Imagine This Same Vice Squad

SERIES · Herbal Histories. Herbal Histories takes one claim about a drug plant — the kind that circulates in a hundred articles without a citation — and goes to the document it is supposed to rest on. Twenty-five issues, each built on primary sources read in the original: statutes, papyri, newspaper columns, parliamentary papers and manuscripts in Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Nahuatl, Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese and Egyptian. Translations are the author's own and are marked as such. When a claim survives the document the issue says so; when it does not, the failure is the story.

On Friday the thirteenth of March, 1931, the California Eagle ran a line of type across the top of its front page, above its own nameplate, where a paper puts the thing it wants seen from a news-rack at forty feet.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG, FAMOUS TRUMPETER, SENTENCED ON DOPE CHARGE.

The Eagle was the Black newspaper of Los Angeles. It had been publishing since 1879, it was run out of an office on Central Avenue, and in 1931 Charlotta Bass had been editing it for something over twenty years. Armstrong had been in the city since July, fronting the band at Frank Sebastian's New Cotton Club out in Culver City, and the Eagle had been printing him in the social columns all that time — arriving in town in July, swimming at Terminal Isles with a club party in September, playing a dance in October, being entertained by two men named Thomas Southern and Luke Rosser in November, singing a request from the bandstand into somebody's birthday party in February. On the nineteenth of December a hostess furnished the music at her party by turning on the Majestic and letting the Cotton Club broadcast do the work.

So when the Eagle put him at the top of the front page, the readers knew exactly who he was, and had known for eight months.

What they had not been told, in any of those eight months, was that he had been arrested.

Look at the whole page and the argument is already made, without anybody making it.

The trumpet story is four inches of agate in column four.

Then a sentence that tells you what the Eagle thought its readers did and did not already know:

That is a paper explaining the substance to its own readership from a standing start. No slang, no wink, no assumption of familiarity. The word had to be spelled for them — marihuanna here, marihuana a fortnight later — and the method of use had to be described.

The rest of the column is a working musician's file. He has been at the Cotton Club in Culver City for the past few months. His bizarre method of playing the trumpet and his individualistic interpretation of popular songs have won him a wide following among night club followers and radio fans, who listened in great numbers to his nightly broadcasts. His contract with Frank Sebastian, owner of the Cotton Club, has expired, and he had made plans to leave for the east within the next few days. Rumours had it that he had refused to sign a new contract despite a fabulous salary. He is married, living at the Dunbar hotel with his wife, and the couple have no children.

Read that last line twice. The paper does not name her. Armstrong's marital situation in the spring of 1931 was in the middle of coming apart, and the Eagle — which had been printing him weekly for eight months and had a reporter who tried to reach her — writes Mrs. Armstrong, wife of the trumpeter, and stops. Which of two women that was, the document does not say, and this article is not going to supply the answer from somewhere else and pretend it came from here.

Set beside what is on the page what is missing from it, because the absences are patterned.

There is no arrest. Not the date, not the place, not the officers, not the agency. The Eagle ran nothing at the time. The entire reel of this newspaper for April 1930 through March 1931 — a year of weekly issues — contains the word marihuana exactly twice, and both times it is in these two March stories about Armstrong. The arrest, whenever it happened, was not news to this paper. The conviction was.

There is no second defendant. The account that circulates now has Armstrong taken in company with a white drummer named Vic Berton — born Victor Cohen in 1896, dead in 1951 — usually outside the club, usually in November 1930, usually with a suspended sentence at the end of it. None of that is in the Eagle. Berton's name does not appear in the paper at all, in any context, in the whole year. I could not verify the arrest date, the co-defendant, or the suspended sentence from any source I could reach; the newspapers that would settle it are the downtown Los Angeles dailies, and they are not open. What can be said is narrower and firmer: on the tenth of March 1931 a judge in department 26 gave Louis Armstrong thirty days in the county jail, and on the nineteenth of March he was paroled. Nine days. The figure of nine days is attached in the retellings to a spell in custody straight after the arrest. Here it is the gap between the sentence and the parole, and the two dates that produce it are printed a fortnight apart in a newspaper.

And there is no vocabulary. No reefer, no muggles, no vipers, no tea pad — none of the words that the later literature on jazz and cannabis runs on. Those terms belong to the musicians' own world and to the memoirs written out of it decades afterward, and they are worth handling the way you would handle any in-group vocabulary recorded by someone with a reason to make it sound colourful. In the Black daily press of Los Angeles in March 1931 the language is dope, the drug, marihuana cigarettes, and the state poison act. The word reefer does turn up in this record, in Los Angeles, on the wire of the Associated Negro Press — but not for another two and a half years, and we will come to it.

The statute is the one solid legal fact the page gives, and it is worth stopping on. The state poison act. Not a federal charge, because there was no federal charge to bring. Cannabis was not prohibited under United States law in 1931 and would not be until the Marihuana Tax Act took effect in October 1937, six and a half years later. Whatever happened in Culver City happened under a California statute, enforced by California officers, and disposed of in a Los Angeles courtroom. The Bureau of Narcotics is not in this story, and putting it there is a way of moving the story to Washington, where it did not take place.

Directly to the left of the thirty days, sharing the same fold, the Eagle ran this.

Last Monday, it begins, the down-town dailies played up in big headlines the names of the Apex Nite Club and the Chez Norman, both near Forty-first and Central. They got there because a vice squad under "that uncrowned chief of police, Col. Harry Light" had raided them and searched their patrons, on some of whom bottles were found.

Then the Eagle states the case:

And then it names the control:

The Biltmore and the Alexandria were downtown hotels. The Cotton Club was Frank Sebastian's, in Culver City, and the Eagle's own trumpet story, one column to the right on the same sheet of newsprint, says so twice.

The paper is not drawing the connection. There is nothing on the page that joins the two columns; they are separate stories, unsigned, set by the same hands on the same night, and the Eagle nowhere says look at these together. But it has printed, side by side and by accident of the make-up, both halves of a proposition. Here is a house that the vice squad will never walk into. Here is the man who worked in it, doing thirty days.

Nothing was done to Sebastian. Nothing was done to the club. The club kept its band and its licence and its broadcast wire, and the Eagle went on listing it in the social columns. What the state poison act reached, in Culver City in the winter of 1930, was the trumpet player.

That is not a claim about anyone's motive. It is a description of where the law landed, and it is the same description the Eagle was making, in general terms, in the next column over.

The Eagle of the twenty-seventh of March put him on the front page again, under a headline that used the period's own word for what had happened to him — the performer was "stuck" — and the story is mostly about where he had gone.

It was learned today. Eight days after the fact. The paper did not have the courthouse; it had friends of Armstrong, and it says so. It also had a reporter who went after Mrs. Armstrong at the Dunbar, at Forty-first and Central, and got nowhere: "all efforts of Eagle reporters to reach her for a statement today failed."

Above that, boxed off and set in bold, a bulletin off the Associated Negro Press wire, datelined Chicago that same day:

Paroled on a Thursday, in Chicago by Sunday, on at the Regal inside the week. The last clause is the whole of it — his arrival in Chicago was somewhat unexpected — and it is the closest the record comes to a man's own decision. He did not go back to Culver City.

The Eagle's own summary of the charge, printed in this second story, is the fullest description of the offence anywhere in the paper: the charge "was lodged against Armstrong last winter when a number of marihuana cigarettes were found in his possession." Last winter. Not a date. The arrest is still not there.

And the front page around it is the reason the trumpet story reads the way it does. The lead that day is MRS. COLLINS ACQUITTED, over the case of a woman who told a courtroom that Los Angeles police officers had beaten her, torn her clothing and put their feet on her in a car; two witnesses corroborated it and Judge Georgia Bullock let her go. In the next columns: a request for an open hearing that angers the police heads; citizens protesting the establishment of a segregated "colored" fire station. And this, which is the one to hold on to — POLICE COMMISSION RULES APEX MAY RETAIN PERMIT. DECISION IS UNANIMOUS. CLUB THANKS FRIENDS FOR ASSISTANCE.

Curtis Mosby's club, the one the vice squad had raided a fortnight earlier, kept its licence. The bandleader who worked at the club the vice squad would never enter did thirty days.

The Eagle stops there. Armstrong is in Chicago, the story is over, and the paper has a city to cover.

The statute is not over.

The Atlanta Daily World for Monday the fourth of December, 1933, page two, under a decorative banner reading REALM of CULTURE:

Nineteen people, one Tuesday night, one address, on the same statute, in the same city, still four years before the federal law existed. Two of them are named because the police named them, and one of them is a woman whose first name the wire gave as Ruby. Nothing else about any of the nineteen survives in this record. They got four sentences on a page about conferences and book columns, and they got them because the police blotter reached the wire, which is how almost everybody in this history gets into it.

By 1933 the wire has the word reefer. In March 1931 the Eagle did not, and had to explain to its readers that the drug is smoked in cigarette form.

Go back to the streamer.

A newspaper puts a line above its own nameplate when it wants a passer-by to buy the paper. The Eagle had a front page that week with four separate stories about the Los Angeles police on it, and it chose, for the top of the sheet, the one with a famous name in it. Armstrong sold the paper. That is not cynicism about the Eagle, which spent that page arguing that the police were running Black clubs out of business and would never touch a white one; it is the ordinary logic of a five-cent weekly, and it is also the reason we have any of this at all.

Because the record here is a police record wearing a newspaper's clothes. Every fact this article can establish about what happened to Louis Armstrong in Los Angeles came out of a courthouse and a police blotter and reached the page through a reporter who was not present at any of it and could not get the man's wife on the telephone. The date of the arrest is missing because the arrest did not produce a document that this newspaper saw. The other man, if there was another man, is missing for the same reason. The nine days exist only as the arithmetic between two court dates. What we know about the night in Culver City is nothing, and what we know about the tenth of March is four inches of type.

That is what the archive is. It is not a description of a life. It is the residue of the moments at which the state took an interest, and it is shaped exactly like the interest that produced it.

Set against that, the two facts the Eagle recorded on its own account are worth more than they look. A hostess in Los Angeles switched on her radio in December and got the Cotton Club. And a man who had been given thirty days on the tenth of March was in Chicago on the twenty-second, unexpectedly.

Two front pages of the California Eagle — Volume 43, 13 March 1931, and Volume 43 No. 43, 27 March 1931 — are the citation of record for everything asserted here about the conviction, the sentence, the parole, the statute, the employer, the Dunbar Hotel and the vice squad. Both were read directly from the page images on Internet Archive microfilm reel la_caleagle_reel11, leaves 641 and 663, and all quotations were transcribed from those images rather than from optical character recognition, which is poor on this film. The reel is filmed out of order at this point — the issue of 20 March precedes that of 13 March — and both issues were identified from the datelines printed in their own nameplates, not from position on the reel.

The following are established from those pages: that Armstrong was sentenced on 10 March 1931 to thirty days in the county jail for violation of the state poison act by the judge of department 26; that he was convicted of possessing a quantity of cannabis; that he was paroled on 19 March; that he had been employed at Frank Sebastian's Cotton Club in Culver City; that his contract had expired; that his wife was staying at the Dunbar Hotel; that he arrived in Chicago on Sunday 22 March for a week at the Regal Theatre.

That "department 26" was a department of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County is a reasonable interpretation, from the Eagle's use of the same formula elsewhere on the same page for a Superior Court matter. I did not reach the case file, the docket number, or any court record.

That the two columns on the page of 13 March bear on each other is the argument of this article, not a claim about the newspaper's intention. The Eagle nowhere connects them.

That the arrest took place in November 1930, that Armstrong was taken with the drummer Vic Berton, that there was a suspended six-month sentence, or that he spent nine days in custody immediately after the arrest, are widely repeated and not verified here. Berton's name appears nowhere in a year of this newspaper. Berton's dates — Victor Cohen, 7 May 1896 to 26 December 1951 — are from a general reference work and are the weakest sourcing in this piece. The Los Angeles daily press for November 1930, the Los Angeles County court records, and Armstrong's own later writings on the subject would settle these questions and none of the three was reachable.

That no federal cannabis prohibition existed in the United States in 1930 or 1931 is established; the Marihuana Tax Act is attested in the periodical press from October 1937. I did not inspect the text of the California State Poison Act as it stood in 1931, and nothing is asserted here about its wording, its penalties, or its legislative history beyond what the two newspapers state.

The vocabulary finding is a negative result and holds only for this source: across the whole California Eagle reel for April 1930 to March 1931, marihuana occurs twice, both times in these two stories, and reefer, muggles and viper in the cannabis sense occur not at all. That is a fact about one newspaper, not about how anybody spoke.

Of the nineteen people jailed on East Seventeenth Street in December 1933, two are named in the only surviving account because the police named them to a wire reporter. The other seventeen cannot be recovered at all. That limit belongs to the archive, and repairing it would mean inventing them.

The point of separating these columns is that the retellings collapse an arrest nobody documented, a sentence a newspaper printed, and a parole it learned about eight days late into one continuous episode.

Translations here are the author’s own and are marked as such. Sources are reproduced rather than linked. Claims that failed are printed with the verdict on them.

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