Not in Kansas anymore; The Garners

Among the most pitiful stories to come out of the Mass Sedition case was that of Elmer J. Garner, an elderly Kansas country newspaper editor who died within weeks of the trial opening after two years of persecution.

The impoverished elder Garner, who had been indicted along with his son in the failed 1942 and ‘43 attempts, faced the third and final indictment and opening of the trial alone.

That’s a point worth making, I think. His son was by his side for the first two years, but not included in the last indictment. It seems to me the government was tightening up their case, dismissing defendants who didn’t fit the profile or didn’t have enough evidence against them to sell a conspiracy charge to a jury.

Since there are examples from his early 19th century newspaper days of E.J. being called “Jim,” I’m going with a hunch that his son James Francis Garner, about whom we know very little, was called “Frank.”

Frank must have had mixed feelings about being left off the third indictment. On the one hand, obviously, freedom. No prison cell yawning for him. On the other, his elderly father seated in the defendants’ gallery without him.

I don’t know if Frank traveled back to DC in ‘44. I have read one account of fellow travelers passing through Wichita stopping to visit him in his father’s absence, so I get the sense that he stayed behind to work.

What we do know is that on the morning of May the 3rd, 81 years ago today, 80-year-old Elmer James Garner, a man born during the Civil War, was found dead in a cheap hallway room in a DC flophouse with forty cents in his pockets. At his bedside a typewriter on which he had been preparing his defense.

His suit and clothes were seized by the authorities and his body was shipped naked in a crate back to his widow in Kansas.

No one deserves such indignity. His crime? Publishing opinions at odds with the government during wartime… allegedly. If anyone from Wichita is reading, doesn’t the Elmer Garner Active Club have a nice ring to it?

That’s his story and my summary.

Here are some scare resources for the Garners and their newspaper “Publicity.”

Washington Post smear piece by Dillard Stokes, April '42

PM Daily, NYC, profile (partial)

Elmer Garner; entry from Encyclopedia of the Great Plains

Another Wichita Seditionist? detailed article from Kansas History magazine, 1994