A Lynching You’ve Never Heard Of

by Andrew Hamilton

Although most Americans probably equate the term “lynch mob” with an image of a band of Southern whites hell-bent on punishing their black victims, readers of Swift Justice [1992] quickly learn that dark skin and southern geography are not prerequisites for the hangman’s noose. Power, prestige, and the press played critical roles. – Book review in 5 Western Legal History 256 (Summer/Fall 1992).

THERE WAS a notable double-hanging in 1933 that you’ve probably never heard of, the murder of two young White men, Thomas Harold Thurmond, 27, sometimes called “Harold,” and John M. “Jack” Holmes, 29, in San Jose, California, 40 miles southeast of San Francisco in what is today Silicon Valley. At its peak, 5,000 to 10,000 onlookers (crowd estimates vary enormously) witnessed the midnight hangings or their immediate aftermath, in a city park across the street from the county jail.

The crime was briefly national and international news before being quickly and efficiently consigned to decorous invisibility. Every year the Associated Press compiled a list of its Top 10 news stories. For 1933, the California lynchings ranked sixth. The accession to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany ranked ninth.

Germany’s National Socialist regime knew about the lynching, understood its racial implications, and publicized the event to its citizens.

The catalyst for the hangings was the kidnapping and murder of 22-year-old Brooke Hart, the heir to a local Jewish department store fortune.

No member of the lynch mob was ever publicly identified, captured, or punished. The power structure completely sided with and assisted the lynchers, not the low-status Whites they hung.

Key actors included the corrupt Governor of California, the Jewish community (presumably), wealthy businessmen, privileged university students, politicians, the legal system, the San Jose police and fire departments, the California National Guard, the FBI, and the media — newspapers, radio, and newsreels.

The White victims had been arrested and interrogated — possibly under duress. Ultimately, both men signed confessions. But they were never tried, convicted, or sentenced, much less able to appeal anything.

The transcripts of their interrogations were destroyed in the 1940s.

San Jose

Today San Jose, situated in the center of the Santa Clara Valley on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, is the largest city in Northern California in both population (1 million) and land area. It is the third most populous city in California after Los Angeles and San Diego, and the county seat of Santa Clara County, the most affluent county in California and one of the most affluent in the U.S.

San Jose’s official motto is “The Capital of Silicon Valley.” Cisco Systems, eBay, Adobe Inc., PayPal, Broadcom, Samsung, Acer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Zoom are some transnational Leftist corporations headquartered there.

Already by 2010 the city was heavily homosexual and non-White.

In 1933, San Jose’s population was 60,000.

The Hart Dynasty

San Jose and nearby San Francisco had hosted wealthy, powerful Jewish communities since frontier days. Jews thrived, made money, and were unhesitatingly accepted by the White populace. From the outset they ensconced themselves in the region’s economic, political, and social elite.

Starting in 1849, when it became the gateway to the California gold fields, the San Francisco-San Jose area soon had many quickly-wealthy, tightly-intermarried Jewish families who established themselves on the West Coast early on.

In San Francisco these included the Strausses, Haases, and Sterns (all affiliated with the Levi Strauss clothing company), the Steinharts (importing, mining corporations), and others.

The Jews didn’t pan for gold. They set up businesses catering to the burgeoning hordes of woefully undercapitalized individuals from the East hoping against hope to strike it rich.

As early as 1860 Jews, unapologetic practitioners of segregation for themselves even in death, established a 10-acre Hebrew cemetery in San Jose.

Leopold Hart, the founder of a local retail dynasty, joined his half-brother Lazard Lion in San Jose during the Gold Rush of 1849. The brothers immigrated from Alsace-Lorraine, the frontier region between France and Germany that historically spawned many Jews.

Lazard Lion owned a number of businesses in San Jose, including a retail store, a carpet shop, and a glove factory, and was director of the Commercial and Savings Bank, later acquired by San Francisco-based Bank of America as its first branch.

His half-brother Leopold Hart, who married a French Jewess, founded the retail store that his son, Alexander Hart, Sr. (Brooke’s father), later developed into downtown San Jose’s landmark department store.

Temple Emanu-El of San Jose, today Santa Clara Valley’s oldest Jewish congregation, was founded by Leopold Hart (the kidnap victim’s grandfather) and Lazard Lion.

Some White San Joseans in 1861 contributed funds to help build the synagogue, just as Benjamin Franklin and other citizens had done in Philadelphia years before. The affluent Philadelphians were unashamedly dunned for money by the already rich parasites in their midst, yet still gave. Presumably the same thing happened in San Jose (and elsewhere), since Jews and Whites display stereotyped interactions over long periods of time.

Note that this odd “taking” relationship exists even at the individual and local level, and occurs immediately upon contact — but also that upper-class Whites routinely do give Jews money and countless other favors in this fashion when asked. The same behavior occurs on the macroscale, for example when Whites go to war and subjugate Germany for Jews or hand over billions of dollars to Israel.

Today Temple Emanu-El boasts on its Web site that it “enriches the spiritual and social lives of our members and strengthens the bonds within our community and with the state of Israel, ensuring [our] continuity as a people and a religion.”

Are they saying “It’s OK to be Jewish”? Fortunately, the bigots will never be designated America’s foremost domestic terrorists and treated accordingly.

As the early Jewish presence in California demonstrates, Whites have never been free of Jews. History should be retrospectively reexamined with this (and other overlooked factors) in mind, bringing to light the true forces that shaped events, while deemphasizing misleading conventional narratives that sweep crucial information under the rug.

Alexander Hart married a White Maryland-born girl 23 years his junior.

This continuous sexual harvesting of native girls and women by Jewish men on a large scale in all European lands has badly polluted the White gene pool.

The couple had four children, two boys and two girls, racial half-Jews, and adopted a third girl.

Nettie, the wife, was 19 when their first child, Brooke, was born. “Brooke” was Nettie’s maiden name.

The Harts were perceived as Jewish by San Jose’s Jewish-Gentile elite, but race/ethnicity/religion played no role in the kidnapping and murder of young Hart — though it probably had everything to do with the violence that ensued.

When an Establishment account of the crime was finally published after decades of complete silence in the 1990s, the author said the kidnappers could not have selected a victim who “would more surely guarantee the violent retribution that followed” — an extraordinary statement.

Is it true? If so, why? Were the Harts proto-gangsters of some sort? Nothing I’ve seen suggests it.

The fact that Brooke Hart was Jewish is somehow key, though the author would never admit it.

Even so, why did he make such a claim? The Harts were not famous. Other kidnappers of wealthy people or their children were not lynched with fervent government-media participation the way these men were.

If events didn’t match the author’s statement so precisely it would be easy to dismiss as meaningless. Instead, it provokes mistrust.

The extreme zeal of all officialdom, plus the press, to commit and then cover up and not prosecute the crime is difficult to grasp. Their weird eagerness closely resembles the lawless, unpunished violence that targets White Americans and our cultural heritage today.

The kidnappers wanted a big ransom. Unless some Jewish criminals who have never been spoken of were also involved (unknown accomplices have been hinted at), the usual case must be assumed: the kidnappers could not distinguish Jews from members of their own highly variable race.

Brooke’s father Alexander and some of his children attended services at the San Jose synagogue founded by his father and uncle. In 1933 it still bore its original name, Congregation Bikkur Cholim.

The two Hart boys attended San Jose’s exclusive, Jesuit-run Bellarmine prep school, and Brooke had just graduated from private Santa Clara University, also Jesuit-run. Some of the university’s students participated in the lynchings.

The Kidnap-Murder of Brooke Hart

Kidnapping reached epidemic proportions in 1920s and 1930s America. The kidnap-murder of infant Charles Lindbergh, Jr. in 1932 was the most famous case, but there were countless others as well, including abductions of members of the German American Busch (Adolphus Busch Orthwein, age 13, St. Louis, Mo., 1930) and Hamm (William A. Hamm, Jr., age 39, St. Paul, Minn., 1933) brewing families. Many victims, including Orthwein and Hamm, were released unharmed after ransom was paid, but others were murdered.

After work on Thursday, November 9, 1933, Brooke Hart picked up his expensive automobile at a parking lot near the store to chauffeur his father to a Chamber of Commerce directors’ meeting. But the young man never showed up. A few hours later Alexander Hart reported his son missing.

According to their subsequent confessions, the alleged killers Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes murdered Hart 1 to 1 1/2 hours after seizing him. They tied him up, bashed his head with concrete blocks, weighted the body, and tossed it into San Francisco Bay from the San Mateo Bridge.

The two confessions, as well as newspaper and radio accounts of the slaying, contain numerous inconsistencies.

Ransom Demands, Arrests, and the Recovery of the Body

That evening, ransom notes and telephone calls to the Hart residence began. $40,000 was demanded for the victim’s safe return.

Authorities tapped the Harts’ phone the night Brooke disappeared. Incoming calls were traced to locations in San Francisco, but the callers were gone by the time police arrived.

Letters, telegrams, and phone calls of a similar nature continued sporadically over the next 7 days; the ransom demand was lowered to $20,000.

Finally, a call made by Thomas Thurmond was traced to a phone booth located near the San Jose police station, where the caller was arrested by Santa Clara County Sheriff William Emig — along with his men the only hero in this story — and unethical San Jose police chief J.N. Black on November 16, 1933 at around 7:30 PM, a week after the kidnapping.

After six hours of intense interrogation, at 3 AM on November 17, filling station attendant Thomas Harold Thurmond, 27, signed a written confession. He implicated John M. Holmes, 29, a Union Oil Co. salesman, married, and the father of two little children, as his collaborator.

Holmes was rousted from bed a half hour later and subjected to a similar grilling. By 1 PM on November 17 he also signed a written confession.

A massive search for the victim began on November 9, the day he disappeared, and intensified after the men’s confessions on November 17. A number of clues were found, but Hart’s body was not discovered until November 26 by two duck hunters — the day after the government had officially called off its search.

The badly decomposed corpse was hard to identify. Even Brooke Hart’s best friend couldn’t positively ID him. A subsequent FBI account said it was by means of the teeth that the body was designated as Hart’s. His dental chart (chart, not x-rays in those days) “proved the most conclusive means of identifying him.”

Later, after the lynchings, a rabbi conducted his funeral, and a Jesuit priest delivered the eulogy.

FDR and J. Edgar Hoover’s Department of Investigation (DOI)

The newly-installed Roosevelt Administration in Washington DC immediately became involved.

The US Navy and Marine Corps participated in the search for Brooke Hart along with State and local agencies.

J. Edgar Hoover’s federal police force, then called the Division of Investigation (DOI) (two years later renamed the FBI), was mobilized. This was just prior to its massive expansion into a full-blown secret police outfit by Franklin Roosevelt, with a major assist from the mass media and Hollywood PR machines.

Roosevelt had assumed office a few months before on a conservative, old-style Democratic platform, so the constitutional division of powers — the principle that sovereignty is divided between the federal and state governments — had not yet been completely eviscerated.

Two years earlier the kidnapping would have been exclusively a state crime. But the Federal Kidnapping Act (called “the Lindbergh law”) enacted the year before, also made it a federal crime if victims were transported across state borders or the US Mail was used to conduct ransom negotiations.

The Hart kidnapping did not qualify on the first ground, so the federal government justified its involvement because some ransom notes were delivered by mail. (The snatchers also used telegrams and telephone calls, which did not trigger federal jurisdiction.)

The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (October 1940, PDF p. 22) states that an investigation conducted by its Special Agents led to the arrest of Thomas H. Thurmond as he was making a ransom call to the Hart mansion from a pay phone. Thurmond’s purported “complete confession” then implicated his alleged accomplice John M. Holmes, who was apprehended in San Jose a few hours later. (Key dates in this 1940 summary are off by one day.)

Both men were arrested by local officers, not Feds, and held in State, not federal, custody.

A federal grand jury indicted the prisoners on seven counts under the Lindbergh law, including extortion, using the mails for extortion, and conspiracy. The seven charges carried a maximum sentence of 122 years for each man.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff lodged separate charges against the pair for violations of California’s new kidnapping law (a state crime). This statute provided for death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The local prosecutor was preparing grand jury indictments on the state charges.

Thus, the constitutional safeguard against double jeopardy was selectively violated, as it so often is. This is the same piling on, overkill, and biased bullying universal among corrupt officials today. (The US Supreme Court has sanctioned such conduct.)

Officials should be required to file either Federal or State charges, not both, and then be bound by the outcome rather than selectively doubling up whenever they want to chase headlines or discriminate against unpopular or reviled defendants.

The Lynch Committee

The Madera [California] Tribune reported that a secret committee of “20 influential friends of the socially prominent Hart family” had been formed in San Jose to insist on immediate and drastic punishment.

In reality, it was a high-level lynch committee. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Royce Brier had contacts within the group and reported its doings, in a veiled way, in his newspaper.

Brier said that 60-70 citizens signed a secret agreement to take “adequate action” against the “slayers.”

The “leaders of the movement,” who were “not the town ruffians,” approached men they felt could be implicitly trusted and “sounded them out.” If deemed acceptable, the candidate was given a password and instructions to see a second person at a specified time and place. If he passed that examination he was sent to a third man, who presented a written agreement for him to sign.

The vaguely-phrased written pledge to “see justice done” or “adequate action” taken, everyone knew meant lynching. It was this committee that directed everything that happened from behind the scenes.

Even in 1933 such behavior by a simultaneously tiny but “large” (in conspiratorial terms) group, including signatures on written agreements, left a trail a mile wide for investigators to follow. The point is, no investigator wanted to follow it — or did.

The scheme could only work because its leaders were above the law — and knew it. They enjoyed privileges and immunities unavailable to the vast majority of citizens in America then or now. For whatever reason, they knew they would not be prosecuted like common criminals, much less selectively stamped into the ground like James Fields or the Capitol protestors.

As events proved, they bore no more risk than the shadowy cliques who direct coordinated mobs to burn down American cities and violently attack, murder, and maim White voters today. Not only are such cliques immune from prosecution, their mobs are as well.

Even a hack journalist who wrote the only account of the affair 60 years afterward — the story had been totally memory-holed after it happened — a goy friend and guardian of the Hart family who refused to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but only partial truth combined with dissimulation to protect the evildoers, didn’t shrink from calling the Committee a “cabal.” He added:

Here was a grand conspiracy of homicide in the heart of [Santa Clara County Sheriff William] Emig’s territory, common knowledge to his peers and even to an out-of-town reporter. Yet the knowledge was being withheld from the sheriff by conspirators who were his friends, supporters, and usually his allies. (Harry Farrell, Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, 190-191.)

“All ‘inside’ San Jose [= insiders] knew about it, and knew the names of most of the pledge signers,” the Chronicle’s Brier reported. Everyone who counted knew there were plans afoot to lynch the prisoners before court proceedings could take place.

The Committee members bided their time, waiting for Hart’s body to be found — a formality to forestall the remote possibility of a System backlash, since value-laden “anti-lynching” terminology had by that time taken on a life of its own as a sanctified component of anti-White ideology.

Many rank-and-file Leftists, confused by the deceitful terminology, had been conditioned to think that lynching was intrinsically evil, whereas all that was really opposed was interracial lynchings by Whites. Left-wing elites could care less about justice. They used universalist language only because it sounded good and gulled the credulous.

The recovery of Hart’s body would be the “the action signal” to trigger the already meticulously planned hangings.

San Jose’s Corrupt City Administration

Taxi fleet owner, liquor dealer, and slot machine operator Charlie Bigley was the shadowy political boss of San Jose, a town that harbored “pimps, bookies, and gamblers.”

He controlled the City Council and City Manager, and through them the city itself. It has been speculated that he played a behind-the-scenes role in restraining multiple sources of local authority from doing their duty.

Crime, violence, corruption, and greed serve as primary vectors for Jewish infection of Gentile societies. They are one of that group’s principal means of obtaining and maintaining power over host populations. Criminal activity is socially parasitic at all times, but becomes especially malignant when it spreads into and contaminates large segments of the upperworld.

The 7-member City Council passed a resolution stating it hoped “legal technicalities” (the law) would not impede punishment of the arrestees.

Police chief J.N. Black, the fire chief, mayor, city manager, and council all refused to assist the embattled sheriff and his deputies while the jail was under siege, or to interfere in any way to stop the murders. Black had earlier lent the sheriff twelve San Jose police officers to help guard the jail, but as soon as Hart’s body was found (the Committee’s “action signal”) he summarily withdrew all but two of them.

The entire San Jose city administration was corrupt. Its passivity (if not active involvement) was a prerequisite for the crime to occur.

Though operating in metropolitan northern California, Bigley might have stepped from the pages of Raymond Chandler’s Black Mask stories set 300 miles to the south in Los Angeles.

San Jose was so corrupt that even its reformers were crooks. When a “reform” group finally ousted Bigley from power in 1944, the city immediately fell into the clutches of two Sicilian crime groups, the Cerrito family and New York City’s Bonanno family, who fastened themselves onto the rapidly growing town like leeches for decades thereafter.

California Governor James Rolph (R.)

The reason the lynchings caused minor embarrassment and feigned disapproval by a handful of local and national System apparatchiks was Republican Governor James Rolph’s ostentatious blustering to the press.

Lynching, due to the self-righteous dissembling of its “opponents” for so many years, had acquired a bad odor by 1933.

Rolph had served 19 years as mayor of nearby San Francisco, to this day the longest-serving mayor of that city, and so had many local contacts.

When Sheriff Emig and John Holmes’ defense attorney Vincent Hallinan separately contacted Rolph requesting state troops to protect the prisoners, he refused. Preening before reporters in Los Angeles three days before the killings, Rolph brazenly announced, “I am not going to call the [state National Guard] to protect the kidnappers who willfully killed a fine boy like that.”

He concluded, illogically, “Let the law take its course.” By which the charlatan meant, “Do not let the law take its course.”

Due to local dereliction of duty by everybody save Sheriff Emig, this was tantamount to a death sentence without trial or appeal for both men.

Rolph was as good as his word. He canceled his trip to the Western Governors’ Conference in Boise, Idaho solely to prevent Lt. Governor Frank Merriam from calling out the Guard, which the latter intended to do as soon as the governor left the state.

Rolph also refused a second request for assistance from Emig a mere half hour before the pro-Hart forces stormed the jail. Via an intermediary Rolph maintained a direct line to the sheriff’s office, and doubtless another to the Committee, as he gleefully helped the latter cut the sheriff’s throat.

The day after the murders, Rolph — long an ostentatious opponent of lawful capital punishment! — praised the killers: “That was a fine lesson to the whole nation and there will be less kidnapping in the country now. If anyone is arrested for the good job I will pardon him.”

His braggadocio, amplified by the national and international press, forced a few high-level hypocrites to issue toothless denunciations of the lynchings afterward.

Rolph died from a heart attack a few months later.

The Fake News

With one voice the mass media — radio, newspapers, and newsreel reports (disseminated via motion picture theaters) — played a key role in the lynchings and their aftermath.

The press recklessly attacked Holmes and Thurmond as soon as they were apprehended, heaped scorn upon them, and stirred up hatred, just as the controlled media and “social media” do today against Whites and patriots.

The narrow spectrum of opinion ranged from the San Francisco Chronicle’s “moderate” “There is only one thing to do with the murderers of Brooke Hart. That is to hang them, legally but promptly . . . the gallows should end two lives which have forfeited all rights except that to be executed by the law” to the San Jose News’s advocacy the day after the arrests of “mob violence” against the “human devils” in a page one editorial signed by the paper’s owner-publisher G. Logan Payne. Two days later he ran the same front page editorial a second time.

On Sunday morning, November 26, 1933, the man the San Francisco Chronicle had posted near the San Mateo Bridge to keep an eye on the search for Hart’s body alerted the city desk that the corpse had been found. The Chronicle phoned five of its staffers in San Jose, who in turn informed the lynch Committee.

This shows how closely intertwined the controlled media and privileged classes are.

Sheriff Emig in the San Jose jail received his notification at 10 AM.

The Hart family also knew, because the husband of their adopted daughter was told to return immediately to San Jose — a 3-hour drive from where he was — so that he could be present for “the necktie party” that night (which he was).

In order to keep a low profile, Alexander Hart sternly warned his department store employees that anyone participating in an illegal demonstration would be fired.

In a damning if barely mentioned revelation, even the federal Division of Investigation (FBI, and therefore the Roosevelt Administration) knew what was going to happen.

Committee members immediately set their plan in motion.

The San Francisco Chronicle and G. Gordon Payne’s San Jose Mercury both knew when the lynchings would take place. Although it was Sunday, employees were ordered to report for work to produce lynching Extras.

A Los Angeles radio station 300 miles to the south broadcast the lynchings live — no small feat in the early days of still-expanding commercial radio.

Crowds began to gather outside the jail around 11 AM that morning, shortly after local newspapers distributed extras reporting that Brooke Hart’s body had been found.

All day Sunday and into the evening radio stations, including KQW in San Jose, broadcast inflammatory bulletins announcing that a lynching would occur that night in St. James Park.

Radio and newspapers thus played a huge role in amassing the crowd of onlookers on short notice, many from miles away, who naïvely served as cover for the Committee’s special squad of on-scene killers, thereby enabling the media to portray the crime as an outbreak of mass hysteria rather than the carefully planned operation it really was.

Before midnight the jail would be a shambles, with Thurmond and Holmes hanging from trees in the park across the street.

In terms of staging, what happened is fundamentally no different from Charlottesville, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and countless other riots and mass crimes of violence today, except the hidden government and Soros-type funding and organization is now much more extensive and sophisticated, and conducted through innumerable front groups and individuals carefully concealed from public view by the media and government.

The media’s crucial role, in conjunction with corrupt prosecutors, judges, law enforcement personnel, businessmen, and politicians, remains basically the same.

A Small Band of On-Scene Lynchers

Already by November 23 a crowd was loitering near the county jail. Sheriff Emig strengthened his arsenal due to rumors that a vigilante committee planned to seize and kill the men.

Three days later, on November 26, the day of the lynching, aided by the evening darkness and large number of spectators drawn to the scene by newspaper and radio reports, a core group of some 50 men executed the plan from start to finish.

Most members of the “mob” thus unwittingly served as props and media scapegoats, depicted as joyously dancing and singing beneath the swaying bodies, performing serpentine dances, and so forth. It would be crucial to know to what extent these reports were exaggerated or outright fabrications (think Charlottesville and January 6) as well as how many Jews were present to watch and celebrate.

The concerted attack on the jail began at exactly 9:00 PM, when some 2,500 spectators were present. This number swelled to 5,000-10,000 over the next several hours as people were drawn to the scene by radio bulletins.

The 50 key men appear to have been carefully-selected young toughs.

One was truck driver Rocky Santoro, “who had been tuned in on the preparations,” and knew ahead of time the lynchings were going to happen. “They had the word out — a bunch of businessmen downtown, the politicians,” he said.

Santoro had a strong affinity for violence of every kind — killings, fires, automobile accidents. He was later hired by the San Jose Mercury News as a cameraman to photograph such events. His psychological profile reminds me of Jewish New York City crime photographer Weegee, partly the model for Jude Law’s memorable character in the gangster film Road to Perdition (2002).

It was this small band that, from 9:00-11:00 PM, consistently withstood the tear gas explosions, broke down the locked and barred doors of the jail with a huge iron battering ram, physically attacked officials who resisted them, violently assaulted peace officers trying to protect the prisoners, and seized the keys to the two men’s cells.

Sheriff Emig had given a set of keys to two different men, calculating that the mob would search him.

But the assailants knew exactly which of the deputies had the keys to Holmes and Thurmond’s cells, attacked them, and seized both sets. When Howard Buffington refused to surrender his keys, he was bludgeoned with a blunt instrument.

The assailants knew where the two men’s cells were, and could identify the alleged kidnappers by sight so as not to kill the wrong men.

None of this detailed intelligence came from Sheriff William Emig, who with a handful of his men appear to have been the only honest and courageous government officials in the entire city and state apart from Lieutenant Governor Frank Merriam, originally an Iowan: “His nine deputies and the eight state traffic patrolmen whom they had as their only allies fought with their hands and with gas bombs, and took fearful beatings,” one newsman reported.

All other law enforcement officials — local, state, and federal — purposely withheld aid from Emig, leaving the sheriff and his handful of men to battle the Committee’s thugs alone.

J.N. Black’s police force milled about doing nothing, just like contemporary cops do in Kenosha, Wisconsin and everyplace else Antifa/BLM riots are staged or American monuments are torn down.

The sheriff had earlier made the decision not to use firearms. He relied instead on improvised barricades, beefed up fortifications, and particularly tear gas bombs. The gas canisters held the ringleaders at bay for three hours.

Emig had forbidden his men to use even clubs, so when the gas ran out and the jailhouse was stormed, they were forced to fight with their hands. Unable to retaliate effectively, several suffered tremendous beatings. They were knocked down, trampled, and choked by the attackers.

Emig and a deputy were hospitalized in serious condition after the attack — the sheriff delirious from a possible skull fracture, the deputy with a brain concussion caused by a blow to his head — both serious felonies.

The ringleaders feared no legal reprisals, nor did they suffer any. As with BLM and Antifa “mobs” today, high-level orchestration, funding, approval, and corrupt prosecutors, judges, and “journalists” made crime easy for the right people to commit.

As for what transpired inside the jail, Jewish journalist Harry A. Lerner’s account in the Oakland Tribune sounds more reliable than Royce Brier’s Pulitzer Prize-winning version in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lerner extensively quoted a sheriff’s deputy who witnessed it all, whereas Brier, who had ties to the lynch Committee, dished up a melodramatically absurd scene in which several lynchers knelt and prayed for Thurmond’s immortal soul before dragging him out and killing him.

Brier also claimed, “They all knew one another — remember that — the mob and the officers. This was not a masked job.”

But the deputy quoted by Lerner says one of his attackers spoke to him from behind a mask, and men who later threatened photographers in the park also wore masks.

According to Lerner, again quoting the sheriff’s deputy, prisoner Thomas Thurmond “put up a fight. He fought like a demon for a minute but he was soon a mass of blood. They tied the rope around his neck and dragged him down to the second floor.” No prayers were mentioned in that account.

As for Holmes,

Fists crashed against his face. He went down on the floor, still crying for mercy. Then he was kicked and then they spat on him. His head was knocked against the floor. Dragging him on the end of the rope [around his neck], they pulled him head first down the stairs.

Contemptuous spitting on people is a common Jewish trait.

Innumerable felonies were committed by the Hart-government forces: terroristic threats, use of deadly force, assaulting and physically destroying the jail, inflicting serious bodily injury on multiple law enforcement officers, and two murders (deliberate, organized, willful, and premeditated). The list goes on.

All of which was shrugged off and ignored by everyone then and since.

Carolyn Anspacher

Carolyn Anspacher, a newly-hired Jewish writer for the San Francisco Chronicle — though, of course, nothing identified her as Jewish — crafted a cunning women’s angle for thousands of female readers in her front page story, “Hell Rips Loose — Women Laugh — Women Sob and Cheer On Frenzied Mob.”

Hundreds of that mob were women. Old women, young women, and girls in their teens. Earlier many of them had whispered words of encouragement to their men — egged them on.

“I hope they hang them. This is one case when I believe in lynch law.”

All evening long this admonition was heard from many feminine lips.

During the day they had recalled Brooke Hart’s fate, stirring their men folk on to taking the law into their own hands. . . .

These gentle, timid housewives and stenographers and ranchers’ wives, these debutantes and sub-debs and school girls dropped all refinement.

Impelled by the Biblical edict of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” they cast their robes of femininity from them and roared their approval of the fate meted out.

The purpose of fake news is to mold public beliefs, not report facts.

The great-granddaughter of one of Oakland, California’s early Jewish settlers, Anspacher remained on the Chronicle staff until her death in 1979, covering the murder trial of Negro Communist Angela Davis and the kidnapping and trial of White newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by Black terrorists.

“String ’em up!”

Hauled from jail, Holmes and Thurmond were kicked, tortured, and beaten into semi-consciousness as they were dragged across the street to their doom: “Both Victims Beaten, Kicked Viciously by Their Executioners,” Harold Fitzgerald wrote in the Oakland Tribune.

As they were “pulled and jerked through the densely packed crowd,” male and female onlookers vied for the chance to “strike, kick, or spit upon the two.” (Emphasis added.)

A man who tried to save the victims — more than one did, private citizens, not law enforcement officers, each acting individually, taking on the teeming multitude singlehandedly — was “picked up bodily and hurled almost over the heads of the crowd.”

Thomas Thurmond was hung first, from the low-hanging branch of a mulberry tree. Three or four times he was lowered and then jerked up again, his head striking the limb as the noose around his neck strangled him.

His trousers and underwear “were torn from him while he hung twitching in his death agony.”

Thurmond thrashed about, swinging to and fro “in a last spasm of life. For perhaps three minutes he swayed there, his face blackening slowly, his tongue extended,” Brier wrote.

The executioners taunted the dying man: “Brookie Hart — Brookie Hart.”

A few minutes later John Holmes was strung up from a nearby elm. He, too, was jerked up and down by the neck as Thurmond had been. Before he died the Hart forces stripped him completely naked in front of the crowd.

The newspapers did not lavish as much loving detail on his death as they did on Thurmond’s.

The entire affair from start to finish lasted 26 minutes. Both men were dead by 11:26 PM.

The bodies hung in the park for less than half an hour.

Shortly before midnight squads of officers from San Francisco were finally ordered to appear, causing the crowd to disperse. These were the troops Sheriff Emig had requested from Governor Rolph a half hour before his prisoners were seized.

As intended, the state reinforcements arrived too late to do anything.

Scores of reporters, photographers, newsreel cameramen, officials, and crowd members had witnessed what happened and knew who the guilty were.

As with today’s ubiquitous smartphone and surveillance cameras, everything at this particular crime was thoroughly observed, documented, and known to key elements of the press and officialdom. The power structure then — as today with Antifa, BLM, and other PC gangs — knew who the perpetrators were. But photographs of the violence were deliberately smudged to conceal individual identities.

Also like today, physical threats and criminal violence were perpetrated against independent photographers. An inner core of criminals moved through the crowd, faces masked with handkerchiefs, identifying men with cameras and systematically smashing them and exposing the film. Hart partisans even had System vigilantes hold guns to the heads of recalcitrant photographers, threatening to kill them if they did not comply.

The organizers and their politicians, cops, prosecutors, judges, and “journalists” must have savored memories of the affair for years afterward, just as their counterparts do today with Antifa riots, Charlottesville, and January 6.

There is little difference between such events and movies, plays, elections, football games, and other public spectacles these people excel at producing. “Tardy Bemoan Missing Show,” the Associated Press announced over its wires the next morning.

The day after the lynchings local newspapers sold 1.2 million copies — twice their normal daily run.

Rabbi Joseph Karesh Present

As previously noted, the Hart family synagogue was Congregation Bikkur Cholim of San Jose. At least one its rabbis was present for the lynching — lawyer-rabbi Joseph Karesh, a Southern Jew who later became a federal and state judge in San Francisco.

In 1978 Karesh presided over one of Huey Newton’s trials.

A co-founder of the Black Panthers who has been lionized by the Establishment from that day to this, Newton murdered a White police officer and wounded another in a 1967 shootout. Karesh knew about that.

Under Karesh, Newton was acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon for pistol-whipping his tailor, but sentenced to two years in prison (later reduced to probation), for being a felon in possession of two handguns.

Karesh’s 1996 obituary states, “During the Newton trial, Karesh kept his demeanor in check, repeatedly asking the defendant, ‘Are you finished?’ when Newton would mouth off in court. Karesh later explained that it would have ‘served no purpose for me to lose my temper.’”

According to two authors, Newton told a friend that he’d ordered the 1974 murder of Betty Van Patter, a White bookkeeper for the Panthers, four years before the Karesh proceedings occurred.

Van Patter had been introduced to the group by then Left-wing, now neoconservative David Horowitz, the son of Stalinist Jews, for whom she’d worked at the extremist Ramparts magazine, “the leading white [sic] propaganda agency for the Black Panther party.” Described another way by Horowitz’s colleague Peter Collier: “The Panthers were a wholly owned subsidiary of Ramparts.” (Mother Jones, May 1987, pp. 31, 32.)

Tortured and raped before she was killed, Van Patter had objected to the Panthers’ shady accounting practices. Five weeks after her disappearance her corpse was fished from San Francisco Bay, the skull crushed from a heavy blow. The Panthers were universally understood to have killed her, but Left-wing prosecutors never charged anybody. They claimed they lacked sufficient evidence.

Newton basically remained free his entire life until his murder at age 47 by another Black criminal.

In 1975 Karesh oversaw the trial in San Francisco of four of the Zebra killers, members of a Black-on-White murder cult. The four Negroes were not executed, but sentenced to life in prison. They were not unceremoniously lynched. But then, they hadn’t killed Jews.

Systematic racial murders and brutal crimes against Whites have occurred on a massive scale for more than half a century, aided and abetted by the System of which Karesh and his people are leaders.

Karesh was the United States Commissioner before whom Francis Parker Yockey appeared following his San Francisco arrest by the FBI in 1960. Karesh put Yockey in jail, where he committed suicide at age 42. According to Willis Carto’s Right magazine (August 1960), Yockey’s “bail was set at $50,000 by Judge Joseph Karesh, an ordained rabbi. (At one time Karesh said he wished it was $150,000.) The 8th Amendment bars excessive bail. Normal bail for passport fraud — the only charge against him — is $5,000.”

In sum, Joseph Karesh, a rabbi at the Harts’ synagogue, attended the Holmes-Thurmond lynchings. Whether or not he played some non-passive role in the crime on behalf of the Jewish community, the lynch Committee, or the Hart family, is unknown.

Brooke Hart’s Kid Brother Also Present

Another witness who saw the naked bodies of the accused dangling in the park that night was 13-year-old Alexander Hart, Jr., Brooke’s younger brother. He later took over the family business.

As noted, his adopted sister’s husband had also been notified ahead of time, and was present.

Alexander Hart discreetly told a fellow Jew decades later that the killings were “absolutely” a statement of support by “the community” for his family. Holmes and Thurmond “got what they deserved.”

Given the alleged out-of-control “mob” atmosphere and recent murder of one son, it seems improbable that the 13-year-old was permitted to be in the park alone. Perhaps he enjoyed a box seat in an upper window of the Lion’s Club building across the street with his brother-in-law and other VIPs.

Were other members of the Hart family or the “Jewish community” ceremonially present? We do not know.

Aftermath

Journalist Harry Farrell, the Establishment chronicler whose body now lies a-mouldering in the grave, was not troubled by the lynchings.

To be sure, he would have been livid if any Black, guilty of a crime no matter how heinous, had been lynched by Whites, and apoplectic if a guilty Jew had been lynched after indictment, arraignment, trial by jury, conviction, and innumerable appeals as the wealth, power, and media of the nation’s elite employed every dirty trick in the book to spring him.

Such crimes would have outraged him.

But the Hart family and the community to which they belonged were precious; John Holmes and Thomas Thurmond were Whites whose lives did not matter.

The two men were guilty of Brooke Hart’s murder by a “preponderance of the evidence,” Farrell proclaimed. He meant limited and highly selective preliminary investigative and reportorial evidence, for there was no trial.

“Preponderance of the evidence” is a technical term whose meaning Farrell well understood.

He did not claim that Holmes and Thurmond were guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard necessary to impose a criminal fine or imprisonment, much less execute somebody.

Nor did he say that guilt had been shown even by “clear and convincing” evidence.

No, after examining the known facts, he carefully said a “preponderance of the evidence.” That is not a high standard.

There were lingering doubts, he admitted, about the validity of the confessions; the timing did not fit, and alibi evidence placed Holmes elsewhere at a key moment.

There was “pretty clear evidence there were some other accomplices who were never caught,” Farrell said, quickly correcting himself: “There were some things that hinted that.”

The possibility of accomplices was alluded to in the formal charges brought by the federal government: “In the indictments handed down by the federal group the possibility of accomplices was mentioned. The conspiracy indictment named ‘others whose names are not known to the jury.’” (“Slayers Return to San Jose Jail,” Madera [Calif.] Tribune, Nov. 23, 1933, p. 1.)

Even Alexander Hart believed Holmes and Thurmond had been assisted in the kidnapping and murder of his son by one or two other men. Ransom notes continued arriving at his home after they had been jailed. (Oakland Tribune, November 27, 1933, p. 5.)

Neither man had a criminal record.

John Holmes’ father, a respected local tailor, paid prominent San Francisco attorney Vincent Hallinan a retainer of $10,000 in cash to defend his son, which must have been his entire life savings. (America would have been better off without Hallinan, his father, and his son. All three were walking arguments against unrestricted immigration.)

The day after the lynching Hallinan announced a civil suit on behalf of Holmes’ parents seeking heavy damages against California Governor James Rolph, San Jose and Santa Clara County officials, and the city and county of San Francisco. But nothing came of it.

The only evidence against Holmes was his alleged confession.

A statement Hallinan issued to the press said there “is a grave question of doubt whether or not an innocent man was hanged when Holmes was lynched.”

Every time Holmes had an opportunity to speak unhampered, he asserted the confession was obtained from him by third degree police tactics. He claimed the officers threatened to turn him over to the mob for lynching if he did not confess. His innocence or guilt is beside the point. The claim for damages rests on the failure of officers to protect him from violence and guarantee him a fair trial. (Madera [California] Tribune, Nov. 28, 1933.)

Holmes’ wife Evelyn and two small children, David, 5, and Joyce, 4, filed a separate lawsuit seeking $50,000 in compensatory and $1 million in punitive damages against California Governor James Rolph, the San Jose News, San Jose radio station KQW, and 12 identified and 100 unidentified persons for felonious acts, including murder and conspiracy. The suit was dropped after Rolph died from a heart attack.

Later in 1934 Mrs. Holmes filed a second suit for $20,000 against Sheriff Emig and some of his deputies on behalf of her children for failure to properly protect her husband while he was in custody. This, too, went nowhere.

Reporter Farrell spoke to Mrs. Holmes, “still very sharp,” when she was in her 80s. She continued to maintain her husband’s innocence, saying that his confession had been coerced. So heavily suppressed was information about the lynching after it occurred that no cop, FBI agent, reporter, or writer had spoken to her once during the intervening years.

By contrast, Thomas Thurmond’s family took no action on his behalf, and never again spoke of the affair. They did not try to deny his confession, and said he was insane, even though he, too, had had a good reputation and no criminal record prior to his death.

During his brief incarceration Thurmond was represented by attorney J. Oscar Goldstein of Chico, California, a strongly identified Jew.

Goldstein presumably volunteered his services pro bono (for free), because Thurmond appears to have had no money during the depths of the Great Depression.

Whether Goldstein provided genuine representation or functioned as a fox in the henhouse is impossible to say. He visited his client in jail, meaning he was able to feel him out and know exactly where his cell was.

According to his daughter, Goldstein was also a lay rabbi (a curious parallel with Joseph Karesh), who maintained a Torah in an ark in his house where other Jews came to pray.

There is no way to know for sure whether the defendants were guilty, because they had no legal representation and were never tried. Their lawyers had no time to do anything for them.

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