The Montgomery Advertiser
- 'GATORS ENGULFED BY RUTHLESS TIDE IN 49 TO 0 STYLE
- LOVE LETTERS FROM RECTOR ARE FEATURE OF HALL-MILLS TRIAL
- Aged Confederate Veterans' Company Enlists As Guards
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page of Sunday, November 14, 1926, led with Jack Langhorne's exuberant account of Alabama's 49-0 rout of Florida in Montgomery, presenting the result as proof that Coach Wallace Wade had kept his promise to take no chances, and noting one of the largest crowds the capital had seen for such a game. An Associated Press dispatch from Somerville, New Jersey, described Frances Stevens Hall listening as letters professing her murdered husband's love for another murdered woman were read in the Hall-Mills trial, with the jury seeming less absorbed than the spectators. From Nashville, the AP reported that Company B of the United Confederate Veterans, men aged 79 to 89, had re-enlisted in the national guard for three years and intended to stay in it as long as they lived.
Translation
'GATORS ENGULFED BY RUTHLESS TIDE IN 49 TO 0 STYLE
By JACK LANGHORNE
Friday afternoon it was when Coach Wallace Wade let it be known that his team, the Crimson Tide of Alabama, would take no chances with Florida's crew of Alligators, and Saturday afternoon brought ample proof of the fact that the Capstone athletic chieftain is a man of his word. The Tide, ruthless, powerful, magnificent, relentless, ever-onward, swirled over and engulfed the Everglades Saurians, 49 to 0, before one of the largest crowds ever to assemble in Alabama's Capital City for such an attraction. Proof
LOVE LETTERS FROM RECTOR ARE FEATURE OF HALL-MILLS TRIAL
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 13. - (AP) - Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall sat in a little court house here today and heard letters, telling of the professed love of her dead husband for another woman, also dead, read to [?] jury, which seemed less interested than the curious throngs in the court room.
Aged Confederate Veterans' Company Enlists As Guards
NASHVILLE, TENN., Nov. 13. - (AP) - Company B, United Confederate Veterans, composed of men aged from 79 to 89, re-enlisted as members of the national guard for a three-year period this afternoon, the oath being administered by the company commander, Captain C. H. Binkley. The veterans have been members of the guard for many years, and according to Captain Binkley, they have decided to remain in the guard as long as they live.
Context
Alabama from the 49-0 Florida game to the 1927 Rose Bowl
Langhorne framed the 49-0 score as proof that Wallace Wade meant it when he promised to take no chances, and he described one of the largest crowds ever gathered in Montgomery for such a game. Later season records confirm the venue and the margin: the game was played at the Cramton Bowl, Alabama scored in all four quarters, and Tolbert Brown scored the first three touchdowns, giving Alabama a 21-0 halftime lead. The Florida game was not the end of the campaign. In its final regular-season game Alabama beat Georgia 33-6 and clinched a third consecutive Southern Conference championship, finishing 9-0-1 overall and 8-0 in the conference. The single blemish came in the 1927 Rose Bowl, where Alabama tied undefeated Stanford 7-7; that tie ended a 20-game winning streak, and the game was also the first sporting event broadcast nationally on radio. Several ranking systems later named Alabama the 1926 national champion retroactively, an after-the-fact verdict that readers of this November page could not yet have known.
The 1922 crime scene behind the Hall-Mills love letters
The letters read aloud in Somerville belonged to a case already four years old. The Rev. Edward W. Hall was rector of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick, and Eleanor Mills, a member of his choir, was having an affair with him. Their bodies were discovered in a field on September 16, 1922, with torn-up love letters placed between them, and newspapers soon revealed that the scattered papers were love letters. The original 1922 investigation produced no indictments. The case came back in 1926 when a piano tuner petitioned to annul his 10-month marriage and said his wife had withheld from him knowledge of the Hall-Mills affair; the New York Daily Mirror, a new Hearst paper eager to win a circulation war, pressed the story, and that speculation led Governor A. Harry Moore to order a second investigation and a trial. In the prosecution's scenario, Mrs. Hall instigated the murder of her cheating husband, a theory in which the affair recorded in the letters the jury heard supplied the motive.
How the 1926 Somerville trial ended
The trial reported here opened on November 3, 1926, at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville and ran for a month. The prosecution's key witness was Jane Gibson, a pig farmer on whose property the bodies were discovered; she said she had heard a woman shout "Explain those letters," a line that tied the correspondence to the killing in her account. The defense produced witnesses to show that Henry Stevens spent the night of the murders bluefishing on the Jersey shore, and three fingerprint experts found no resemblance between the smudge on the card left at the scene and Willie Stevens' prints. After hearing 87 witnesses for the state and 70 for the defense, the jury deliberated for five hours, and all three defendants were acquitted on December 3, 1926; charges against their cousin Henry Carpender were then dropped. The Somerset County prosecutor's books still list the case as unsolved. The scene this dispatch sets, with a jury seemingly less absorbed than the crowd, matches the case's later reputation as an early example of a media circus.
The United Confederate Veterans behind Nashville's Company B
Company B belonged to the United Confederate Veterans, organized on June 10, 1889, by ex-soldiers and sailors of the Confederate States of America. The UCV was built on military lines: members holding UCV ranks officered and staffed echelons of command from General Headquarters at the top to local camps, also called companies, at the bottom, which is how a Nashville unit came to be styled Company B. The association's declared purpose, however, was emphatically nonmilitary, so the national guard service the AP describes went beyond the veterans' organization's own stated aims. The UCV's peak lasted until 1903 or 1904, after which veterans died off and the organization gradually declined. At its 1896 convention the UCV resolved that the Confederate veteran had returned to the Union as an equal and remained in it as a friend, the reconciliation language behind old Confederates swearing an oath in a state force of the reunited nation. The ages the AP gives, 79 to 89, mean the youngest men were in their mid-teens and the oldest in their twenties during the 1861-1865 war; the last verified Confederate veteran, Pleasant Crump, died at age 104 on December 31, 1951.
Original
'GATORS ENGULFED BY RUTHLESS TIDE IN 49 TO 0 STYLE
Friday afternoon it was when Coach Wallace Wade let it be known that his team, ' the Crimson Tide of Alabama, would take no chances with Florida's crew of Alligators, and Saturday afternoon brought ample proof of the fact that the Capstone athletic chieftain is a man of his word. The Tide, ruthless, powerful, magnificent, relentless, ever-onward, swirled over and engulfed the Everglades Saurians, 49 to 0, before one of the largest crowds ever to assemble in Alabama's Capital City for such an attraction. Proof
LOVE LETTERS FROM RECTOR ARE FEATURE OF HALL-MILLS TRIAL
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 13. - (AP) - Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall sat in a little court house here today and heard letters, telling of the professed love of her dead husband for another woman, also dead, read to [?] jury, which seemed less interested than the curious throngs in the court room.
Aged Confederate Veterans' Company Enlists As Guards
NASHVILLE, TENN., Nov. 13. - (AP) - Company B, United Confederate Veterans, composed of men aged from 79 to 89, re-enlisted as members of the national guard for a three-year period this afternoon, the oath being administered by the company commander, Captain C. H. Binkley. The veterans have been members of the guard for many years, and according to Captain Binkley, they have decided to remain in the guard as long as they live.
Source: Holding institution