WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman
a baby-faced younger Lothario with a glazed expression and weird giggle. Thaw developed a reputation as a dope fiend with a violent temper. He made frequent use of laudanum and carried a special silver case filled with syringes for injecting his own drug cocktails, which reportedly included the original “speedball” mixing cocaine, morphine and heroin.
Like the lawyers for Czolgosz, Thaw’s lawyers pleaded insanity as a defense to gunning down his victim in front of hundreds of witnesses. Yet the public reaction to Thaw’s crime, the nature of the trial, and its outcome were vastly different – a reflection obviously of the magnitude of Czolgosz’s crime, but also of the difference in the two men’s class, their wealth and their rationale. With Mother Thaw footing the bill, Thaw had the best defense they could buy. In an era when so many Americans openly supported vigilante justice, Thaw invoked an age-old chauvinistic code of ethics that reinforced traditional community values vilifying debauchers of young virgins. His crime was not perceived to threaten society; it provided an entertaining lesson in morals.
Within a week of White’s shooting, inventor Thomas Edison’s New York movie studio churned out a short, dramatic reenactment, Rooftop Murder, which instantly attracted the most nickels in thousands of arcades across the country. By then, the new art of silent picture shows was well on its way to drawing 30 million fascinated people a week. Postcards of Evelyn Nesbit sold out so quickly that printers kept their presses going around the clock, generating millions more. As voyeurs flocked to nickelodeons and souvenir vendors, moralists on and off the pulpit, appalled by the city’s sexual permissiveness, applauded Thaw’s defense of his wife’s honor. Monsters like White who ruined young girls deserved to be shot.
When even Adolph Ochs’ dignified New York Times played up the murder of Stanford White in effusive detail, a consensus was reached. The prosecution of millionaire Harry Thaw for killing high-society architect Stanford White would be the “trial of the century.”8 The New York World’s editor Frank Cobb drooled over the irresistible cast of characters: “rich old wasters, delectable young chorus girls and adolescent artists’ models . . . artists and jaded debauchees . . . Bowery toughs, Harlem gangsters, Tenderloin panderers, Broadway leading men, Fifth Avenue clubmen, Wall Street manipulators, uptown voluptuaries and downtown thugs.”9
The seamy side of the city’s elite captivated everyone from housewives to professionals, society matrons and political reformers. Most members of the public responded with gratitude to Thaw for the public service he performed. Exposure of the dirty linen of society leaders like White who did not follow rules of behavior expected of everyone else had great appeal to the disgruntled laboring class: Jews in the lower East Side, the denizens of Little Italy and Harlem, the Irish, and other European immigrants riding on the new subway system to and from their back-breaking, underpaid jobs and overcrowded slums.
In 1906 the desperate poverty and exhausting work schedules of millions of new immigrants caused simmering resentment of the upper class, but little concerted action. In exploiting the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of Stanford White, Hearst delighted in creating a wide audience for salacious details about White’s immoral social circle of plutocrats and the sordid side of New York’s theater life. Soon everyone who read the tabloids learned of the “girl on the red velvet swing” that White had hung from the ceiling of one of his Manhattan love nests. They read every horrifying detail of how the debaucher asked each of his young conquests to swing back and forth both in childlike innocence and in various stages of undress while he looked on in lecherous anticipation of bedding his prey.
By the time of trial in January of 1907, publicity about the case had become so pervasive that the lawyers had to question six hundred men before they could agree on an unbiased jury. Women were not eligible for jury service at the time. The judge decided to sequester the jury to keep them from being tainted – reportedly a first. Journalists swarmed all over, including newly hired female reporters mockingly dubbed “The Pity Patrol” for their maudlin descriptions of Evelyn Nesbit’s plight. Soon newswomen who appealed to their readers’ sympathy would become known as sob sisters.10
The prosecutor was a Republican, former judge William Travers Jerome, a talented district attorney with his eye – like Hearst – both on the governor’s office and the White House. Why not? President Teddy Roosevelt was himself former Governor of New York. Though Jerome had earned his reputation by routing out vice and corruption, he did not let marriage impede him from dallying with a woman twenty years his junior. In fact, Jerome traveled in the same social circles as White and should not have accepted the lead role in a trial involving so many friends as potential witnesses.
Thaw’s original trial counsel was veteran New York attorney Lewis Delafield. Delafield came highly recommended by the family’s corporate lawyers, but soon lost Thaw’s trust. Jerome had originally approached Delafield with a practical solution: to have Thaw sent to an asylum instead of an expensive trial where he might risk execution. The very idea of pleading insanity met with strong resistance from both Thaw and his mother. Thaw fired the man he called “the traitor.” The family only agreed to try the case on a plea of temporary insanity based on provocation by White’s conduct. Mrs. Thaw had no intention of airing family secrets, including her son’s history of bizarre behavior.
The trial opened with Delafield’s partner Gleason presenting a confused array of defenses. Contrary to the Thaws’ instructions, the defenses included inherited tendencies toward mental instability. After a heated conference, Gleason volunteered his resignation. His replacement was renowned San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Delphin Delmas. “The legal Napoleon of San Francisco”11 had never lost a case. His celebrated victories included a murder trial of a Californian who had similarly avenged the honor of a close female relative by killing her debaucher.
Delmas had a term for the defense he would present for Thaw: “Dementia Americana.” The concept first surfaced in a United States courtroom shortly before the Civil War. Lawyers for New York Congressman (and future Union general) Daniel Sickles had used it successfully to exonerate Sickles for killing his wife’s lover, the son of famed lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key. Unlike the Sickles case, by the time this trial ended, Mrs. Thaw would pour more than a million dollars into her son’s defense, including $500,000 for Delmas and an equal amount on a dozen medical experts. The doctors would offer testimony on a new concept they called a “brain storm,” by which they meant temporary interference with rational functions. Mrs. Thaw embraced the opportunity to avoid reference to her son’s past behavior patterns as well as his feeble-minded uncles.
Delmas focused on transforming Stanford White from victim to villain, the man whose lechery caused Thaw’s brain storm. To accomplish his aim, Delmas turned to Evelyn Thaw as his star witness. He would leave his unpredictable client off the stand. With limited questions on direct examination, they could avoid having Evelyn mention Harry’s attack on her in Austria, his attempted suicide with laudanum, and other bizarre behavior. The risk was on cross-examination, but Evelyn gladly undertook to paint her husband in the best light possible. She did not want to see Harry executed; her own future support depended on doing her mother-in-law’s bidding and saving Harry’s life.
The day Evelyn Nesbit Thaw was called to the stand, thousands of would-be spectators tried to get in. But police and temporary barricades kept most of them out in the street. Dressed demurely in a long, navy blue suit and prim white blouse, Evelyn spoke in a soft, childish voice. The whole courtroom strained to hear her much-anticipated account. The basis for allowing Evelyn to tell her life story was that it had all been told to Harry Thaw and had motivated him to kill Stanford White. So Delmas started by having Evelyn explain how Thaw had proposed to her in Paris and how she had tearfully told Thaw that she could not marry him. Evelyn then revealed that she spent one long night explaining to Thaw why she would not make him a good wife. “He wanted every detail and I told him everything. He would sit and sob or walk up and down the room as I told him.”
At the defense table, Thaw became upset all over again. He sank down into his chair and shuddered. Evelyn described the poverty of her childhood after her father’s death; her life as a model in Philadelphia and New York and the publicity that led to her getting selected as a chorine, giving all the money she earned to “momma.” She had turned down the first invitation to a party