Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (32 page)

Howell may have lacked tact, but he certainly was a man who knew where he wasn’t wanted. Eventually he moved out of town—where to no one seemed to know or care.

Howell left, but the talk remained. What kind of man was Howell to defend that monster Kehoe? What sick demons infested Howell’s brain? Gone? Good!

Later word came back to Bath that Sidney Howell died when his automobile
was hit by a train. The official record said his automobile smashed into a speeding train.
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Rumors in Bath said otherwise. Some said the car was stuck on the tracks. Another story had Howell simply stopping his machine in front of an approaching locomotive and waiting for the inevitable.
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Periodically letters, some signed, some anonymous would arrive in town. Many were expressions of sympathy, an outreach of humanity to a people wounded both physically and spiritually. Schoolchildren everywhere readily identified with Bath’s dead. “Our teacher Mr. Egidio Barroni, has told us today of the tragedy that happened in your village, caused by the explosion of dynamite,” wrote a class of seventh graders in Pisaro, Italy. “Even if we are far away, this terrible tragedy has left us an impression, our sorrow is too big and we feel that we ought to write with our hearts to the pains that the children must have suffered, and to the greater sorrow of the poor mothers. We want you to know that all Italy is sympathizing in your tears.”
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There were other letters, ugly, angry screeds written by strongly opinionated people who felt the need to take pen to paper and blame the people of Bath for May 18, 1927.
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One writer peppered his missives with incoherent rants and biblical verses. Some letters came by mail; others were found in the street.
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“In every community there are unbalanced minds which need only some spectacular disaster, such as occurred at Bath . . . to set their deficient minds in a turmoil,” wrote one newspaper editor. “It now develops that Kehoe himself became first a crank and then a maniac. People who show indications of even mild insanity should be reported to the proper authorities before some great damage is done.”
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On another front, the Ku Klux Klan distributed a broadsheet, claiming that Kehoe’s Catholic background was the root cause of his actions. The Klan, a relic of America’s Reconstruction era past, was on the rise during the postwar era. The 1915 release of D. W. Griffiths’s epic film
The Birth of a Nation,
coupled with the notorious Leo Frank case that same year (in which a Jewish pencil factory owner, found guilty in a trumped-up conviction for the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl, was lynched by an angry mob), gave new motivation to the once-dormant Klan. The great influx of immigrants; fear of blacks, Jews, and Catholics; and the rising menace of Bolsheviks in Russia fomented dissent in the
form of men in white sheets. Klan membership is estimated to have been 4.5 million by 1924.
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Its influence was formidable among movers and shakers; Hugo Black, a rising young Alabama politician—and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice—was a member.
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There was a considerable Klan presence in Michigan as well; reportedly, Sheriff Fox was a Klansman.
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The pamphlet—of which five million copies of its “first edition” were allegedly printed—was typical propaganda, short on subtlety and long on fearmongering. Paragraph after paragraph detailed Kehoe’s Catholicism in all its depravity. Numerous quotes were pulled from Catholic publications to prove the Klan’s case against Kehoe. One citation, written by a priest in 1873, read, “The children of the Public Schools turn out to be horse thieves, scholastic counterfeiters and well versed in the schemes of deviltry. I frankly confess that Catholics stand before the country as the enemies of the Public Schools.” Summing up its truth-challenged study of Catholicism and its influence on Kehoe, the anonymous Klan writer ended with a loaded rhetorical query: “Are [Kehoe’s] actions in accordance with the dictates of the ecclesiastical voice? How long, O Lord, how long?”
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Blame could be found everywhere, it seemed, regardless of the facts.

Senator Couzens, accompanied by Governor Green, toured the ruins on June 16; afterward they visited with children still hospitalized in Lansing.
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As a respected—and well-heeled—politician, Couzens’s arrival had a second purpose. He would personally fund the rebuilding of the Bath Consolidated School.

Couzens’s offer ended any discussion of what to do with the school property. Both he and the governor were in agreement: Bath Consolidated should be rebuilt on the same site. The following week, a telegram to the school board from Couzens’s office solidified everything. “My views are the school be put in the same condition as before explosion,” Couzens wrote. “Have asked Warren Holmes to get in touch with you at meeting tomorrow and report my views.”

The Warren-Holmes-Powers Company, a Lansing architectural firm that created the original building’s design, was well known to the school board. With the senator graciously offering to pay for the new facility— estimated to run anywhere between eighty and one hundred thousand dollars—the trustees were left with no other choice. Albert Detluff wired Senator Couzens’s office. “We are pleased to accept your gracious offer
to rebuild our school and accept same in behalf of the Bath Consolidated School district,” he replied on behalf of the board. “Have asked Warren Holmes to confer with you.”
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The Bath Consolidated School bombing dominated newspaper headlines around the world on May 18 and 19. It was an unprecedented event, a mass murder of schoolchildren by one man, an act of sweeping horror. The kind of thing that sold newspapers with big, bold headlines heralding stories marked by fevered prose.

On May 20, everything changed.

That morning at 7:52 a.m., another Michigan-born man, the pilot Charles Lindbergh, pointed his small aircraft—dubbed
The Spirit of St. Louis
—to the eastern skies. Taking off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, Lindbergh headed toward France. In 1919, a wealthy hotelier, Raymond Orteig, had put up twenty-five thousand dollars as prize money for the first pilot to successfully make a solo flight between New York and Paris. Several internationally known flyboys died attempting to make the dangerous trip. Lindbergh, a relatively unknown barnstormer and mail pilot, was intent on winning the Orteig Prize.

Man and machine, daring the forces of nature, were attempting the impossible. It was a story rich with promise. Other news items fell to the wayside. Lindbergh captured the world’s attention in a way no media darling had ever done before. His progress was breathlessly reported in extra editions of major and minor newspapers. When Lindbergh finally reached Paris, some 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds after takeoff, people around the world hailed him as a hero.

The tragedy of a small Michigan town was barely worth a mention after that. If anything, it was generally relegated to back pages, perhaps taking up a column’s worth of newsprint at best. Andrew Kehoe’s bombing was old news, a curious story but not a gripping fact of everyday life to people outside of Bath.

As spring rolled into summer, the Bath Consolidated School bombing was completely out of the public spotlight. An earthquake in China killed two hundred thousand people on May 22. Lindbergh’s triumphant return to the United States was heralded on June 15 with an extraordinary ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York. Throughout the summer, the fate of two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, was debated until the pair was executed on August 23.

What happened in Bath was old news to the rest of the world. But in local homes and hospitals, the aftermath was very much alive.

For two weeks, Dean Sweet lay comatose in the hospital. Doctors feared his chest wounds might kill the boy. There was grave concern that his heart would stop beating at any moment. Periodically they gave the unconscious child sips of whiskey to maintain a steady heart rhythm.
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The whiskey—illegal under the laws of Prohibition—did the trick. Dean pulled out of the coma. Yet for weeks on end he remained in danger. Sometimes his heartbeat was so intense that his bed would rattle and shake.

Dean remained in the hospital for several months. Periodically he had unwanted visitors, strangers come to stare, take photographs, and then disappear.

He felt like an animal in a zoo, unhappy at being caged and unable to change the situation on his own accord.
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Days after the bombing, doctors feared the number of dead would rise to fifty-one. Five children—Josephine England, Florence Hunter, Donald Huffman, Helen Komm, and Gail Stebleton—were on death watch. Their injuries were too severe; recovery seemed impossible.

The quintet proved to be fighters. They defied expectations and medical predictions. By summer’s end, all five had been released from the hospital.
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Throughout the summer Willis Cressman’s legs were sore. He figured it was from the jump he’d made from the roof to the ground when he escaped from the school.
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On July 14, Earl Proctor spent his thirteenth birthday lying in a hospital bed immobile. His badly broken legs were slowly healing; his left ankle now had a silver plate holding the bones together. The thighbone of his right leg was also broken. When he was found in the rubble, Earl’s pants were gone, torn from his body in the explosion. Debris had ripped into his back, and his hips were in bad shape as a result. Additionally his head was sliced open in three places.
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Although he was released after nine weeks, the severity of Earl’s injuries put him back in the hospital now and then over the next year.
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Perry Hart’s foot was in danger. After four months in the hospital, doctors were still uncertain about amputation. Infections and the looming possibility of gangrene were always close at hand. Whenever Perry got out of bed, the flesh around the drain tubes on his foot grew swollen from constant infection. Despite the physical and emotional pain he felt—his family had been hit hardest by the blast, after all, with his two sisters and one brother killed—he did not complain. One thing Perry did have in his favor was his overall health. He was a strapping teenager, strong and in good health. These factors, coupled with his stoic demeanor, went a long way toward his eventual recovery.
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