The Thaw trial, and Stanford White’s character—ColonelⒶtextual note Harvey’s parable concerning the case, copied from Harper’s Weekly.
The most lurid cause célèbre Ⓐtextual note of modern ages is still before the court, but the most spectacular feature of it came to an end day before yesterday. This feature was the testimony of Mrs. Thaw, the slender and illustriously beautiful girl-wife of young Thaw, the fast youthⒶtextual note who is charged with the murder of the gifted and famous architect, Stanford WhiteⒺexplanatory note. Daily, for many days, the girl has been under fire on the witness-stand, and hour after hour she has answered the questions of the lawyers, with the result that the whole Christian world is now as intimately acquainted with the past six years and a half of her life as she is herself. From the time that she was fifteen and a half, and was setting all the scoundrels of New York crazy with her matchless beauty, until now, when she is twenty-two, all the details of her comings and her goings have gone into print; in all the Christian communities of the globe these details have appeared daily in interminable cablegrams and Associated Press dispatchesⒶtextual note, and have been devoured by everybody, and commented upon by all the newspapers; no such banquet of cowardly crime and mephitic filth has ever before been spread before the world; the like banquets have always been local, before, and hardly heard of outside of the local limits—but all the kings and emperors, all the high and all the low, all the clean and all the unclean, have fed at this horrible ThawⒶtextual note banquet and passed their plates for more.
The girl’s testimony exposes six years of Stanford White’s career also. The witness charges the middle-aged architect—who was rich, of the first renown in his profession, and possessed of a middle-aged wife and a grown-up son—with eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction. These facts have been well known in New York for many years, but they have never been openly proclaimed until now. On the witness-stand, in the hearing of a court roomⒶtextual note crowded with men, the girl told in the minutest detail the history of White’s pursuit of her, even down to the particulars of his atrocious victory—a victory whose particulars might well be said to be unprintable;Ⓐtextual note yet, with the exception of four abnormally hideous descriptive sentencesⒺexplanatory note, theyⒶtextual note were put in type in the daily newspapers and exhibited to the world.
New York has known for years that the highly educated and elaborately accomplished Stanford White was a shameless and pitiless wild beast disguised as a human being;Ⓐtextual note and few, if any, have doubted that he ought to have been butchered long ago, by some kindly friend of the human race.
Under our infamous laws the seducer is not punished, and is not even disgraced, but his victim and all her family and kindred are smirched with a stain which is permanent—a stain which the years cannot remove, nor even modify. Our laws break the hearts and ruin the lives of the victim and of her people, and let the seducer go freeⒺexplanatory note. I am not of a harsh nature—I am the reverse of that—and yet if I could have my way the seducer should be flayed alive in the middle of the public plaza, with all the world to look on.
[begin page 455]I have come into casual contact with Stanford White, now and then, in the course of the past fifteen or twenty years. He had a very hearty and breezy way with him, and he had the reputation of being limitlessly generous—toward men—and kindly,Ⓐtextual note accommodating, and free-handedⒶtextual note with his money—toward men; but he was never charged with having in his composition a single rag of pity for an unfriended woman. Notwithstanding his high and jovial spirits and his cordial ways, there was a subtle something about him that was repellent. I was not the only one that felt this; in times past others have mentioned this feeling to me. That splendid human being, Tom Reed, was one of these. When we were yachting in the West Indies with Henry RogersⒺexplanatory note several years ago, and were in the great lobby of the hotel in Nassau one day, the majestic figure of Stanford White appeared among the crowd, and he marched past with his gray-haired wife on his arm. Tom Reed said,
“He ranks as a good fellow, but I feel the dank air of the charnel-house when he goes by.”
The question now before the country is, ought the newspapers to be allowed to print the dreadful particulars of such a trial as the one which I have been speaking of? Good arguments have been put forth on both sides, and I have read them thoughtfully, but I find myself unable to settle upon an opinion as yet. Therefore, for lack of a view of my own, I will here transfer from Harper’s Weekly ColonelⒶtextual note Harvey’s parable, which I like because it justly and properly characterizes Stanford White.
The Man Who Ate BabiesⒺexplanatory note
The President of the United StatesⒶtextual note thinks that the papers that give “the full, disgusting particulars of the Thaw case” ought not to be admitted to the mails. Perhaps not. Perhaps the country at large does not need all the particulars, but in our judgment New York does need most of them, and it would be not a gain, but an injury, to morals if the newspapers were restrained from printing them.
We will try to explain.
Once there was a man who had the incomparable misfortune to be afflicted with a mania for eating babies. He was an extraordinary man, of astonishing vigor, of remarkable talents, of many engaging qualities, and of prodigious industry. He had education and social position; he could earn plenty of money; and the diligent exercise of his intellectual gifts made him valuable to society. There was nothing within reasonable reach of a man of his profession which he could not have, but over what should have been a splendid career hung always the shadow of his remarkable propensity. The precise dimensions and particulars of it were not definitely known to many persons. A few men who had a mania like his doubtless knew absolutely; a good many other men knew well enough; and there was practically a public property in the knowledge that he had, and gratified, cannibalistic inclinations of much greater intensity and more curious scope than those that commonly obtained among careless men. There was an honest prejudice against him. Persons of considerable indulgence to eccentricities of deportment disliked to be in the same room with him. Sensitive stomachs instinctively rose against him. Yet he was tolerated, for, after all, nobody had ever seen him eat a baby.
One day another man—quite a worthless person—knocked him on the head, [begin page 456] and let his pitiable spirit escape from its body. It made a great stir, for the man who was killed was very widely known, and his assailant was also notorious. There followed profuse discussion of the dead man’s character, qualities, and achievements. His record was assailed, but it was also warmly extenuated. When it was averred that he was an ogre, the retort was that he was not a materially worse ogre than a lot of other men, and that we must take men as we find them, and make special allowances for men of talent. When it was whispered that he ate babies the answer was that that was absurd; that whatever his failings, he was the helpfulest, best-natured man in the world, and particularly fond of children and good to them; and that if he ever did eat babies he was always careful where he got them, avoiding the nurseries of his acquaintances, and selecting common babies of ordinary stock, who were born to be eaten, anyway, and would never be missed, and who, besides, were in many cases not so young as they made out.
So the discussion went on, and waxed and waned as the months passed. But one day there was set up a great white screen, big enough for all the world to see, and over against it was placed a lantern that threw a light of wonderful intensity, and then came a person named Nemesis, with something under her arm, and took charge of the lantern. And then there fluttered forth all day on the great screen the moving picture of the poor monomaniac and a baby—how he found her, enticed her, cajoled her, and finally took her to his lair, prepared her for the table, and ate her up.
Well; it was said that the picture was shocking, and that the public ought not to have been allowed to see it. Oh yes, it was shocking; never picture more so. But it was terribly well adapted to make it unpopular to eat babies.Ⓐtextual note
most lurid cause célèbre . . . gifted and famous architect, Stanford White] On 25 June 1906, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw (1871–1947) fatally shot renowned architect Stanford White (1853–1906) as he sat watching a play at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden. Thaw had a history of sexual violence, drug abuse, and mental instability. His trial for murder began in January 1907, Thaw claiming he had been tormented by thoughts of White’s earlier intimacy with Evelyn Nesbit (1884–1967), the artist’s model and chorus girl with whom both men had had affairs, starting when she was sixteen years old, and whom Thaw had married in 1905 at age twenty-one. Evelyn Nesbit Thaw was called to the stand on 7 February; in twenty days of testimony she put forward the case that White was a seducer who had plied her with drugs. Thaw’s lawyers argued that he suffered from “dementia Americana,” a previously unknown ailment wherein zealousness in defense of female chastity turns into uncontrollable violence. The trial ended with a deadlocked jury on 12 April. In a second trial the next year, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity; he was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane, from which he escaped in 1913. He was captured and tried for conspiracy; yet two years later he was pronounced sane and released (Mooney 1976, 22–28, 244–62, 266–73, and passim).
with the exception of four abnormally hideous descriptive sentences] These “hideous” sentences have not been recovered. Clemens could have heard them repeated by any of several friends who were involved in the case, such as District Attorney William T. Jerome, the prosecutor, or Martin W. Littleton, who later became Thaw’s chief attorney at his second trial, in 1908 ( MTB, 3:1406–7; Mooney 1976, 244, 266).
Under our infamous laws . . . the seducer go free] In a 1903 article published in Harper’s Weekly (“Why Not Abolish It?”) Clemens had given vent to his view that the age of consent should be abolished, arguing that it shifts the burden of guilt from the males (who seduce) to the females (who are seduced). He returns to this theme in the Autobiographical Dictation of 20 April 1907 (SLC 1903e).
splendid human being, Tom Reed . . . we were yachting in the West Indies with Henry Rogers] In April 1902 Clemens sailed to the Bahamas on Rogers’s yacht, the Kanawha; among the other guests was Thomas B. Reed (1839–1902). Reed was trained in the law and served as a Republican congressman from Maine from 1877 to 1899, and as the very powerful Speaker of the House for much of that time, resigning when President McKinley decided to go to war with Spain. Clemens enjoyed Reed’s company, calling him a “delightful & irresistible old bullfrog,” and they passed much of their time on the cruise playing poker and arguing about politics (7 Aug 1902 to Rogers, CU-MARK, in HHR, 496; MTB, 3:1162–63).
Colonel Harvey’s parable . . . The Man Who Ate Babies] George Harvey, the president of Harper and Brothers as well as the editor of Harper’s Weekly, published his parable in the March issue of that magazine (Harvey 1907).
Source documents.
Harper’s Facsimile of Harper’s Weekly (the original clipping that Hobby transcribed is now lost), 2 March 1907, 51: 296: ‘The Man . . . eat babies.’ (455.21–456.24).TS1 Typescript carbon (the ribbon copy is lost), leaves numbered 1871–77, made from Hobby’s notes and Harper’s, and revised.
TS1, a carbon copy, was made by Hobby from her notes, and revised by Clemens. For the text of Harvey’s “parable,” Hobby copied the article from Harper’s Weekly; this text too received some alterations from Clemens’s hand. We follow the magazine text, as revised by Clemens.