It’s a story that’s vaguely familiar to many San Joseans: on November 9, 1933, the young heir to Hart’s Department Store, Brooke Hart, was kidnapped by local oil company salesman Jack Holmes and his unemployed accomplice Harold Thurmond. Hart, a 22 year-old recent Santa Clara University graduate, was murdered that same night on the San Mateo Bridge, his body bound with baling wire and weighted down with concrete blocks in the Bay. His killers were caught–and lynched three weeks later by an angry mob of approximately 5,000 in St. James Park. The mob and lynchers went unpunished, with Governor James “Sunny Jim” Rolph quipping, “‘I am checking San Quentin and Folsom to find out what kidnappers they may have. I am thinking of paroling them to those fine citizens of San Jose who know how to handle such a situation’” (241).
Such are the basic grisly events of Harry Farrell’s Swift Justice: Murder and Vengance in a California Town (1996). As Farrell notes, “Virtually everyone in the city [of San Jose], population then 60,000, knew either the Harts, the Holmeses, or the Thurmonds, or all three, and my family was no exception. One of Brooke’s cousins was a schoolmate of mine. My father and Jack Holmes were business acquaintances” (x). Indeed, it’s true in my case, too. My grandmother was in the crowd that quickly turned into a mob at St. James Park, leaving early with her “beau” upon realizing what was going to happen. And like the author, my dad also went to school with a descendant of the Hart family.
Farrell, a former Mercury News reporter, depicts the Depression-era “Valley of Heart’s Delight” while recounting the gruesome kidnapping, murder, and lynching that follows. After writing a series of features about the event for the Mercury, he turned it into a full-length book that won the 1993 Edgar Best Fact Crime Award. Filled with references of bootlegging, speakeasies, nickel pay phones, and Steudebakers, Farrell gives the reader more than true crime, but a dizzying trip through the Bay Area before it became Silicon Valley.
Take, for instance, San Jose itself:
. . . the valley floor was a carpet of fields, vineyard, and orchards that were pink and white in springtime bloom, green in summer, purple and gold at the harvest. What wealth the city enjoyed was derived from prunes, apricots, pears, strawberries and grapes. San Jose was the largest fruit and vegetable canning center in the nation, with thirty-three canneries and twenty-one dried fruit packing houses. (25-26)
With this idyllic backdrop, it’s hard to imagine driving with a young man bound and gagged for something so crass as ransom money, but Holmes and Thurmond used the agrarian landscape to their advantage and managed to evade authorities longer than expected, especially given the amateurish nature of the kidnapping and ransom notes. The kidnappers, along with Hart, were allegedly (and still controversially) spotted transferring him from his shiny new light-green Studebaker roadster with yellow wire wheels near what is present-day Milpitas:
The Silveria farm, four acres of apricots with a small house and a barn, had no running water and no plumbing. It was on Piedmont Road in the foothills northeast of San Jose, about two and a half miles south of the spot where Brooke Hart’s car was found. Because of its isolation–no telephone, no radio, no newspaper–the distance could have been a hundred miles. (52)
In fact, today portions of the land off Piedmont Road remain undeveloped to the east and full of suburban sprawl to the west. While farm life has mostly vanished from the area today, it’s easy to imagine how spoiled the rural beauty was against the backdrop of young Hart pleading with his soon-to-be killers for his life. That November, the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” instead revealed itself to be a thin topsoil over the bedrock of earthly cruelty.
Unfortunately, that earthly cruelty extended far beyond the events in downtown San Jose and the murder on the San Mateo Bridge. According to Farrell, once Hart’s body was found–crab-eaten and largely decomposed–on November 26 near Redwood City, it was feared, however justified or not, that the killers would receive a light sentence. As the San Jose City Council put it, “It is the hope that justice will be sure and swift and that the subterfuges and technicalities of the law that frequently thwart or delay justice will not be taken in this instance” (139). Or as many San Joseans correctly interpreted it, a lynching of Holmes and Thurmond would go unpunished.
Thus that evening of the 26th, after a frenetic day of members of the mob advertising around town and on local radio stations that the killers would be brought to justice at 11:00 pm at St. James Park, Holmes and Thurmond met their demise. Farrell describes a frantic mob full of men, women, and even children thirsting for justice. The crowd, shouting “Brook-ie HART! Brook-ie HART!” (231) broke into the jail across the street, hung Holmes and Thurmond, stripped them naked, and burned cigarettes into their dead, bare legs. What started as one murder was now three, and to this day, a conspiracy of silence envelops the identity of lynchers and many in the mob itself (262). The police justified not shooting into the crowd by arguing that “among the people likely to be storming the barricades . . . were citizens of good repute, leaders of the town. Others in the mob would be mere youngsters–the cream of the student body at the Jesuit college in Santa Clara” (207). And perhaps most revealingly read a defensive editorial: “Many people who don’t believe in mob violence will criticize them. The News offers no criticism” (251).
It’s impossible now to find any public commemoration of the cruelty that occurred that November of ’33 in the nation’s largest canning center. Instead, anyone curious in the events can retrace the events by visiting Bay Area landmarks. Many landmarks, such as the Hotel De Anza–where Hart was supposed to visit the evening he was kidnapped for a public speaking class–and the San Mateo Bridge remain familiar. Others, such as the Hart Department Store on Market and Santa Clara, are gone, demolished in 1973. You can still visit the remains of Hart’s warehouse near where the train tracks cross First Street, or spot it when going south on Highway 87 from the Coleman exit overpass. Another landmark you can partially see is where the Hart family’s Petit Trianon-inspired home on The Alameda once stood; it was mostly razed in the 1950s, and is now the site of the local YMCA (294). Perhaps St. James Park is the most changed, albeit subtly: the two gallows trees–an elm for Holmes, a mulberry Thurmond–were cut down and the firewood given to needy families “because of the irreparable mutilation by the souvenir hunters” trying to make a profit (249). Although there were attempts to commemorate Harte with a statue or even a plaque, ultimately, nothing was placed there. Today, people looking for where the trees once stood would struggle finding the spot, let alone any indication of the mob violence that occured the night of November 26, will likely be disappointed. The only real plaque lies at Oak Hill Memorial Park in south San Jose. There, Brooke Hart rests in his family crypt; Thurmond’s body lies in the same cemetery in an unmarked grave, and Holmes’s body was turned to ashes at the cemetery’s crematory (259).
Indeed, as Farrell ponders, the events in San Jose that November of 1933 brought it fame, well before it became part of Silicon Valley. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both weighed in on the lynching; chillingly, during World War II, Hitler’s propagandists used photos of the lynchings to prove American barbarism (301). It would seem too that even when the tech giants have plowed under the orchards and the fields, the hidden undertow of human vileness remains–even without a commemorative plaque.
Sources
“Brooke Leopold Hart.” Findagrave.com, 27 March 2004, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8564062/brooke-leopold-hart. Accessed 14 April 2022.
Farrell, Harry. Swift Justice: Murder and Vengance in a California Town. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Herhold, Scott. “Visiting 1933 San Jose Lynching Sites.” San Jose Mercury News, 24 Sept. 2017, https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/24/san-joses-1933-lynching-a-guide-to-historic-sites/. Accessed 14 April 2022.
Price, Raechel. “Unearthing San Jose’s Sordid Past.” bayarea.com, 8 July 2016, https://www.bayarea.com/uncategorized/unearthing-san-joses-sordid-past/. Accessed 14 April 2022.
“The Orchard” courtesy Annette Elrod.
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