The Broken Heart of America and Its Distortions A reviewer unveils scholarship that seems closer to polemic than history.

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

By Walter Johnson (2020, Basic Books) 528 pages with notes, index, maps, and illustrations.

In The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Harvard University professor Walter Johnson has written a history of St. Louis that could not come at a more sensitive moment. Between its author’s prestigious pedigree and its exquisite timing, the book is winning a large audience among well-intentioned readers eager to better understand the city’s and the nation’s tragic racial history.

Broken Heart tells its story through the lens of an overarching thesis—racial capitalism, which Johnson defines as “the intertwined [White] supremacist ideology and the practices of empire, extraction, and exploitation. Dynamic, unstable, ever-changing, and world-making.”’ As racial capitalism has played out in American history, Johnson argues, St. Louis has been at the center. It is “the city at the heart of American history.… the crucible of American history … much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness in the city of St. Louis.”

It is a large claim, but indisputably St. Louis has played a key role in the nation’s racial history. From the 1857 Dred Scott decision to the 1917 East St. Louis “race riot”; from the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley vs. Kraemer, which outlawed judicial enforcement of racial covenants in housing, to the nation’s largest inter-district voluntary school busing program beginning in the 1980s; from the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 to the birth of Black Lives Matter; St. Louis has indeed played a critical role in America’s struggles with race.

So the issue is not whether St. Louis merits a close examination in the context of the American racial tragedy. The issue is whether this is the careful and scrupulous examination we deserve.

Spoiler alert: It is not.

To the contrary, the book is pocked by factual errors, some so astoundingly conspicuous as to raise questions about the research, editing, and fact-checking. Perhaps more important, the book is laced with critical omissions, most of which seem to serve a common tendentious purpose – to over-simplify, exaggerate, dramatize, and villainize.  As a result, one has to conclude that Broken Heart is at least as much polemic as it is history.

What follows are only a few examples.

Slavery

“The deeper truth,” Johnson writes, “is that slavery in St. Louis was uniquely precarious, and because it was uniquely precarious, it was uniquely violent.” (91)

Johnson makes several intriguing arguments to advance his “uniquely precarious” contention, but the more important assertion—that slavery was “uniquely violent” in St. Louis—is simply astonishing. That is because: 1) the word “unique” is so extraordinarily powerful and 2) making reliable comparisons in an area so difficult to assess as the violence of slavery is obviously all but impossible. On what ground does Johnson base his confident claim? Primarily, apparently, on accounts by three women slaves and a memoir by William Wells Brown, an ex-slave who wrote, “no part of our slaveholding country is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants than St. Louis.”

But Johnson simply omits all the considerable evidence to the contrary. For example, J. Neal Primm, in his authoritative 1980 history of St. Louis, Lion of the Valley, writes: “The local tradition [was] that slavery was comparatively mild in St. Louis” and that this view “was shared even by such moderate or strongly anti-slavery leaders as J.B. C. Lucas, Frank P. Blair, Jr., and William Greenleaf Eliot, who spoke of the humaneness of local masters and the general disapproval of ‘unnecessary’ cruelty. Manumissions [freeing of slaves by their owners] were more frequent in the city than in rural areas … A few slaveowners illegally helped or encouraged their chattels to learn to read and write; some bondmen were permitted to ‘hire themselves out’ so that they could buy their freedom; and slaves were guaranteed trial by jury.”¹

Primm’s discussion of the “local tradition” and the evidence in support of it does not come across as whitewash. “Even if the questionable premise that the institution was comparatively humane in St. Louis is accepted,” he concludes, “the essential condition of slavery remained.”² But the additional information he provides is pertinent—and Broken Heart offers none of it.

Abraham Lincoln

Consistent with his thesis that there is a through-line between the history of America’s treatment of Native Americans and its treatment of Blacks, Johnson touches on a mass execution of Dakotas in what is now Minnesota. The Dakotas, who were starving after not being compensated for land they had ceded, rose up and killed hundreds of Whites. War ensued. The U.S. Army eventually took a large number of Dakotas as prisoners, and a military tribunal sentenced 303 to death.

Here is how Johnson reports what happened next:

“On the day after Christmas in 1862, a week before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln ordered the simultaneous execution by hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men, in an exemplary act of retribution that remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States (as well as a marked contrast from the emergent laws of war that governed the treatment of Confederate prisoners of war).” (163)

Now here is two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner David Herbert Donald on this episode:

“As soon as the news [of the Indian trials] reached Washington, in mid-October, the President told Pope [the General in charge of military operations against the Dakotas] to stage no executions without his sanction. … he also sought the advice of Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple, who advised ‘a new policy of honesty was needed’ for dealing with this ‘wronged and neglected race.’”³

In November, Pope warned Lincoln that if all 303 condemned by the tribunal to death were not executed, White Minnesotans would respond with an indiscriminate massacre of the Dakotas. But Lincoln “refused to be stampeded,” Donald writes. He personally read the record of every single one of the 303 condemned men, “seeking to identify those … guilty of the most atrocious crimes … He came up with a list of thirty-nine names, which he carefully wrote out in his own hand: ‘Te-he-hdo-ne-cha,’ … and so on.  Wiring the list to the military authorities, he warned the telegraph operator to be particularly careful, since even a slight error might send the wrong man to his death.⁴

“On December 26,” Donald continues, “the thirty-eight men (one more man was pardoned at the last minute) were executed–the largest public execution in American history. Few praised Lincoln for reducing the list of condemned men. On the contrary, his clemency lighted a brief firestorm of protest in Minnesota, … [and] in [the election of] 1864, Republicans lost strength in Minnesota. Senator (formerly Governor) Ramsey told the President that if he had hanged more Indians he would have had a larger majority. ‘I could not afford to hang men for votes,’ Lincoln replied.”⁵

In short, Lincoln’s “ordered” executions actually represented his accedence to those executions and came in the context of a humane and politically courageous rejection of more executions. All of which may not matter in the sweep of history, but which matters a great deal in how we view our 16^th President. Johnson leads us to think that his vaunted humanity was nowhere to be found when it came to Native Americans. That is not so.

Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Folk, and the World’s Fair

In 1902 and 1903, the great muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens published two articles in McClure’s magazine, later collected in a book, The Shame of the Cities, about the comprehensive corruption of St. Louis’s government.  A central character in both St. Louis articles is Joseph W. Folk, the city’s incorruptible circuit attorney, who almost singlehandedly pulled back the curtain on the city’s corruption.

Johnson writes:

“Over the course of several years beginning in 1904, Folk investigated a rolling set of conspiracies between local businessmen, bankers, and political leaders to buy and fix virtually every matter that came before the St. Louis city council. … The occasion for Folk’s crusade was, as Steffens noted at the beginning of his first essay in McClure’s, the city’s bid to host the 1904 World’s Fair …” (201)

Almost all of this is knee-slappingly wrong.

First, Steffens would have had to be a time traveler to have written in 1902 and 1903 about investigations Folk did not begin until 1904. In fact, Folk started his work right after he took office, on Jan. 1, 1901.

Second, Steffens did not note at the beginning of his first essay that Folk initiated his crusade in connection with the city’s bid to host the World’s Fair. Instead, Steffens simply made a cheeky reference to the Fair, as follows, in his first sentence:

“St. Louis, the fourth city in size in the United States, is making two announcements to the world: one, that it is the worst-governed city in the land; the other that it wishes all men to come there (for the World’s Fair) and see it.^{” 6}

And then Steffens moves on. The Fair never comes up again. And none of the scandals Folk investigates relate to it.

Monsanto

The St. Louis-based company that is now part of Germany’s Bayer AG “began during World War I,” Johnson writes, “as a producer of the compounded precursors for high explosives, increased its profits a hundredfold before the war ended.” (225) Referring to the decades after World War II, he later adds: “Monsanto … emerged as the world’s largest chemical company in these years, producing, one after the other, some of the most notorious products in human history …” (312)

In fact, Monsanto was founded sixteen years before the United States entered World War I, in 1901. Its first product was saccharin, soon followed by caffeine and vanillin, and shortly thereafter, aspirin. Once the United States entered World War I, this is what happened next, according to Henry Berger, the late Washington University history professor, in his “St. Louis and Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest & Urban Crisis”:

“The War Industries Board imposed rigid restrictions on the use of saccharin for nonmilitary purposes.  A vital ingredient in manufacturing saccharin was needed for making munitions. Monsanto was able to make the necessary ingredient as well as other chemical components created for military purposes and benefited from America’s association with the Allies.”⁷

That obviously puts matters in a different light. In addition, although Berger’s figures for Monsanto’s financial growth during the war are incomplete, those he does provide suggest that a 100-fold increase in profit is wildly exaggerated.

Nor was Monsanto ever “the world’s largest chemical company.” It was never even the biggest American chemical company. A quick check of the Fortune 500 rankings between 1955 and 2015 shows that DuPont and Dow Chemical were consistently larger, in DuPont’s case by generally three to seven times.  In the twenty-first century, however, Monsanto, emerged as the global leader in seeds, including genetically modified ones.

Legal segregation

Johnson brings up a notorious ordinance mandating housing segregation in St. Louis at two different points in his book.

• Page 199—“The city also passed its first segregation ordinance at this time, in 1901, forbidding Black St. Louisans, by popular referendum, from establishing a residence on any block that was at least ‘seventy-five percent white.’”

• Page 252–“On February 29, 1916, the city of St.  Louis became the first in the nation to pass a residential segregation ordinance by popular referendum …. ”

Johnson has it right the second time; the correct date is February 29, 1916. But even his second pass can still mislead, because it lacks context. St. Louis was not the first American city to mandate residential segregation; Baltimore, Atlanta, New Orleans and Louisville all predated it with that practice, other sources disclose. St. Louis was simply the first U.S. city to do it through the then innovative public referendum process.

None of this, of course, gets St. Louis off the hook in this ugly matter, but it does weaken Johnson’s argument that “the history of the United States was made … was first and best expressed … in St. Louis.”

The 1969 Public Housing Rent Strike

In Johnson’s brief discussion of the strike against the St. Louis Housing Authority by tenants of St. Louis’s public housing projects, he writes: “The successful strike was almost entirely led by Black women.… They were supported by virtually every Black activist organization in the city.” (374,375)

The strike indeed was led by Black women, and they did win the support of St. Louis’s Black activist organizations. The only Black woman whom Johnson names in this account, however, played a marginal role at best. The Black women who actually did lead the strike, including the late Jean King, the president of the Citywide Rent Strike Committee, are not mentioned.

The rent strike here had national impact. King testified before Congress. The Brooke Amendment—sponsored in the House of Representatives by St. Louis’s own William L. Clay Sr.–soon followed. It capped tenants’ rent obligations at 25 percent of their income and led in turn to federal subsidies for local Housing Authorities, to make up the difference. The strike also led to the placement of public housing tenants on the Housing Authority board here, an innovation later replicated around the country.

Broken Heart mentions none of this.

Charles “Cookie” Thornton and the Kirkwood City Council Massacre

On Feb.7, 2008, Charles “Cookie” Thornton, an African-American resident of Meacham Park, an African-American neighborhood annexed by Kirkwood in 1991, shot and killed a Kirkwood police officer guarding City Hall before entering the building where a city council meeting was in session. He then shot and killed another police officer, two city council members and the city’s public works director, and shot the Mayor, who later died from complications related to his wounds in conjunction with cancer treatments. Police rushing to the scene killed Thornton.

Thornton was a well-known figure in Kirkwood and Meacham Park and for many years a popular one. Broken Heart portrays him as driven to extremes by the betrayal of Kirkwood city officials, who harassed him by ticketing him for parking his dump truck on his lawn and similar infractions. By 2008, Johnson writes, Thornton “owed almost $20,000–a total that is hard to understand as anything other than a massively disproportionate and punitive response to Thornton’s claim (albeit a stubborn one) of a long-standing customary right to do business in the way that he always had.” (389)

Thornton also felt betrayed by the city for another reason. Referring to the demolition work required for the development of a new mall in Meacham Park, Johnson writes:  “Virtually everyone in Meacham Park thought that Thornton had been promised work on the project in return for his support, including Thornton himself.” (393)

But in the end, Thornton won no business on the project. Thornton, Johnson writes, “was simply another Black cipher recorded on the page of a faraway account book … in a decision that came down to dollars and cents in the pockets of people who cared more about calculating the bottom line than taking the high road.  It was then that Thornton began to … descend into the dark cycle of feelings of humiliation, betrayal, anger and fear that led him to the city council chambers on that February night in 2008.” (393, 394)

Thornton’s perceived betrayal, Johnson writes, took place in the context of a larger betrayal by the city of Kirkwood, related to the redevelopment project. The promises the city made about it, Johnson writes, “turned out to be hogwash–or, if not hogwash, a sort of diluted runoff that still smelled like hogwash .… In the end, the mall project destroyed more than half of Meacham Park … ” (391, 392)

Johnson refers approvingly to the “sensitivity” shown in a St. Louis magazine report on the tragedy. But he omits some crucial facts in that report. Most glaringly, as early as 2002, Kirkwood offered complete forgiveness of Thornton’s fines in return for his agreement to stop breaking the law. But Thornton refused, saying he wanted a public apology from the city. Then former Kirkwood High School principal Franklin McCallie, a friend of Thornton’s, interceded to try to resolve the matter, but “Thornton kept saying ‘No, no, no!’” McCallie later recalled.  After four months of futility, McCallie gave up. The city then made yet another futile attempt with Thornton to work it out.

A 2010 report published originally by the St. Louis Beacon provides other pertinent facts related to the city’s alleged betrayal of Thornton in connection with demolition contracts for the redevelopment project. Thornton did not just want some of the demolition work, the report says, he wanted all of it. But Thornton lacked the capacity to do it all, Kirkwood officials said, and would not even bid to get contracts.

In regard to the alleged betrayal of Meacham Park, the Beacon article notes that the redevelopment project remains controversial. But it also cites a number of benefits, including $4 million of TIF (tax increment financing) money spent on housing improvements in Meacham Park.

None of this can be found in Broken Heart.

Michael Brown

Johnson repeatedly refers to the 2014 killing of 18-year old Ferguson resident Michael Brown as a “murder.” In one reference it is an “unpunished murder.” In the book’s index it is an “execution.” He tells the story this way:

“… Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, who had been walking down the middle of a street near his grandmother’s house. After a short scuffle in the street, Brown ran away. When Wilson shot him, several witnesses later asserted, Brown had his hands raised in the air. Wilson later claimed that Brown, whom he had already shot at least once, had turned around and run toward the officer, even as Wilson kept shooting.”

Many readers will find Johnson’s terminology justified, in spite of two investigations – first by the U.S. Department of Justice, and more recently (and subsequent to the Broken Heart’s publication) by the office of St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell—that failed to lead to charges of murder or any other crime. After all, at the very least, more competent police work might have averted the physical confrontation that ended in death. There is also plenty of reason to believe that racism played a critical role, in multiple ways. (Johnson’s linkage of the story to the tax structure in Ferguson and the St. Louis region–a major theme of this part of his book—is provocative and praiseworthy.)

But Wilson did allow a physical confrontation, and Johnson’s telling of the story is highly selective. The DOJ report described something far more serious than a “scuffle.” The report supported the officer’s contention that Brown attempted to reach inside his vehicle and grab his gun; indeed, it found “conclusive evidence that Brown’s DNA was on Wilson’s gun.”⁸ It also found that Brown struck Wilson in the face, was wounded by a gunshot inside the car, fled 180 feet, suffered no wounds in the back, and then moved back at Wilson immediately before the fatal shots.

The DOJ–Eric Holder’s and Barack Obama’s DOJ–also concluded that Brown did not cry out “Don’t shoot” and that, if he had his hands up, it was only for a moment before he began moving back toward Wilson. The DOJ said many of the witnesses who told the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” story had repeated what they had heard from neighbors or on the news. Some witnesses admitted they made up stories so they could be part of a big community event. The forensic evidence lined up with Wilson’s account, the DOJ said, and “Multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of Wilson’s account and are consistent with the physical evidence.”⁹

None of this is in Johnson’s narrative. He dismisses it all in a footnote, as follows:

“The separate DOJ report on the murder of Michael Brown, on the other hand, is, at best, a legalistic restatement of the extraordinary latitude provided police officers who shoot unarmed people in the United States and, at worst, a complete misunderstanding of the full set of circumstances surrounding the shooting.” (451)

Again, he has a point about the constraints around the DOJ’s (and Bell’s) investigations. But if he is going to present one version of the story—the part about what some eyewitnesses initially reported—then it is not too much to ask that he report what the DOJ later said about the credibility of those witnesses and the contrasting information obtained from others.

Kim Gardner and Wesley Bell or, more precisely, the absence of Kim Gardner and Wesley Bell

Two highly significant political upheavals in the St. Louis area in recent years have been the elections of Kim Gardner as St. Louis Circuit Attorney and of Wesley Bell as St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney. Both are Black and both have instituted reforms in the justice system’s approach to the Black community. Bell’s election was especially shocking—a stunning upset of the longtime incumbent, Robert McCulloch, whose handling of the Michael Brown case had been widely seen as biased in favor of Officer Wilson.

Both elections might have found their way into the hopeful conclusion Johnson gives his book. Instead, he builds that conclusion on descriptions of various community-improvement efforts by people he himself refers to as “marginal and radical.” (441) Beneath the surface, he writes, “these ordinary people are doing something beautiful and profound.” (441) In the book’s very last sentence, he describes Black children being trained as runners by a woman whose own son was shot to death by a police officer in 2017.  “They fly around the track in the fading light, little kids taking impossibly long strides.” (442)

Poetic, for sure.  And a case can certainly be made for including such images in the book’s conclusion. But how can they be allowed to crowd out any mention of the very nonmarginal Wesley Bell and Kim Gardner? Why are we not offered the meat with the meringue?

A final word

In an Oct. 1 Webinar sponsored by the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis, Johnson was asked to comment on this review, which he had read in a longer form in the Gateway Journalism Review. He dismissed it as barely worth discussion.

The critique “picks up some empirical errors … (that) can be quite easily fixed in the paperback,” he said.  It “creates some innuendo” that “I (Johnson) am unsympathetic to the well-intended efforts of White people like Abraham Lincoln and the city of Kirkwood;” the latter, he said, had only offered to forgive Cookie Thornton’s fines in return for his sacrifice of his First Amendment rights to protest them.  And he suggested there was “a tone of paternalism to the review–that maybe we should not accept the testimony of people like William Wells Brown” and the enslaved women who described slavery in St. Louis as “particularly bad” (the book, as noted earlier, actually calls it “uniquely violent”).

These objections, however, either distort or miss this reviewer’s point.

Johnson speaks casually of the easily fixable “empirical errors.” But any newspaper reporter who made errors like his would be read the riot act by his editors or even fired–and journalism, as the saying goes, is only the first draft of history, something Broken Heart distinctly is not. Errors like those cited in this review—and others, which only space limitations and perhaps the reader’s patience prevent listing here—errors that in several cases are either self-evident or require only a microsecond to unearth on Google—raise the question of whether Johnson’s over-arching narrative is more important to him than the facts it is meant to explain.

In regard to “innuendo” about White people not getting the credit they deserve and “paternalism:” These kinds of accusations are actually more appropriately leveled at Broken Heart itself. It is this book that in several instances creates a misleading impression–an “innuendo”–regarding either an individual or a situation by withholding pertinent information. It is this book that presents only the evidence in favor of its argument that slavery in St. Louis was “uniquely violent,” but simply ignores the argument and the evidence to the contrary.  It is this book that deems the evidence found by the Department of Justice in the Michael Brown case to be not worth sharing, and the repeated efforts by the city of Kirkwood and by Franklin McCallie to settle Cookie Thornton’s dispute with the city to be similarly beneath mention. It is this book which, through these and other omissions, leaves itself exposed to the charge, precisely, of paternalism.

To be clear: This is not to argue that St. Louis’s heart—or America’s—is not broken. This is not to argue that Whites in St. Louis have not enslaved, excluded, exploited, expropriated from, and removed Blacks. This is not to try to explain away or challenge the fundamental tragedy of our racist past.

It is only to argue that Johnson is often his own worst enemy in telling the story. It is only to argue that with a more rigorous approach to the facts and with fuller storytelling, Johnson would have given us something more trustworthy—and useful.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Gateway Journalism Review, which also published a longer rebuttal by Wagman to Walter Johnson’s remarks in the Oct. 1 webinar sponsored by the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis.