Women in Black

 

Christmas approaches.  This will be my last homicide for the indefinite future, and that’s a promise.  But you need to know that in 1909, in Essex County NJ, three weird sisters, the impoverished daughters of an old, ruined Southern family named Wardlaw, were indicted on charges of having committed a ghastly and incomprehensible murder.  The signature feature of their flamboyantly eccentric behavior—labelled a folie à trois by the fascinated metropolitan press, which for a year kept the case headlined on its front pages—was that all three were never seen wearing anything but heavy, enveloping black mourning dresses with full veils.  This meant that they were seldom actually seen at all.  The semi-starved body of a young woman, Oceana Martin Snead—the daughter  of one of the sisters (Caroline Martin) and the niece of the two others (Virginia Wardlaw and Mary Snead) lay dead in the water of a bathtub at the top of an old rented house in East Orange, a nearly empty house in which there were only a few sticks of furniture.  She had been dead for at least twenty-four hours when her aunt Virginia Wardlaw, apparently the unfurnished house’s only other inhabitant, tried to summon the coroner.  According to the aunt, poor young Ocey (as she was called)—discouraged by the death of one young child, the necessity of having to commit a second baby to a charity hospital, and the disappearance and presumed death of her husband (who also happened to be her first cousin)--had drowned herself.  This was also the gist of a supposed suicide note at the scene.  This note seemed a bit fishy to the authorities at the time, given the fact that there was in the house no paper and neither pen nor ink.  Their suspicions were not allayed when in the course of investigation in various parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan through which the Wardlaws had left a trail of unpaid bills for short-term rentals, they uncovered dozens of similar suicide notes, written by one hand, signed by another.  They also discovered that Ocey’s young life had been lavishly insured by her relatives, that the Wardlaw ladies indeed were surrounded by a veritable cloud of witnesses of conveniently insured dead associates, and that the bizarre transactions of their peripatetic lives constituted a pattern of elder-care anticipating that in  Arsenic and Old Lace.  (It turned out that their thing was actually morphine.)

 

 

            Many years ago I was involved in recruiting for our department the eminent feminist scholar and general all-around great lady Sandra Gilbert, co-author of a book much admired then and now, The Madwoman in the Attic.  Readers of Jane Eyre will at once recognize the reference to Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason, the demented, incendiary wife of Jane’s brooding heart-throb, kept under wraps in permanent house arrest on the top floor of creepy Thorncroft Manor.  Not good mental health therapy, perhaps.  The “madwoman” theme has been brilliantly developed by feminist literary criticism.  But Virginia Wardlaw demonstrated the dangers of letting the madwoman out of the attic.  Death by fire, death by water: take your choice.  Virginia’s own lawyer declared her mad, and her ministerial brother tried to save her from the trial of being tried by having her committed instead.  But she took charge, went on a hunger strike and died before the Law could arrange either her punitive or her protective confinement.  The State of New Jersey took the other two sisters to trial.  At the last minute Caroline Martin plead guilty to manslaughter, while Ocey’s surviving aunt got off on a legal technicality, there being no such thing as an accessory to manslaughter.

 

 

Oceana Martin Snead, in better times

 

            There are limits to the amusement to be found in eccentricity, which often enough masks grave distress.  What I know of this matter comes from a delightful book, and I have adopted the tone of its lighter moments.*  However, there was much, much more to the story, some of it tragic; and Ms. Wardlaw’s tragedy played out on several levels: mental illness, the upheaval of war, the inequities of a Man’s World.  For there is definitely a feminist dimension to the Wardlaw disaster.  All three women, dependent upon male lawyers, were patronized offensively by court and counsel alike.  They explicitly made the point, made also by other female defendants, that an all-male jury could hardly be regarded as a “jury of their peers”.

 

            The sisters’ stuffy lawyers told them to keep their mouths shut.  “I want to talk,” one of them said to eager newspaper reporters,  "but I am like one of the six hundred who rode to their death through obeying orders.”  This was, of course, an allusion to Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” the subject of which is a horrendous military snafu in which Lord Ragland’s Light Cavalry brigade of six hundred men was mistakenly sent against an inappropriate artillery target at the Battle of Balaclava (1854), resulting in nearly forty percent casualties.

 

Into the Valley of Death

            Rode the six hundred...

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the light brigade!

 

Her point was that her lawyer’s gag order was stupid, but had to be followed.  “I do not mean that we are surely going to our death.  We are innocent.”  My point is that in 1909 she could assume that any reporter, and possibly most Americans capable of reading a newspaper, would pick up on on a citation of the British poet laureate.  It was a different age.  In a moment of whimsy I once wrote those final two lines in very small print on the memo line of the payment check for a steep monthly PSEG electric bill.  The result was a phone call from a puzzled employee at a “payment center.”

 

            The most interesting thing I learned from this bizarre criminal case was incidental.  It concerns the history of American education, particularly the education of young women.  All three of the sisters were well educated teachers.  One of them had had a distinguished career in the New York high school system—a statement far from meaningless in 1900.  Before they left the South, all three sisters had been active in the organization and administration of two highly successful “female seminaries”.

 

            I was only vaguely familiar with this term, the modern synonym for which would be “girls’ school”; and to the limited degree I had ever thought about the subject at all, I suppose I imagined them as rather trivial “finishing” schools for the daughters of the upper middle classes.  So they were, to some extent.  The curriculum normally included such things as piano, needlework, freehand sketching, painting on velvet and other domestic skills thought socially necessary for a family matron and the mistress of a household, the destiny presumed for their pupils.  But among the six thousand female seminaries active in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, many also taught Latin, Greek, French, geography, mathematics and laboratory sciences.  Many were well equipped with scientific instruments, for which there was a bull market beginning in the 1850s.  In New England, not a few of them were hotbeds of Abolitionism and therefore, almost necessarily, of the nascent movement for Women’s Rights.  Obviously, this was not true in the same way in the South, but many schools there were also “progressive” in the context of the time.  Two of the sisters had with considerable success organized and nourished excellent schools in Murfreesboro TN and in Christiansburg VA, near Roanoke.  The Soule Academy in Murfreesboro, the flagship educational institution of vigorous Tennessee Methodism, was of ante-bellum founding and boasted a strong science curriculum.  The Montgomery Academy in Christiansburg had flourished under the headship of a Mrs. Oceana Pollock, after whom the bathtub victim had been named.  In both instances it would appear that successful Wardlaw enterprises  were finally overthrown by the deranged interference of the mentally ill Virginia.  Blood was thicker than water, and the Wardlaws stuck together.  Education was one of the limited number of  arenas in which women were allowed to make significant public social contributions in the old South, and the sisters unquestionably made theirs.  In the bankrupted and reactionary climate of post-Reconstruction, the Wardlaw sisters, like so many others, found it much more difficult to continue to do so.  Like so many emigrées from other national cataclysms, the French or Russian Revolutions, for example, they had been cast into a hostile world which they could face only when shielded by the heavy black garments of eternal mourning and inconsolable loss.

 

*Norman Zierold, Three Sisters in Black (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)

 

 

 

 

 

The Plot Against Charles Lindbergh

 

 

                                                                                The hero

A few essays ago I touched upon my fascination with certain famous New Jersey murder cases.  Since then I had the time for a crash refresher course on “The Crime of the Century,” the Lindbergh kidnapping on March 1, 1932, perpetrated about ten miles from where I now live.  It’s pretty easy to research a subject pre-organized for you on a special bibliography prepared by Amazon!  It’s still that hot a topic in the conspiratorial-industrial complex.  Indeed, though the “case” itself is endlessly fascinating, what now strikes me as most remarkable is the graph of its historiography.  In recent decades there have been several revisionist books that have moved from exculpating the man convicted of the crime in the direction of inculpating Charles Lindbergh, father of the dead child.  This is a remarkable phenomenon worthy of reflection.*

 

Little Lindy lost

 

            The trial concluded with a guilty verdict against Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an immigrant German carpenter with a serious criminal history, an impressively loyal wife, a young child, a conveniently dead business partner,  and a rented house in the Bronx.  The trial was manifestly unfair to Hauptmann in various ways, but not in any way that succumbed to judicial review.  The New Jersey law with respect to “felony murder” at the time was that any death occasioned by the commission of a felony was homicide.  The theory held by almost everyone, and most probably correctly, was that the child’s death had been an accident caused when the kidnapper’s ladder broke as he was carrying the baby down it.  The murder charge, which allowed the prosecutor to seek and obtain the death penalty,  was a torturous stretch.  Unfortunately, kidnapping was not a felony at the time.  (The felony was stealing the night clothes the baby was wearing at the time he was taken!)  Still, fairness or unfairness in legal apparatus is a different matter from innocence or guilt in criminal activity.  Though many questions remain unanswered, I conclude that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was indeed guilty of participating in, or perhaps single-handedly executing, a terrible crime in which a baby was killed.  I come to this conclusion on the volume and strength of unrebutted evidence presented in court four years after the crime.

                                                   

Bruno Richard Hauptmann

            The stronger the evidence that must be refuted, the more extreme and dramatic must be the claims of the revisionist who seeks to dismiss it.  The prosecutors presented a huge amount of evidence against Hauptmann, some of it a rather tenuous and some of it convincingly strong.  For brevity’s sake, consider two of the strongest bits.  He had in his possession a large portion of the ransom money.  His explanation for having it—the famous “Fisch story”—falls somewhere between the implausible and the preposterous.  Then, one of the boards in the homemade ladder found at the crime scene indubitably had had a former life in the rough attic subflooring in Hauptmann’s garage**.  When under the duress of scientific demonstration the conspiracy theorists were forced to abandon doubting the indubitable they had to move to a theory of a police frame-up, that is, conscious, criminal, and very wicked hoax perpetrated by local and state officials in New Jersey, including the Attorney General in his role as prosecutor.  The ladder had indeed been made from a board in Hauptmann’s garage, but it was not the carpenter, but the police who made it!  Richard Hofstadter’s classic Paranoid Style in American Politics has just been republished in the Library of America.  Who will write a Paranoid Style in American Historical Writing?

 

            It is no exaggeration to say that in 1927 Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world.  His fame had if anything increased by 1932.  Furthermore that fame, the product of historical, cultural, and technological circumstances of a unique moment, was of a kind unlikely ever to be matched in future generations.  Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” may be overly cynical, but it’s probably closer to future norms.  In 1932 Charles and Anne Lindbergh received more than 100,000 telegrams of sympathy when their baby’s remains were found in the woods where they had been cruelly dumped.  By the end of the century supposedly serious writers were postulating that Charles himself had dumped them.  How could this be?

.

            Historians, who ostensibly make history, are themselves made by history.  If you read accounts of Lindbergh today you will hear more of his suspect politics and of the bizarre double life he undertook in his late fifties than of his heroic lone-eagle transatlantic flight in his twenties.  As war in Europe appeared ever more likely in the late ‘Thirties, Lindbergh became an outspoken isolationist whose America First movement preached an aloof neutrality and presented a serious obstacle to Roosevelt’s semi-covert policies.  America First was not simply a pro-fascist group, as sometimes represented, but a broad-based coalition uniting the Socialist leader Norman Thomas and King Kleagles of the Klan.  But both Lindberghs were for a time way too Germanophile for their later reputational health.  Once the war came, and Hitler became the most hated man in the Anglophone world, Lindbergh’s earlier enthusiasms diminished him.  And when much later it became known that he had secretly sired several children with three different women in Germany,  it may have seemed to many that there was no crime, however unlikely,  of which he was incapable.  Americans had always imagined the man in semi-mythical terms.  So when in 2004, thirty years after Lindbergh’s death, Philip Roth published his brilliant counterfactual novel The Plot Against America, you could hear the click of the paradigm shifting into its new socket.

                                                                                        

 Hauptmann's tripartite ladder

            Virgil has a striking image of the personification of Fama (Rumor, or Gossip) as a great and most dangerous bird-lady flapping about the land spreading “news” in which truth and fiction are inextricably mixed.  That would do as a description of the counterfactual historical novel, of which I know no more impressive an example than The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.  In it Lindbergh—through circumstances made to seem not merely historically convincing but historically inevitable—wins the presidency in 1940 in a truly vast right-wing conspiracy compared with which Hillary Clinton’s is very small beer.  In this book an inventive mind, like Fama, has so thoroughly dissolved what could have happened in what really did happen that only the knowing few will know the difference.   It is the special gift of a powerful novelist to exercise supremely well a privilege that should not be claimed by historians. But that is exactly, I think, what the revisionists have done.  That is why I call their work the plot against Charles Lindbergh.  Despising his politics and feeling justified by his apparent sense of sexual exceptionalism, their strange retribution takes the form of accusing him of infanticide and imputing to the police and the judicial authorities of two states the elaborate framing of Richard Hauptmann: all in all an extraordinary exercise in blaming the victim.

 

*Among the principal revisionists are the following three: Ludovic Kennedy, The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann (1985); Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier, Crime of the Century: The Lindberg Kidnapping Hoax (1993); and Robert Zorn, Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2012). The most balanced and dispassionate antidote to the conspiracists is Richard T. Cahill’s Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2014).  In A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh (1998), a masterly biography by a masterful biographer, the episode of the kidnapping is fully treated as a terrible event in its subject’s long and varied life.  As his subject is Lindbergh, not Hauptmann, Berg takes no definitive position on the “revisionist question” but does recognize that despite all flaws of the police work, a rabid press,  and the judicial proceedings, “there remained a veritable mountain of undisputed evidence against [Hauptmann], a man so secretive that his own wife declared that she did not even know his first name was Bruno…” (pp. 334-335).

 

**The sleuthing done by Arthur Koehler, an expert dendrologist in the U. S. Forest Service, remains one of the most amazing feats in the history of criminal forensic science.  It is described more or less adequately in most of the books about the kidnapping, but best of all by Shirley A. Graham, “Anatomy of the Lindbergh Kidnapping” in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, no. 42 (1997), pp. 368-377.

 

 

 

The Buried Past

 

                                                 Alabama: a forgotten cemetery

            A saving grace of this generally unpleasant coronavirus lockdown, one that makes it more tolerable for us than for so many others we know, is that we have been able to see most of our children and grandchildren, those who live in New York City, on a fairly regular basis.  As the adults are abundantly occupied professional people with full agendas of their own, not to mention their own pandemic constraints, the filial piety manifested is neither unnoted nor unappreciated.  Our elder son Rich and his wife Katie, based in Brooklyn, have been able to make frequent escapes to their  gorgeous rural property about thirty miles northwest of us, near Frenchtown, and they regularly drop in on us in Princeton on their journeys to or fro.  They were here briefly on Sunday, with the sun still shining bravely if not entirely effectually for a well aerated and distanced backyard visit.

 

            I have mentioned their place in Kingwood Township before but not, I think, one of its most interesting features, a family cemetery dating back to the eighteenth century.  This appears to have been badly neglected by twentieth-century owners, but the headstones for some of their Huguenot predecessors from Revolutionary times are still clearly intact.  Rich and Katie were quite pleased when a special “grave expert” from (I think) the Hunterdon County Historical Society asked if he could inspect and record the graves.  He came during the last week, and much to Rich’s pleasure, this knowledgeable man took a keen interest in the site, spending several hours in serious clean-up and brush removal, leaving no fewer than seventeen gravestones, some with still legible inscriptions, exposed to view.  (In my own earlier survey, I had found only six.)  I regret that I have no photographs as yet, but even in its “wild” state it was an impressive sight.   My hope is that we can eventually enclose and protect the whole area with a low fieldstone wall.  There is some evidence at the site of a much earlier gesture in this direction.

 

            This local historian was a font of fascinating information, but not all of it was encouraging.  Private graveyards were apparently by no means uncommon in early America, especially but not only on the large properties of rural magnates.  Many of the old, large landholdings in the Delaware Valley survived more or less intact well into the early twentieth century.  There were 180,000 people in all of New Jersey in 1790.  By 1940 there were four million, by 1950 not quite five million, but by 2000 more than double that.   Most of the large old Jersey farms were sold and sometimes repeatedly subdivided, often for suburban residences.  Throughout the Eastern states subsistence farmers suddenly were besieged by developers.  It was standard practice to exempt burial sites from land sales in special clauses.  No matter how needy or greedy people were in unloading their ancestral acres, even those who (in a great line of Wordsworth’s) “would peep and botanize upon their mother’s grave” would not brazenly  face up to having sold their grandfather’s bones for the mineral rights.  But from the developer’s point of view it is quite unsatisfactory to have a protected and unowned pile of gravestones in the middle of their Tinkling Brook Luxury Estates.  Beginning in the 1980s, according to this expert, aggressive Jersey subdividers began simply bulldozing their way through the diminishing  back woods—metaphorically and sometimes literally—in the 1980s..  A landowner had recently denied the  grave historian  access to a small plot that he did not own but effectively surrounded.   Well, we’ve had roughly four centuries of practice trampling over Indian burial grounds.  The shoe has been on the other foot since the Tennessee Valley Administration began building large lakes in places long settled by Europeans.

 

            American family burial plots are not uncommon in most rural places, especially in places of early settlement.  We had some even in the impoverished Ozarks, and I have seen some fairly extensive ones in older parts of the Old South.  There are undoubtedly many small plots that have simply disappeared in the woods.  In old England, with its long-settled village and parochial systems, the normal, expected site of burial would be the churchyard.  There is now a transatlantic divergence in the meaning of the English term yard.  What Americans might call their back yard is in England the garden.  The two words, yard and garden, are obviously close relatives, the original Old English, like Old French jardin, denoting an enclosed and specially tended plot of land.  In England the word churchyard principally signified, and still signifies, the  burial place or cemetery associated with a church building,  as in Gray’s immortal “Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard”.  But even in old Christian times the dead could be buried, for a variety of reasons, in many other places.  The burial of the dead was one of the recognized acts of “corporal” mercy encouraging the establishment and upkeep of civic “Potter’s Fields” for indigents, travelers, unknown and unclaimed bodies found on the road, and so on.  Criminal executions, military deaths and epidemic disease often called for a variety of ad hoc arrangements.

 

            In colonial North America the burial customs of the new immigrants from  Spain, England, and France survived but with greater or lesser degrees of mutation and adaptation.  In our country, the radical Protestantism of large sections of the population broke cleanly with the traces of medieval mortuary customs still half remembered even in Puritan Anglicanism.  Furthermore, the old parish system presupposed conditions very different from those of frontier life, which is another way of saying that churchyards presupposed churches with stable, uniform congregations.  We see some of that development in New England, but not much in the sparsely populated countryside.  Family graveyards were common, and in populated places one sees also the growth of the civic public (or semi-public) cemetery, eventually aspiring to the grandeur of a Green-Wood in Brooklyn.

 

            That life is for the living no sane person would dispute.  Its spiritual tense is future—at least until it isn’t.  We spend a great deal of time in hope or apprehension pondering futurities—our own, our children’s and grandchildren’s, our nation’s, the future of food, medical care, race relations, classical music, whatever.  All this is done, however, beneath the shadow of a preterit destiny that becomes ever more importunate with advancing age.  In the midst of life we are in death—a beautiful line from the old burial service, and the English of a Latin liturgical hymn going back at least to the fourteenth century.  I do not regard it as the life-denying downer that many take it to be.  I take it instead to be a reverent and poetic statement of fact that recognizes our own participation in the universality of human life, which has an ending even as it had a beginning and a past as well as a prospective history.  Far from being macabre, a few carved stones in the south forty could be an encouraging reminder that your own animated vitality was not your personal invention.  It came as a gift and can be passed on as one.

Intransigent Transition

 

            One hesitates to try to make light of a situation that so many serious and substantial people quite seriously view as an unprecedented national crisis, but I at least would make a plea.  Eartha Kitt, an inventive popular singer of my college years,  at one point had a hit song that went “If I can’t take it with me when I go, I just ain’t going to go.”  Perhaps even some of those who enjoyed her song were not aware that Ms. Kitt’s theme, which she pushed with a kind of edgy irreverence, plays off the common doctrine of many of our most solemn religious and secular moral traditions.  The theme is summarized in the title of one of Dr. Johnson’s poems, itself an imitation of the Latin satirist Juvenal, “The Vanity of Human Wishes”.  According to Aristotle the fall from power, prestige, authority, and material sufficiency, allowed or encouraged by some moral blemish or transgression, is the very pattern of tragedy.  According to Boethius, supposed happiness dependent on the possession or enjoyment of what can be taken away, cannot be true happiness.  Returning to the realm of catchy popular music the Beach Boys reminded us that among such items are Thunderbirds.  Just at the moment we seem to have a problem with our President, Donald Trump.  Because Daddy—in the form of the American electorate—really has taken the T-bird away.

 

            Though by the end it seemed to me likely that Trump would lose, that was by no means an easily foreseeable certain outcome, the pre-election polls being mainly expressions of wishful thinking on the part of the liberal press.  What was perfectly foreseeable was that if he were a loser, he’d be a sore one.  How can anyone have been shocked, shocked by the President’s tantrum, which was perfectly predictable and had in effect been predicted by Mr. Trump himself?  I was more surprised by the number of sore winners.  It is no doubt always discouraging to feel that one is voting against something rather than for something, and a very large number of Mr. Biden’s votes must have been in that category.  It is much easier  to strike back indignantly at the flamboyant mendacities  of the aged impresario of “The Apprentice” than to burst with enthusiasm for the long-practiced mediocrity of an aged career politician who has been running for the presidency for forty years.  But the Democrats did win the presidency, and while the nature of the victory was not of the sort that can sustain arrogance, it was clear and decisive and  should encourage all of us to get on with the job.  Our press could help by concentrating on this aspect of the situation rather than on endless whining about the latest episode of presidential petulance.  Why should the loser’s losing be a greater story than the winner’s winning?

 

            Many wise commentators whose political wisdom far exceeds my own say that the reason is that Trump’s current posture is an actual existential threat to American democracy.  It is perhaps presumptuous to disagree with a whole college of experts, but I think they are selling America and Americans short.  It is true that political rancor and division within the land are acute.  A rancorous atmosphere has been spreading, and poisonous attitudes cultivated, for many years.  The President has been no small part of this, but he is not alone.  I am also prepared to believe that my personal innocence of Facebook and Twitter leave me ignorant of the dimensions of the “social media” aspect of all this.  One of my own sons, whom I would rank among wise men, tells me, gently, that I simply don’t know the half of what has been going on.  But I still think that if we are susceptible to being swept up in a Q-Anon plot, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings

 

            Having reached this point in my essay, the Tuesday newspaper arrived with a banner headline: TRANSITION TO BIDEN ADMINISTRATION BEGINS.  As I am unlikely to get another chance to be prophetic, I’ll have to be satisfied with claiming this prophecy retrospectively.  Mr. Trump has shown no hint of graciousness, but in this context a mere whiff of realism may be satisfactory.  Perhaps he can view the results of the election as he has viewed his previous string of bankruptcies, as evidences not of personal failure but of the reluctance or actual inability of the common mind to appreciate great ideas and true genius.  And then there was the fortuitous and  malign intervention of the “Chinese virus”.  As for the President-elect, the entire nation owes him best wishes and moral support as he addresses major challenges affecting all of us, but who would envy him his job?  Apart from one well-known person, that is.

 

            Invitations to a universal and nonpartisan comity may seem preposterous under the circumstances, but if Lincoln could issue one in the middle of the Civil War we should not be shy of trying now.  And as a matter of fact certain important issues of general interest, free of the most obvious contaminations of partisan interest,  did emerge from this mess.  Would it not be a good idea, for example, at least with regard to the offices of president and vice-president, if we had clearly articulated uniform  national voting regulations and procedures worthy of a first-world country?  Specific aspects of the arrangements are less important than their impartiality, uniformity, and practicality.  For efficiency’s sake one would hope that state and local elections could fall under the same governance.  Next concern: income taxes.  This arises from the peripheral issue of the drama of Donald Trump’s tax records.  I am enough of a libertarian to doubt that anyone should be compelled to make public such private information, but also  sufficiently intelligent  to find the President’s stated reasons for refusing to do so laughably contrived.  But some records did become public, and the subject of wide public discussion.   I do not accuse the President of any illegality.  On the contrary, my fear is that his preposterous calculations might be entirely legal.  Legality would demonstrate the gross unfairness of a system rigged in favor of very wealthy people.  The architecture of this system—the moral equivalent of geographical gerrymandering--can only be the result of the effective intervention by special lobbies working on pliable legislators.  I hope that its prominent exposure might lead to some obviously desirable reforms, though if good sense will not move our congressmen, I doubt that embarrassment can.  What would embarrass many of them would shame a hog to death.

 

 

Hall-Mills

 

The unfortunate lovers

       

        I have lived in New Jersey for well over half my life, but I spent the first several decades in a kind of residential denial.  I lived there, but I could not face up to being from there on account of certain dumb prejudices about turnpike exits, oil refineries, and Atlantic City casinos.  I longed for the rural wilds of my rapidly mythologizing youth.  Very gradually, though, I have come to appreciate that New Jersey is one of the really interesting places on earth both in terms of its geology and its human ecology; and there are few places in the Ozarks more gorgeously placed deep in the sticks than my son’s old farm thirty miles away in Hunterdon County.

 

            Just at the moment I am focusing on crime in New Jersey, especially murder.  I don’t know that there is measurably more of it here than most places, but from the historical point of view it seems to me more interesting and pace-setting.  Not too many actual murders become the stuff of compelling literature after Shakespeare’s time, but one can think of Dreiser’s great American Tragedy or Meyer Levin’s barely fictional Compulsion before getting to masterworks of non-fiction like Capote’s In Cold Blood or Joan Didion on the Manson clan.  But in the recent Library of America anthology,* True Crime, the top homicidal century, the twentieth, is represented by no fewer than three all-time greats from central New Jersey alone.  Each of them received prophetically sensational news coverage.  I don’t know that this essay will be the first in a series, but let me begin with Hall-Mills.  Hall-Mills was not a piece of mind-dulling tax legislation, but a sizzling scandal and tabloid bonanza.  It may not have been “the greatest story since the Resurrection,” Mencken’s memorable characterization of the Lindbergh kidnapping case for which Hall-Mills was the journalistic warm-up, but at the time it was the hottest thing to hit central Jersey since Granny got her titty caught in the wringer.

 

            There are several Episcopal churches in New Brunswick.  One is large and ancient.  It was one of the official venues from which the Declaration of Independence was publicly proclaimed, and its churchyard preserves the remains of Revolutionary War heroes.  I know this church well, as my wife was its rector for a decade in the 1990s.  Another, St. John the Evangelist, dates from the Civil War and still holds on, though greatly reduced in size and entirely without the social glitz it appears to have commanded in the Roaring Twenties, when its rector, the Rev. Edward W. Hall, cut quite a figure in the old Dutch town.  Hall was married to a wealthy heiress of the old aristocracy, and in this instance figure-cutting included a red-hot and  insufficiently concealed affair with a woman named Eleanor Mills, choir member and wife of the church sexton.

 

            In September, 1922, a young man and his teen-aged girlfriend strolling along a secluded country lane west of town, came upon two corpses under a crabapple tree, eventually identified as the remains of the scandalous lovers just mentioned.  Both had been shot through the head, the woman three times.  Eleanor Mills had also had her throat slit and her tongue excised, though in Keystone Cops fashion the authorities failed to notice the lacuna!  The utter brutality of the murders had been superficially disguised by the arrangement of  the bodies in positions of restful, mild intimacy.  The police thought that the pages of love letters decorating the carnage possibly offered  a significant clue as to motive.  New Brunswick, whose police were first called to the scene, is in Middlesex County.  But the horror site, by presumption also the murder site,  was in Franklin Township, Somerset County.  While the Jersey authorities puzzled over jurisdictional issues incomprehensible since the time of James II, the hastily informed  populations of two counties gawked and trampled about the grim tableau gathering souvenir crabapple leaves and bloody shards of love letter and befouling the crime scene beyond forensic redemption.  It’s not the crime.  It’s not the cover-up.  It’s the constabulary incompetence.

 

The unusual suspects

            Nobody was convicted of the killings, and nobody absolutely knows for sure who dunnit.  One intriguing recent theory is that it was the Ku Klux Klan, vigilant guardians of public morality.  But…come on.  About the only theory at the time, and certainly the most probable one still, was that it was the work of or on behalf of the wronged blueblood wife, Frances and/or her peculiar relatives, two brothers--Henry Stevens and William (‘Willie”) Stevens and their cousin Henry de la Bruyere Carpender.   Ordinarily it would be obvious that anybody named Henry de la Bruyere Carpender had to have done it, or something worse; but he was never actually tried, and this time you would be safer putting your money on Willie Stevens, who in addition to being a most peculiar man who lived in a foggy thicket  somewhere along the spectrum, boasted credentials as an ace pistolier.  His chief, if not only regular employment, voluntary of course, was hanging out and schmoozing with the guys at the firehouse.  He seems to have been a man who covered some serious  inner darkness with the outward eccentricity of a trust fund simpleton.

 

            Sensational court trials almost naturally take on a theatrical cast, especially those dubbed by the press “the trial of the century,” of which there are seldom fewer than three per decade.  And hot pants in high places has ever been a guaranteed sell with the American people.  Midwifed by the press, the Hall-Mills trial, featuring the three aforementioned Stevens siblings, finally took place in 1926,   There are fascinating legal and evidentiary aspects of the case--the sadistic misogyny suggested in the overkill of Eleanor Mills, for example.   Just now my two principal interests in it  are somewhat eccentric.  The first has to do with the dramatic suburbanization of New Jersey in the middle of the last century.  Before World War II the murder site, a modest walk from central New Brunswick, was such rural and untraveled farmland that the bodies lay in place for the better part of two days before being discovered.  The old lovers’ lane is now overwhelmed with McMansions, fast food joints, and a heavily traveled highway.  I have seen a good deal of this happen while living here.  The second concerns a recurrent pattern of theatrical type-casting.

 

            All mysteries mystify, but many famous American murder cases in their dramaturgy strangely feature, in addition to the principals (beleaguered or defiant defendants, celebrity lawyers), what might be called a designated Best Supporting Actor.  Surely you will remember Kato Kaelen from the O. J. Simpson trial?  He became, quite literally, a household name, more familiar to most Americans than the names of their political representatives.  Where do the Kato Kaeilins of the legal world come from?  They are not in the pages of Blackstone.  The Kato Kaelen of Hall-Mills was the pig farmer through whose land the death-lane cut its path.  She had a name (Jane Gibson), but she lives in history as the Pig Lady.  The Pig Lady was eccentric and seriously ill.  By the time of the trial she had to be brought to the courtroom on a pallet.  Over two long investigations she provided the police with a great deal of testimony, contradictory and incoherent, but colorful and captivating.  With so much available, the prosecutors chose the best and forgot the rest.  Her tale was this: During a nocturnal mule-ride along her lonely lane in pursuit of “wagon noises” and suspected thieves, she had come upon the murder scene, illuminated by automobile lights, as the crime was happening, was about to happen, or had just happened.  Yes, she could identify the defendants, but she had hurried her steed along home when she realized trouble was brewing, or perhaps was already poured out in its second cup.  While she testified from her prone position her mother, a demented crone, sat prominently in the courtroom muttering “She’s lying…lying.” 

 

Testimony of the Pig Lady

 

            Wily Willie Stevens hardly batted an eye at this testimony, coolly treating it with the scorn with which he so obviously wanted it be be viewed.  Willie Stevens is perhaps the most remarkable  member of this varied dramatis personae.  In 1937 he was the subject of a fascinating New Yorker essay by James Thurber, “A Sort of Genius,” that recaptured my own interest in the case when I read it last week.  This was not at all Thurber’s normal line of work.  He was one of America’s great humorists, not a crime reporter, but here we find him strangely serious, though not a little sardonic.  He doesn’t say it in so many words, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks that Willie Stevens, so expert in convincing others of his own simple-mindedness, was indeed a genius—a homicidal one.

 

*True Crime: An American Anthology (350 Years of Brilliant Writing About Dark Deeds), ed. Harold Schechter (Library of America. 2008), 788 pages.  Thurber’s essay, “A Sort of Genius,” is at pp. 382-406.

 

Leafing and Loafing

 

 

 

            October exited these parts in a somewhat unpleasant manner.  The days already became short and dark even before we turned the clocks back.  Chill winds seemed to threaten a cold and early winter.  It was all the more delightful, therefore, as well as thematically appropriate, when the weather turned full Indian Summer just after election day—bright, crisp, sunny days with clear cool nights, extending over several days and still going strong as I write this.  The foliage has been particularly notable.  So much early cool and wet weather seems to have retarded for an extra week the tincturing of the leaves, but all of a sudden they have turned bright and are falling in profusion.  Along the gutters of most of the roads in our neighborhood are long leaf mountains waiting for the big, noisy trucks  to take them away.  A few days ago in the late afternoon we sat in the yard listening to the nearly silent scraping of dry locust leaves against the lower branches of the tree from which they floated down.  Half the leaves on a large tree must have fallen in half an hour.

 

            I lack a therapy dog, but a lot of the rest of my life is therapeutical, such as my recently acquired “happy light” and my daily walk in the mini-park across the street.  This spot, which I have written about before, is the former site of a graduate housing project dating back to the end of World War II.  The University removed all the buildings, but left the mature trees, which are numerous and varied.  Circling and criss-crossing along the old street grids, now looking nearly as ancient as the Appian Way, I do almost three miles in my daily perambulation.  For the past two weeks of cool weather, the local leaf-peeping has been superb, but in dry weather a fallen leaf soon shrivels.  The photo at the top of the post is of a batch gathered on Monday.  That is probably my last of the year.  Winter really is around the corner.

 

            Thinking about leaves in one way soon leads to thinking about them in another.  For an English professor one other way is particularly obvious.  Leaf is a very old word in our language, unchanged in its spelling (though not its pronunciation) for more than a thousand years.  And already in Old English it had the double sense of Latin folium—the leaf of a tree, the leaf of a book.  A third meaning was a shoot of any kind of vegetation.  Several factors account for the richness of the English vocabulary.  One of the most important is that we tend to have both a Germanic and a Romance word for so many nouns and verbs.  So far as leaves are concerned, the Latin folium (French feuille) has left many active progeny, such as foliation, folic acid (from green vegetable leaf), and portfolio.  Walking in the place just described with my young grandson before the pandemic, I came upon a happy linguistic epiphany.  He lives in Montreal and goes to a French school, and he sometimes throws in a French word if he doesn’t happen to know the right English one.  Walking past a lush patch of clover, his eyes lit up.  “Trèfle” he cried out in recognition.  I actually know that word in French, though only when he said it did I grasp its etymology—trefoil, (trois feuilles) three leaves.

 

            As noted above, the parallel botanical and bibliographical meanings of a leaf are already fully developed in classical Latin.  Of many materials used as surfaces for recording the written word, by far the most common has been vegetable stuff, leaves, bark, processed wood fiber.  Our very word for paper is the name of the papyrus plant of the Nile delta.  Specially treated animal skin is more durable, but also very expensive.  So we still leaf through a book, just as we may hope in our metaphoric life to turn over a new leaf to find a better way.

 

                                                                                     Walt Whitman

 

            Inevitably I had to go to a bookshelf and take down my copy of Walt Whitman.  I have never really thought too deeply about the title of his amazing masterpiece, Leaves of Grass.  There are leaves on trees and many other plants, but are there leaves of grass?  Surely the proper English term is blade of grass?  The word Whitman himself uses in the first lines of “Song of Myself,” the extraordinary first movement of Leaves of Grass, is spear: “I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass”.  Both of those terms (blade, spear) are military, referring to thinly-beaten and sharpened metal.  From the French side the relevant word is foil, as in a fencer’s sword.  Beaten tin or aluminum is tinfoil or aluminum foil; but finely beaten gold is gold-leaf.  Here the defining feature is thinness, just as it is with paper—or with a blade, a spear, or a leaf of grass.  In his substantial prose preface to his vast poem Whitman makes the explicit claim that his language is particularly suited for his national theme.  “The English language befriends  the grand American expression. . . . it is brawny enough and limber and full enough.”  

 

            Whitman followed many lines of work in his vagabond career, among them that of a trained printer.  Nineteenth-century printing was a large, expanding, labor-intensive industry in America.  He was not the only major American literary figure who made books in more senses than one.  Naturally he also had experience as a journalist and editor, and there are throughout his writings numerous passages in which his vocabulary reflects a printer’s expertise.  In “Song of Myself” he says somewhat cryptically that paper and types are unsuitable for the task he has undertaken.  What, then is suitable?  I believe that the answer to that must be leaves—leaves of grass.  There is a strange moment early in his book concerning a small child, presumably, like the poet himself, another “loafer” on the grass.  “A child said, What is the grass?  fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.”  But the leaves of grass, surely, are the copious and varied, indeed nearly encyclopedic materials of his vast panorama of the American land and the American soul.  The poems themselves are leaves, or woven from them.

 

            As a printer, too, he knew the specialized meaning of the borrowed Latin term folio (“in the [single] leaf”), meaning the largest size of printed book, made by printing very large sheets of paper folded only once, resulting in four pages , two recto and two verso, front and back, of formatted book.  This is not the format in which Leaves of Grass was actually printed, but it invokes the kind of maximalism the poet must have had in his mind in writing such a bold and abundant poem.  If you think as I do that too many of our poets today tend to shy away from great projects and grand designs, you might hope with me that more would take a leaf out of Whitman’s book.

 

                                                      a set of folios from my library--each volume about 18 inches tall