Charles Stewart’s early exposure to hardship scarred him literally but did not even warrant a mention in his letter to B. Virdot. He wrote:
Dear Sir-
I read the article or item in the Canton Repository, yet I hesitate in even writing or asking aid from a person or organization of any kind.
Practically my entire working career has been a white-collared job, until April, 1930. Since that date I have been unable to obtain any kind of steady employment. I did manage to obtain a day now and then during the summer, which kept the wolf from the door, or at least wouldn’t allow him entrance. I applied to the Service Director for work, to be paid in groceries, but he stated he couldn’t assist me in any way.
My last position I held was with the Klein-Heffelman-Zollars Co. as collector, which was in April, 1930.
For myself, I can get along on nothing, but I have a wife and daughter to think of beside myself—and they certainly need shoes and clothing. We have been trying to get along on cast off clothes from other persons, but it’s rather a hard chore.
I am unable to obtain factory employment, on account of not being able to pass their physical examinations due to Tuberculosis which has partly destroyed one lung.
Should I be fortunate enough to be one of the 50 or 75 family men granted aid, I request that you supply your real name, so that this may be repaid with interest when the writer obtains remunerative employment.
I trust I have made myself clear in all details.
I AM RESPECTFULLY,
C. LEROY STEWART
335 CLEVELAND AVE. S.W.
CANTON, OHIO
Stewart’s eloquence was matched by his penmanship. Each letter was formed with a spare upright discipline, the writing of a proud man. But what he doesn’t say reveals most about himself and his times.
For that, one must speak with the only child of Charles and Gertrude Stewart, Ruth Brown. She was eleven at the time her father wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, but knew nothing of the letter or the five dollars that her father received days later. But she does know her father’s story. One of six children, he was born in 1896 and raised on a farm in tiny White Fox, Ohio. Sometime in 1917 or 1918 he married Gertrude Wilson, who was thirteen years his senior.
On April 29, 1918, at twenty-two, Charles Stewart volunteered for service in the army and was assigned to Company F, 112th U.S. Engineers. On July 10, 1918, he joined the American Expeditionary Force. He soon found himself in the midst of World War I’s deadly trench warfare. One evening, he and a dozen others were ordered to go over the top, crossing no-man’s-land in the face of heavy gun-fire. They seized two German machine-gun nests and returned to the trench. Stewart’s hand was bloodied from shrapnel. He refused to be taken to the hospital.
But the date he would never forget was September 26, 1918. That was the day the Allies advanced against the Germans in the Argonne Forest; for Americans, one of the bloodiest of all battles. Within six weeks, more than 26,000 members of the Allied Expeditionary Force were dead. Another 96,000 were wounded. In the early bombardment some 800 mustard gas and phosgene shells rained down on the Germans.
During the battle, Stewart himself was exposed to mustard gas. The powerful agent seared his lungs and incapacitated him. On October 18, he found himself in an army base hospital in Toul, France. When the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, Stewart was still unable to get out of bed. Thanksgiving came and went. His unit went home, but he could not. In January, he was moved to yet another hospital, where he remained until January 21, 1919. It was not until four months after he was first hospitalized that he was fit enough to come home. On February 10, 1919, Stewart was honorably discharged. He had survived the war, but he would never escape it.
Even when he returned to America, he carried with him the damage to his lungs. Immediately following the war, he moved to Canton and worked as a clerk in a factory and later as a bookkeeper. He lived a quiet life, lost himself in Zane Grey novels, tended his garden, and provided for his family, his wife, Gertrude, and daughter, Ruth. But he lost his job during the Depression and thereafter took whatever work he could find—which in his increasingly fragile condition was not much. In 1930, he worked as an enumerator for the U.S. Census. The Stewart family had an apartment they enjoyed rent-free in exchange for the couple cleaning and maintaining the building. But even with Gertrude working as a maid in other people’s homes, they came up short.
Their daughter, Ruth, was hardly aware that they were poor. Still, she could not afford a movie at the Palace Theater or an evening at Bender’s fashionable tavern. But eighty-seven-year-old Ruth Stewart Brown insists she never suffered or wanted for anything. She hopscotched and roller-skated her way through the worst days of the Depression, and in the evenings enjoyed games of euchre with Mom and Dad in the apartment. “You survived and that was it,” she says. Like so many during the Depression, Ruth did not have far to look to see others in worse shape, and the few who enjoyed a measure of luxury or ease were too distant to see and, if they were sensitive at all, too discreet to put their good fortune on display.
Over time, and long after the Depression lifted, the Stewarts managed to get their feet on the ground somewhat. Charles kept the books for a printing company and later clerked for the Canton Police Department. Ten years after writing to Mr. B. Virdot, the Stewarts purchased their own home at 814 High Avenue Southwest. But through it all, Charles Stewart had to cope with his exposure to mustard gas. He had a constant sinus condition and was forever blowing his nose. His wife, fearing germs, would boil his handkerchiefs. But the source of his distress was rooted in events that occurred decades earlier. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and until his final labored breath on July 20, 1955, at age fifty-nine, not a year passed when he was not in and out of veterans’ hospitals as doctors tried to attend to his lungs.
Decades later, a descendant of Charles Stewart, his great-grandson Evan Jet Brown, is a sheet-metal worker who has had his own taste of both economic hard times and war. These days, like many in Canton—and across the country—he is caught up in a constant scramble to find work to support his young family. In the early summer of 2008 he was helping to rebuild a local high school but facing an imminent layoff—and not his first. Not long after speaking with me, he was out of work for months—but at least there was unemployment. A father of two, he now commutes two hours to a job in Wooster, Ohio. When we last spoke he was standing on a twelve-foot ladder, keyhole saw in hand, cutting a hole in drywall to make way for a heating duct at Wooster Hospital, and knowing that a month from then he would be out of work yet again.
Half a dozen years earlier he was serving on the front in the war on terrorism. The former marine sergeant, in five years of service, was deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, and the Horn of Africa, and was even on the USS Nassau when, in December 2002, it boarded a North Korean ship carrying SCUD missiles to Yemen. Like his great-grandfather, he is reluctant to speak of his time in the service. “We don’t really talk about it,” he says. “We just did it, that’s all. I don’t tell anybody.” Charles Stewart would have saluted such silence.
FOR SOME THE decline from positions of stature to empty pockets and worn-out shoes was almost more than they could bear. It was not merely the loss of possessions, nor even the years of work and sacrifice with nothing to show for it. For some, it was also the humiliation that came with failure, made all the worse for those whose lofty expectations of themselves had been realized and then dashed by the Depression and circumstances over which they had no control. Those who had enjoyed prominence now had to cope with the loss of self-esteem, the severing of bonds with established social circles, and the lack of prospects that stretched before them. There are no figures in Canton for how many took their own lives during the Depression, but it is certain that some did commit suicide and others at least contemplated it. The B. Virdot gift did not restore fortunes or friendships, but it may have convinced some not to give in to despair. For some, it appears the offer by B. Virdot may have been enough to restore confidence and counter the daily barrage of bills and bad news.
J. L. White lived on Tuscarawas Avenue, just four doors away from what had been the Dick family mansion. He had owned two stores and lost them both in 1929, the same year Sam Stone nearly lost his. He had diligently saved his money only to discover, like so many others, that his savings were lost when his bank failed. “If I [had] only known at that time,” he lamented. Now he was unsure how he was going to feed his seven children. In his letter to Mr. B. Virdot, he wrote: “Your encouraging letter and generous offer in Repository of 18 December has again given me the courage to try again. Yesterday evening just before I read your letter was thinking of things that no person should. Four years ago I was a successful business man. . . . I am down flat. But since reading your letter will say that I am not out yet.”
Such dark thoughts were not his alone. But the outpouring of letters that greeted the B. Virdot offer—J. L. White’s among them—signaled that its power and appeal had less to do with the prospect of receiving a check than with the affirmation it offered that others cared and were concerned for them. Despite widespread unemployment and block after block of poverty, those suffering often felt profoundly isolated and abandoned by government and society at large. Washington had not yet demonstrated its commitment to address the suffering. The New Deal had not yet made itself felt upon the land, and the poor were desperate for some evidence that their plight mattered to anyone other than themselves. B. Virdot’s gift was modest, but the gesture behind it was not. To those like J. L. White, who momentarily lost their way, overcome by the gloom all around them, B. Virdot’s offer was seen as a small beacon, but enough to help them find their way back from the precipice.
Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: The Promise
There is nothing to prove that any of these men—George Monnot, Frank Dick, Bill Gray, Charles Stewart, or J. L.
White—were personal friends of the real B. Virdot, Sam Stone, though in a town of Canton’s size, it would be hard to imagine that their lives would not have intersected. Sam’s store, Stone’s Clothes, was located in the heart of the downtown on the busy corner of Tuscarawas Street and Market Avenue, a minute’s walk from the courthouse, the banks, Bender’s, the First Presbyterian Church, and the Repository’s newsroom. All those who benefited from this gift would have walked by his shop countless times and at least known of him. But whether he knew them on a personal level or not, it was not mere affection or commercial connections that moved him to do what he did. The Sam Stone I knew always identified with the struggles of workingmen and -women.
And Sam’s own financial troubles neither began with the Depression nor ended in 1933. Today many Americans think the Depression extended a few miserable years, starting with the crash in 1929 and ending in the midthirties. But as the men and women of Canton could attest—as Sam himself knew well—the Hard Times arced across the entire decade and, but for a brief respite in the middle, never loosened their grip. There was just enough time in the midthirties for the exhausted to drop their guard and catch their breath before the second blow landed.
In Sam’s life and so many others, prosperity was that dollar bill lying on the floor that a hidden hand might snatch away. Just when Canton seemed to emerge from the Depression, as factories began to rehire and the pile of bills began to shrink, the town and the nation were hit by a devastating second wave of Hard Times that again drove unemployment skyward. In 1937, Canton’s misery was exacerbated by a series of bitter and sometimes violent strikes that disabled some of its most prominent employers—Republic Steel, Timken, and Hercules Motor Corporation—tossing additional thousands out of work. The headlines of riots, National Guardsmen, rock throwers, dynamite, and injured strikers were not Canton’s alone.
Caught in this economic downdraft were many of the town’s leading merchants, Sam Stone among them. He was forced to move the family from their stately Ridgewood Tudor into a cramped bungalow in one of the town’s modest working-class neighborhoods. My mother, then in her last years of elementary school, remembers her life being upended—twice changing schools, saying good-bye to friends, parting with some of the comforts she’d grown accustomed to, and sensing the tensions that come with such reversals. Like George and Alice Monnot before them, the Stones discovered how quickly some society friends could turn their backs on them. Short of cash, they lived for a time on traveler’s checks left over from an earlier cruise to Central America and the Panama Canal.
By September 1938, Sam Stone found himself in bankruptcy court with suppliers clamoring for the $205,000 owed them. Under a court agreement he pledged to pay his creditors thirty-five cents on the dollar. But in the years thereafter, despite the agreement, he insisted on paying off each debt in full and did, as noted in a later Dun & Bradstreet report. (That same report suggested that Sam was getting younger and younger, as it pushed his date of birth forward five years, to 1893.)
Periodic reversals were as much a part of Sam’s life and outlook as the good times, and continually chastened him to remember that the line between the down-and-out and himself was not drawn in indelible ink. I heard him say as much many times, especially in those moments when he was about to enjoy his own good fortune. A cracker with caviar would trigger a memory of a tougher time, to which he would refer, but only obliquely.
That Christmas of 1933, he knew how lucky he was and that he could just as easily have been one of the many supplicants to B. Virdot, a role he invented, I believe, in part to pay homage to the fickle nature of fortune. He always saw himself in the sunken eyes and hard-luck faces of those around him, particularly those who had fallen so far and so fast. Even decades later, he would speak of them as one might speak of a lost sibling. But unlike others in a position to help who merely said, “There but for the Grace of God, go I,” or dashed off checks to local charities, Sam Stone was driven to do something more. I am convinced that he felt the need to actually connect with them, to reach out in a human way that would provide not only momentary financial relief but some measure of spiritual comfort as well. His was an elaborate scheme whose true benefits were intended to be a multiple many times over the actual dollars that went out across the city. In 1933, when so many suffered in silence and isolation, such a release was as close to therapy as most would experience.
