Yesterday I was reading a twenty-year old article in the Mexican journal Estudios Sociológicos titled "La huelga de Cananea 1906. Una reinterpretación." Reading Spanish slows me down dramatically, so I pick up more details. This time it was about a heavily-armed posse of North Americans attempting to force their way across the border at Naco, Sonora to attack striking copper miners. The detail? The leader of the vigilantes was a man listed as C.E. Buchner, the athletic director at the Bisbee, Arizona YMCA.
My relationship with the YMCA goes back to childhood. I went to a YMCA day camp for five summers. I went to a YMCA sleep-away camp when I was eight. My brother and father and I participated in a YMCA father-and-son organization. The Y materialized in my scholarly pursuits when I did my Master's essay in US History on the Indian Peace Policy of President Grant's administration. One of the members of his Board of Indian Commissioners was William E. Dodge, a founding member of the YMCA in the United States.
Now, though, that resonates with my new work. Much of the forthcoming Though An Army Come Against Us deals with copper miners and their unions, including the Cananea strike in Mexico, but also the 1917 Copper Queen strike in Bisbee. The Copper Queen was owned by the Phelps, Dodge Corporation. Yes, that is the same Dodge. And Bisbee, Arizona had a rather elaborate YMCA precisely because the Dodges were so committed to that organization and to its particular view of "muscular Christianity" that saw safe recreation, lodgings and worship as safeguards against gambling, alcohol, drugs, and frequenting prostitutes.
So when I saw the athletics director from Bisbee leading a racist mob to Cananea it piqued my interest. What else could I find out about Mr. C.E. Buchner? Was he still in Bisbee eleven years later for that strike? What part did he play in that?
YMCA documents can be found in Google Books. Old newspaper articles are on the Library of Congress website. Sometimes the indices of academic journals help, too. So it turns out that Buchner was active in the sale of Liberty Loans in Arizona during the First World War, perhaps because he was so familiar with the area. He seems already to have been transferred to Tulsa, Oklahoma as the head of their YMCA, where he was responsible for the construction of another very large building to house their work. And, wait... Tulsa?
Tulsa is the locus for another major plot thread in my new book, the 1921 assault on the prosperous Black community there that resulted in uncountable deaths and the arson of the entire district. What was Buchner's association with that? One thought is his leadership in the sale of Liberty Bonds. In 1917 a group of IWW's, a union that was having some success in organizing Oklahoma oil workers, was arrested for possession of antiwar literature. They were fined in court for not owning Liberty Bonds(!) then turned over by the police to a masked, hooded posse of about fifty who whipped them with heavy ropes, tarred and feather them, and threatened them with death should they ever return to the state. Leading the mob was Buchner's friend and fellow Rotarian, Tate Brady, a Tulsa businessman and also a KKK member.
I don't know if C.E. Buchner was a member of that mob. A partial answer might be in the NY State Archives in Albany, in the papers of an investigator who looked into the outrage. I really don't know whether Buchner was a Klansman, nor what his role might have been in the pogroms of 1921. I do know that it is well-documented that YMCA secretaries in other cities were leading members of the Klan. I do know that the KKK of the 20's shared the YMCA's "muscular Christianity," especially with regard to drugs, alcohol, gambling and prostitution. I do know that Buchner demonstrated his willingness to lead an armed mob against another, non-white nationality when he attempted to cross the Mexican border in 1906 and engaged in a firefight with the customs agents there.
For the purposes of fiction, I have no problem with creating a character with his name who appears in four different chapters, at four different times, and in three different places, as an antagonist to two of my protagonists. My only question is: to what purpose? How does that character advance the reader's understanding and appreciation of the plot and themes? I know for certain that including him will amuse me. I worry already that there are too many Easter eggs concealed in this manuscript that are of interest to nobody else. I need to think this through carefully, and I am hopeful that writing this blog post will help me with that.
