Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  That day, a search was made of the barracks. A letter was found addressed from Adkins, who had been a carpenter during the camp’s construction, to Sergeant Penland, who was currently in the Army Cooks and Bakers School. Penland, at one time, had been Adkins’s bunkmate.

  Dear Friend:

  Will now try to write you a few lines to ask a favor of you as well as to tell you what to do in order to get tickets to the dance free. I am helping Mrs. Humiston by doing (keep this to yourself) some detective work in regards to girls under 17 years of age being enticed from their homes to white slavery and I have told her about the way girls done near the ice plant when we were working on same one Sunday and also about two girls being found dead near the camp while I was working there, and now she wants as many of your sergeants 1st class as she can get to do so to come over to her office and tell her what you know about the conditions of the camp and how the girls stay over night there.

  Come over Wednesday and bring all the men you can get to come with you and I will show you all a good time. Hoping to see you all on Wednesday evening and with best wishes to all the boys I am

  Your Friend,

  Jas. C. Adkins

  435 East 15th St.

  The letter was dated November 20, five days after Grace’s speech before the Women Lawyers Association.

  On November 26, Grace received a telegram from Secretary of War Baker. “You are quoted in morning papers as making serious charges against United States soldiers,” he wrote. “It is requested that you come to Washington immediately.”

  “I made no serious charges against United States soldiers,” Grace replied. “But at a dinner of women lawyers, I mentioned certain conditions which have been reported personally and by letter to my office. Mr. Fosdick’s telegram is not expressive of the sentiment of my address.” Grace offered to work for six months—for free—to help the Department of War get to the truth. She even hoped that she and Major Bell would become good friends. “It takes two to make a right, you know” she said.

  William H. Zinsser, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Civilian Co-operation in Combating Social Diseases, had his own views on Grace’s behavior regarding Camp Upton. “She has not been willing to cooperate with any of the bodies that have been working to see whether anything has been done or to report any ‘hearsay evidence’ that has come to her,” he said. “She rather chooses to adopt a sensational method of flaunting a hysterical charge, outlining a condition which does not exist, and perhaps in one interview doing more to spoil the work of months than anything which has yet come before the public, at least in this locality.”

  The next day at Grace’s office, two military men walked in. They were not potential clients. They sat down with Grace and Miss Francis to take their official statements. Grace admitted to the whole plan of sending the couple to Upton. The only reason Grace’s plan had failed was because of a dance she gave a few days previous where one of the attendees—Sergeant Penland—saw Miss Francis for the first time. On the night of Adkins and Francis’s secret visit to Upton, Penland recognized her as she passed him by in camp. He then tipped off the military police and Secret Service, who hightailed it to the hotel room.

  The press, who had begged Grace for evidence during this long ordeal, were not kind to her now. The New-York Tribune editorialized that “Mrs. Humiston may, in her way be doing what she considers good work, but is it necessary that twenty-five or thirty thousand members of a United States army unit, or any other organization, should have their character shaded in this manner?” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it “a disgraceful experiment”:

  Charges of wholesale immorality at Camp Upton or any other camp are not to be sustained by casual experiments designed to trap hotel clerks, they are to be sustained only by the production of evidence. No such evidence has been presented by Mrs. Humiston. All that has been so far received from her is a proposal that if the Government pay her expenses she will go after the “evidence.” The Government does not need to waste a penny on her. An indignant public opinion has sufficiently discounted her charges.… To the man who lent himself to this disgraceful experiment nothing need be said.… As to the girl … she should be removed by law, if need be, from all contact with the woman who employed her on this disgusting errand.

  “I hesitate to say anything which would seem to dignify the activities and statements of Mrs. Humiston,” declared Secretary of War Baker. “What she has so far done seems to have begun in irresponsible slander upon the army and ended in a futile and disgusting trick.”

  Soldiers are not saints.… Reformers, too, are only human, and frequently a misguided zeal o’ertops judgment. Mrs. Humiston’s motivations may have been admirable. Her performance has been deplorable, and its effects vicious beyond description. A scandalous accusation has been lodged, not against individual soldiers or cantonments, but against soldiers in general, facts to sustain which have not yet been produced by this woman. The charge has been spread far and wide, and wearers of the uniform have been discredited, regardless of their personal character. Yet the most discreditable thing in the whole affair has been done and admitted by Mrs. Humiston itself. Any servant of this country should be free from the attack of sensation mongers.

  Government officials and reporters were calling her claim of six hundred girls “the greatest exaggeration” and added that she was simply “seeing things that ain’t.”

  Grace had apologized for her methods but was sticking to her story that she had evidence of vice at Camp Upton. She told the papers that she had three cases with facts that were “absolutely straight” and would vindicate her. She said that she had evidence of two infantry soldiers who had attacked two fourteen-year-old girls and held them in a Bronx rooming house for ten days. Grace kept repeating that the army had actually instructed her to investigate Upton in the first place as part of a secret operation. Fosdick disagreed: “The army has not been directed to cooperate with her in her investigation.” He was quoted in the Upton newsletter, the Trench and Camp, that she had not “one scintilla of evidence.”

  Grace finally had a meeting with Major Gardner of the inspector general’s office on Governor’s Island, which lasted three hours. According to Grace, she furnished him with full affidavits and witness reports about the three cases, including the Bronx kidnapping. But the commander of the regiment refused to place the men Grace named under arrest. Grace’s response was biting: “If more of our Generals were like General Pershing and would order men shot who attack women, we would have fewer problems on our hands.”

  As December approached, the shining reputation of Grace Humiston as a peerless detective was no more. The criticism against her seemed never-ending: “Her vague and preposterously incredible charges of immorality at Camp Upton,” wrote Brooklyn Life, “show to what depths of depravity and mendacity a morbid imagination coupled with an inflated ego induced by a little notoriety can cause a woman to descend. Her achievement in the Cruger case has evidently turned Mrs. Humiston’s head completely, but imagine a woman posing as a public informer of morals inducing a young girl to ruin her own reputation in order to supply some shadow of evidence to sustain the would-be reformer’s extravagant charges. It would be well for this lady barrister to change her mind or have it thoroughly fumigated.”

  More ridicule came from “The Rookie’s Diary” in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a column allegedly written by an Upton army private. “The men in my squad were discussing her refuted charges and her nasty attempt to manufacture evidence after mess this evening,” he wrote. “I have been reading the papers and I never did take the woman or her charges seriously.”

  “Corporal” was another soldier who was quoted, further down the column. “If I had my way I would see that the proper punishment was imposed upon that woman. The Major General disposed of her in short order and to make the job more complete Washington disowned her. But being discredited does not have any effect upon her. The men I know personally in the National Army do not feel that justice wi
ll be done them until the woman who threw the mud is forced to remove the smirch.”

  On December 19, the Cosmopolitan Club on East Fortieth Street held an event to honor Sara C. Douglass, one of the first women police officers in New York City. The event also featured Miss Miner, who was head of the Committee on Protective Work for Girls at Camp Upton. There were smiling, flowered ladies everywhere. Miss Miner delivered a patriotic speech, and as she was stepping down from the dais, she was asked about Mrs. Humiston and the Upton disaster. Miss Miner said she was glad to be reminded, since she had meant to bring it up.

  “Absolutely false her stories are,” Miss Miner said, with emphasis. “The conditions about the camps are wonderful. We know, because we have had expert investigators there. Here is one of them.” She drew Marian Goldmark up to the stage, who spent October investigating conditions at Camp Upton.

  “Of course, we don’t mean that nothing unfortunate ever happens there,” said Goldmark. “There are silly girls and bad women attracted by uniforms, and there are bad soldiers of course. But the conditions are wonderfully clean, as clean as they could possibly be, and there is no truth in Mrs. Humiston’s stories.”

  As Goldmark spoke, a man stepped in through the back door of the room, framed in its shadow. When Goldmark saw him, she stopped speaking. After a moment, she smiled and said that police commissioners were busy persons and must not be kept waiting. She gestured to the back door and introduced Commissioner Woods.

  Woods took the stage with a smile. In truth, he was on his political last legs. “I am on the eve of a period of my life when I will not be so busy,” he told the crowd with a smile. They all knew that the next mayor would want his own police commissioner. But instead of being nostalgic, Woods plunged into his subject, which was about the necessary human touch of police work.

  “Poverty,” Woods said, “is one great cause of girls leaving home, ignorance of parents is another, and drunkenness on the part of the father.” He told of one girl who ran away because “she was so large for her age that she was ashamed to go to school, and her father beat her to make her go.

  “That is the kind of work I like the police to do,” said Woods, his grave face lighting up. “I admit I disagree with my friends who want to spend their efforts teaching Sing Sing men to knit, and so on.” He paused for effect. “I’d rather prevent boys from landing in Sing Sing!” The crowd laughed and cheered.

  When Woods was done, Captain Williams spoke next. He told stories of missing girls found by the police.

  “Too bad we got to lose Commissioner Woods,” Williams said, shaking his head. “I’ve been in the department twenty-one years and I haven’t seen any like him. Surely the new administration can’t afford to fall behind the pace he has set.”

  Sara Douglass then took the stage in all her glory. She told of the girls she had scolded and sent home when she found them on the streets with strange soldiers. “I’m just crazy about uniforms,” some of the girls would confess to her. Sometimes, she had to rescue youthful soldiers from women. Everyone laughed at her stories. She announced with pride that the mayor’s committee was trying to add ten policewomen to the role. Everyone clapped at the historic announcement. The very next day, as police power for women was being expanded throughout the city, Commissioner Woods revoked the police commission he had given to Grace Humiston. Woods also took away the authority given to her chief detective, Julius Kron.

  “Mrs. Humiston has done a great deal of good work,” Woods admitted. “But I have not felt that I could take any responsibility for the Federal investigations which she has been carrying on.” Woods announced that all of the New York City detectives working under Grace would be reassigned. The police records in her office would be removed. Woods revealed that an internal investigation, conducted by Inspector “Honest Dan” Costigan, had been completed ten days ago. The report concluded that Grace had done fine work “so long as she confined her activities to New York.” According to the report, Grace’s caseload was repeating, even overlapping, the work already being done by other detectives. It recommended that Grace be replaced by Lieutenant Grant Williams, who would now head the Missing Persons Bureau.

  Woods refused to go into detail, saying only that this action “demonstrated the wisdom of having the work done by regular policeman acting under officers at Headquarters.” Woods would not comment if the Upton controversy had contributed to the move. He said that the police department couldn’t concern itself with that kind of thing. Woods did say that he had sent Grace a letter asking for her resignation earlier in the month and had offered to talk to her in person. But she was unreachable.

  After Woods’s announcement, the committee appointed by the mayor to help Grace in white slavery cases met at the Bar Association and demanded that Grace finally give up the evidence for the charges she had made about Upton. The stormy session ended in failure. The next day, its members all resigned, and the committee disbanded. The announcement that Commissioner Woods had deprived Grace of her shield was also followed by news that the Ruth Cruger Emergency Fund and the Grace Humiston League, founded by a number of prominent society women, had parted company with Grace early in October.

  On December 30, Grace was still not in her office. Izola Forrester answered the phone and told reporters that Grace was ill at a hotel in Washington and that she would make a statement later. When reporters called on Grace at home (just to see if the Washington story was a ruse), they found only a woman named Mrs. Frankel, who was living with Grace at 307 West 100th Street. She had nothing to say. Privately, her friends complained that Grace was being persecuted because of her claims about Camp Upton. Grace was still telling her friends that she had acted with full authority from the secretary of war. The Washington Post said that the Department of War “had been cooperating with the women lawyer in an investigation of moral conditions at various army camps.” The source for the story of the two murdered girls was never found, though it was confirmed that Camp Upton was populated with 142 former New York City policemen, many of whom had been there since the camp was constructed.

  When the holidays came and went that year, most people had forgotten about Ruth Cruger, though she sometimes came unbidden to the thoughts of mothers and fathers as they watched their own happy children. Ruth was, of course, never far from the Cruger apartment in Harlem, once again covered with the snow that carried so many cold memories. On New Year’s Eve, on the last day of 1917, Grace Humiston wrote a final telegram to Commissioner Woods. She accused him of playing politics and challenged his right to remove her without a hearing.

  Thank you for your expressions of praise made yesterday to Miss Forrester concerning my work for girls, and your statement that it is beyond criticism. I am informed, however, that you suggest my resignation because you deem my recent criticism of conditions surrounding military camps either inadvised or unfounded. As I have written you, investigations now proceeding with army officers will, when completed, establish the fact and remedy conditions which may require change I cannot believe that you or any one else will prejudge accuracy of statement.

  Differing opinions may properly exist as to whether public statement of truth is inadvisable, but I submit that in any event no criticism that has arisen because of these statements has been in the least directed against you or your department, and now that the matter has dropped out of public attention I earnestly urge that it should not again be brought to public issue by you at this last moment of your administration.

  Grace then told the newspapers that she was planning on resigning anyway because of the incoming mayor, but it rang a little hollow.

  20

  The Assassin Strikes

  As 1918 began, Grace decided to keep her practice open at her main office on the third floor of 50 East Forty-second Street. There were clients, though not as many as six months ago. Whether the lower volume of clients was a result of the war, Grace’s tarnished reputation, or something else, Grace didn’t know. But people still came in lookin
g for help, especially when they were desperate.

  So it was no surprise one afternoon when a man, around seventeen years old, walked into her third-floor office. He slipped off his coat and hat and hung them on the post outside the door. The secretary was busy, so Julius Kron stepped up to greet him and take down his information. There was always room for a new client.

  “I’ve come to see Mrs. Humiston,” the young man announced.

  “She’s not in,” said Kron. “Why did you want to see her?”

  “I’m going to kill her,” the boy said.

  Kron looked at his face. He could instantly tell that the kid was serious.

  “Well, if I can’t kill her,” the boy said slowly, “then might as well kill you!”

  The boy picked up a chair and circled Kron with a cold look in his eyes. There were two young men from the Morality League and four other clients in the office. They ran out the door immediately. Josephine Geisinger, the operator for the office, entered the room and gave the boy a disarming smile. He put down the chair.

  “Be calm,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m going to kill Mrs. Humiston,” he said. “But I’ll kill you first.” The boy lunged forward with the chair, throwing it at Kron. The detective dove behind a desk as Geisinger sped into the secretary’s office, locking it behind her. As the young man banged on the door, she and four other young women took shelter under the desks. Josephine pulled the phone with her under a desk and demanded to be connected to the West Thirtieth Street police station.

  By this time, Samuel Bustwick, another private detective who was in the back of the office, ran in and squared himself up against the assassin. The boy eyed him before he pulled an eight-inch blade out of his shirtsleeve. Behind a desk, Kron palmed a small object from an inner pocket. Bustwick pointed at the boy’s knife. “You better put that up,” he said. The boy grabbed a chair with his other hand and chased after Bustwick, striking a glancing blow on his head. Bustwick staggered back. At the same time, Kron stuck his head out the window and blew the police whistle he had retrieved from his person.