July/Aug 2025 (Volume 17, Issue 4)

 

By C.J. Williams

 

At the nadir of the Great Depression, a mob of Iowa farmers nearly lynched a judge when he refused to stop signing foreclosure orders. The judge’s insistence on the rule of law showed judicial courage that nearly cost him his life. This is a story of that judge and that time worth knowing and remembering.

 

Judge Charles Clark Bradley was a state district court judge in the small town of Le Mars, located in the northwest corner of Iowa. Born on May 27, 1879, in Exira, Charles Bradley was the son of Franklin Pierce and Fannie (Atkinson) Bradley. Exira was a small farming community with a population then of about 500 people. Young Bradley spent most of his early life in Audubon and eventually moved with his family to Council Bluffs where his father was in the real estate business and from which Charles Bradley graduated from high school.

 

Bradley earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1899, where he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He graduated from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1901. He was admitted to the Iowa bar that same year and began practicing law in Council Bluffs. In 1902, Bradley moved to Le Mars and began practicing in a small law firm. He was active in the bar and in the community, becoming a member of the Masons and the Elk’s club.

 

In 1915, Bradley became Judge Bradley when he ascended to the state court bench. He took his role as a public servant seriously; when listing his “employer’s name” on his 1918 military draft registration card, Bradley wrote: “People of the foregoing District.” Referring to his occupation on the same form, he described it as “Judge 21st Judicial District of Iowa.” By 1933, Bradley was a 54-year-old, unprepossessing-looking bachelor. He spent part of each summer visiting his widowed mother at her home in Kansas.

 

 

In the aftermath of the stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929, the Great Depression descended like a dark cloud upon America. By March 1933, the bottom had fallen out of the economy. Farmers were among the hardest hit. When deflation drove down the price of agricultural products, farmers couldn’t turn a profit. When they couldn’t make loan payments, banks foreclosed on the farms. Judges then entered foreclosure orders that displaced families from their homes and land upon which some had lived and toiled for generations.  

 

Popular grassroots movements, like the Farmers’ Holiday Association, arose to fight back. The so-called Holidayers withheld products from the market—taking a so-called holiday from providing food to America—and sometimes used violence to prevent others from sending products to market. They also used mob rule to interfere with farm foreclosures.

 

Around noon on April 27, 1933, a mob of some 500 farmers descended on a sheriff’s sale of a farm being held in Primghar at the O’Brien County Courthouse, about 45 miles northeast of Le Mars. The mob attempted to enter the courthouse to stop the foreclosure hearing, but the sheriff and 22 deputies met them on the courthouse steps and beat back the mob, injuring several of the farmers.

 

Bradley had issued that foreclosure order. When word spread that he was at the Plymouth County Courthouse in Le Mars, the mob’s leader, Morris Cope, said, “Let’s go up and throw the fear of God into Bradley.” They arrived at the courthouse in Le Mars at about 5 p.m., just as Bradley was adjourning court. Cope, whose head bore a bloody bandage from the fight with the deputies earlier that day, led 150 to 250 of the farmers into Bradley’s courtroom on the third floor.

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.