Careless People (34 page)

T
he first woman senator in American history was sworn into office on Tuesday, November 21, 1922. Her name was Rebecca Felton, she was eighty-seven years old, and she served the state of Georgia for only one day: the appointment was an honorary one. Whether she deserved the honor is another question. Although Felton was a prominent supporter of women's suffrage, she was an equally prominent supporter of lynching. A former slave-owner (holding the dubious distinction of being the last slave-owner on the floor of the U.S. Senate), Felton was an avowed white supremacist who defended the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, a black man accused of raping a white woman. After lynching Hose, his murderers carved up his body and sold the pieces as souvenirs. Felton said any decent man would have done the same.

Two weeks before Felton's appointment to the Senate, New York police had to rescue a black man from a mob of two thousand white people in Manhattan. The mob had beaten the man senseless and was preparing to lynch him for having allegedly kissed a white woman.

Immediately after Mrs. Felton was sworn in and out, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People bought a full-page advertisement in the
New York Times
, seeking support for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was debated throughout 1922, and disputing several canards about lynching that persist to this day. The first was that lynching was restricted to the South, when the threat was alive and kicking on the streets of Manhattan. The second was that “lynching” always, or usually, meant hanging: more often it meant burning at the stake and other modes of torture including dismemberment. The ad also challenged the white supremacist myth that revenging rape was the motivation behind lynching, accurately reporting: “Of 3,436 people murdered by mobs in our country, only 571, or less than 17 percent, were even accused of the crime of rape. Eighty-three women have been lynched in the United States: do lynchers maintain that they were lynched for ‘the usual crime?'” (In fact, history has shown that more often than not black people were lynched for economic competition against whites, rather than supposed sexual crimes; the ad lists some of the other excuses and ostensible reasons, including “jumping a labor contract” and “being a relative of a person who was lynched.”)

The NAACP advertisement didn't work: the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill failed again that autumn, and would continue to fail until it disappeared altogether.

The same day that Felton took her seat in the Senate, the
New York Times
front page reported a new “popular idol” on the rise in Europe, its first mention of a man it said the Germans referred to as “Der Hitler” and whose followers they called “Hakenkreuzlers”—swastika-wearers. There is nothing
socialist about the “National Socialism” being preached in Bavaria, warned the
Times
reporter; indeed, Hitler “
probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish.” However “the keynote of his propaganda” is “violent anti-Semitism.”

If Mrs. Felton shows the dangers of idealizing the past, it is also wise to avoid patronizing it. Despite the era's widespread anti-Semitism, the
New York Times
recognized Hitler's threat from its first mention of him. The next day the paper followed up with a report that “sophisticated politicians” in Germany believed Hitler's anti-Semitism might have been a mere ploy to manipulate the ignorant masses. Because the general population can never be expected to appreciate the “finer real aims” of statesmen, said one German politician, “
you must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism” rather than the higher “truth about where you are really leading them.”

Alas for sophisticated politicians and where they really lead people: similar arguments had led latter-day Puritans in America to drag the nation back into a state of counterfeit innocence by banishing the demon liquor. Empty promises and national myths would continue to mislead people, including those convincing themselves that they were leading their nation toward higher truths rather than toward cataclysm.

I
n January 1923 Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story that begins: “Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities.” He sold it to Hearst's
Metropolitan
magazine, which published it under the heading “A Typical Fitzgerald Story.”
“Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar” is another tale of an outsider, a young man named Jim Powell, who falls in love with a debutante. Attired in the outlandish costume of bell-bottom trousers that were a fad among very young men in the early 1920s, he hits on a scheme for teaching society girls how to protect themselves using brass knuckles, how to play jazz guitar, and how to shoot craps (“
I protect pocketbook as well as person”). Shooting craps had become a popular pastime at high society parties, as part of the decadent, modern metropolitan world: Alec Woollcott and Margaret Swope shot craps at the Paris Ritz, and the party scenes in DeMille's
Manslaughter
feature satin-gowned sophisticates crouched on marble steps shooting craps.

Fitzgerald's story begins by describing the “last-century landmarks” that could still be found in the New Jersey countryside, including gracious old Victorian homes, which the modern tourist driving past would lack the taste to appreciate: “
He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop—because this is the twentieth century.” Jay Gatsby is a son of the twentieth century, confident that the early Norman meat-market he has purchased will impress—but Scott Fitzgerald was less convinced.

Jim Powell's “Jazz School” is a great success, but he remains excluded from Long Island high society: “he lay awake many nights in his hotel bed and heard the music drifting into his window from the Katzbys' house or the Beach Club, and turned over restlessly and wondered what was the matter. In the early days of his success he had bought himself a dress-suit, thinking that he would soon have a chance to wear it—but it still lay untouched in the box in which it had come from the tailor's. Perhaps, he thought, there was some real gap which separated him from the rest.” When he confronts the rich, snobbish villain of the tale, Jim is informed, “
Ronald here'd no more think of asking you to his party than he would his bootlegger.”

Unlike many of Fitzgerald's heroines, the debutante in this tale loves the hero; she informs him, “You're better than all of them put together, Jim.” But Jimmy Powell remains an outcast. At the story's end he hits the road in
his jalopy (with his black “body-servant” Hugo—it is one of the most carelessly racist of Fitzgerald's works), as the girl returns to the aristocratic world of the Katzbys. Less than two years later, Fitzgerald would have Nick Carraway tell Jay Gatsby virtually the same thing: “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.” As it happens, both Jim Powell and the girl he loves pretend to be people they aren't: masquerade may be the favorite game of romantic comedy, but it is also at the heart of the game of fiction, whether your name is Katzby or Gatz or Gatsby.

A
s the grand jury hearings progressed, “
the number of feminine witnesses called” made for “lively” days in court, reported the
Tribune
. James Mills also took the stand, “
a thin, emaciated drooping man, with a perpetually apologetic expression on his face,” wearing “a cheap suit of clothes.” He'd spent the morning wandering the streets in front of the courthouse, eating doughnuts. In the afternoon, “
James Mills sat stonily across the hall, his face as white and set as marble, his hands twitching nervously with his hat . . . He had a hangdog air, and such dejection that he was noticeable among all the witnesses.” There was no mention of the lingering question of his alibi. As soon as Mills finished testifying, he
requested his witness fee. Four days later the
Tribune
reported that Mills was “
as lugubrious as usual, pitying himself for his sad domestic state.” A few pictures of Jim Mills survived the media circus, including one of him praying beside his dead wife's freshly dug grave, in which he appears to be smiling.

Meanwhile, said the
World
, “the ‘woman in gray' and one man may be charged with the crime,” but no evidence had been found against a third person. Instead, Mott's “whole case will have to stand or fall on the story of Mrs. Jane Gibson,” who had identified “the woman in gray” as Mrs. Hall but had named three different men as the “man with the bushy hair” whom
she claimed to have seen. At least two of these men were understood to have strong alibis, which was awkward for the prosecution.

James Mills at his wife's grave.