Charles W. Chesnutt to Harry C. Gahn, 1 November 1921
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November 1, 1921.
Hon. Harry C. Gahn,
House of Representatives,
Washington, D. C.
Dear Mr. Gahn:-
I hope you will see your way to vote in favor of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill which I understand is pending in Congress.1 It is intended, as you know, to discourage one of the most popular of American amusements,2 but which I think you will agree with me is not in accordance with democracy or good morals.
Yours very truly,Correspondent: Harry C. Gahn (1880–1962) was a White lawyer from Ohio who was a Cleveland city council member (1911–1921) and U.S. Congressman for Ohio's 21st district for one term (1921–1923), after which he left Cleveland for Berea, Ohio. A life-long Republican, he worked from 1906–1908 in the law practice of Theodore E. Burton (1851–1929) before entering politics. Gahn, along with the other twenty-one Ohio representatives (all Republicans) voted for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which then failed in the Senate in December.
1. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced in 1918 by Leonidas C. Dyer (1871–1957), a White Republican U.S. Congressman from Missouri. In January 1922, it passed in the House, but was then blocked by Democratic filibusters beginning on December 2, 1922. The NAACP had begun its anti-lynching campaign shortly after its founding in the 1910s and began to lobby forcefully for the Dyer Bill in 1918 after initial doubts about its constitutionality. As a member and sometime leader in the organization, Chesnutt would have received regular updates and calls to action about the bill's progress; as it was being debated in November 1921, he wrote to at least two Ohio representatives, Harry Gahn (1880–1962) and Theodore Burton (1851–1929), in support of the bill. [back]
2. Chesnutt occasionally used macabre humor to refer to lynching, for example in his unpublished novel Mandy Oxendine, posthumously edited by Charles Hackenberry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 110. [back]
