WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman
came from one of New York’s best families.
The incredulous prosecutor periodically interrupted Evelyn’s answers to defense counsel Delphin Delmas: “You told all this to Harry K. Thaw that night in Paris?” Evelyn affirmed she had. White and another man took her and a girl friend to see his three-story apartment on West Twenty-Fourth Street. The two girls took turns being pushed on a red velvet swing. A Japanese paper parasol hung from the ceiling that the two girls each punctured with their feet when they swung forward. White let her sip champagne. He offered to have a dentist fix her teeth. Finally, Evelyn reached the crux of the story – the night in November of 1901 when White invited her to a party at his apartment on West Twenty-Fourth Street. She said that she almost left when she saw no one else present, but White convinced her to stay for dinner, telling her perhaps the others had forgotten. He gave Evelyn a glass of champagne and after dinner took her up a back staircase to a sitting room filled with fine art and a piano. She played the piano briefly, and then he suggested she join him in the next room, a small bedroom all decorated in chintz.
Another split of champagne sat on a bedside table from which White poured her a glass. Evelyn put it down after a sip, not liking the taste, but at White’s urging she downed it all. Thaw hid his face behind his handkerchief. Evelyn said that her head began to buzz and she passed out. Thaw wept, his body heaving with emotion. The whole courtroom was otherwise still. Delmas paused for effect and then asked, “And, will you please, Madam, tell what happened when you regained consciousness?”
“I found myself in bed,” Evelyn replied. White was naked beside her. The walls were covered with mirrors. Blood now stained her leg. She told the courtroom that she started screaming. White took her home and she cried through the night.
“And you told all of this to Harry Thaw that night in Paris after he had asked you to marry him?” Delmas finished with a flourish.
“Yes,” Evelyn responded simply.12
Evelyn was forced to go through the whole story again under harsh cross-examination by Jerome. Jerome’s strategy was to demolish both Evelyn Thaw’s and Harry Thaw’s character. His witness list included handsome young John Barrymore. But Barrymore had left the state after being interviewed and declined to return, claiming he was ill with pneumonia. Jerome made do with a prize-winning 1901 photo of Evelyn sleeping on a bearskin rug, provocatively dressed in White’s borrowed kimono, as the “Little Butterfly.” As a surprise blow against both Evelyn and Harry, Jerome produced the affidavit Evelyn had signed and given White’s attorney, accusing Thaw of attacking her in Europe and of being a drug addict. The newspapers found that evidence sensational. Yet Jerome took the risk that he painted Harry Thaw as even crazier than the defense did.
In his argument to the jury after three months of trial, Jerome characterized Thaw as paranoid and dangerous, but technically sane. He knew right from wrong when he killed Stanford White. Delmas closed with his plea of insanity based on Dementia Americana:
The species of insanity which makes every American man believe his home to be sacred; that is the species of insanity which makes him believe the honor of his daughter is sacred; that is the species of insanity which makes him believe the honor of his wife is sacred; that is the species of insanity which makes him believe that whosoever invades his home, that whosoever stains the virtue of this threshold, has violated the highest of human laws and must appeal to the mercy of God, if mercy there be for him anywhere in the universe.13
The jury took two full days before they returned deadlocked, with seven jurors convinced of Thaw’s guilt and five convinced he was not guilty by reason of insanity. The standing-room-only courtroom erupted in a roar. Reporters rushed for the exits to write the result up for their papers. Thaw was deeply disappointed. He was headed back to jail pending a retrial when he had hoped to go free as the acclaimed defender of innocent girlhood.
The following January, in a less sensational retrial Thaw had a new chief defense counsel, Martin Littleton. Mrs. Thaw had finally realized that she could best save her son from conviction by giving far more ammunition to the temporary insanity defense. She offered up details of trauma experienced by Thaw in utero, serious illnesses he suffered as a child, and many instances of weird behavior. The tales his mother had done her best to keep private over the years included Thaw’s history of writhing uncontrollably with a movement disorder (either from rheumatic fever or epilepsy), wild temper tantrums in which he threw china and heavy objects at servants, an attention-grabbing suicide attempt as a teenager, and his propensity for babbling like a baby even as a young man.
During the first trial, the names of White’s friends and associates as well as chorus girls other than Evelyn were deliberately kept from public airing to protect their reputations. By the time of the second trial in 1908 no one involved came out unscathed. The public did not feel sorry for the victim, nor did they empathize much with his crazed, self-indulgent attacker. Evelyn Nesbit also was impugned as a gold digger with the spread of false rumors that she was paid a million dollars for her teary-eyed testimony. No faith remained in innocence as the 20th century emerged with a full-blown exposé of the immoral excesses of New York’s moneyed class.
Thaw’s tendency to lash out violently when angry and Evelyn’s new testimony about his suicide attempt with laudanum made it far easier for the second jury to decide that Thaw was not guilty of murdering White by reason of insanity. The judge announced that Thaw was a danger to public safety and would be committed to an asylum. Thaw flew into a rage. He had expected to be set free. Seven years later, in 1915, Thaw was declared sane and released. He and Evelyn divorced soon afterward. By 1917, Thaw was rearrested for whipping a teenage boy and was sent back to an asylum for another seven years. Even after his final release, Thaw faced periodic civil claims from showgirls he dated, who claimed he whipped them. None of these claims ever went to trial as his enormous inheritance came in handy yet again.
Evelyn Nesbit later penned two memoirs, one in 1934, Prodigal Days: The Untold Story of Evelyn Nesbit, and one twenty years earlier that would not be edited and published for ninety years – Tragic Beauty: The Lost 1914 Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit. Harry Thaw wrote his own memoir, The Traitor. Stanford White’s murder inspired several other books and movies. Among them, E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 fictionalized Ragtime became the best known and was later adapted as a musical. In 2008, historian Paula Uruburu entranced audiences with her dramatic retelling of the tale in her book American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl and the Crime of the Century.
The first “trial of the century” was practically a scripted melodrama. Audiences found compelling the rags-to-riches story that Evelyn Nesbit Thaw told, raged against the power imbalance that led to her deflowering, and applauded Thaw’s revenge against the man who had “ruined” his wife. It gave new fodder to those who still viewed females as protected possessions of fathers and husbands. They condemned the decadence of big city life and agreed the lecherous victim had it coming to him. Yet what gave ubiquitous coverage of Stanford White’s murder its special oomph was how Thaw triggered new insights into the Gilded Age and permanently tarnished its most vaunted members.
As riveting as Thaw’s first trial had been, it was eclipsed within a month by a political murder trial that had labor directly pitted against capital. The charges that radical labor leader Big Bill Haywood ordered the assassination of Idaho’s ex-governor had obvious national implications. Though far to the left of most Americans, Haywood had developed a large following in the previous decade as an outspoken champion of the eight-hour day. In June of 1905 he helped convene representatives of militant unions, Socialists and anarchists at a “Continental Congress of the working class.” At that meeting, the revolutionaries co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies.”
The IWW was dedicated, like anarchist Emma Goldman and her followers, to the overthrow of the capitalist structure. The potential for the IWW’s radical message to rally millions of underpaid recent immigrants unnerved industrialists and Progressive reformers alike. President Roosevelt made it his personal mission to see Haywood executed and thereby decapitate his radical union. Socialist Party leader