the older George Sealy in 1901, the presidency of the Wharf Company passed to his nephew, John Sealy, Jr., who, in turn, died in Europe in 1926. George Sealy, Jr., then became president and went on to form the Galveston Corporation, which was a holding company for the Wharf Company, Cotton Concentration Company, Bay Cotton Bagging Company, and Gulf Transfer Company. Moody interests had been reduced along the way, and Sealy thus established nearly complete control of the cotton business and waterfront. When the city finally took control of the docks in 1947, the largest owner among a widely spread bondholder group was the Sealy and Smith Foundation.59 Before this final dissolution, however, several notable events in the history of the port occurred.

A longshoremen’s strike which began in New York City reached Galveston in March 1920. The basic issues were demands for a wage increase from sixty to eighty cents per hour and recognition of the bargaining authority of the International Longshoremen’s Association. The Morgan Lines responded with scab labor, and the Mallory Company diverted traffic to Port Arthur. The Morgan management contacted the Texas Chamber of Commerce in Dallas and threatened to leave the Port of Galveston. The Dallas organization queried the Galveston Commercial Association, which responded that there was plenty of labor in Galveston, but that workers were afraid to challenge the union. Business complaints to the Dallas organization indicated that seasonal goods were not moving and that the banks could not carry the loans. Along with island businesses, the Texas Chamber of Commerce asked Governor William P. Hobby to use troops to open the port.⁶⁰

The Galveston police in this instance were sympathetic to the strikers and often did not interfere with union acts of intimidation, so Governor Hobby declared martial law, suspended the municipal government, and sent in soldiers to break the strike. The city commission formally protested this “insult to the citizenship of this city,” but the takeover was cordial. The military spent $50,000 per month, the ladies organized dances for the soldiers, the ships were serviced, and at the end of September martial law ended. The city presented the commander a twelve-inch loving cup at a farewell banquet, where the toastmaster declared: “And though we are unable to compensate them [Texas National Guard] in full for the valuable service rendered, the fact that not one of them is leaving us without taking from ten to fifteen pounds more of flesh back home than he brought down here seems in slight degree to bespeak the fact that their stay with us was not without its results to each of them.”⁶¹

Texas Rangers remained in charge of the police force until January 19, 1921, and the workers went back to tasks at a wage of sixty-seven cents per hour, but with the union shattered.⁶² It was a temporary setback for organized labor, but the I.L.A. and other unions reasserted themselves by the mid-1930’s. Labor trouble, as in 1920, usually started elsewhere, often on the East Coast, and the port was caught in tides beyond its control.

During this year of turmoil the harbor acquired one of its curious landmarks, the ship Selma. It was built in 1919 by the U.S. Shipping Board at Mobile as an experiment—421 feet long, 54 feet wide, 34 feet deep, two decks, two masts, a round stern, and constructed of reinforced concrete. After it hit the jetty at Tampico, tugboats towed the odd vessel to Galveston, in August 1920, for repairs at a recently established dry dock. Iron bars protruding from the damaged hull made it impossible to restore, so the government gave up and, after a few mishaps while moving, sank the Selma near Pelican Island and the entrance to the Galveston channel. It rested at an angle in three-to-seventeen-foot water and became a favorite fishing site. It had a succession of owners, the most colorful being “Frenchy” LeBlanc, who bought the grounded vessel for $100 in 1946. He retreated from the world, lived on board, and caught most of his food. He later left for health reasons, but the Selma remains as an enduring curiosity.63

The port continued its preeminence as a cotton and grain shipping point, and in the 1920’s became the main place for sulphur cargo as well. The Intracoastal Canal, which opened in 1933, and the removal of the railroad differential (see page 53) the same year aided exports and helped the city ease through the Depression. Todd Shipyards of New York bought the Galveston Dry Dock Company in 1933 and acquired land on Pelican Spit for expansion. The firm repaired ships in World War II and took control of Gray’s Iron Works, which built tankers under government contract in Galveston. At its peak during the war 4,500 people worked there. Todd maintained its facility afterward and became the main repair station for the western Gulf of Mexico.⁶⁴

The most important event in the history of the port in this period, however, was the transfer of ownership and control to the city. Private ownership of the facility had long been a point of contention, a smolder that periodically broke into flame. The Moody-directed newspaper said in 1928: “Galveston has been a fief of the Galveston Wharf Company since 1869. We now see this port lagging behind the march of progress, while competing ports appropriate an increasingly larger share of the business which Galveston must depend upon for sustenance. The Wharf Company should be called to account before the bar of public opinion for its laggard and selfish administration of the trust imposed upon it by its monopolistic control of the waterfront.”⁶⁵

There is little evidence that the Wharf Company was inefficient or slow to improve. It caught the blame, however, for the success of Houston and other rival ports.⁶⁶ Enmity, moreover, existed between the family which controlled the newspaper and the one which ruled the wharves. Early in 1939 the Galveston Chamber of Commerce began to investigate and promote the idea of municipal ownership of the wharves. The thought gained momentum, the voters approved, and in 1940 the city bought the Wharf Company for $6,250,000 in bonds. Under the agreement the wharves would be directed by a board consisting of the mayor, a member of the city commission, and three representatives of the Galveston Corporation. The municipality would not gain command until all the bonds were redeemed, and although the Wharf Company dissolved, the leader of the Galveston Corporation, George Sealy, remained in control.67

Sealy died in 1944, but trouble continued, aggravated by disagreements and the refusal of the corporation’s board of trustees for three years to authorize the annual payment of $160,000 to the city in lieu of taxes. A court finally ordered the board to pay the city. The directors also received criticism for holding $3 million in the Hutchings-Sealy Bank as a reserve without collecting interest. The president of the bank was a vice president of the Galveston Corporation and a member of the board that controlled the wharf. This was too much. The voters in 1947 approved another $2,500,000 in city bonds to redeem the remaining wharf bonds, and William L. Moody, Jr., probably with great satisfaction, bought the bonds at par to provide the money. The newly selected municipal board then utilized the surplus to pay back the $2,500,000, and, at last, the waterfront belonged to Galveston.⁶⁸

The other two dynastic families—Kempner and Moody—followed much the same pattern as the Sealy family. The founder earned the initial fortune, the second generation expanded the estate, and the third dispersed the money among its members and to charitable foundations.⁶⁹ The patriarch of the Kempner family, Harris Kempner, was born in Poland in 1837 and sailed to the United States in 1854 to escape service in the Czar’s army. He lived near Cold Springs, Texas, worked as an itinerant peddler, fought for the South in the Civil War, and moved to Galveston in 1870. He opened a wholesale grocery business, dealt in cotton, and invested in country banks, railroads, and real estate. His financial connections reached to New York, Paris, London, and Basel. Kempner and his wife had eleven children, three of whom died in infancy.⁷⁰

The second generation continued the businesses and spread into life insurance and sugar refining. Four of the brothers ran the enterprises and administered the profits through an unincorporated association called a “Massachusetts trust” under Texas law. The leader, informally selected, was Isaac H. Kempner. He was deeply involved in the municipal recovery from the 1900 hurricane and the formation of the commission government. He possessed an interest in the welfare of his community and expressed socialistic leanings in his youth, which prompted his father to comment, “If at twenty you are not socialistic, you have no heart. If at forty you are still socialistic, you have no mind.”71

The Kempners began as a strong Jewish family, but became diverse. As Isaac Kempner stated: “Oh, I’ve got one child married to a Jew, one child married to a Baptist, one child married to an Episcopalian, and one child married to a Catholic, and I am president of the Synagogue.”⁷² It is of interest that in their long association with Galveston there was little antisemitism directed toward them. There was never a ghetto in Galveston, and Jews were active on all levels of society and politics. A major reason for this lack of prejudice was the community concern of the Kempners and the presence of leaders like Rabbi Henry Cohen.

This remarkable rabbi was born in London in 1863, and arrived in Galveston in 1888 to lead Temple B’nai Israel after several other assignments elsewhere in the world. During his career he worked to gain aid for the destitute, reform Texas prisons, and facilitate immigration to the United States. Woodrow Wilson called him the “foremost citizen of Texas,” but he was best known around Galveston for visiting the hospitals. “I never ask what religion each patient professes or whether he has any religion at all,” Cohen said. “To me, there is no such thing as Episcopalian scarlet fever, Catholic arthritis, or Jewish mumps.”⁷³

The rabbi once traveled to Washington, D.C., to gain freedom from deportation for a Greek Orthodox who faced a firing squad at home in Russia. On another occasion he charged—all five feet of him—into a Galveston brothel to free a young woman held against her will. He found her naked in a room, wrapped a blanket around her, marched up the street with her and his bicycle, stormed into a store, and commanded in a stuttering voice, “Fit her out from head to foot!” Cohen then took her to his home and found her a job in town. He labored with Father James M. Kirwin to aid in the recovery from the great storm and stood beside him before the city commissioners to block a parade permit for the Ku Klux Klan. He was a force for righteousness and beloved in his community. A granddaughter recalled walking with him through the dark streets to a Saturday night movie when a shriveled stranger stepped out of the shadows. “Rabbi Cohen?” he asked. “Yes.” “God bless you,” the man said and disappeared.⁷⁴ Cohen was a man who touched the heart.

There was little love, however, extended between the Kempners and the Moodys. In 1903–1904 Isaac H. Kempner and William L. Moody, Jr., took over the American National Insurance Company (ANICO), but, according to Kempner, “trickery and deception, which I should have anticipated, gradually but definitely permeated the policies of [my] associate.” Moody told him that the Texas insurance commissioner had recommended that one family or the other own ANICO to avoid the split in responsibility. Kempner sold his part of the successful company to Moody, but later found out that the commissioner had said nothing of that nature. Moody had tricked him. Kempner reacted in 1910 by starting the Texas Prudential Insurance Company, but it was not nearly so prosperous as ANICO.75

When the Galvez Hotel was built, Isaac Kempner led the effort, and the Moody name was not to be seen. There had been a longstanding idea to replace the Beach Hotel, and in 1907 Isaac’s brother, D. W. Kempner, offered $100,000 for construction if the city would match with $500,000. Nothing happened, but in 1910 four business leaders—Isaac H. Kempner, Bertrand Adoue, John Sealy, and H. S. Cooper of the Galveston Electric Company—subscribed $50,000 each as a nucleus. The rest of the money came from small purchases of stock in the Galvez Hotel Company, and Kempner became the president.

The $750,000 landmark hotel opened its 250 rooms in 1911 with all places reserved. It had a specially designed silver service, waiters imported from New York, a view of the Gulf from behind the seawall, and a character that won the affection of the citizens as a symbol of the “Galveston spirit.” Hyman Block, an employee of Isaac Kempner, remembered the Galvez for its dances. The bands played one-step, two-step, and waltz music. There were selections called “Paul Jones dances” during which the band stopped and everyone changed partners. “I’m telling you,” said Block, “it was gorgeous. You would be with your date and the more you danced, the closer you got, and the closer you got, the warmer it got. And finally you’d say, ‘Whee, it’s hot in here. We’d better go outside.’ Then on the Galvez’ south lawn you could look at the tropical moon, listen to the roar of the Gulf and sit on their wonderful wooden swings . . . and yes, there was some courting that went on there, even in those days.”⁷⁶

After Isaac Kempner died in 1967, the last of the second generation, the Kempner trust left the cotton business and developed mainly into an investment operation for the benefit of numerous, scattered family members, and for the support of the Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund for philanthropic purposes.

In a monetary sense, no one else in Galveston history was as successful as Colonel William L. Moody and his son, William L. Moody, Jr. Colonel Moody made his fortune after the Civil War in cotton and banking. He founded the Cotton Exchange in 1873. In the 1880’s he sought, without success, a deeper harbor for Galveston, but he did little for his home town during its recovery from the great storm of 1900. Colonel Moody died in 1920, but meanwhile his son, who had become his junior partner in 1886 and who displayed considerable financial ability, had expanded the family activities into insurance, hotels, and ranching. In 1923 he bought the Galveston Daily News and consolidated it in 1926 with the Galveston Tribune, although they continued as before—the News in the morning, the Tribune in the afternoon. In 1932 the “Moody Interests” published a public New Year’s greeting which listed: City National Bank; American National Insurance Company; W. L. Moody and Company, Bankers; W. L. Moody Cotton Company; Galveston Compress and Warehouse Company; Buccaneer Hotel; News; Tribune; and radio station KFUL.77

The Moodys, father and son, were hard-driving, self-seeking capitalists with a reputation for parsimony. Colonel Moody placed his desk by the door of the office and checked the clock as people came to work. When hiring, he asked people to recite the Lord’s Prayer, spell “Tuesday,” and explain one-eighth and one-thirty-second of a dollar. This was in 1908.⁷⁸ His son was equally punctual, and once left the governor of Texas standing behind on the dock when he was a few minutes late for a fishing trip. To his grandson, W. L. Moody, Jr., wrote in 1945 his philosophy of business: be truthful, honest, fair in dealings; do not take unfair advantage of your fellow man; do not gamble, especially in the stockmarket; do not smoke or drink. “They are vulgar and expensive habits that lead you nowhere,” he stated.⁷⁹ Even Colonel Moody’s wife, who lived ninety-three years, had a reputation for tightness. According to a story told among the Kempners, she owned a car but did not like to drive it because she had to buy gasoline. It was a cruel dilemma for her, however, because if she did not drive, the tires would rot and that was just as bad.⁸⁰

The Moodys built the first ANICO building in 1913, and opened the second in 1971 as a statement of faith in Galveston. They built the Buccaneer Hotel in 1929, established a school for children with cerebral palsy in 1950, and constructed a convention hall in 1957.⁸¹ W. L. Moody, Jr., opposed the Kempner and Sealy factions in local politics, particularly in the mid-1930’s. He was unsuccessful, but his son-in-law, Clark W. Thompson, became the congressman from the Galveston district in 1933.⁸² Moody’s son, Shearn Moody, led in the political fights of the 1930’s and was taken into the business. At age forty, however, Shearn Moody died of pneumonia and the family lost its heir apparent. Shearn Moody’s brother, William L. Moody III, lost favor by going into bankruptcy after the 1929 stock-market crash. His ranch was put up for sale on the courthouse steps of Kimball County, and W. L. Moody, Jr., bought it so his son would have a place to live. He placed the ranch in trust so that W. L. Moody III, would have an income but no control for the rest of his life. W. L. Moody, Jr., was embarrassed; no family member had ever chosen bankruptcy before.83

Before his death in 1954, William L. Moody, Jr., worried about the effect of taxes on his estate and arranged for the bulk of the fortune to go to the Moody Foundation for the support of religious, educational, scientific, and health institutions in the state of Texas. The amount of money involved, estimated at $440 million, ranked the new foundation among the top fifteen in the nation. The will cut off William L. Moody III with one dollar, and placed direction of the empire in the hands of his dutiful sister, Mary Moody Northen. She was a widow of seven weeks at this juncture, and had never spent a day at the office. She commented later, “Up until my father died, I had never been farther than Houston by myself. The next day I was head of all Moody interests.”⁸⁴ She proved tougher, however, than anyone suspected.

William L. Moody III, who felt that he did not receive enough from the estate, sought to break the will on the basis that the old man was insane. If he won, the foundation’s share would have shrunk to $73 million, but Mary Moody Northen opposed him, and he settled for $3,640,000. She also beat off suits from other family members in 1959 and 1970, weathered a state investigation in 1970, and blocked attempts to transfer funds to family members by special state law in 1965, 1967, and 1969. Behind much of this turmoil was Shearn Moody, Jr., whose business, W. L. Moody Bank, was closed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and fell into receivership in 1972. Even though all depositors eventually recovered their funds, the old man must have rotated in his grave.⁸⁵

After six years of litigation, the foundation began functioning in 1960, and it was like opening a floodgate. The foundation, for example, gave the Buccaneer Hotel to the Methodists for an old folks’ home; the convention center plus money to operate it for three years to the city; $1 million for the establishment of the Texas Maritime Academy in 1965; $500,000 for a new wing of the Rosenberg Library in 1968; various amounts for planning, building, and equipping Galveston Community College; a basic sciences building at the medical school; and much of the money for historic preservation work in the city. From its beginning until 1976, the foundation gave 750 grants throughout Texas amounting to $75 million; it had donated $40 million to Galveston projects by the end of 1981.86 The philanthropy of the Moody Foundation provided a satisfying conclusion to the lifetime work of two generations of hard-working capitalists.

The Sealys, Kempners, and Moodys ran the economy, ruled society, and directed politics until after World War II. They reigned because the economy was stagnant and the population grew but slowly. There was no new blood, no one to rock the boat, and people of vitality went to Houston. Only the Maceos provided a dynamic element, and they ran an illegal empire. The patricians tolerated the vice and the criminal leadership of the Maceos. Why?

There is no easy answer, but a feeling existed of “live and let live,” within limits. The elite rose to action over the Phillips murder, but generally allowed vice to operate until it caused a problem or threatened their own domain. There is a story that Sam Maceo once began to build twenty nice apartments at 23rd Street and Avenue Q. W. L. Moody, Jr., sent for Rose Maceo, the older brother who ran the family, and said, “I stayed out of the gambling business, and I expect you to stay out of the hotel business.” The Maceos tore down the apartments.⁸⁷

There is little evidence of joint investment between the Maceos and the others, and no intermarriage. During an investigation of ANICO in 1970–1971 it was revealed that the company had loaned money to Las Vegas casinos, but there was nothing illegal about that.⁸⁸ Both Moody and Maceo invested in the Galveston Pleasure Pier, but to say that they were business associates would be incorrect. The Maceos, furthermore, were not welcome at the country club. Johnny Mitchell, an oil millionaire who grew up poor in Galveston, said about Sam Maceo, “He did more for Galveston than anybody I ever knew. But that’s the kind of town Galveston is. It’s a two-class town, all poor and a half-dozen snobs. They’re still wearing high button shoes down there. The old-timers, they never had a bit of fun; they never been nowhere; they ain’t going nowhere.”⁸⁹

The elite, however, enjoyed the pleasures offered by the Maceos. Their own investments, often off the island, were uninvolved, and socially it was a one-way street. They could live in a city of vice and not be a part of it. Isaac Kempner wrote to his daughter, Cecile Kempner, in 1942 after a visit to Maceo’s Balinese Room:

Crowded as usual but very few people that we knew. They have two orchestras so there is no lull in the music realm—one of the orchestras is a Mexican or Cuban Rhumba band, and when they play, conversation is a futile proceeding. I never encountered so much noise condensed in one evening. Besides that, the food was poor, though when I got out of the dim and darkened light, I found I had carried away quite a portion of it (in a spotted inventory of each dish) on my shirt front.90

He also noted the decorations of the remodeled Turf Club, operated by the Maceos: “Nowhere this side of Hollywood has there been more lavish or lurid decor. It is on the whole in good taste—but I imagine it would be rather trying to live with night after night.”⁹¹ Isaac Kempner once held a debutante party at Maceo’s Hollywood nightclub. On another occasion, Isaac’s son, Harris L. Kempner, smuggled several cases of champagne needed for his sister’s wedding. He sailed a small boat out to Bolivar Roads, picked up the cases, landed at the Beach Club, carried the cases down the jetty and a block or two into town to a car in plain sight, and took them home.⁹² The Kempners saw that gambling was a problem, but took an easy-going attitude toward it, and drinking, and the Maceos.

It was easy to tolerate the gangland family. They brought excitement to the city and provided it with a naughty reputation. During Prohibition days in the United States it was considered “smart” to know a bootlegger and thumb your nose at authority, at least in a small way. People, great and small, continued to drink during Prohibition, and it was the same with gambling. It did not appear that anyone was getting hurt. It was fun, slightly risqué, and no one in Galveston seemed to mind. If you did not like it, you could leave. In addition, the people of Galveston had beaten Mother Nature with a seawall. They had been through hell and high water, and survived. Galveston, and the people who lived there—better, those who were born there—were different from others, so they thought. They broke the laws, natural and human, and got away with it. The island, therefore, was unlike the rest of Texas or the United States. It was insular. In a country increasingly regulated and bureaucratic, the general attitude of the island was one of independence—the free state of Galveston.

Sam Maceo made this myth easy to believe. He was a nice guy, and even the minister of the First Presbyterian Church characterized him as “a very lovable sort of fellow.” It was hard to see that he was a crook, or that the Maceos had anything to do with gangland slayings. In 1933 Sam Maceo paid for a large Christmas party at the city auditorium for needy children; he sponsored swimming contests in the Gulf to prove the water was free of sharks; he gave $1,500 to the building fund of the First Methodist Church; he was chairman of entertainment for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt birthday celebration to fight infantile paralysis; he worked with the Beach Association of businessmen to contract big-name entertainment for the annual opening of the beaches; he was a committeeman to fight pollution in Galveston waters; he brought in Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy to make Mardi Gras a success; he organized a benefit for the aid of Texas City disaster victims; and he personally cooked spaghetti dinners for his friends. How could anyone not like Sam Maceo? Even his rough, taciturn older brother, Rose, who was the boss of the operations, once outbid Glenn McCarthy, the famous oil magnate of Houston, and paid $5,300 for a feathered hat designed by Hedda Hopper at a benefit for the Houston Boys’ Club.93

The Maceos successfully courted the heart of the people, made a lot of money, and retained most of it in Galveston County. The termination of Prohibition in 1933 also ended bootlegging, but it remained unlawful to gamble and to sell liquor by the drink in Texas. The brothers provided these illegal services at the Hollywood Dinner Club into the 1930’s, and at the Grotto, a restaurant on a pier off the seawall which they bought with Dutch Voight in 1926. It was closed for gaming violations in 1928 and damaged by a storm in 1932. They remodeled it, however, and opened it as the Sui Jen (pronounced Swee Rin) in 1932 with a Chinese menu and a small pagoda for a bandstand. Along with these enterprises the Maceos operated a bathhouse, amusement park, nightclubs and casinos on the mainland, the Turf Club in their headquarters building in downtown Galveston, and a rental service for slot, pinball, and phonograph machines. Three hundred places rented these machines, usually with an agreement to split the income in half. The organization also distributed policy cards and took bets on horse races.⁹⁴

In 1942 the Sui Jen was remodeled and renamed the Balinese Room, which became the premier nightclub of Texas. “The atmosphere attempts to be extremely El Morocco,” wrote an observer, “but came up extremely rococo.” After earlier experiences in which open clubs were closed by injunctions, the Maceos and others began to operate on a private basis with easy access to membership. They posted a guard at the front of the two-hundred-foot Balinese pier to screen patrons, issue memberships, and warn of unwanted visitors. By the time law enforcement officers reached the restaurant and gaming room at the end of the long pier, the illegal paraphernalia had been hidden. It is possible that, especially after World War II, the Maceos developed a warning network which tipped them off about raids of the Texas Rangers. According to stories, the townspeople would spot the big hats of the Rangers and tell the Maceos before anything could happen. There were also rumors of inside sources in Austin. Be that as it may, a successful raid on the Balinese Room or other Maceo operations was rare. On one occasion, according to legends, as the unwelcome state officers charged down the pier and into the nightclub, the band struck up “The Eyes of Texas,” and the leader announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we give you, in person, the Texas Rangers!”95

The local police, city and county, adopted a complacent attitude. They enforced the law on the basis of complaints, and very few people complained. The police maintained general order and were not corrupt. Since enforcement was lax enough, there was no reason for the criminals to bribe them.⁹⁶ Typical were the words and actions of Frank L. Biaggne, who served as county sheriff from 1933 to 1957. He was born in Louisiana in 1894, went to war in 1917, worked as a Galveston fireman for two years, and became a patrolman in 1921. He was considered a “lovable character” by the underworld, and early learned to discriminate when he made raids.

In 1930, while still with the Galveston police department, Sergeant Biaggne and Sergeant Tom Lyons staged a series of attacks on slot-machine operators. Lyons revealed initiative, found violators on his own, and made arrests independent of orders. Police Chief Tony Messina suspended Lyons, cited him for insubordination, and ordered the baseball gambling books seized by Lyons returned to the owners. A maverick commissioner, Jacob Singer, asked embarrassing questions about the case, said Lyons should be commended for doing his duty, and explained that the problem arose because the sergeant had struck “protected places.” Nothing came of it. Lyons was reinstated with back pay, and the police actions ceased. In all of this Biaggne received no word of criticism; he had played the game correctly.⁹⁷

Sporadically, raids occurred on gambling and drinking places. If staged by the city or county, the actions usually meant very little, and were often a response to ministers or occasional crusaders seeking reform. The slot machines disappeared for awhile as the “lid” clamped down, and then quietly re-emerged later after the pressure had decreased. More serious were the attacks of the Texas Rangers. They, also, were sporadic and inconsistent, mainly because of lack of manpower and the resistance of the community. “We can’t raid them all,” explained State Director of Public Safety Homer Garrison in 1951. “We’ve only got fifty Rangers. When we raid we have to raid all places simultaneously. You’ve got an extraordinary communication system here. We can’t raid one place and then go to another place down the street, because all evidence of violations disappears.” He later added, “There is no use in raiding Galveston County as long as juries there won’t convict on gambling charges.”⁹⁸ That was another aspect of the problem.

Biaggne, the county sheriff, was a master of innocence through all of this. In 1937, after Rangers confiscated dice tables from two clubs and could not find the sheriff to take custody of them, Biaggne commented, “I was by the Little Club about 11:00 or 11:30 o’clock and nothing was going on. I didn’t know the Little Club had a dice game. I’m surprised at them out at Del Mar!”99 With marble and slot machines operating all over the county in 1940, Biaggne said, “I haven’t seen any marble machines paying off, and I haven’t seen anyone paying off a machine.”¹⁰⁰ Reacting to an ultimatum from the county attorney to clean up vice in 1948, Biaggne arrested four people and said that he knew of no houses of ill fame in the county.¹⁰¹ In 1951, during an investigation by a committee of the Texas legislature, the sheriff gave a classic response to the question about why he never raided the Balinese Room. “I go to the man at the desk and say, ‘How about getting in?’ He says, ‘Nothing doing.’ You see . . . I’m not a member.”¹⁰²

Sheriff Biaggne, obviously, was not a man to look very far for trouble. Ironically, he was elected president of the National Sheriffs’ Association in 1952. Long before, in 1938, Dr. W. F. Bryan, pastor of the First Methodist Church, had said in a sermon that the underworld had Galveston “buffaloed.”

Why, I could take a bird dog, not a good one, but just an ordinary bird dog and smear beeswax over his nose, and he could still flush more quail in an hour than the police officers of Galveston have flushed gamblers in a week. Slot machines, marble machines and gambling devices of all sorts litter the city of Galveston and a few men, men whose names we can hardly pronounce, are getting fatly rich off these machines.¹⁰³

The police should not be blamed too much for their inaction. As William J. Burns, a policeman in the 1930’s and long-term police chief, commented in 1949, “You know as well as I know and all of Galveston knows that there are liquor and gambling violations here.” He tried to keep places decent. “That is about all we can do unless we close the town.” Even Biaggne, after being needled by editor Clyde B. Ragsdale of the Texas City Sun, said in a burst of reality, “That Ragsdale is an s.o.b. If I closed down all the joints, they’d have to close all the hotels in Galveston.” Burns thoughtfully reflected years later, “People get the kind of government they want.”¹⁰⁴

After 1941 the City Party—the political organization of the Sealy and Kempner families—offered no candidates for election, and the political influence of the old elites waned. In 1947 Herbert Y. Cartwright, Jr., with no particular political affiliation, scored an upset victory over the incumbent mayor, George W. Fraser. The chubby, friendly Cartwright personally handed out nine thousand cards during the campaign with his trademark phrase, “Thanks a million.” He was young, thirty-two, with a definite political stance concerning vice. “I don’t believe in prostitution or kids gambling and drinking, but when a man or woman gets to be 21 years of age I don’t worry about them. Where we should do most of our teaching is in the homes, churches and schools.” He commented during an investigation that he had refused bribes to let outside gamblers into the city. When it was pointed out that this meant a closed shop for the Maceos, Cartwright retorted, “Do you want us to let them all come in?” Later, he said to a Dallas audience, “We don’t butt into the affairs of our sister cities and we don’t want them to butt into ours.” The mayor was for a “regulated open town,” and there was a block of five thousand votes from the gambling establishment to support him.105

In 1955 George Roy Clough, owner of the local radio station, KLUF, defeated Cartwright for mayor. He remained in office for two terms. Clough had much the same views about Galveston as Cartwright, but Clough was erratic and irascible. He had a knack for attracting unfavorable national publicity to the city and a tendency to squabble with his commission members.¹⁰⁶ Clough advocated a “clean and open city,” and told the Junior Chamber of Commerce of Houston, “Gambling and prostitution will keep Galveston an ‘isle of enchantment’ as long as there are people around to spend money on them and as long as I am around to see it.”¹⁰⁷ He arrested former commissioners and forced them to pay overdue parking tickets—Cartwright had sixty-two—but in 1959 Cartwright returned to office.¹⁰⁸ By then everything had changed. Galveston had burned the candle from both ends, and its world went up in smoke.

Before the denouement Galveston promoted a number of activities to make it an “isle of enchantment” in addition to gambling, drinking, and prostitution. In the first half of the twentieth century there were a series of all-city celebrations designed to entertain tourists and citizens. Colonel William L. Moody, in a sweat about his diminishing cotton business, started the Cotton Carnival in 1909. He led a list of men supporting the idea with a thousand-dollar donation, made a rare public appearance, and gave a speech at an open meeting of the Business League.

Capital is not coming in as it should. We are losing ground in cotton factorage. . . . We are now admitted to be the second port in the United States. It is wonderful. But, gentlemen, hasn’t the port run away from the city? Let us think much of our port, but let us also build our city. We have lost much of our factorage business. Shipping got ahead and became of paramount importance. It is time that a change were effected.109

The goal of the carnival was to attract cotton growers to Galveston to acquaint them with local facilities, but the idea was anachronistic. Factorage had shifted to the interior of the state, but Galveston hosted the carnival for eight years. It included parades, balls, exhibits, and sporting events, particularly automobile racing on the beach. As many as sixty thousand people attended the two-week affair, but the Cotton Carnival ceased with the coming of World War I because of high costs.¹¹⁰

A secret boosters’ club called the KKK (Kotton Karnival Kids) promoted the fest until its demise, and then shifted its efforts to the Mardi Gras in 1917. Several years later the group changed its name to MMM (Mystic Merry Makers) to avoid confusion with the Ku Klux Klan.¹¹¹ The club sponsored the crowning of King Frivolous, debutante balls, parades, receptions for visiting U.S. Navy ships, and general fun. A Mardi Gras revel had occurred irregularly since 1867, but it was held annually from 1902 until 1952 except during World War II. A similar city festivity, the Oleander Fete, sporadically occurred in late May from 1921 until 1977.¹¹²

Splash Day, the most famous Galveston celebration, began in 1916 at the suggestion of the manager of the Galvez Hotel, to mark the opening of the beaches for the summer season. The idea found wide approval, and there were parades, exhibitions, fireworks, dances, and the coronation of King Neptune. In 1946 Johnny Weissmuller, the movie Tarzan, came ashore from a World War II landing craft as the king. He was supposed to be accompanied by forty bathing beauties with combat helmets and rifles to establish a beachhead. The water, however, was rough, and the photographers delayed the boat. As a result, seasickness wiped out half the landing force. Splash Day continued until 1965, when it had to be stopped because of crowd-control problems. The police could not handle it. Thereafter, the Easter weekend became the unofficial Splash Day for thousands of teenagers from Texas and the Southwest.¹¹³

On this occasion, naturally, beach apparel became an object of comment and observation. The general trends after 1900 were a change from a costume which was essentially a modification of everyday dress to a specific garment designed for swimming and sunning, and a gradual diminution exposing an ever greater amount of skin to a point approaching nudity. In 1914 colors and plaids with caps, stockings, and shoes were in fashion, and in 1916 the California one-piece suit with stripes and colored trim for men and women appeared. It reached to mid-thigh, was sleeveless with a scoop neck, was made of mohair or silk, and had a skirt attached for women. The problem was that girls began wearing boys’ suits without the skirt and without stockings.

People rented these garments at the bathhouses, and the police worried about violation of the old city ordinance that required bathers to be covered from knee to elbow. “The biggest thing that we want to put a stop to on the beach,” said the chief of police, “is the wearing of men’s bathing suits by women. If the women will not ask for and wear men’s bathing suits there will be but little trouble in the matter of enforcing the regulations.”114 But there was no stopping the trend in a day and place where women reached for equality and people liked to tweak the nose of authority. Female competitive swimmers with pictures in the paper, moreover, set the style with sleeveless, scoop-necked, clinging suits cut across the top of the thigh.¹¹⁵ The briefer costumes, which daringly revealed the feminine figure, also helped women swim faster.

Men shed their tops and women tried two-piece suits in the 1940’s. In 1948 the newspaper called attention to the Riviera, or Bikini, style for women, but it was not common at Galveston until the mid-1960’s. In 1964 some topless women’s suits appeared in Galveston shops, although the style did not catch on.¹¹⁶ Nudity was still against the law, and no one seemed willing to go that far. As they were, the styles left ample opportunity for sunburn.

As might be expected there were bathing beauty contests. The Bathing Girl Review, which evolved as part of Splash Day, began in 1920 and changed into the International Pageant of Pulchritude in 1926. At its height it attracted close to forty entries from around the world and crowds of 250,000 people. First place won publicity and a cash prize of $2,500. The most famous entrant, due to later success, was Dorothy Lamour, but she did not win the 1931 contest and later said that the pageant had nothing to do with her movie achievements. Women’s church groups, the WCTU, the YWCA, and the PTA protested the event because it was a “destruction to all sense of modesty,” and in 1927 Bishop Byrne wrote to a potential entrant from Vienna:

The pageant is an uncouth, vulgar display for the purpose of advertising. If you come here you will be asked to parade in only a bathing suit before a motley crowd who will scrutinize you at close range as they would a beautiful animal. I cannot see how any self respecting or decent young lady would enter such a contest.¹¹⁷

Criticism and protests did not stop the pageant; high costs and the Great Depression did. It ceased after 1931. The Depression struck Galveston much as it did Houston—a glancing blow. Tourism, port activity, Fort Crockett, insurance companies, the University of Texas Medical Branch, and the New Texas State Psychopathic Hospital buoyed the Island City economy. Tax delinquency was half that of other places, and the county continued to redeem seawall bonds. The city benefited from a high level of philanthropy, orphan and aged care was good, and the Community Chest continued to function, although at a diminished level. Still, city employees took a 10 percent pay cut, the schools experienced budget problems, and transients increased three times. The Salvation Army became the clearinghouse for meal tickets and care of vagrants, while the YMCA and the Adoue Seamen’s Bethel, a refuge for sailors aided by Bertrand Adoue in 1913, ran at full capacity. In 1938 the WPA in Galveston County employed 438 men and 235 women at a basic wage of $33 per month. The agency spent $858,872 that year on such items as road repair, drainage, sewers, tree planting, malaria control, water mains, school repair, and planting oleanders along the streets.118 The Depression was no lark, even in Galveston.

Housing was a problem even before the 1930’s. The Women’s Health Protective Association first brought slums to the attention of city officials in 1914. The WHPA was a white women’s organization formed in 1901. It worked to plant trees and shrubs, improve the cleanliness of milk, gain proper health inspection of restaurants and markets, clear debris, and give decent burial to victims of the 1900 storm. It gathered 350 to 400 members in the first two decades of the century and then evolved into the Women’s Civic League. The WHPA in 1914 pointed out slum houses on West Mechanic where derelicts lived in places with bare floors, no glass in the windows, and no care except through private charity.¹¹⁹

A special committee looking into a mixed racial area from 36th to 46th Streets and Avenue I north to the railroad in 1940 found that among the 516 houses, 305 used outhouses, 145 had no sewer connections, 182 had no inside water, 274 heated with wood, and 343 had no baths. Most were in bad repair.¹²⁰ Low-cost public housing did not come to the island until the opening of Oleander Homes for whites and Palm Terrace for blacks in 1943. The demand for wartime shelter quickly filled these places, and they did not fulfill their function as public housing until after the hostilities ceased. A survey of housing units in 1945 revealed that 46 percent were substandard. Thirty-six percent of the white population and 75 percent of the black population lived in these places, which were scattered across the city. When asked if Galveston had plans to do anything about the poor housing, an official responded, “Do you want us to tear down the whole city?”121

By 1961, with additional construction, almost 7 percent of housing in the city was public and operated by the Galveston Housing Authority. At this point 21 percent of all private homes in the city were substandard, but this was average for the United States. The percentage of people living in public housing, however, was among the highest in the nation. An effort to sell part of this public housing in 1982 met effective protests, and an editor commented, “Successive generations have now grown up in poverty-laden Magnolia Homes. The residents are enveloped by the public housing lifestyle and mentality which entraps them. The lifestyle unfortunately perpetuates itself.”¹²² Poverty has always been a problem, in Galveston and elsewhere, and seems destined to remain.

In the various festivals and celebrations, and the organizations designed to advertise the city and entertain the population, sports played an important role. Both poor and rich, in economic depression or not, enjoyed these events. Galveston continued to field professional baseball teams in various leagues and with various names—Sand Crabs, Pirates, Buccaneers, and White Caps. The storm of 1915 destroyed the ball park, and Shearn Moody’s death in 1936 interrupted financial support. Galveston won the Texas League Championship in 1934, and there was always someone around to sponsor the team even though it was a long-term financial loss. Even in bad seasons there were bright moments, as sportswriter Ed Angly wrote in 1919:

When a team goes on the road and loses twelve out of sixteen games and then on its way home gets stuck behind a train wreck, so that the choo-choo reaches town just two hours before it’s time to play again, and the players find that owing to the lateness of the hour all their favorite dishes have been sold out at the restaurants, and after that they go out to the ball yard and knock the old horsehide to all corners of the lot and make up for most of their weak hitting on the road—oh boy! ain’t it a gr-r-r-and and gl-l-orious feeling?¹²³

With fewer than four hundred people attending games, the last Galveston team folded in 1955. The president of the Big State League, Howard Green, commented bitterly, “Galveston dropped out because it was the world’s worst baseball town, a resort city of the rankest type. Baseball was too wholesome for a population more interested in gaming, night clubs and that which goes with both.” It was an unfair statement; three other league teams had quit, and amateur baseball with high local participation took away the fans.124 Five years later, when Major League baseball arrived in Houston, there was no hope for a revival in Galveston.

During the early years of the century, drivers raced their automobiles on the beach, often as part of the Cotton Carnival. Much later, after World War II, the airport became the site of sports-car races sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. These began in 1957 and lasted through the 1960’s. The Greater Galveston Beach Association, in which the Maceos played a big role, sponsored football, starting with the Oleander Bowl from 1948 to 1951. The games were played at the high-school stadium and featured outstanding junior-college and small four-year-school teams. Galveston paid only room and board and “one hell of a party afterwards.” Other groups took over the project, changed the name to Shrimp Bowl in 1952, and invited military service teams in 1954–1959. At the last game the Quantico Marines scored almost every time they touched the ball and beat McClellan Air Force Base 90–0. The bowl games did not endure because of small crowds, poor facilities, non-interest by the media, bad weather, and a decline of military service teams.¹²⁵ But there was more to it than that. The “Free State of Galveston” was under attack, and the old leaders were not around to hold it together.

George Sealy, Jr., died of pneumonia in New York in 1944. William L. Moody, Jr., succumbed at age eighty-nine after a short illness in 1954. Isaac Kempner lived on into the 1960’s, but he was an old man by this time. Sam Maceo, at fifty-seven years, died of cancer in 1951, and Rose Maceo passed on in 1953 at age sixty-six after being in ill health with heart disease and clinical depression for two years. Herbert Y. Cartwright, Jr., the mayor since 1947, met defeat in 1955, and Sheriff Frank L. Biaggne lost his office in 1957. What this meant was a change in leadership and control. In the dynastic families—Moody, Sealy, Kempner—the money and power went into foundations or was dispersed among numerous relatives. The younger men who inherited the Maceo empire did not have the ability of the founders, and Cartwright’s successor lacked political adroitness. The web of relationships which held Galveston together, consequently, was ripped by death and the ballot box. The city became vulnerable to outside forces, as it once had been to the hurricane power of nature.

In 1951 the Internal Revenue Service began to apply pressure on gamblers and required them to purchase $50 licenses. The IRS filed income-tax-evasion suits against Maceo family members, and eventually won a $600,000 judgment against the estate of Sam Maceo in 1964. The case revealed that total income from Maceo operations was $3,239,000 in 1948, $3,433,000 in 1949, and $3,835,000 in 1950. About half this income came from gambling. The syndicate kept excellent books, but the IRS pointed to unstated income. Rose Maceo, for example, according to Sam Serio, the Maceo accountant, in the summer of 1947 brought a small safe into the Turf Building headquarters, opened it, revealed twelve bundles of money, and said to Sam Maceo, “Here’s $600,000. Three hundred of that is yours and three hundred is mine.” The safe and its contents did not show up in the record books. Neither did Sam Maceo’s personal betting. He shared with six others a gambling pool containing $670,000, and he won $49,000 on the election of Harry S. Truman. The federal suit diminished the Maceo fortune considerably. How much is not known, but according to newspaper reports, Rose Maceo left an estate of $357,000.126 More important, the family lost its gaming equipment and the freedom to operate.

The Maceo enterprises owned about 80 percent of the 1,300 slot machines in Galveston, which cost $250 to $300 each. In 1951 the Texas legislature made it prima facie evidence of felony gambling to display, possess, or even have the parts of a slot machine. The federal government made it illegal to transport machines across state lines, and the Maceos were stuck. To make it worse, four of them were called before the “Little Kefauver Committee” of the legislature to testify on crime in Texas. They sat “tight-lipped” while the state examined their well-kept books. The lawmakers found no evidence of bribery, no attempt to hide evidence, and a lot of contributions to charity.¹²⁷

While this was going on, the state attorney general, Price Daniel, obtained a court injunction forbidding Southwestern Bell Telephone Company to allow use of its lines to transmit horse-racing information to the Turf Athletic Club and other Maceo establishments. The data were coming by phone from New Orleans via a cafe at East Orange, Louisiana, to the Turf Club. The circuits were open four to seven hours per day, and as the service was cut, the loudspeaker at the Turf said, “They’re off and running in the fifth at Lincoln [Chicago] . . . close everything on the post.” That meant that all bets were off; horse betting in Galveston was shut down.¹²⁸

For several months during the Austin investigation, “the tightest lid ever slammed down on Galveston” kept the casinos dark. Isaac Kempner wrote to his daughter that he was surprised at the revealed amount of money the Maceos took in, and that the crackdown had put a thousand people out of work. An indirect loss, he noted, was the donations to charity and civic causes “by an element that has always been liberal.” Kempner thought that in the long run the eradication of gaming would be good, but that at the moment the tourists found time heavy on their hands.129 This did not last long. The clubs reopened, but without the slot machines.

A Galveston grand jury returned twenty-two felony indictments against Maceo partners late in 1951. The judges postponed the trials five times, and finally the county attorney dismissed the cases for lack of evidence. Slot machines returned in 1954, and the 1956 grand jury reported, “It is commonly known that open gambling, sale of intoxicants to minors, illegal sale of liquor, and prostitution exist in Galveston county, but no charges were presented to the grand jury by law enforcement officers.”¹³⁰ It was business “at the old stand” for Galveston.

In 1956, however, another knight errant appeared, and this one possessed unusual talent. Will Wilson ran for state attorney general and won. Galveston County did not vote for him, but there was little in the newspapers, or in his inauguration speech, to indicate what was coming. Shortly Wilson warned, however, that he would rid the town of crime, and announced that “gambling is the hub upon which the wheel of lawlessness spins.” To the new attorney general Galveston was a symbol of vice in the state. The island was notorious, and had the only mayor who openly supported gambling. Wilson prepared a surprise raid with sixty Rangers and held a secret meeting in Houston with twenty-three assistant lawyers. Before anything happened, however, gambling spots in five counties mysteriously began to close, including the Balinese Room. The plans had obviously been leaked, and the Rangers were dispersed for other duties.¹³¹ Wilson needed a better tactic to crack Galveston’s defenses, and he knew what to do.

Earlier, while county attorney in Dallas, Wilson had learned to use undercover agents to gather proof of gaming in order to provide evidence in the courts. With his secret support, two men from Texas City and their wives visited the gambling and drinking places in Galveston, played the slot machines, and talked to prostitutes to see if they were “available.” They worked for three to four months and went to the same establishments three to four times each. As attorney general, Wilson could not file criminal complaints, but he could obtain injunctions to halt public nuisances.¹³² This was what he was after.

Wilson arrived in Galveston in June 1957 demanding injunctions to close forty-seven clubs, bingo places, and brothels for “openly and flagrantly violating the laws of Texas.” He blanketed the town. “From the plush Balinese Room to West Market street upstairs bawdy houses to West Broadway bingo parlors, such runs the range of drinking and gambling establishments caught in the attorney general’s dragnet,” reported the newspaper. State police officers on the causeway intercepted gambling equipment being sent off the island, while Texas Rangers systematically searched for hidden paraphernalia.

They found 375 slot machines in three warehouses and a gun bunker at old Fort Travis on Bolivar, and another 1,500 to 2,000 at the closed Hollywood Club. The Rangers smashed the slot machines with ten-pound sledgehammers, burned them, and dumped them into Galveston Bay. They confiscated 200 boxes of Maceo tip books, found another 250 to 300 slot machines in a Dickinson warehouse, and successfully raided the night spots. A tavern owner who was caught said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes when they walked in. We weren’t expecting it and I guess it was sort of a shock.”133 The warning system had broken down, and the city closed.

The state maintained pressure for a year, the district attorney pressed felony gambling charges, and the Rangers relentlessly smashed gambling machines and tables. “Closed. Will Wilson’s boys was here!” announced a sign on a padlocked door of a club on 24th Street. There were a few trials, but most of the indictments were not pursued. In 1969 the courts dropped 164 cases.¹³⁴ They had hung like an ax over the necks of gamblers for a decade and were no longer necessary. The criminal element scattered, traveled to Hot Springs or Las Vegas, and became legitimate. Anthony J. Fertitta, a Maceo lieutenant who ran the Balinese Room, for example, came to trial in 1959 and was found guilty. He received a two-year suspended sentence, went to Las Vegas for a while, then moved to Houston to work at Glenn McCarthy’s Cork Club, and finally entered home construction work with his brother in Leesville, Louisiana.¹³⁵

Gambling, prostitution, and illegal drinking were not completely eliminated. They never are in any city, but in Galveston vice diminished to normal limits. The Maceo empire had been crushed, and the dynastic families had little power except in areas of benevolence. The “Free State of Galveston” existed no more except in memory and nostalgia. When a rumor said the town would open again to vice, Ruth Levy Kempner, a councilwoman, said, “We’ll obey the law. Galveston is not a place apart.”¹³⁶

Still, Galveston was different from the rest of Texas in climate and architecture. In the recent period of time an interest in history emerged as the force which shaped the city. At the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., there is an inscription, “What is past is prologue.” For Galveston the past was not only prologue; it also became the present and the future.