The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  Though Victoria expected tolerance toward her own affairs, she demanded faithfulness on the part of her lovers. When in 1876 she learned that Colonel Blood had been attentive to several young females, she was outraged. She told him that she was tired of supporting him and asked him to leave. Though they had not been married, Victoria formally divorced Blood on the complaint that he had consorted with a prostitute. Except for one occasion, years later, when she silently passed him on the street, she never saw him again and long after, she learned that he had died on a gold-hunting expedition to Africa, far from the Utopian world of free love and fiat money he had so long adored.

  At about the time of Blood’s departure from her home, Victoria began to lose interest in radicalism and reform. Her ideals seemed as tired and passe as her person. Her existence seemed to have lost all point and purpose. Once the noble Demosthenes had guided her toward the path to wealth and power. She had tasted both and found them bitter. Now her deepest yearning was to find peace, normality, and refuge in some placid orthodoxy. And so, in her thirty-eighth year, she abandoned Demosthenes for Jesus Christ.

  The startling conversion first became apparent on the editorial page of the Weekly, which was appearing erratically again. A standard quotation from John Stuart Mill on “the diseases of society” was abruptly replaced by more soothing words from St. Paul. Also, a series of interpretative articles on the “Book of Revelations” crowded out shrill arguments on equal rights. Finally Victoria canceled her popular lectures on the prostitution of marriage for lectures, well punctuated with Biblical references, on her discovery that the Garden of Eden was in the body of every married woman.

  Before this vague and confused exploration into religion could go any further, an event occurred that completely changed Victoria’s life. On the morning of January 4, 1877, after shouting for his wife to sing him some hymns, the mighty Commodore Vanderbilt expired. In death, as he had in life, he rescued Victoria from need and oblivion. The Commodore’s will left over $100,000,000 to his heirs. Of this total, $95,000,000 went to his eldest son, William, and the remaining paltry $5,000,000 to his other son, Cornelius, and his eight daughters. The indignant minority sued on the grounds that the deceased had been mentally incompetent at the time the will was written. Though Cornelius settled for $1,000,000 out of court, the eight Vanderbilt daughters fought on. To prove their father’s incompetence, they consulted, among many others, Victoria Woodhull, who had once been his medium.

  In the clash over the Commodore’s will, Victoria saw a golden opportunity to recoup her fortune. The Commodore had left her nothing, though he had left Tennessee an oil painting and had entrusted to both sisters “certain large sums” to be used in advancing the cause of spiritualism. Victoria made it known that the Commodore owed her more than $100,000, the residue of an old, unfulfilled business deal.

  While there exists no documentation on what happened next, it seems obvious that William Vanderbilt, as main heir and defendant, took the hint. Rather than have Victoria testify against his interests by recollecting the Commodore’s mental lapses, William paid off.

  In 1876 Victoria had turned to Christ for salvation, but in 1877 it was the Commodore who saved her. We do not know the precise sum she extracted. Figures ranging between $50,000 and $500,000 have been mentioned. But a condition of William’s deal apparently was that Victoria and Tennessee remove their persons from American soil at once and for the duration of the contest over the will. And so, late in 1877, with new wardrobe, new servants, and six first-class staterooms, Victoria and Tennessee sailed for England.

  Arriving in London, Victoria leased a fashionable suburban home and decided to make herself known by resuming her platform appearances. She had posters printed which announced the forthcoming personal appearance of “the great American orator.” On an evening in December 1877 she addressed a large audience at St. James’s Hall. Her subject was “The Human Body, the Temple of God,” and though it concerned varied problems of motherhood and heredity, there was at least one male member of the assemblage who listened with rapt attention. His name was John Biddulph Martin, the rich and aristocratic son of a rich and aristocratic father. Victoria’s appearance and her personality moved him deeply. “I was charmed with her high intellect and fascinated by her manner,” Martin recalled later, “and I left the lecture hall that night with the determination that, if Mrs. Woodhull would marry me, I would certainly make her my wife.”

  Soon enough, Martin succeeded in meeting the astonishing American “orator.” It was not surprising that Victoria found him agreeable, and that she could reciprocate his affection. She wanted security, acceptance, love, and all of these John Biddulph Martin could promise in abundance. At thirty-six Victoria was then thirty-nine Martin was a full partner of the prosperous Martin’s Bank, at 68 Lombard Street, London, a firm that traced its origin back to 1579. Beyond this major inducement, Martin possessed several others. He had been an athlete at Oxford, and despite his age and beard, he still had the trim appearance of an athlete. He was a quiet man, devoted to culture and scholarship, and Victoria was his first real love.

  If Victoria hoped for a quick, happy ending to a tumultuous career, it was not to be so simple. Martin’s parents, at Overbury Court, were appalled by his choice for wife. Had they thought to investigate Victoria, they would not have had to go beyond their daily newspapers. The press, if restrained, made it plain that Mrs. Woodhull’s past had been checkered. She had been twice married and twice divorced, the elder Martins incorrectly learned. She had crusaded horror of horrors for free love. She had been the inmate of an American jail. And her name had been linked with such public scandals as the Beecher trial and the Vanderbilt-will case. Were these the qualifications for an English banker’s wife? Evidently not. The elder Martins made their disapproval clear. Their son was desolate; their future daughter-in-law was indignant.

  Like the ancient Chinese emperor who burned all history books and records so that history might begin with him, Victoria Woodhull now desperately and grimly set out to obliterate her past. She had been, she insisted, the editor of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly in name only. Colonel Blood had written those reprehensible articles on free love, and Stephen Pearl Andrews had exposed the Beecher-Tilton scandal, all without her knowledge. While she did, indeed, believe in the emancipation of women, all else credited to her pen and tongue were the grossest falsehoods. Her own life, from birth, had been one of chastity and conformity.

  It took six years to convince the elder Martins. At last, probably worn down by Victoria’s persistent chatter about purity and by their son’s endless romantic pleadings, they withdrew threats of disinheritance and gave their consent. On October 31, 1883, at the age of forty-five, Victoria Claflin Woodhull became Mrs. John Biddulph Martin, London lady and legal mistress of a gray, stately residence at 17 Hyde Park Gate.

  But for Victoria, in all her eighteen years of contented marriage, the fight to suppress or revise her shocking and eccentric past was never done. When some of the wives of Martin’s friends cut her dead, Victoria offered 1,000 pounds reward for a list of those in “conspiracy to defame” her. Just as book publishers print excerpts of good reviews of their best authors, Victoria printed and circulated broadsides containing good character references taken from carefully screened American sources.

  When a friend found two pamphlets on the Beecher-Tilton scandal, with ample references to the part played in it by Victoria Woodhull, on the shelves of the British Museum, and reported it to Victoria, she begged her husband to act. On February 24, 1894, Martin brought suit against the trustees of the British Museum for libel. The trial, such as it was, lasted five days. Defended by a peer of the realm, Victoria was described as a victim of constant persecution married by force to “an inebriate” at an early age, unjustly incarcerated merely because she had taken “a strong view” of Reverend Beecher’s adultery, maligned because she had bravely sought to elevate the status of her sex. The British Museum, which had never before be
en brought to court for libel, was represented by a renowned attorney who was also one of its trustees. Though his cross-examination of Victoria was relentless and detailed, her answers were so discursive and vague as to make the usually attentive London Times confess to its readers that it could not grasp her testimony. In the end the jury agreed that libel had been committed, but with no intent at injury, and awarded Victoria twenty shillings in damages.

  Ever vigilant, Victoria continued to incite her husband to defend her good name even when foul aspersions were cast from great distances. Time and again, Victoria took Martin from his coin collection and from the history of his family’s bank that he was preparing, and induced him to accompany her to America to have justice done. When the Brooklyn Eagle featured a series of popular articles by the stern and exacting Thomas Byrnes, celebrated police inspector, on infamous female intriguers, and when one of these intriguers turned out to be Victoria Woodhull, she hastened to New York with Martin for a showdown with Byrnes. Despite her protests of “a great injustice,” despite Martin’s demands for retraction, Byrnes would not budge. Facts were facts, and he had published facts. Martin was dismayed. “I’m very sorry you will do nothing.” Byrnes was stone. “I am sorry, too, but I am a public official and any statement I make I may be held responsible for. And you have the courts to which you can have recourse at once.” Whereupon Victoria and Martin retreated to finish their battle in the press. They told reporters that Byrnes had been cordial and apologetic. Byrnes heard this with “no little surprise” and announced that he had been neither cordial nor apologetic.

  But not all of the Martins’ married life was spent commuting to America in Victoria’s defense. There were happier days in the English years when Victoria sponsored brilliant dinners and evenings at Hyde Park Gate for her growing number of London friends and followers. And, while she occupied herself by again running for president of the United States in 1892 (mostly by correspondence), by planning an autobiography she never wrote, and by publishing a proper monthly called The Humanitarian, John Martin basked in the reflected pleasure of her activity, stirring himself only to fulfill his obligations as head of the Royal Statistical Society.

  In his fifty-sixth year Martin fell ill. After a slow recovery he was advised to vacation at Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, off Africa. There, in a weakened condition, he contracted pneumonia, and on March 20, 1897, died. Victoria’s daughter, Zulu Maud, wrote his obituary for The Humanitarian. “Theirs was a perfect union,” she concluded, “marred only by persecution.”

  Four years later, Victoria, possessed now of an inheritance valued at over $800,000, sold her home at Hyde Park Gate and moved to her late husband’s country manor at Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire. Her ancient valley-residence, thickly populated with servants, looked out upon a vast estate and the river Avon. Without her husband’s restraining influence, she quickly reverted to form. While he was still alive she had in her monthly denounced socialism and all advanced ideas. Now, at sixty-three, insisting that a “charming woman has no age,” she plunged into a whirl of reform.

  Victoria gave over a portion of her estate to an amazon project called Bredon’s Norton College, in which young ladies were invited to study agriculture. She flayed the English school system as outmoded and opened her own progressive kindergartens for village youngsters in the vicinity. She again patronized spiritualism and presided at a salon for those who believed as she believed. In 1912 she offered an antique silver trophy and $5,000 to the first person who would successfully fly the Atlantic Ocean. In 1914 she contributed $5,000 toward the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the home of George Washington’s English ancestors, built in 1531, which was presented to the Anglo-American Association. In 1915, with World War I under way, she worked for the Red Cross and at fund-raising campaigns for Belgians and Armenians, and sent Woodrow Wilson a stiff cable reading: “Why is Old Glory absent from shop windows in England today when other flags are flying?”

  At war’s end she was very old and very alone. Her daughter was ever beside her, but Tennessee remained her closest friend. Tennessee, brash and amoral as ever, had fared well in the English climate. In 1885, during a seance with a wealthy, elderly English widower named Francis Cook, she disclosed that the late Mrs. Cook was urging her husband to marry his medium. The wedding took place at once. Cook, who amassed his money importing shawls from India after Queen Victoria made them fashionable, possessed an expensive house near the Thames and another in Portugal. When he was knighted, Tennessee became Lady Cook. The title did not inhibit her. Upon her husband’s death in 1901 she was left a fortune of $2,000,000, and she disposed of it with reckless philanthropy. She traveled regularly to the United States, scolding Theodore Roosevelt in person for not doing something about woman suffrage, attempting to establish a chain of homes for reformed prostitutes in the South, trying to build a “school for fathers” on Long Island, and endeavoring to raise a female army of 150,000 in 1915. She died in January 1923, and though she left a tearful Victoria $500,000 richer, she deprived her of the last link to the past.

  Victoria knew that her time was near. But she would not accept the fact. She felt most alive during afternoons when in her white sports-car she urged her nervous chauffeur to drive at recklessly high speeds. In her manor house she tried to ward off death with innumerable eccentricities. Like Train, she refused to shake hands with visitors for fear that they might contaminate her. At nights she avoided her bed as she would a coffin, preferring to sleep in a rocking chair.

  But on the morning of June 20, 1927, while English women were awakening and American women were going to sleep, all fully possessed of the equal rights for which she had so long fought, death came to Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin. In three months she would have been ninety years old. Her epitaph had been prepared long years before, by an admiring editor in Troy, New York. He had written history’s verdict in a sentence:

  “She ought to be hanged, and then have a monument erected to her memory at the foot of the gallows.”

  V

  The Forty-Niner Who Abolished Congress

  “We do hereby Order and Direct Major General Scott, the Commander-in-Chief of our Armies, immediately on receipt of this our Decree, to proceed with a suitable force and clear the Halls of Congress.”

  JOSHUA NORTON

  On April 15, 1876, Dom Pedro II, who had the appearance of an Old Testament patriarch and was to be the last emperor of Brazil, disembarked in New York for a three-month visit to the United States. Though Secretary of State Hamilton Fish was on hand to meet him, the studious South American sovereign insisted that he wished no official receptions, but preferred to do his sightseeing as a private citizen.

  Within two days, at his own request, Dom Pedro was on a train to the Far West, eagerly peering through his window for glimpses of redskins or Mormon harems. In San Francisco he attended a performance of King Lear, visited Chinatown, translated several Hebrew scrolls in a synagogue on Sutter Street, and generally did as he pleased. But when the University of California, across the bay, solicited his attendance at an official reception in his honor, he who had once remarked: “If I were not an emperor, I should like to be a schoolteacher,” found that he could not refuse. As it turned out, it was fortunate that he accepted the invitation. For it was on the California campus that Dom Pedro was welcomed, for the first time since his arrival in the United States, by one of his own rank and station who would give him his best understanding of democracy.

  The ceremonies in the University of California assembly hall were about to begin when Dom Pedro, seated beside the institution’s president and most learned professors, was suddenly surprised by the approach of another guest, more royal, more regal, than himself. The visitor, a bearded, stocky, serious, middle-aged man, was attired in a black, high hat surmounted by a green ostrich-plume, a frayed, blue long-tailed coat replete with gold epaulets and brass buttons, a pair of outsized shoes slit at the sides, and a heavy saber dangling from his waist. Soberly, he asc
ended the platform, and, though uninvited, took an empty seat near the dignitaries. The audience of students buzzed and giggled. Dom Pedro was seen to blink at the newcomer. Hastily an introduction was effected and thus Dom Pedro, to his utter amazement, found himself exchanging formal courtesies with one who was described as “His Imperial Highness, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

  Though Norton’s true identity was soon revealed to the Emperor, he was no less astonished. For of all the sights he would see and the men he would meet during his 9,000-mile journey through the United States the admirable water-supply system in Chicago, the appalling insane-asylum in St. Louis, the delightful dinner with Longfellow in Cambridge, the gracious interviews with President Grant, the visits to Mammoth Cave and Sing Sing Prison and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia no one and nothing would prove more memorable than this chance acquaintance with North America’s self-appointed Emperor. Norton I, as Dom Pedro would learn, had publicly abolished both houses of Congress and both major political parties, had printed his own bonds and levied his own taxes, and yet not only had been tolerated by his more democratic Americans, but also had often been sheltered, fed, and clothed at their expense. In the person of this improbable being, Dom Pedro saw perhaps the truest representation of American democracy at work which he was to see in his entire three-month visit.

  Emperor Norton had lived fifty-seven years and reigned benevolently seventeen of them before he met, in the Brazilian ruler, the first and last royal personage he was to know in his lifetime. But unlike Dom Pedro, Emperor Norton was of plebeian stock. His father, John Norton, an English Jew, was a farmer. His mother, Sarah, was of humble parentage. Joshua Abraham Norton, the second of two sons, was born in London on February 4, 1819. His only relationship to royalty was that, at birth, he became a subject of George III.