Learning an Unexpected Fact at the Foshay Tower

While I had a visitor from out of town this week, I finally — after 38 years here in the Twin Cities — went up in the Foshay Tower to its observation deck. Foshay is a 32-story skyscraper that opened in September 1929. It was the only building of its size in downtown Minneapolis until the late 1960s, so it was synonymous with the city for many years.

Its design is based on the Washington Monument, and its developer, Wilbur Foshay, spared no expense in its construction or its grand opening. It features the name FOSHAY spelled out in 10-foot-tall illuminated letters on all four sides, and inside there are many notable decorative elements, like the elevator doors...



...and plaques with beautiful lettering:




Its grand opening, unfortunately, was just a few weeks before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. Foshay and his company were soon bankrupt, and it turned out he had been selling Ponzi stock. The October crash made it catch up with him faster than it otherwise would have, and the feds came calling.

I bring all of this up because Foshay's trial for fraud had resonance with the current Feeding Our Future situation that has been happening here in Minnesota, where some of the defendants tried to bribe a juror. We're all agog that it happened, as if such a thing is unprecedented, at least in Minnesota. What does it mean, we say? Everything is going to hell in a hand basket!

Well, back in Foshay's trial, the following happened. I quote one of the panels from the Foshay Museum, which is on the 29th floor, just below the observation deck on floor 30:

Mrs. Genevieve Clark was the only female juror at Foshay's first trial. She held out for acquittal, which caused a mistrial. Soon afterwards, it was discovered that Mrs. Clark had lied about working for Foshay and had never revealed that her husband, Daniel Clark, had been a business associate of Foshay.

Mrs. Clark was convicted of contempt of court and was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $1,000. Although she appealed her case to the United States Supreme Court, her conviction was upheld. The court excused her monetary fine but not her jail sentence. Embarrassed and distraught, Mrs. Clark and her husband disappeared with their two young sons the day before she was to go to jail. The family was discovered south of Minneapolis in their car three days later, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.

The museum contains this photo of Mrs. Clark and her two sons:

Morbidly, the museum also contains a photo of the car where they died, and the tube used to feed the exhaust.

A newspaper article published after Foshay's death, 26 years after that first trial, told the story of how it was discovered that Clark had worked for Foshay, and how the Minneapolis Journal newspaper had insisted from the beginning of jury deliberations that the trial would end in a hung jury. That story revealed that two newspaper reporters camped out in a vacant office across from the sixth floor jury deliberation room with a pair of binoculars, where they could see through the window. They saw Clark sitting alone at the corner of the jury table while the 11 male jurors talked to each other and studied the exhibits.

"Sometimes the men would talk 'at' her. She would reply with a firm shake of her head."

The Journal also had a telephone tip from a woman who had talked to Clark while waiting for jury examination at the beginning of the trial. She said Clark had told her "she had very special reasons for wanting to be on the jury."

The mistrial was only a stopgap: Foshay was convicted in his second trial. However, he ended up having his sentence shortened by FDR and was later pardoned by Harry Truman. Tens of thousands of people (Minnesotans, I assume) wrote to them asking for leniency or clemency for Foshay the fraudster, and it worked.

Some of us want to be conned. It isn't new. I don't know if that part is good news or depressing news.
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Elevator doors photo by Jim Winstead Jr., CC BY 2.0.