by Simon Baatz
Evelyn Nesbit called on her husband the next day. The prison, designed, incongruously, in the style of a French château, was an attractive building that provided no external sign of the cramped conditions within. Its location, between Centre and Lafayette Streets, had been the site of the original prison, nicknamed the Tombs on account of its resemblance to a mausoleum. In 1902 the city had condemned the Tombs as inadequate and unsanitary and had built a second prison, also called the Tombs, on the same site. The new prison, an eight-story behemoth in gray-white limestone, with a steeply pitched roof and two conical towers, stood directly south of the Criminal Courts Building. Franklin Street separated the prison from the courthouse, but an enclosed passageway, four stories above street level, connected the two buildings. The Tombs typically held only those prisoners awaiting trial, and each morning around eight o’clock, the guards began escorting individual prisoners across the bridge that led to the courthouse for the disposition of their cases.22
Harry Thaw was held in the city prison, nicknamed the Tombs, from June 1906 to February 1908. The Tombs, built in 1902, faced Centre Street, immediately next to the Criminal Courts Building. The bridge over Franklin Street, on the right of the photograph, allowed the guards to escort prisoners securely to the adjacent courthouse. (New York City Municipal Archives, mac_1926)
Evelyn Nesbit, accompanied by Harry’s younger brother Josiah Thaw, arrived at the prison at midday. The warden, Billy Flynn, escorted his visitors to the second tier, to the cells that housed those prisoners accused of homicide. Harry appeared remarkably cheerful, greeting his wife with a kiss, chatting amicably with his brother, and inquiring after his mother and sisters. It was inconvenient, he told Evelyn, that he must spend some time in the Tombs, but his imprisonment would not last long. Earlier that morning he had again met with his attorney Frederick Delafield, and he had learned that Black, Olcott, Gruber & Bonynge, a prominent New York criminal law firm, had agreed to join the defense. It was unfortunate, of course, that they could not now travel to Europe that summer; but it was necessary only to be patient to be assured of the right result.23
Evelyn Nesbit returned to Centre Street the following day, to the Criminal Courts Building, in response to a subpoena to appear before the grand jury. She had reluctantly agreed to appear in the jury room, but she would not answer questions, even if she risked being held in contempt of court. “I must respectfully decline,” she began, speaking directly to the members of the grand jury, “to answer the questions you intend to ask me…. I might say something that would harm my husband, and I think a wife should do all she can to help her husband and nothing to hurt him. Therefore I beg of you all, not to insist upon putting these questions to me, because if you do, I will have to decline to answer.”24
It was a brave response that won the approval of the jury. The foreman, Henry Smith, whispered some words to his colleagues and then informed the witness that there would be no further questions. Other witnesses did testify to the shooting, and, later that afternoon, the grand jury returned an indictment for murder in the first degree against Harry Thaw.25
He entered his plea the next day. The clerk of the court addressed Thaw in the customary manner, asking for his plea in response to the indictment, and Thaw, without pausing to consult his lawyers, replied that he was not guilty.26
That week, while Harry Thaw prepared for his upcoming trial, Bessie White organized the funeral of her husband. The body of Stanford White had lain, since the murder, in the drawing room of the family’s Manhattan residence, a four-story town house near Gramercy Park. On Thursday, June 28, the undertaker brought the body to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry for the journey across the East River to Long Island City, where a special train waited to carry the casket to St. James, the village adjacent to the family estate on Long Island. Several dozen mourners, friends of Stanford White, accompanied the casket on the journey, each mourner caught in a shared sense of dismay that White had died such a violent death, so suddenly and unexpectedly.27
The service was brief, devoid of the panegyrics that might normally have accompanied the burial of so remarkable an individual as Stanford White. William Holden, the pastor of St. James Episcopal Church, recited a psalm and the choir sang a hymn. Leighton Parks, the rector of St. Bartholomew’s, an Episcopal church on Madison Avenue, next pronounced a benediction. Bessie White and her son, Lawrence, then led the procession from the church to the nearby cemetery, and after the pastor had spoken some brief remarks, the gravediggers began to cover the casket with earth. Charles McKim and William Rutherford Mead both lingered to console the widow, promising Bessie White that they would settle any business matters that remained.28
It had been a modest ceremony, without any pomp or ostentation, in a Long Island village, far from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. The funeral had originally been intended for St. Bartholomew’s, but already too much controversy had accumulated around the memory of Stanford White for the congregation to consent to the service.29
Stanford White had been dead only three days, but the newspapers had already passed judgment, condemning him as a libertine who used his power and influence to lure unsuspecting girls to his apartment to rape them. The cause of the murder was, according to the newspaper accounts, the rape of Evelyn Nesbit as a young girl several years earlier. Several women, actresses on the Broadway stage, had reportedly corroborated this narrative, volunteering to the defense lawyers that White had raped them also.30
Anthony Comstock claimed that his organization, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had uncovered evidence that coteries of wealthy men frequently sponsored orgies in which young girls, recruited from the tenements, were the victims. James Lawrence Breese, the society photographer, was the leader of one group of men, nicknamed the Carbonites, who met for riotous dinners in Breese’s studio on Sixteenth Street. A second clique, according to Comstock, lured actresses and chorus girls, some as young as fifteen, to an apartment owned by Charles Dana Gibson on Thirty-fifth Street. “I will drive every moral pervert out of New York,” Comstock declared. “The investigation must go on now to the bitter end, without fear or favor, no matter how rich or how prominent or how brilliant the perverts may be…. Many a man who has been generally held in the highest esteem must be tumbled into the mire, where he belongs.”31
The prosecution of wealthy pedophiles was long overdue, Comstock proclaimed. It was the evident reluctance of the district attorney to investigate Stanford White that had led to his murder. “Thaw’s act in slaying White,” Comstock stated, “was the indirect result of the refusal by the proper authorities to bring White to book.”32
Comstock’s accusations found a ready echo in denunciations from the pulpit. Stanford White had engaged in the most wicked crimes, using his association with the theater to rob young girls of their innocence, and White’s life, according to Madison Peters, a minister at the Church of the Epiphany, was a predictable consequence of the concentration of wealth, the corruption of morality, and the failure of the authorities to safeguard civic virtue. “These crimes, worse than murder,” Peters declared, “must be avenged. That there are men of large wealth in this city who have made it a business to degrade womanhood—backing plays and players and using art studios to procure poor young girls… is a new revelation to the public: a new story that wealth has turned its rotting force to the corruption of innocent girlhood, whose misfortune is their poverty.”33
Reuben Torrey, an evangelical preacher, was sanguine that the revelations about White would effect a reawakening. “Exposures of moral leprosy,” Torrey commented, “always do good…. The outraged public sense of purity and decency revolts and turns on these criminals and brings about moral regeneration…. No jury will be found to convict Thaw, in my opinion.” Thomas B. Gregory, a minister of the Universalist Church, agreed that, in a technical sense, Harry Thaw had indeed broken the law; but he had also fulfilled a higher law that transcended the formal statute. “When the libertine falls,” Gregory proclaimed, �
�every healthy instinct of humanity feels, and cannot help feeling, that it is only the natural finale.”34
Several of White’s closest friends had already vanished, leaving little trace of their whereabouts. Reporters from the city’s newspapers fanned out across New York, hunting for White’s accomplices, hoping to provide the accused men with an opportunity to rebut the charges. James Breese could not be found either at his Manhattan residence or at his favorite haunt, the Metropolitan Club. The antiques dealer Thomas Clarke did not return to the city after attending White’s funeral, and there was a suspicion that he had already left the United States for an extended stay in Europe. Robert Lewis Reid, an artist, had not been seen at his studio, and the caretaker could provide no further information.35
His many friends, some of whom had known White for decades, stayed silent, refusing any association with a man who had become a moral leper. Even Charles McKim, who had worked closely with White since the 1870s, refused to condemn the murder of his friend. “There is no statement to make,” McKim answered in response to a query from a reporter for the New York World. “There will be no information coming from us.”36
A few brave souls did resist the tide of public opinion, remarking on the contribution that White had made to architecture in the United States. The sculptor Augustus Lukeman noted the surprising reluctance of the architectural profession to pay tribute to the dead man. “No voice appears to be raised,” Lukeman said, “calling attention to the stupendous loss that has befallen the country in the death of Stanford White…. Mr. White was not only an artist, a great architect, if not the greatest of his age, but he had a generous spirit, which stimulated… the taste of the public to a higher standard of beauty.” John M. Carrère, one of the partners of Carrère & Hastings, the firm responsible for the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, had worked as an apprentice for McKim, Mead & White, and he also mourned the death of White. “I have always looked up to him both as an architect and as a teacher. He was the foremost man of his profession,” Carrère told a reporter from the New York Times. “Speaking generally of his position among American architects I consider that he had no superior.”37
The emerging consensus that the authorities had been negligent in failing to apprehend such men as Stanford White both provoked the police to take more forceful action and emboldened such reform organizations as the Society for the Suppression of Vice in their campaign for moral purity. The arrest of Henry Alfred Short on July 1 for molesting young girls was one sign that the authorities looked to end the sexual exploitation of children. Short, a wealthy realtor and a member of the University Club, had lured Charlotte Fitzsimmons to his apartment with gifts of candy. He had repeatedly raped the fourteen-year-old, telling her that he would kill her if she told her parents; but the girl had eventually informed her father, and the police had raided Short’s apartment, finding a trove of pornographic photographs.38
Anthony Comstock applauded such initiatives but continued to urge his acolytes to take independent action to combat such social evils as prostitution and pornography. Nothing in this regard was more infuriating to the Society for the Suppression of Vice than the complicity of newspaper proprietors in promoting prostitution, and no one was more culpable than James Gordon Bennett Jr., the owner and publisher of the New York Herald. Hundreds of paid notices, offering various services, appeared in the Herald every day; these advertisements never explicitly mentioned sex, but their meaning was nevertheless obvious. Such notices promoted prostitution, Comstock asserted, yet Bennett had always denied any responsibility, claiming that it was impossible for the Herald to distinguish between advertisements that offered companionship and those that offered sex.39
But the campaign for moral purity would not be denied, and on July 7, Charles Wahle, a magistrate in the Seventh District Police Court, issued a summons against the New York Herald for printing obscene and lewd matter. Charles Grubb, a pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church, had initiated the complaint, but it was equally a triumph for Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice.40
The campaign for moral rectitude simultaneously denigrated Stanford White and exalted Harry Thaw. White had reportedly continued to pester Evelyn Nesbit after the rape, even attempting to resume their relationship after she had married Harry Thaw. Who would not, under such circumstances, act as Thaw had acted, to avenge the honor of his wife? The authorities had taken no action and had done nothing to stop White. Surely, many commentators argued, Thaw had been justified in shooting Stanford White.
William Olcott, an attorney in criminal law, a partner at Black, Olcott, Gruber & Bonynge, had first encountered Harry Thaw on June 27, and already, less than a week later, he was starting to regret his firm’s connection with the case. He had cautioned Thaw that he could avoid the electric chair only if he pleaded insanity; but the prisoner rejected his advice outright, saying that White’s assault on his wife had given him every justification for killing the architect. “No jury will convict me of any crime,” Thaw had explained, “when they hear the truth. I killed White because he ruined my wife. I am not crazy.”41
Olcott had suggested to Thaw that his attorneys petition the Court of General Sessions to appoint a lunacy commission—a panel of three experts—to determine Thaw’s mental condition. This commission could then recommend that the court commit the prisoner to an asylum. Thaw would remain in the asylum for a certain period, a few years, say, and could subsequently apply for his release on the supposition that he had regained his sanity. There would then be no necessity to endure the uncertainty of a trial, no need for an elaborate and expensive defense, and no danger that a jury would find Thaw guilty of murder.
But nothing could dislodge Thaw’s belief that he had acted rationally and justifiably in killing Stanford White. There was no reason, Thaw stated, why he should spend any time in an asylum; he refused to apply for a lunacy commission, as Olcott had suggested, or to file a plea of insanity at trial. There was, he declared, no need for him to meet with the psychiatrists whom Olcott had hired, and he would not tolerate any examination that might question his sanity. “I am the boss,” Thaw told Olcott, “and I won’t plead insanity. I’m no more crazy than you are.”42
It was in vain that Olcott argued for an insanity plea. Stanford White may have led a dissolute life, Olcott said, but there was no independent evidence, apart from Evelyn Nesbit’s testimony, that the rape had occurred, and there would necessarily be no possibility of presenting any corroborating testimony that would support her account. The alleged rape had taken place in 1901, shortly after Evelyn moved to New York, several months before she first met Harry, and four years before their marriage in 1905. Was it meaningful to claim, therefore, that the murder of White had occurred in defense of Evelyn Nesbit when the supposed rape had been committed several years before? Would it seem reasonable to a jury that Thaw found his justification in an act that had happened so long ago? Why would Harry Thaw have waited such a length of time before killing his rival?
Thaw was adamant, nevertheless, that his defense—the “unwritten law” that a husband could legitimately kill a man who had dishonored his wife—would persuade the jury to free him. He had done the world a great favor, he believed, by killing White. He would assuredly win his case. Such a defense, Olcott replied, might find favor in the southern states, in Georgia, say, or Alabama or Kentucky; but it would not work with a Manhattan jury. Jurors in New York were too sophisticated, too knowledgeable, to believe that a man could kill another man solely on account of some supposed wrong.
But such arguments counted for little when set against the tsunami of public opinion that congratulated Harry Thaw for his act of killing White. Every day, sackfuls of mail, from every part of the United States, arrived at the Tombs, each letter praising Thaw for his courage. Opinion polls in the New York newspapers were equally celebratory, an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers supporting the murder and predicting that the jury would acquit Thaw at his upcoming trial.43
It infuriated Thaw to learn that, despite his instructions, William Olcott continued to act as if he would present an insanity defense at the upcoming trial. Various newspaper accounts reported that Olcott, suspecting the existence of hereditary insanity in the Thaw family, had surreptitiously traveled to Philadelphia to interview staff at the Friends’ Asylum for the Insane. Harriet Thaw, a cousin, had resided at the asylum for several years, and it was reasonable to assume that Olcott hoped to present evidence of insanity among Harry Thaw’s relatives in order to win an acquittal.44
It was the final straw, an act of insubordination that Thaw would not tolerate, and on July 14 he informed Olcott that his firm’s services would no longer be required. He had hired Hartridge & Peabody to represent him, and he asked Olcott to send the papers on his case to Clifford Hartridge at his offices on Broadway.45
But that day, at the very moment when Thaw was dismissing his attorneys, his mother arrived back in New York on the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. Mary Thaw had left the city three weeks before, sailing from New York on the SS Minneapolis. Only on her arrival in England did she learn that Harry had killed Stanford White, and almost immediately she booked her return passage to the United States, arriving back in the city on July 14.46
She called on Harry the next day. It would be folly, she told her son, to imagine that a jury would acquit him of murder solely because Stanford White had assaulted Evelyn Nesbit five years before. There would be too great a risk that the jury would vote to convict; it would be far better either to petition for a lunacy commission or to plead insanity at trial. But Harry remained maddeningly obstinate, refusing to hear his mother’s pleas, determined to state his case in court. “I am a sane man,” he patiently maintained, “and I will never consent to have these alienists construe my actions, my conversation and my physical being as those of an insane person. The unwritten law must be my defense. I killed White because I had to. Instead of being guilty of murder I should be looked upon as a benefactor to mankind.”47