Tar and Terror in Tampa
The Murder of a Bennington Activist

One of the most notorious Ku Klux Klan incidents in Florida history occurred in Tampa in 1935, when labor organizer Joseph A. Shoemaker was flogged, castrated, and tarred and feathered. Shoemaker eventually died from his injuries.

Late on the night of November 30, 1935, in the Bloomingdale district fourteen miles beyond Tampa, Joseph Shoemaker, founder of the "Modern Democratic party," lay unconscious. He had been stripped naked, then tarred, feathered, beaten, and left for dead in a wooded area. Now he was paralyzed across the entire right side of his body, and gangrene was beginning to settle in his right leg. Several hours later, Shoemaker's brother Jack, district vice commander of the American Legion, reached the scene and rushed Joseph to Centro Espanol Hospital, where the attending physician prescribed the amputation of Shoemaker's gangrenous leg. Eleven hours after the surgery, Shoemaker died, his injuries evidence of a crime that Dr. Winston likened to the most severe hogwhipping he had ever seen. Earlier on the night of Shoemaker's assault, the Modern Democrats met at the home of Adolphus and Farleigh Herald. It was at Farleigh's insistence that the Heralds offered their home on East Palm Avenue as a headquarters for this emerging organization, though she was absent from that night's proceedings because she had to report to work at the county jail. Aside from being matron of the jail, she acted as secretary for the truck drivers' union in Tampa. Her working-class sensibility made her sympathetic to Shoemaker's central tenet of "production for use instead of profit." As the Modern Democrats conducted their meeting in the dining room of the Herald home, Adolphus Herald, the couple's teenage daughter Virginia, and a boarder sat listening to the radio in another room. Although by this time the Modern Democrats numbered around forty, only six appeared for the meeting on East Palm Avenue that night. They were Charles Jensen, secretary for the Florida Socialist party, Walter Roush, a member of the State Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, Eugene Poulnot, president of the Florida Federation of Workers' Alliance, Samuel Rogers, a WPA worker, Mcaskill, a Tampa fireman, and Joseph Shoemaker, chairman. That night they planned to draft a constitution and by-laws for their organization. Around 8:15, ten detectives led by Sergeant "Smitty" Brown burst into the Herald residence and reportedly announced: "This is a police raid. Keep quiet and don't move." The Heralds' visitors were under arrest for their presumed Communist activities. While all six men were initially brought to the police station for questioning, Poulnot, Rogers, and Shoemaker were from there forced into separate cars. The plainclothes officer who escorted, Poulnot to the Florida Avenue exit of the jail – a public thoroughfare – told him that he was going back to the Heralds, but when Poulnot responded saying he would walk, another man waiting in the backseat wrested him into the car. A crowd formed as Poulnot shouted for help but people dispersed when one of the officers claimed that they were bringing Poulnot to Chattahoochee, the state mental institution. Discretely, one of the men in the car pressed his foot onto Poulnot's neck as they approached the city limits. Rogers, meanwhile, was subject to similar treatment at the hands of his assailants. About thirty minutes later, the cars transporting Poulnot and Shoemaker stopped at the docks of the warehouse district. Policemen stripped the three men from the waist down and flogged them with chains and rawhide. According to Poulnot, the officers spread tar over his abdomen, genitals, thighs, and buttocks, casting feathers on his loins. He and Rogers crept to the side of the road, where they were picked up by a passing car; but Shoemaker, who remained immobilized, asked them to get help. When he finally arrived at the hospital the following morning, he was kept under constant guard. In his final moments, Shoemaker managed to utter the name of the men who beat him. Six police officers were subsequently arrested for the crimes committed against Shoemaker and his comrades: Sergeant C.A. "Smitty" Brown, C.W. Carlisle, Sam E. Crosby, John E. Bridges, F.W. Switzer, and Robert Chappell. As one of eleven hundred "special policemen" on the city's payroll appointed to monitor voting during the primaries, Joseph Shoemaker had been well versed in city politics. The work exposed him to the prevalence of graft and corruption in Tampa's political machine, which condoned violence and intimidation at the primaries to ensure that the most prominent faction, represented by Robert E. Lee Chancey, did not fade from the political landscape. On one September day at the polls, Shoemaker counted over one hundred more ballots than voters, and was told to submit the fraudulent votes. As these maneuvers continued, he grew to abhor the existing administration. By the end of the primaries in 1935, he was moved to rally the unemployed and the indigent who were sorely underrepresented in Tampa politics, making for himself not a few enemies along the way. To be sure, his grandiose plan for economic recovery, laid out in weekly newspaper installments throughout the summer of 1935, threatened the city of Tampa's corporate interests – notably the cigar manufacturers, who supplied about 65 percent of America's cigars. Historically, there had been a great deal of animosity between the workers and the bosses within this industry – five union organizers were lynched in 1910, and two decades later, rumors of a "manufacturer's secret committee" circulated. Among Shoemaker's most tendentious proposals was the institution of a 25 percent tax levied on incomes of $5,000 and above. "The one-half million persons who would pay this would simply be doing their patriotic duty to their country, the country that made it possible for them to acquire such huge incomes," he argued. He also supported full government control over factors of production, effectively dis-empowering the large, anti-union corporations and elevating the worker. During the city elections in late 1935, the Modern Democrats endorsed Miller A. Stephens, independent candidate for mayor, during the city elections. Meanwhile, Hillsborough County Sheriff McLeod and Governor Scholtz snubbed Mayor Chancey in favor of Miller A. Stephens, the candidate endorsed by the Modern Democrats. Stephens garnered only 900 votes to Chauncey's 10,000, but nevertheless the primacy of the Old Guard was challenged, due in part to Shoemaker's influence. Shoemaker was born February 24, 1888 in Philadelphia, making him forty-seven-years-old at the time of his death. Though his obituary in the Tampa Tribune claimed that Shoemaker suffered a physical impairment as a young man that barred him from military service (information apparently supplied by his brother, Jack), on his own World War I draft registration he declared himself a conscientious objector. And yet he had no qualms about starring in a recruitment reel called "Made In America." In 1920, when Shoemaker was living with his wife and her family in Brooklyn, he reported his occupation as "motion picture actor," a title possibly more aspirational than realistic. In 1925, Shoemaker and his wife, Grace, moved to Bennington, where they assumed management of the Handee Company, manufacturers of clothes hangers and dryers. They first resided at 655 Main Street before moving to 124 Burgess Road in 1928. Around this time Shoemaker renounced the Democratic party and joined the local Socialists, composed of bluestockings like Helen Phelps Stokes and Mary Robinson Sanford of Old Bennington, wealthy summer transplants from New York who infused local politics with a touch of Greenwich Village social consciousness. "There were many factions in the Socialist Party at the time, and the one that Sanford and Stokes belonged to was considered the conservative faction, more intent on reform than revolution and more progressive than radical," wrote Anthony Marro for the Walloomsack Review. Even so, when Ms. Sanford and Ms. Stokes were identified as members of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1912, followers of socialism had only recently cast off the obloquy of the American public. Four years earlier, newspapers from as far away as South Carolina had reported a change in Ms. Sanford during the fall of 1908, as though her political coming-of-age were a matter of widespread concern: Miss Mary R. Sanford, a member of a wealthy family in New York City and New Haven, has become a Socialist. Following her debut, Mary Sanford orchestrated mass meetings of Bennington socialists at the grandstand in Morgan Park, pontificating, once, to a crowd of hundreds in the pouring rain. It was Mary Robinson Sanford who persuaded John Spargo, the renowned lecturer, author, and member of the National Committee of the Socialist Party, to leave New York for Vermont in 1909. He went on to lead the Socialist contingent in Bennington, referring to Mary Sanford as a "fellow traveler" and acknowledging their shared socioeconomic milieu on the dedication page of his Karl Marx biography: To Mary Robinson Sanford: Greetings from "Nestledown" to "Tucked Away." Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War I resulted in a schism within the Socialist party that divided Sanford and Spargo, with the latter dismissing the former as a "parlor pink" in his later years. Up until 1916 it was Spargo himself who was branded by fellow party members as "that dangerous radical." Over time, he metamorphosed into a Hoover conservative sympathetic to the Republican party while the zealotry of Ms. Sanford and Ms. Stokes had merely dulled in old age. Jack Shoemaker alleged that his brother had never been a Communist; that he "knew it was wrong and wouldn't work." And yet Joseph Shoemaker's convictions strayed from the relatively conservative pedagogy of Bennington's Socialists; where the other, mostly older members concentrated on reform, he agitated for revolution. In an article published in the Bennington Banner on October 30, 1934, Shoemaker wrote that common sense should supersede partisanship: " . . . I am much more interested in realism than party dogma," he declared. "Don't waste any energy fighting other people who are also against profit for the few and the misery of near starvation for the many." He recognized that Vermonters were disillusioned by their local party leaders and urged them to relinquish control to the national administration, which if made powerful, could affect real economic change. Shoemaker's endorsement of a Communist candidate for governor as a palatable alternative to the Socialist one – and indifference to the party in office so long as it accomplished his desired end – raised alarm among his fellow party members. A few days after the offending article was printed, Shoemaker appeared before a committee of Bennington Socialists who reported their charges against him: "he has publicly advocated the election of Democrats to Congress . . . he has made public appeal for support of the National Democratic Administration . . . he has publicly disparaged the Socialist party of another state . . . he has publicly recommended voting for either the Socialist or the Communist candidate for governor . . . he has made public reflection upon the Socialist candidate for governor." At the next meeting, he was ousted from the group. Henry B. Walbridge, the insurance broker who recommended Shoemaker's expulsion from the Socialist party and instigated the proceedings against him, wrote Mary Sanford on January 2, 1936: " . . . Comrade Shoemaker frequently displayed a feeling that he was being persecuted by those members who did not thoroughly agree with him." In his closing remarks to the committee, Shoemaker voiced the impression that Walbridge and his cronies meant to banish him from the Socialist party on a technicality. He had always harbored subversive ideas, which local Benningtonians had accepted civilly. Displaying these opinions publicly, on the other hand, carried more serious repercussions. According to his obituary, Joseph Shoemaker left Bennington in May of 1935 when "the depression ruined his business and reduced him to the necessity of preserving his home through the Home Owners Loan Corporation." Despite his banishment from the Socialist party, Shoemaker's death nevertheless prompted outrage in Bennington. Gage Street resident Alice Cameron Voorhis, who called Shoemaker "a welcome friend at our home" and "a valued member of our family circle," wrote Mayor Chancey on December 16, "A shocked commonwealth of the United States of America is watching Florida . . . waiting to see the murder lynchers of Joseph Shoemaker, unselfish friend of the down-trodden, brought to account for their inhuman crime." She also wrote to Norman Thomas, the nationally known Socialist, who had promptly organized a Committee for the Defense of Civil Rights in Tampa, urging him to leverage his influence in federal affairs. Later in December, the Tampa Tribune printed her elegy to Shoemaker, "Oh, Tell Us Sleeper!" The piece celebrates his restless idealism: " . . . the fair dream of a new-made world . . . Of man's equality of opportunity – Of long, sweet days of well divided toil and ease –That olden dream of comradely profane as hell – Mumbling and snuffling at their bloody work – Like famished wolves, mouthing a bone. To Voorhis, comrade Shoemaker would remain an innocent. Thus Joseph Shoemaker's greatest legacy is also his greatest failing. America's economic woes inspired him to test his visionary plan, while the Great Depression had turned the rest of the country wooden, fatalistic. He had established the short-lived Handee Company in Bennington prior to the Depression, but earned the admiration of his Bennington comrades not for his business acumen but for his initiative, his foresight, and above all, his integrity.

(Written by Jennifer Shakshober, Walloomsack Review
Bennington Museum, Volume 22, Autumn 2018, Page 22)