The Montgomery Advertiser
- QUIET OBSERVANCE OF ARMISTICE DAY PLANNED FOR CITY
- HALL-MILLS TRIAL IS RECESSED FOR NATIONAL HOLIDAY
- ILLNESS OF JUROR HALTS HEARING OF DAVIS MURDER CASE
The Montgomery Advertiser of November 11, 1926, greeted Armistice Day with a short notice that the city would quietly observe the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Armistice, describing the date as a day of rejoicing for victory and the peace it brought. Two trial reports ran beside it. An Associated Press dispatch from Somerville, New Jersey, said the Hall-Mills jury had voted to take Armistice Day off, recessing the murder trial until Friday after half a dozen witnesses testified. From Birmingham, the paper's own correspondent reported that a juror's illness had interrupted the eighth day of the murder trial of Charles R. Davis, a former Flat Top convict warden charged in the death of the convict James Knox.
Translation
QUIET OBSERVANCE OF ARMISTICE DAY PLANNED FOR CITY
Montgomery today will observe the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Armistice, which brought peace and a delirium of joy and thanksgiving to war-riven, suffering, weary world. Like the first Armistice Day, the recurrence of that never-to-be-forgotten date in the history of the human race, is always a day of rejoicing for the great victory won and the blessed peace that it brought.
HALL-MILLS TRIAL IS RECESSED FOR NATIONAL HOLIDAY
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 10. - (AP) - Patriotism of a Somerset county jury today decreed a recess in the Hall-Mills murder trial until Friday. The jury voted there should be no session tomorrow, Armistice Day. Half a dozen witnesses were heard today.
ILLNESS OF JUROR HALTS HEARING OF DAVIS MURDER CASE
BIRMINGHAM, ALA., Nov. 10. - Special to The Advertiser. - Illness of a juror, Archie Brown, temporarily halted the trial of Charles R. Davis, former Flat Top convict warden, charged with first degree murder in connection with the death of James Knox, convict, when court met Wednesday afternoon to finish the eighth day of the hearing of the case.
Context
Armistice Day's legal standing in 1926
In 1926 Armistice Day was observed at Congress's request and did not become a legal holiday until 1938. The Advertiser marked the "eighth anniversary," and the headline over the Hall-Mills dispatch called November 11 a "national holiday." At the federal level, Congress had adopted a resolution on June 4, 1926, asking President Calvin Coolidge to issue annual proclamations calling for the day's observance, so the 1926 anniversary was the first November 11 after that request. A congressional act approved May 13, 1938, made November 11 a legal holiday each year. Until then, veterans' organizations played a large part in the observance. The American Legion, formed in 1919, the year of the first Armistice Day, ran grassroots campaigns and promoted civic observances, and communities were encouraged to pause at 11 a.m. for a moment of silence, matching the hour of the armistice. Montgomery's planned "quiet observance" fits this pattern of locally organized commemoration, although the excerpt does not describe the city's program or any part the Legion played in it.
Alabama's prison mines and the Davis trial
The Davis trial belongs to Alabama's long use of convict labor. Between 1875 and 1928 the state and its counties profited from the convict-lease system, and by the 1880s nearly all of the several thousand prisoners under it labored in coal mines around Birmingham, where the Davis case was being heard. More than 95 percent of county prisoners and 90 percent of state prisoners were African American. From 1912 the state itself took over the prison mines and sold their coal directly. In 1924 the death of a prisoner who had been tortured by being lowered into a vat of boiling water prompted an investigation. The encyclopedia entry names neither that prisoner nor the mine, so it cannot by itself confirm a link to this case. The Advertiser reports only that Davis, a former Flat Top convict warden, was on trial for first-degree murder in the death of the convict James Knox, and that the hearing had reached its eighth day. Prison mining and convict leasing in Alabama finally ended in 1928, two years after this trial, and Alabama was the last state in the nation to abolish convict leasing.
Why a New Jersey murder trial reached Montgomery
The Hall-Mills case is remembered in the history of journalism chiefly for the scale of its coverage. Edward Wheeler Hall, an Episcopal priest, and Eleanor Mills, a member of his choir with whom he was having an affair, were murdered on September 14, 1922, and such vast nationwide coverage was unusual for a local murder case at the time. When the case finally came to trial in 1926, it drew huge national attention largely because of the social status of the wealthy Stevens and Carpender families. Newspaper rivalry had helped revive it: the New York Daily Mirror, a new Hearst paper eager to win a circulation war with the Daily News, led the press in demanding that the case be reopened. In Somerville some 300 reporters sent their stories out over 60 leased wires. That level of attention explains why even a one-day recess voted by the jury went out on the Associated Press wire and appeared in an Alabama paper.
How the Somerville trial ended
The recess reported from Somerville came early in a trial that ran from November 3 to December 3, 1926. The dispatch counted half a dozen witnesses on November 10, one week after the trial opened; by the close, the jury had heard 87 witnesses for the state and 70 for the defense and then deliberated for five hours. All three defendants at trial were acquitted on December 3, 1926. On the books of the Somerset County prosecutor the Hall-Mills case remains unsolved, so the proceedings that Advertiser readers followed in November ended without a conviction.
Original
QUIET OBSERVANCE OF ARMISTICE DAY PLANNED FOR CITY
Montgomery today will observe the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Armistice, which brought peace and a delirium of joy and thanksgiving to war-riven, suffering, weary world. Like the first Armistice Day, the recurrence of that never-to-be-forgotten date in the history of the human race, is always a day of rejoicing for the great victory won and the blessed peace that it brought.
HALL-MILLS TRIAL IS RECESSED FOR NATIONAL HOLIDAY
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 10. - (AP) - Patriotism of a Somerset county jury today decreed a recess in the Hall-Mills murder trial until Friday. The jury voted there should be no session tomorrow, Armistice Day. Half a dozen witnesses were heard today.
ILLNESS OF JUROR HALTS HEARING OF DAVIS MURDER CASE
BIRMINGHAM, ALA., Nov. 10. - Special to The Advertiser. - Illness of a juror, Archie Brown, temporarily halted the trial of Charles R. Davis, former Flat Top convict warden, charged with first degree murder in connection with the death of James Knox, convict, when court met Wednesday afternoon to finish the eighth day of the hearing of the case.
Source: Holding institution