ABOUT THE MOVIE

“The great trouble with this country today is too much hippodroming in the administration of justice.  The San Jose incident is merely a manifestation of lack of confidence in the administration of justice.  There are 3,000 kidnappings and 12,000 murders a year, and the government has not measured up to its responsibilities as far as the protection of life and liberty are concerned.”

Earl Warren, District Attorney, Alameda County, California, November 28, 1933 (future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court).

In the Valley of the Heart’s Delight

What is now known as Silicon Valley was once covered with tens-of-thousands of fruit trees.  Every spring, millions of red, yellow, white, and pink blossoms carpeted the valley from Palo Alto on the north to Gilroy, some seventy miles to the south.  The residents of this peaceful, safe, beautiful and prosperous enclave -- free from the extreme ravages of the Great Depression -- affectionately called it the Valley of the Heart’s Delight. It was in this modern-day Garden of Eden that trusting innocence was ripped from its heart when the beloved son of a prominent retailer was kidnapped.  First came fear, then a relentless rage inflamed by business, government,  religious, and  political leaders, and lurid newspaper stories that culminated in the lynching of two local men accused of both kidnapping and murdering the young man.

Other than the family of one of the men accused of the kidnapping and murder, not one voice was raised to stop the lynching.

Valley of the Heart’s Delight is a penetrating, deeply moving examination of the human and political forces that give rise to mass violence against what civic, religious, and political leaders have defined as evil. It is a tale of decent and honorable citizens manipulated by those they entrusted with the enforcement of the law and the Constitution into the commitment of an act of violence that stands in dramatic opposition to everything held dear in a democratic republic governed by the rule of law.  When the sun came up the morning after the lynching, virtually none of the estimated 5000-10,000 citizens who participated in, or simply witnessed it, would discuss it publicly for the remainder of their lives. There has never been anything like it before or after in American history.