Old letters help us reconnect to the past
There’s hardly any better way to reconstruct the past than to have old letters in hand. Among the letters kept for decades in the attic of his home on South Mount Vernon Avenue by the late, great federal judge Edward Dumbauld were a dozen or so he received from an old high school friend by the name of Frank Monaghan.
The name might be familiar to those of you who have read the book “The Monaghan Affair: Screams From The Courthouse Basement” by Wolf Swimmer and Beverly Peterson. Or you might know the case on which the book is based: the 1936 death of Frank Monaghan Sr. while in police custody.
Monaghan’s death caused a major uproar reaching all the way to Harrisburg because of the involvement of the sitting Fayette County district attorney. But this isn’t about that. It’s about Frank Junior, a far different character than his mobbed up father.
To give you some clue: Frank Monaghan (he never used the “junior” qualifier) was director of research for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City — only the biggest, baddest event of the 1930s.
Quite a climb for a kid from Uniontown, but then again Frank Monaghan was quite a guy. A professor of history at Yale and an aide to the Army chief of staff during World War II, he was a member in good standing of a remarkable group of Uniontown high school chums that included Dumbauld and John Dickson Carr, the writer celebrated still as the master of “the locked door” murder mystery.
The letters, which fell into my hands thanks to Judge Dumbauld’s esteemed relative Bob Pritts includes this one, posted Nov. 2, 1927. The letter contains news of Dumbauld and Monaghan’s hometown chums now scattered across the country and the world.
“Art has written me from Vanderbilt (University),” Frank Monaghan informed “Eddie.”
Art (no last name used) “reports … there are many beautiful women” on the Vanderbilt campus. In a nod to the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, Art mentioned the dearth of “fundamentalist” religious fervor among Vanderbilt students.
Whether the presence of pretty girls and the absence of hellfire and brimstone were coincidental or consequential, we don’t know.
“From the recesses of Paris,” Frank added in his letter to Dumbauld, then studying at Harvard Law School, “there is no sound from John le Sage”, a reference to the fact that Carr had escaped to the City of Lights, presumably to write.
Carr was soon enough on the chums’ radar screen (if only radar had been invented by then).
In a December letter, Frank pleaded that Eddie shouldn’t tell anyone, least word get back to John’s father, former Democratic congressman Wooda Carr. “My friend Cresswell reports that (John) hath a great love for the bottle and women, and that he spends most of his time chasing one or the other, or both, since they are conveniently pursued together.”
Frank was not surprised, such was to be expected from John. He needed to “get well saturated” before buckling down to work.
“Let us pray that he does not begin worshipping at the feet of the local deity in the Cafe du Dingo: James Joyce,” Frank added.
Two years later, Frank reported that “Sage Carr” was with him in Washington, D.C. “I have been trying to locate him a job here, so far without success..”
By now, Monaghan was employed full-time, writing articles for the American Biographical Dictionary, and conducting research at the Library of Congress. In addition, he was writing for The Saturday Review, a literary weekly, and preparing for a trip to France on behalf of the American Historical Review.
“I hope you do not get ensnared in (law) practice in a small town,” Frank told Eddie on March 31, 1929, at a time that Eddie no doubt was being pressured by his parents to return to the family nest. “Your talents are too great … international law does not flourish in Uniontown.”
Edward Dumbauld did return to Uniontown, where he became, with help from his father, chairman of the Fayette County Democratic party. But he didn’t stay. Eddie soon enough headed off to Washington and a job in the the Justice Department under FDR.
In 1935, Frank was excited to tell his friend that President Roosevelt was sent a copy of a speech he had made on the Constitution containing an interpretation of the document that “would sink the Republicans if they want to bring it up in the (1936) election.”
He quoted FDR, “I am grateful for … that most interesting lecture by Mr. Monaghan. … I am glad to have it … it will be of real value to me.”
In the same letter, Frank asked Eddie, by now a party boss, for a favor: to help find a job for his brother Bob, unemployed for four years with a wife and a young daughter to support.
A job for Bob at this point in the Great Depression would be “a godsend. Please, Eddie, do the best you can.” Frank couched his appeal “in the simple and, at the same time, great art of friendship.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books – Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.