“Hitler Politics”
James Earl Ray’s move to Alton temporarily took him away from his father’s bitterness and anger, his mother’s increasing drunkenness, and the family’s stifling poverty. Although he preferred Quincy, his uncle Earl’s imprisonment meant he had lost his mentor there. Alton at least offered the comfort of his grandmother, who was always willing to help the family. Now that her first grandchild was setting forth on his own, she readily offered a room in her Broadway rooming house, and promised to help him find work.
Ray, who had decided to try his hand at a straight job, believed his parents when they told him he was the smartest in the family and that he could amount to something. Now was his chance to prove that to himself and to them.
Mom Maher helped Ray almost immediately land a job at the International Shoe Company tannery in nearby East Hartford. He worked in the dye department, earning seventy-seven cents an hour, and commuted the ten miles to work by streetcar. War production meant that many factories were at full capacity, and Ray accumulated plenty of overtime. Diligent about saving his money he talked about opening his own gas station. Mom Maher was impressed with his serious approach to work as well as his personal discipline. He did not drink, smoke, or chase women. “Never went out … never ran around,” Maher later said. “As far as girls he was backwards. He was bashful with girls. No pals of men, either. Just stayed home. He’s quiet and easy. Always comes in with a smile on his face.”1
For a while Ray spent time with Maher’s son, his uncle Willie. They went to football games, played pool, and joined in pick-up baseball games at a local park.* But soon Ray left Willie behind when he found a new friend at work, Henry Stumm, an older, ethnic German. The two became, according to factory shop steward Eric Duncan, “bosom buddies … together all the time.”2 Stumm, who was single (and some coworkers thought gay), was a German nationalist who publicly professed unpopular wartime admiration for Hitler and the Nazi party.†3 His views were a combustible mixture to Ray’s already reactionary political beliefs. According to George “Boob” Roberts, the owner of a local restaurant where the two men sat huddled for hours, they used to talk “Hitler politics.”4 Shop steward Duncan said Ray admired Stumm, who “went around the shop calling Germany the Fatherland.”5 Mom Maher recalled that Ray told her Stumm carried a picture of Hitler, whom he claimed he knew personally.6 Willie Maher later confirmed to the FBI that James had a relationship with an “individual who had pro-Nazi leaning and Ray became anti-Negro and anti-Jewish as [a] result.”‡7
“What appealed to Jimmy in the first place about Hitler,” recalled Jerry Ray, “was that he would make the U.S. an all-white country, no Jews or Negroes. He would be a strong leader who would just do what was right and that was it. Not try to please everybody like Roosevelt [did]. If Hitler could win it would be a different world. Jimmy didn’t think Hitler would kill Jews and blacks, just put them in their own country someplace. Jimmy thought Hitler was going to succeed and still thinks he would have succeeded if the Japs hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor.”8 One of James’s sisters concluded, “There no doubt about it. Jimmy liked Germany better than he did the United States.”9 James’s mother, Ceal, was petrified that his beliefs might get him killed.10
Ray, pleased at having found a political ally in a coworker, was also satisfied with his new job. When he visited home he told his brother John to “stay out of trouble—it’s easier working—you can make more than you can steal.”11 By December 1945, he had stockpiled $1,180 in his new account at the Alton Bank & Trust Company, more money than his father had saved in a lifetime. But Ray’s experiment with straight life ended abruptly that same month when he was fired due to the suspension of the factory’s military shoe production. Even years later, Ray mused that if he had not been let go, “possibly, I would still be working for International Shoe.”12
Jobless only weeks before the Christmas holidays, he was crushed. For several weeks he tried in vain to find work, but it was a bad time to be unemployed, as most manufacturing plants were trimming their staffs and older workers with seniority had the first claim on jobs. Then, on February 19, 1946, two months after he was fired, Ray impulsively visited an Army recruiting office in East St. Louis and enlisted.* He was seventeen years old. When asked for his preference of a duty station, he requested Germany.13 When he visited home and told Ceal he was entering the Army, she sobbed.14 “She took it bad when Jimmy went into the army,” recalled Speedy.15
Ray was sent to Camp Crowder, Missouri, for basic infantry training. There he qualified with a rifle on the practice range as a marksman.† On leave at home, his enthusiasm for the Army was high, and he boasted that he would quickly become a captain.16 By July 1946, five months after enlisting, he was shipped to occupied Germany. “I think he went over there,” recalled Jerry Ray, “with the idea in his head that he would work to support the Nazi party, even though the war was over.”17 Ray’s uncle Willie Maher agreed that James’s “sole motive for enlisting in the U.S. Army was to go to Germany and perhaps study Hitler’s racist techniques.”18
Ray was initially assigned to drive refrigerated trucks in the Quartermaster Corps in Nuremberg. He had difficulty, however, in maneuvering the large trucks—“I couldn’t drive,” he later wrote—and became the butt of jokes.19 In December 1946, Ray was transferred as a driver to the 382nd Military Police Battalion in Bremerhaven, northern Germany.20 That assignment was fortuitous for him since Bremerhaven—a city of 100,000—was a regional center for a booming black market. More than two-thirds of the city had been destroyed by Allied bombing raids.21 There were few streetlights and no public transportation, and the sewage system was badly damaged.22 Americans had to travel in pairs to avoid a group of ex-German soldiers dubbed “werewolves,” who robbed and beat, sometimes killing, GIs.23 Ray, however, was still sympathetic to the Germans and later wrote that while “heavily populated residential areas were reduced to rubble, many if not most of the German military compounds I saw were untouched.” He charged that the Allies had spared the military targets in order to use them after the war—“I wasn’t surprised to learn this. Life had already taught me that governments need human blood to live.”24
Bremerhaven had all the vice and seediness of Quincy, but now Ray was part of the unit that was supposed to prevent crime. The temptation to profit from the black-market trade, however, was just too great. The market’s currency was cigarettes.25 Although strictly prohibited by the Army, soldiers actively traded cigarettes for jewelry, cameras, radios, and even art.26 For Ray, who had learned from Uncle Earl how to fence goods, it was simple, and soon he asked his family to steadily supply him with cigarettes.27 In return, he sent money home. “We never lived so well as we did when Jimmy was in the army,” said Jerry Ray. “He sent money home nearly every month.”28
Another of Bremerhaven’s postwar industries was prostitution.29 Ray frequented the local dives, and his Army record reflects the consequences: Among the twelve illnesses for which he was treated while stationed in Germany, he had acute gonorrhea twice, syphilis once, and pubic lice another time.30 But while he took advantage of the local prostitutes, he also despised them. They sold themselves even to black soldiers.31 These were not the proud Germans of whom Stumm had boasted. Nor did Ray find redeemable qualities in the other Germans he encountered. While he arrived expecting to find a noble people and the remnants of a heroic Reich, instead he watched scornfully as Germans pleaded to work as maids, drivers, and cooks for American officers, ran in gangs that robbed GIs, or spent their days hustling for pennies in the black market. Another soldier, who served in the city at the same time as Ray, later wrote, “The wreckage was human as well. I couldn’t and still can’t get over the fact of people going through garbage, or throwing a cigarette butt away and young kids running for it, of sleeping with a woman for a pack of cigarettes or kids waiting on railroad tracks for GI’s to come through and hope they’d throw out some of their K-rations.”32
Ray was also distressed by the war crimes trials of top Nazi leaders. “He got discouraged after he saw the Nuremberg trials,” recalled Jerry. “That was the turning point. He saw what happened to the Nazis and gave up hope.”33
His disillusionment caused problems.* Throughout late 1947 and early 1948, Ray had begun drinking. According to his brother John, this was also when he started experimenting with drugs, most likely amphetamines—he had “not seemed right since,” John later said.34 By April 1948 he was transferred from the more prestigious Military Police to the regular infantry, Company B in Frankfurt, which he disliked—“Everyone kicks you around there,” he later said.35 Ray was unhappy and “asked to get out.”36 The Army denied his request. In October 1948, he was charged with being drunk in quarters.37 Three days later he escaped and was briefly AWOL before he was captured and taken back to the stockade.†38 In November, despite his not-guilty plea, a court-martial tribunal demoted him from private first class to buck private, sentenced him to three months hard labor, and ordered that his $45-a-month pay be forfeited for four months.39 To Ray, it was a hard comedown and left him bitter. Ironically, he served his time at the Military Post Stockade at Nuremberg, across the street from the Palace of Justice, where some of Nazi Germany’s top leaders had been tried and executed for war crimes.*
In December, Ray’s sentence was commuted and he was shipped back to the States.40 According to his brother John, the journey home further infuriated him. “What really burn Jimmy and the rest of soldiers coming back from Germany was the orders that all married couple ride first class and singles ride second,” John recalled. “They almost had a riot on ship when white soldiers who did the fighting had to ride second. The Black soldiers who were the kitchen workers had all married German girls and rode first class. The Blacks would parade around on the deck with a white gal on his arm, getting the best service.”41
The Army had given up on Ray. He was given a general discharge (neither honorable nor dishonorable) two days before Christmas “for ineptness and lack of adaptability for military service.”42 The action was only days before Ray’s regular enlistment duty would have expired. That enraged him. “This was a slap in the face,” he later wrote. “If the Army had wanted, it could have let me stay a soldier another 48 hours and muster out with a standard honorable discharge.”43 He never forgot that slight, never told his family why he was dismissed, and always told prospective employers that he was honorably discharged.44
When Ray returned to the States, he discovered that his family, now resettled in the heart of Quincy, had accelerated their downward spiral of poverty and misery. An eighth child, Suzan Ray, had been born in 1947.† Ceal was now fat and bloated from the cheap wine she drank. When a juvenile probation court officer visited the house and opened a closet, “nothing fell out but wine bottles—dozens of wine bottles.”45 Twice arrested for public drunkenness, Ceal was increasingly unable to care for the children.46 The youngest ones were largely neglected and the older ones were mostly uncontrollable. Melba, then ten, showed severe emotional problems. She had tested with a subnormal IQ, and was often seen riding her bike near the courthouse, screaming obscenities at passersby.47 Speedy had also started drinking heavily. Although he handled his liquor better than his wife did, it meant that Ceal now had a partner for her all-day binges.48
“Very often they would both be drunk … four or five nights a week,” recalled Jerry Ray, then thirteen. “They would have awful fights, hit each other. That’s why we older children stayed out all the time. I wouldn’t come home until one o’clock, [then I would] go straight to sleep, sneak in without their hearing me, the stairs I used were on the outside of the house. And John would be gone two or three days at a time, robbing. The younger kids had to stay home and suffer.”49 By this time, neighbors had started complaining about the fights and squalor at the Ray apartment. Probation officers assigned to Quincy’s court system began visiting the family. “When we went down there the children were throwing garbage out the windows.… They were filthy and covered with lice,” recalled one officer.50 Ceal was warned that if conditions did not improve, the courts might take away her children.
When James Earl Ray discovered his family’s disarray, he did not stay very long. “He was ashamed of the way we lived,” said Jerry. “He had got away from the stuff of sleeping on the floor.”51 The only good side effect of James’s brief visit was that Ceal and Speedy stopped fighting while he was there. “They didn’t dare,” recalled Jerry. “They were afraid to. He was too violent.”52
When he left his parents, Ray tried to find Uncle Earl, but discovered that he was back in prison in Menard. This time he had hurled a bottle of carbolic acid at his wife, severely burning her face, mouth, and arms.53
Instead, James returned to the relative calm of his grandmother’s boardinghouse in Alton. With some $1,400 in the bank, and extra cash from his black-market dealings, he had high hopes.54 He told his aunt Mabel that the GI bill would allow him to finish high school and then go to college.55 Financing the purchase of a two-year-old Mercury, he talked about opening a furniture store, a gas station, a nightclub, or even a high-class whorehouse.56 None of these ideas ever got past the planning stage—a bank rejected his one serious effort to borrow money for a bar.57 Meanwhile, he spent freely, giving money to his parents in Quincy and buying gifts for his siblings. But as his savings dwindled, he briefly contemplated returning to Germany, where he thought there were greater opportunities.58 However, whatever Ray was doing at this time, he had evidently not returned to the thefts to which he had become accustomed prior to enlisting in the Army. His only brush with the law was an arrest by Alton police for reckless driving, for which he was fined $45.
Not everyone in the family thought James was the same since leaving the Army. The most extreme view was expressed by his uncle Willie Maher, who now recognized problems in his introverted nephew, a sullenness not evident beforehand. “I knew the boy was badly in need of psychiatric attention upon his release from military service.… I should have helped more than I didn’t.”59
By June, six months after his Army discharge, his money had dried up, except for an education allowance from the Veterans Administration.*60 He moved to Chicago, less than two hundred miles away, in the hope it might be easier to find a job. Ray later wrote only that he took some high school classes there until the “cold wind started coming in off Lake Michigan in September [and] I decided I wanted to live in a more hospitable climate.”61 Actually, Ray landed work within weeks of his arrival, as a rubber mold operator for the Dry-den Rubber Company.† Still painfully shy with girls and without any friends in the new city, he spent much of his time in pool hall dives, going to movies, or in his cheap rooming house reading detective novels. When he was dismissed in early September, he was penniless. His Mercury was repossessed. At twenty-one, he was nowhere near the expectations he had set for himself when he left the family three years earlier. Instead, he gave up on Chicago and headed west by riding railroad boxcars.62
In three weeks, he had only reached Colorado. “I was hanging around waiting for a California-bound train when a migrant labor recruiter offered me a job,” recalled Ray.63 Needing money, he accepted. While most of the Mexican laborers were trucked daily to the fields, he and a few others stayed behind at the migrant camp to build more housing for workers.64 Each night, according to Ray, “the place went crazy, everybody staying up until two or three in the morning drinking and fighting.”65 Some of the Mexican workers had brought along girlfriends or wives. While the men worked in the fields each day, Ray claimed that he and some of the other men left behind had sex with the women. Within a couple of days, Ray said there was animosity because he was a “gringo” and since he did not care “to lay awake at nights looking out for possessive boy friends with shanks, I decided to move on.”66 Collecting a week’s wages, he walked into the nearest town and caught a freight train heading southwest. A few days later, sitting atop a boxcar, he arrived in Los Angeles.67
Ray had enough money to rent a room in a run-down flophouse on lower Broadway. At night he continued “a habit I’d started in the Army” by drinking in “a nearby honky-tonk.”68 His first run-in with the law happened in less than a week. On the night of October 7, 1949, Lee Strayhorn, the assistant manager of a seedy downtown cafeteria, the Forum, entered his business office on the third floor. When he switched on the light, he saw Ray partially hidden behind the safe. Before Strayhorn could do anything, Ray grabbed a chair and threw it at him, then ran to a rear window, climbed through, and fled down the fire escape.69 A typewriter, evidently already carried outside by Ray, was resting outside the window. Strayhorn leaned out and screamed for help. A parking lot attendant lurched at the running Ray and grabbed him for a moment, but Ray broke free and sprinted around the corner.70
Unfortunately for Ray, his Army discharge papers and a bank passbook flew from his shirt pocket when the parking lot attendant tried to tackle him. But since there was no Los Angeles address for him, the matter would probably have been forgotten had Ray not been foolish enough to reappear at the same corner four days later. The parking attendant recognized him and called the police, who arrested him.* At the downtown booking station, both the parking attendant and Strayhorn positively identified Ray as the perpetrator.
This burglary arrest was the first on Ray’s rap sheet, and is significant because it reveals a certain pattern that would reappear in his subsequent crimes: While there was a degree of ineptness to many of them, and some violence (usually with Ray as the victim), they demonstrated a remarkable, if misplaced, self-confidence on Ray’s part that he could always concoct a story after his arrest that would set him free. On the occasion of his first adult arrest, Ray typically pleaded not guilty, denied everything, and told a rather remarkable story that placed him at the scene but only as an innocent victim of circumstance.* At the time he was arrested, he told the police “I never was in the building and I don’t even know where it is. I’ve only been in town three or four days. Someone stole my identification papers.”71 A few days later, his story had changed in a handwritten statement given to the police: “I had left a theatre on Broadway approximately 30 minutes before I entered the restaurant. I did not enter the building to commit a theft. I was stopped for a few seconds after I entered the building by an employee, I guess, as some people went out as I came in. He grabbed ahold of me and told me to leave the building, which I did. After I got down the street about half a block he started hollering for the police. About a week later I was arrested. I don’t know anything about a typewriter or whether there was one in the building.”72 Ray challenged the police to produce fingerprints from the crime scene. Years later, in his first book, he modified his defense by saying that he actually had been at his favorite bar that night, and “I either drank too much or the hostess slipped a goof-ball in my drink. All I recall is some character shaking me awake from dozing in a hallway. There was a brief argument as to why I had entered the building, and then I departed somewhat hastily while the other party commenced hollering for the police.”73
The probation report is filled with Ray’s fanciful version of his life. He told the probation officer that his only living relatives were his mother and uncle since his father had died in 1956, that he had completed one year of high school, and that while he could not remember the name or address of the rooming house at which he was staying in Los Angeles, he was there to arrange for a construction job in Guam. According to Ray, he was a wayward Catholic who went to the movies several times weekly, read magazines and “common ordinary books,” liked to play baseball, and dated many girls. Denying that he was anything more than a social drinker, he did admit, however, “to an occasional excessive use of intoxicants.”74 The probation officer, emphasizing the obvious, concluded: “He does not appear to be completely truthful in discussing his crime.”
The brief trial was held on December 9, 1949. Ray was convicted of second-degree robbery and sentenced to eight months in the county jail and two years probation, on the condition that when released he either find a full-time job or return to Illinois. During the sentencing, the judge also admonished him about his fondness for alcohol: “I want you to stay out of drinking places and not indulge in the use of alcoholic liquor or frequent or go to places where it is the principal item of sale.”75
In March 1950, Ray’s application for a “good time” early release was approved, and after serving only ninety days, he walked out of the Los Angeles County Jail by the end of the month. The five-ten Ray was nearly twenty pounds lighter, but his brief stint in prison had not turned him away from crime.76 He recalled that since he had virtually no money, “I passed the first day out of jail looking for a place to burglarize for nourishment and enough money to carry out the court’s mandate to ‘get out of Dodge City.’”77 He went to a Chinese restaurant and used his last loose change to buy a bowl of chili. While there he noticed an exhaust fan—large enough for a man to squeeze between the blades—over the rear door. That night, Ray returned and “in my lighter condition, thanks to jail, I had no problem maneuvering between the blades of the exhaust fan.”78 He left with a bag full of rolls of silver dollars and some groceries. “The only potential obstacle I encountered in the place,” he later wrote, “was a sleeping dog that probably ended up in the Chinaman’s ‘Special’ the next day.”*79 He had had enough of Southern California. That night, Ray caught a freight train headed for Las Vegas. It was the start of his journey home.
* Speedy later put much of the blame for James’s problems on Willie Maher, claiming he had “a goddamn old filthy mind.… That Bill done him [James] more harm than anybody on earth.” Whatever went on with Willie and young Ray, years later James finally beat him up one night, saying, “I’ve been wanting to whip your ass for twenty years.”
† After the King assassination, Stumm initially denied even knowing Ray and emphatically claimed he was pro-American and had never been a Nazi sympathizer. the assassination. Over However, Stumm’s pro-Hitler leanings were well known during the war, both at the factory and in the town where he lived. Willie Maher said that Stumm thought “Hitler was all right” and that his sentiments were so blatant that he and Ray had joked about it. Meanwhile, Ray conveniently omits Stumm in both his books. In the 20,000 Words he wrote about his life for author William Bradford Huie, Ray recalled only three of his coworkers, again leaving out Stumm.
‡ Maher made that admission about Stumm to the FBI about two weeks after the assassination. Over ten years later, he tried to downplay the Stumm-Ray relationship when he was interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He also told the Select Committee investigators that he had never heard Ray utter an antiblack remark. However, there is no reason to doubt that his contemporaneous statements to the Bureau in the immediate aftermath of King’s murder are correct, and that his backpedaling in 1978 was a belated attempt to help his nephew.
* Ray, in his two published books that are part autobiography and partly his defense in the assassination, makes numerous factual errors about his own life. Most of them are insignificant—such as the date of his Army enlistment, which he has as a month later—but cumulatively the errors indicate a sloppiness about details and an imprecise recall that must be considered when Ray later recounts, with great specificity, his alleged meetings in the year leading up to the assassination with the person he calls Raoul.
† Marksman is the lowest of three military rankings, below sharpshooter and expert. Ray has tried to downplay his marksmanship medal. In 1993, he “testified” in a televised mock trial of his case, “You have to qualify as a marksman or they will keep you out on the rifle range for six months until you do,” he contended. When asked on cross-examination how long he had had to stay on the range before he qualified, Ray admitted, “I qualified as a marksman when I first went out there.” While Ray’s proficiency with a rifle does not necessarily indicate whether he could make an assassin’s shot, even an easy one, over twenty years later, it is a factor to be weighed. However, Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, Joachim Joesten, and William Pepper, in their eagerness to diminish Ray’s proficiency with a rifle and therefore his likelihood of being a successful assassin, omit from their books any discussion of his military rifle training.
* Jerry Ray told author George McMillan that this was also the period when James and a friend attacked a group of black GIs in an alley and worked them over. Soon afterward, according to Jerry, Ray was involved in a riotous barracks-room brawl that started when he aired some of his political views. Both of those stories, reprinted by McMillan, are false and were invented by Jerry Ray.
† Ray always has a more exculpatory, albeit incorrect, version of almost every incident in which he has gotten into trouble. Regarding his military problems, he claims he was originally arrested only for having missed one of his guard shifts since he was “ill.” Then, while confined to quarters, says that he merely “hitch-hiked into Nuremberg. While there, a sweep by the MPs caught me and several other soldiers who were where they weren’t supposed to be.”
* Ray continued to exhibit his anti-U.S. government leanings, even years later. As late as 1987, when he wrote his first book, Tennessee Waltz, he not only implied that the Allies had merely invented the category of war crimes in order to prosecute German military and civil leaders, but he also bitterly complained about a “cruel deportation project” in which Soviet defectors and deserters who had come west were returned to the Soviets. “How many Americans know their government was instrumental in snuffing out so many friendly lives? Not many, because government agencies use official mechanisms to suppress and conceal facts which, if widely known, might jeopardize their policies.”
† Records show that Suzan was placed into the Catholic Children’s Home in Alton when she was six, and stayed there for seven years. Then she remained a ward of the court until 1965. When she was officially discharged from supervision, she moved to Chicago and became a go-go dancer at the Bourbon Street Club, a job she quit when she married shortly before the assassination. Ashamed of her family and background, however, when questioned by the FBI after King’s murder, she claimed the Rays had abandoned her when she was one, and that after eight years in a children’s home, she was taken by foster parents. She also claimed never to have met James and said she would not recognize him if she saw him. Ray, in his two books, does not mention her.
* FBI files reveal that when Ray applied in April for his veteran’s benefits at the local Quincy office he listed his occupation as “Student, American Television School, St. Louis, MO.” Actually, there was only an enrollment office in St. Louis, but the school was in Chicago. It does not appear that Ray attended any classes in Chicago after he moved there that summer.
† Part of the difficulty in recounting full details of Ray’s experiences at his various jobs is the absence of records from the companies for which he worked. For instance, at Dry-den, when FBI agents approached company officials after King’s assassination, they discovered that the company had no personnel records for the period Ray was employed there, since its policy was to destroy them after seven years. Many of the employees who had been there almost twenty years before had left. The few remaining had no recall of a person who worked there only a few months, two decades earlier. Each of the other places at which Ray was employed presented similar problems in trying to reconstruct his work history.
* On the arrest report, under “Distinctive Characteristics,” the police listed “talks slow like a southerner” and “slim.”
* One of Ray’s future lawyers, Robert Hill, told author George McMillan that “Ray has an automatic eraser in his mind—if he thought that bookshelf wasn’t there, he would will it away. It’s not there for him. He can rearrange reality to suit himself.”
* In his first book, Tennessee Waltz, Ray sometimes used expressions that were derogatory to various races, such as “wetback” for Mexicans and “Chinaman” for Chinese. He also was quite political, on subjects ranging from Allied war crimes trials to alleged government cover-ups of dirty programs. By 1992, when his second book, Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King?, was published, he dropped the ethnic slurs and political overtones. None appears in the second, “politically correct,” version.