God Has A Long Face

The title of this blog comes from a novel written in 1940 by Robert Wilder.  I thought of using “God Has A Sad Face,” but Wilder’s term, “Long Face” (“an unhappy or disappointed expression”) seems the better of the two.

During World War One, hundreds of thousands of southern blacks migrated into the industrial   north.   One afternoon in the summer of 1919, a seventeen year old black boy was swimming in Lake Michigan.  One part of the shore was set aside for whites and another for blacks.  The boy took hold of a railroad tie floating in the water and drifted over that invisible line dividing the two areas.  Stones were thrown at him by the whites.  He let go of the railroad tie and drowned.    The black community blamed the whites of stoning him to death and a fight ensued.  This incident set off a bonfire of racial hatred that mushroomed into a week-long civil war in Chicago that  included beatings, stabbings, gang raids and shootings, along with the destruction of houses and property.  Fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks were killed, five hundred-plus people were injured and a thousand or more were left homeless.  

White supremacists in 1920 thought the dark-skinned races constituted a worse threat to western civilization than the Germans or the Bolsheviks. Jews, Roman Catholics, and similar groups  were considered as having divided loyalties and, therefore, dangerous to America.  The KKK was born in 1915, proclaiming itself the defender of whites against the black, of Gentile against the Jew, and of the Protestant against the Catholic, inflaming the fears of the time. After fighting a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy, the United States became a hotbed of white Anglo-Saxon bigotry and arrogance.  Was America Great in 1919?  In 1943?  In 1963?  God Has A Long Face and a face speaks volumes.