Abram Surasky

SEE www.jhssc.org/Aiken.pdf for great article about the Jews of Aiken, SC.

The article below is a detailed description of of Abraham's murder. In 2003, the hundredth anniversary of Abraham's death. I found his unmarked grave in the Jewish section of Magnolia Cemetary in Augusta, Ga. About 30 or so descendant's of Menachem Mendle gathered for a ceremony to place a marker on his grave. Why his brothers had not done so, no one knows.

SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY MOB:

VIOLENCE AGAINST RELIGIOUS OUTSIDERS IN THE U.S. SOUTH, 1865-1910

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Patrick Q. Mason, B.A., M.A., M.A.

5.2 The Murder of Abraham Surasky

Late in the morning of 28 July 1903, Abraham Surasky stopped at the home of Lee and Dora Green, situated in the rural woods outside Aiken, South Carolina.4 The Greens’ home was part of Surasky’s regular circuit as he guided his horse-drawn wagon through the area peddling goods. Virtually everyone in the neighborhood knew Surasky, as most of them were his clients, and he enjoyed an “excellent reputation” in the county.5 The thirty-year old Jewish peddler, who had recently immigrated from the Polish shtetl of Knyshin, had packed his cart the day before to make his usual rounds. Surasky’s purpose when he visited the Greens, as with many of his customers, was twofold: to sell his wares, and to collect debts on merchandise previously purchased on credit. He was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jewish peddlers who rattled through the southern countryside and who played

4 Surasky’s first name was spelled both Abraham and Abram by contemporaries; here I use Abraham, as it is the spelling preferred in most (including family) sources. Also confusing is the day that Surasky visited the Greens’ home and was murdered. Most sources agree that it was July 28, which would have been a Tuesday. However, witnesses variously identify the day as a Wednesday or Friday, somewhat clouding the actual chronology.

5 “The Assassinations in Aiken,” Beaufort (SC) Gazette, 13 Aug. 1903.

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a crucial but often underappreciated role in the economy of the New South, bringing manufactured goods, and, in a sense, modernity, into the maze-like backroads of rural Dixie.6

When Surasky’s cart rolled to a stop in front of the Green homestead, he found only Dora at home. This was perhaps a bit of a relief for the peddler, because her husband Lee was known to be a rough and dangerous character, and the matter of collecting a debt might be easier with him absent. So Surasky, whose peddling represented the sole support of his two daughters after the death of his wife, ambled up the front steps to do his business with Dora Green. She invited him in, but they had not been talking long when Lee arrived. According to what he told his neighbor George Horsey a week later, Green immediately recognized the peddler’s cart, and upon not seeing Surasky, assumed that its owner was inside with his wife. Green burst through the front door, where he later testified he caught

6 The literature on Jewish peddlers in the South is relatively small, and is virtually all the work of Louis Schmier. See Schmier, “Helloo! Peddler Man! Helloo!” in Ethnic Minorities in Gulf Coast Society ed. by Jerrell Schopner (Pensacola, FL: Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference Proceedings, 1979), 75-88; “‘For Him the “Schwartzers” Couldn’t Do Enough’: A Jewish Peddler and his Black Customers Look at Each Other,” American Jewish History 73 (September 1983): 39-55; “The Man from Gehau,” Atlanta Historical Journal 23 (Fall 1979): 91-106; and “The First Jews of Valdosta,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 62 (Spring 1978): 32-49.

Other than Schmier’s work, the scholarship on peddlers focuses almost exclusively on antebellum peddlers in the North and West. See David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860,” Journal of American History 78 (Sep. 1991): 511-535; Henry L.. Feingold, Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974), 73-78; and Rudolf Glanz, “Notes on Early Jewish Peddling in America,” Jewish Social Studies 7 (1945): 119-136. In her keynote address at the 2004 conference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, Hasia Diner spoke about the importance of peddlers and peddling as engines of Jewish immigration and economic development. Diner, “Wandering Jews, Peddlers, Immigrants, and the Exploration of New Worlds,” speech at the Southern Jewish Historical Society annual meeting, Charleston, SC, October 2004. All of these authors agree that Jewish peddlers were important players in the rural economy. Jaffee most explicitly makes the argument that by bringing consumer goods to rural homes, peddlers also integrated them into a market culture and to a certain degree introduced them to modernity. Many of Jaffee’s observations about peddlers in the antebellum North also ring true for the postbellum South, raising questions not only about the different chronologies of the introduction of the market to each section, but also about the ambivalences inherent when a culture embraces a market economy. Stephen J. Whitfield briefly makes this point for southern peddlers, saying that “their peddler’s packs and sample cases helped cultivate a taste for the products of the modern world. . . . In helping to make the South more modern, more like the rest of the United States, Jewish businessmen altered the moral climate which all Southerners breathed.” Whitfield, “Commercial Passions: The Southern Jew as Businessman,” American Jewish History 71 (March 1982): 356.

Edward L. Ayers discusses the importance of small-town merchants and stores in integrating the South into the modernizing national economy after the Civil War; however, he omits any mention of Jews. See Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 4. While Jews were a tiny minority of the population throughout the South, they were disproportionately represented in commercial trades. See Whitfield, “Commercial Passions.”

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Surasky holding his wife’s hand. Enraged, he “did not multiply any word with him at all,” but immediately shot the peddler. (It is unclear whether Green had his gun with him when he came in the house, or whether he grabbed one that was kept inside.) Surasky, wounded but not downed, ran out the back door and rounded the house with the obvious intention of getting his cart and fleeing. But the enraged Green was not to be cheated of his prey. He burst through the front door, put another shell in his gun, and intercepted Surasky as he came around the corner of the house, shooting him a second time. Surasky stumbled through the front door and begged Dora to intervene with her husband, but he was greeted only with a third shot from Lee’s gun. Mustering all his strength, the peddler staggered back outside and fell to his hands and knees. Green followed him and then spied an axe nearby. Surasky apparently saw the same thing, and begged, “Mr. Green don’t kill me: I have got two little motherless children.” Past the point of mercy, Green snarled back, “Goddamn you and your motherless children. I am going to kill you.” As he said this, he raised the axe and swung it down on the peddler’s skull with all his force. He finished the horrid deed with several more swings, and by the time he was finished, Surasky’s face and body were “hacked horribly,” and one of his arms was almost completely severed.7

As gruesome as it is, this version of the story was the one that Green wanted people to hear; indeed, it was the narrative he unashamedly related to George Horsey just a week after the murder, and on which Horsey later based his affidavit. In fact, Green never denied committing the murder. Even when he was on the run from law enforcement officials who

7 This account relies primarily on two sources: “Gruesome Murder in Aiken,” (Charleston) News and Courier, 2 Aug. 1903; and especially the sworn affidavit of George H. Horsey, 18 Feb. 1904, Aiken County Indictments, Bundle 164, June 1904, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter cited as ACI). Original reports were that the murder was carried out by Lee Green and George Toole, but Green was the only one charged and tried. There was some disagreement about whether Green shot Surasky two or three times. Regardless, the doctor to inspect Surasky’s body found his upper back “well sprinkled with shot.” He declared the cause of death to be either the “large wounds” in his flesh near his shoulder and collarbone or the “blow on head,” all from the axe. Testimony of Dr. W. S. Eubanks, Aug. 1903, ACI.

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had come to arrest him several days after the incident, he bragged to Luther Cordon, who found him hiding at the edge of the woods, that he had killed Surasky.8 Green wanted to portray the murder as a crime of passion after he happened on the peddler attempting to seduce his wife. Like any good nineteenth-century husband, he then flew into a rage and killed the seducer, his better nature clouded by his loyal and loving instinct to protect his innocent and hapless wife. In this scenario, not only would Green have been justified in killing Surasky, but he would have been held at greater fault had he not protected his wife’s (and by extension his own) honor. So rather than attempting any real cover-up—his feeble attempt to hide the body and the cart in the woods was soon betrayed by the circling buzzards—Green was happy to share the story. To provide support, Green’s lawyer proffered the testimony of two other women who swore that “‘the peddler’ tried to rape them.” Although there is no corroborating proof of these claims, they may have helped win the day for Green’s defense, as the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.9

8 Luther Cordon affidavit, 17 Feb. 1904, ACI.

9 Note, dated 15 June 1904, on back of testimony of Morgan Halley and his wife, 18 Feb. 1904, ACI; verdict issued on 25 June 1904, ACI. According to the “unwritten law” of nineteenth-century legal culture, still prominent after the turn of the twentieth century, “if a man found his wife in the arms of another man and he killed the other man on the spot, he would never be convicted of murder. His exemption was part of a complex of self-defense rights, at one with his right to shoot a burglar or a malicious trespasser, to repel, violently if necessary, someone who had invaded his property (although, like other property holds acting in self-defense, the man might be convicted of manslaughter). His exemption was part of the privileged identity of a husband. . . . This was the unwritten law.” Hendrik Hartog, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘the Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 67-96 (quote from 67-68).

In promoting his story of Surasky making sexual advances upon his wife, Lee Green may have been drawing upon rumors and fears about Jewish sexuality. However, based on available evidence I am more persuaded by a historical rather than psychosexual reading of this event, seeing Green’s rape narrative more as a convenient rationale for his own violent behavior, fabricated after the fact, than a manifestation of cultural beliefs about Jews’ sexual deviance. Although they were sometimes constructed as hypersexual, more frequently Jews were seen as deviant or feminized, and often homosexual. Green’s defense that Surasky was a rapist is therefore more akin to southern fears of black “beasts” (a myth commonly used to justify violence against African American men) than antisemitic narratives of Jewish sexual deviance. On ideas about Jewish sexuality, see Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Jeffrey Paul Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), esp. chap. 3.

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Green’s story was more convenient than it was true. While the basic skeleton of the narrative—that he had come home to find Surasky with his wife and then killed him—remained intact, the motives behind Green’s actions shifted significantly in light of additional testimony provided at the trial that apparently had little effect on the jury. According to the lengthy statement of Mary Drayton, supported by sworn depositions of several others, Lee Green was less a noble defender of family honor and southern womanhood than he was a violent, dangerous, and even antisemitic criminal. Drayton, an African American neighbor who occasionally worked for the Greens, testified that Lee and Dora Green came to her home about four o’clock on the afternoon of the murder. Reassuring her that the gun Lee held in his hands was not intended for her, as he had already “done too much damn shooting,” he demanded that she come to his home immediately and scour the floors. When Drayton expressed hesitation at the strange request, she said that Green admitted that he had killed the “damn peddler,” and that he wanted her to stay with his wife and for them to clean the blood off the floors while he found someone to help him dispose of the body. He then related to her the sequence of that morning’s events. According to Drayton, Green told her that as he arrived home, Surasky came out the front door of the house and helped with Green’s horse. Just as the peddler turned to go back into the house, presumably to continue his business transaction, Green shot him in the back. At first Surasky ran into the house, but then turned toward Green and cried out, “Oh, Mr. Green what have I done to you? Don’t shoot me; I will give you all I have got.” Green callously replied, “Stand back, you son of a bitch, don’t come on me,” and shot him a second time. When Surasky dropped to his elbows and knees, Green “put the muzzle of the gun to his head and shot him again and then he took the axe and knocked him in the head twice.”10

10 Mary Drayton affidavit, 24 Feb. 1904, ACI, 1-4.

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The most significant addition of Drayton’s testimony is not the details of the murder itself, but rather her account of what happened before and after the shooting, which seriously undercut Green’s later story that it was a crime of passion against his wife’s seducer. As to motive, Drayton revealed that Green had long held a grudge against Jewish peddlers in general, and Surasky in particular. Some three weeks before the murder, Drayton testified, Green had confided to her husband “that he intended to kill him [Surasky].” In addition, she noted that part of the reason she considered Green a “dangerous man” was because he had bragged in her presence “about shooting at Levy,” another Jewish peddler in the area, just “to make him drop his bundle.”11 That Surasky’s murder was premeditated to a certain degree, and that it grew at least partly out of a prejudice against Jews, was backed up by other depositions. David T. Parker made a sworn statement that George Toole (who was originally accused of the murder along with Green but never tried) had told him that Green said, “the pedlars took all of his wife’s change and that he was tired of them and that he was going to kill ever damned Jew pedlar that came around and get shed of them.” Parker additionally testified that after Toole found the dead body in the woods, Green came to his house and confessed, rather triumphantly, “I have done what I said I was going to, I have killed that damned pedlar.”12 Further building the case against Green, H. B. Heath affirmed that while visiting his home a month or two before Surasky’s murder, Green said he had recently shot at Levy (the same peddler Drayton mentioned) “to scare him,” and that “the first thing some of them Jew peddlers knew he was going to kill some of them, that he wouldn’t have them a deviling around him.”13 These

11 Drayton affidavit, 3, 8.

12 David T. Parker statement, undated, ACI.

13 H. B. Heath affidavit, 18 Feb. 1904, ACI.

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witnesses’ statements raise serious doubts about Green’s story and make a compelling case that the crime was not motivated by a chivalrous protection of his wife’s virtue.

On their own the testimonies of Parker and Heath do not necessarily incriminate Green. It is conceivable, after all, that even following the series of threats and the Levy shooting, he could have legitimately discovered Surasky making advances upon his wife, which could have justified the killing in the eyes of a nineteenth-century jury. However, Drayton’s deposition shatters this possibility as well. Drayton testified that while she was at the Greens’ home the night of the murder, Lee Green bemoaned his situation to Arthur House, another neighbor who had come to the house but refused to help dispose of Surasky’s body. “Arthur,” Green asked, “what will I do now; how will I get out?” House replied, whether seriously or flippantly is not clear, “I don’t know unless you tell it that you came up on this man committing rape on your wife.” The light seemed to go on in Green’s head, and he immediately concocted a plan. He forced all the people in the room—his wife, Arthur House, and Mary Drayton—to swear that they would stick to this story of attempted rape.14 Although Drayton reneged on her pledge, the other conspirators, particularly the Greens, promoted the story as their primary defense. In fact, Lee Green was scheduled for trial in October 1903, but Dora had given birth at the beginning of the month and was bedridden. This led the judge to grant the defense’s request for a continuance of the trial until the court’s next session—not only was Dora the sole eyewitness to the murder, but the defense rested on her testimony that Surasky was guilty of “criminal assault with the intention to commit a felony upon her,” and that her husband was simply defending her

14 Drayton affidavit, 7. In Arthur House’s sworn testimony, he says that while at the Greens’ home the night of the murder, he had asked Dora Green “what was the trouble between [her husband] and the pedlar.” She replied that “the pedlar had been bothering me,” but did not give any details. House does not mention suggesting to Green that he fabricate the rape story, nor being sworn to abide by it. Arthur House affidavit, 17 Feb. 1904, ACI.

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from the peddler’s sexual advances.15 Although transcripts of Dora Green’s testimony have not survived, we can infer by the trial’s outcome that she stuck to the prearranged story and delivering an emotional performance capable of persuading the jury to deliver the verdict of not guilty. The significant evidence and testimonies portraying Lee Green as a violent antisemite wilted in the face of a wife’s trumped-up declaration of her husband’s loyalty, fidelity, and honor.

Abraham Surasky’s murder was in part made possible because he was a lone peddler walking the country roads of the South. Solitary Jewish peddlers were highly vulnerable figures. They usually began as recent immigrants who spoke little or no English and had few established personal connections in the vicinity. The wares in their cart and the cash in their pockets also made them attractive targets. In the cash-poor economy of the rural South, the local peddlers and merchants were among the few people who had currency at hand. Beyond that, their account books represented written records of the chronic indebtedness that plagued individual southern farmers, especially during bad years. So when Lee Green not only murdered Abraham Surasky, but then stole his money and ripped the page recording his debt out of the peddler’s account book,16 he was lashing out at Surasky as a Jew, as his direct creditor, and as the most immediate (and vulnerable) symbol of the economic system that frustrated many southern farmers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

15 Request for continuance of trial, 19 Oct. 1903, ACI; Order continuing case, 21 Oct. 1903, ACI.

16 According to David Parker’s affidavit, Green confessed to George Toole that after he killed Surasky, “I taken his account book, tore out my account and then taken the book and his hat and dug a hole by a stump in the cotton patch and buried them just back of the house.” In her affidavit, Mary Drayton testified that Green owed Surasky fifteen dollars, and stole $3.05 from his dead body, which he complained did not even “pay me for my trouble.”

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What differentiated Abraham Surasky from many other Jewish peddlers in the South was that he was not in fact an isolated and marginalized figure in the community. As mentioned earlier, Surasky enjoyed a solid reputation in the area. Morgan Halley described the peddler to be “as nice a man as I ever saw,” who “always behaved himself as a gentleman” on his periodic visits. “Everybody, white and colored in the neighborhood,” Halley concluded, “spoke in the highest terms of him.”17 Even beyond his reputation and business relationships, however, Surasky was tied into the Aiken community through respected family and religious connections. The Surasky family had been integrated into Aiken society for over a decade, ever since Abraham’s older brother B. M. (Benedict Morris) had traveled to the South as a peddler shortly after 1890 and eventually opened a store. He prospered enough to pay for the immigration of his wife, children, and three of his four brothers, including Abraham. Over time the Suraskys became something of an Aiken institution, with B. M. serving on the city council for a decade and his wife Sarah actively involved in civic affairs.18 In addition to his family ties, Abraham was connected to Aiken’s fledgling Jewish community. When the body was discovered two days after the murder, men were immediately sent to town “to let the Jews know it,” a token of the recognition of and respect for the small Jewish community in the area.19 Moreover, several weeks after the incident, one of the county newspapers and “several prominent citizens and leading

17 Morgan Halley testimony, 18 Feb. 1904, ACI.

18 For biographical information on the Surasky family and their place in the Aiken community, see Surasky family file, College of Charleston Special Collections. Sources in the file include a typed Surasky family history (author unknown, May 1978); Arnold Shankman, ed., “Jewish Life in Aiken, S.C.: Childhood Memories of Esther Surasky Pinck,” SJHS Newsletter (March 1982): 2-3; and various local newspaper articles.

19 Burrel Holley affidavit, 18 Feb. 1904, ACI. Two of Lee Green’s uncles, Robert and James Green, were among this particular group that discovered the body. (It was actually “discovered” at several different times by multiple people in the days after the murder.) James wanted to quietly bury the body and thus “settle up the question,” but Robert and the others insisted that the incident be made known, both to the local Jews and the larger populace.

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ministers” pressed the sheriff to work diligently to apprehend Green, who had gone into hiding.20 Clearly, Surasky was a known figure who was part of a respected and included segment of Aiken society, and his death was not swept under the rug or deemed to be of minor consequence simply because he was an immigrant Jewish peddler.

The experience of Abraham Surasky and his extended family thus models the many tensions facing Jews in the South. While it represented a land of opportunity where they could flourish and become integrated into communities, their immutable Jewishness meant they could never become true insiders. Antisemitism usually remained dormant, but particularly among poor and frustrated farmers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their Jewish creditors became symbols of the economic system that held them paralyzed, and they grasped at stereotypes and prejudices that helped them make sense of their world, lashing out in violence against anyone they could blame. Unless we believe Green’s story of attempted rape, Surasky did nothing wrong on the day of his murder; his only offense was to fulfill a stereotype and to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Precisely because they knew that such acts of violence could occur at any time, and because they did not want their new homeland to go the way of Eastern Europe, southern Jews did all they could to minimize the likelihood of antisemitic violence by adapting themselves to southern culture and making sincere efforts to become southern themselves. Their acculturation was thus a byproduct of their simultaneous fear of violence and desire for acceptance.