The Scarlet Sisters (41 page)

Her litany of us-against-the world complaints must have worn on him, but Martin faithfully replied, “Be strong & brave, little wife, & trust in God & your husband whose love will put down all that would do you evil.”

Surprisingly Victoria and John’s mother had a few intimate moments. Two years after their marriage and within days of Victoria’s father’s death in 1885, she wrote to her mother-in-law and tried to patch up differences with Richard. “Darling Mother,” she wrote, “Many thanks for your loving letter… My dear husband has become a thousand times dearer to us all… I love you and father because you are his parents. If you would only let me show how much I love you but I am always hurt because I feel you do not care to have me with you.”

Six years later her mother-in-law confessed a secret to Victoria that she would not tell her own daughter, about how wounded she had been by a romance of her husband’s. “I will not be dead a month before that woman has married [John’s father] & is trotting him round the country,” she exclaimed. John’s mother so feared “gossip & scandal” that she would not “speak openly about it even to her children,” despite the “tears of pain & distress” a Miss Fritsch had caused her. She revealed a letter to Victoria that “contained her wishes about Miss Fritsch.” Presumably Miss Fritsch was sent packing; there are no other references to her.

In their life together, the couple visited museums, went to the opera and theater, played lawn tennis, and took a fancy to the new bicycling craze.

Friends from the movement days visited: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Isabella Beecher Hooker, who also saw Tennie and was entranced by her new life. On one of their many trips abroad, Victoria finally met Frederick Douglass, in Rome in 1887. She walked across the hotel lobby and introduced herself. “She frankly—and I thought somewhat proudly—told
me that she was formerly Mrs. Victoria Woodhull,” wrote Douglass in his diary, noting that she was a woman of “very fine appearance. I am not sure that I quite concealed my surprise.” Douglass made no reference to the fact that their names had been linked in a presidential campaign fifteen years before. He was in “no position to think poorly of her for her espousal of free love,” commented a Douglass biographer who noted that Douglass had divorced his first wife and was now married to Helen Pitts, a white woman. At the time they met, Victoria was a matronly married woman who no longer spoke of free love. “I do not know that she is not in her life as pure as she seems to be,” wrote Douglass. “I treated her politely and respectfully—and she departed apparently not displeased with her call.”

After more than a decade of marriage, Victoria had grown restless and wrote a snappish letter to John expressing her need to return to the public. “When I realize how for 12 years I have allowed my soul to remain in a lethargic sleep while others were [profiting] by the work that I almost yielded up my life for I feel that now I must not be idle a moment longer.” She needed him “to help me instead of [either he or she] being secondary to a dozen different things which amount to nothing.”

The result was a magazine,
The Humanitarian
, which tackled politics and women’s rights issues, but with a new emphasis on theology, scientific farming, eugenics, and health. As prescient as the
Weekly
had been,
The Humanitarian
was even more forward-thinking, calling cigarettes lethal to one’s health. It also promoted Woodhull, running admiring biographies of her. With Martin’s money, they were able to circulate it widely. Victoria had shrewdly contracted experts to write for the magazine and fought for astounding changes in society that did not happen for decades: Laboratories should analyze food and drink for impurities. Doctors should examine children in schools. The poor should be provided government services. Birth control was a necessity. Her emphasis on a form of eugenics, stirpiculture, took Darwinism to an odious level by today’s standards, arguing that there should be “selective breeding” as in livestock, with only the physically and mentally “pure” allowed to bear children. In her era, however, this was in fact tried, at Oneida Community, with mates
selected for their superior qualities. Before forced sterilization occurred in America, followed by Hitler’s grisly evil design, breeding only healthy children was a popular idea. H. G. Wells (
War of the Worlds
) wrote admiringly of Victoria and her views.

Both Woodhull (she had given up the affected spelling “Woodhall”) and Martin were excited about their magazine. Editorial proofs were passed back and forth when they were apart, although she did not take kindly even to his smallest criticisms.

Before they produced
The Humanitarian
, Martin’s love for Victoria meant fighting highly publicized battles that surely embarrassed his family and, in the long run, merely kept alive the image of a scandalous Victoria. Martin seemed as obsessed as Victoria about hunting down blackmailers and slanderers. The couple even hired an agency to find Colonel Blood, thinking he may have spread stories. A circuitous chase ensued until the detectives traced him to his death in Africa; Blood had been declared dead on December 29, 1885.

Martin also attacked the esteemed Henry James because of a risqué character in his 1883 novel
The Siege of London
, Nancy Headway. The American fortune hunter sounds like a brash composite of Tennie and Victoria. Headway is “enormously divorced” when Sir Arthur Demesne wants to marry her, which his mother opposes. Demesne ignores friends who tell him she is not respectable, and he marries her anyway. When asked if Headway was based on a real person, James ducked with an evasive answer: “nobody has the right to say the character is actually drawn from real life.” Balderdash, said the New York
World
. “It is an open secret that the heroine” is Woodhull, describing the character as a “scheming widow whose past reputation will not bear investigation.” Historians widely assume Woodhull was also the model for James’s trance medium Verena Tarrant in
The Bostonians
, although Verena is a pale version of Victoria. Probably aware of Martin and Victoria’s litigious bent, the novelist was cordial and acquiescing when the two paid him a call. He wrote a letter for Martin stating that in no way was he “representing or suggesting” Woodhull in the novel
The Siege of London
.

In 1890, Victoria, Martin, Tennie, and even Sir Francis took on the legendary, toughest, and most ruthless cop in the world, New York’s Thomas Byrnes. The Irish immigrant and superintendent of the New York City Police, with a worldwide reputation, was all brass knuckles. He coined the term the
third degree
for his new kind of interrogation, which included torture. His power was “feared by crooks and honest men alike.”

The sisters and their husbands were livid over an article signed by Byrnes and published in 1889 that characterized the sisters as “adventuresses of the broadest and most comprehensive type.” The article recycled the history of Buck, who would “do anything to make a dollar,” and stated that Victoria’s former and then-current husband had lived “under the same roof” in the Claflin household. Tennie, the article claimed, was married to a New York journalist, which would make her a bigamist. Sir Francis Cook (consistently misspelled “Cooke”) was “a titled imbecile” whose family had tried to dissolve the marriage.

The Martins and Tennessee set sail for America, and in January 1890, headlines blared that Martin planned to sue Byrnes for “defamation of his wife and of her sister.” Victoria fumed that the Byrnes article was “broadcast throughout England, mailed to almost every friend of my husband” in the “basest attempt” to damage them. Sir Francis offered £5,000 to anyone who could name those who were trashing the sisters.

After visiting Byrnes in New York, Woodhull told a reporter that the detective had apologized and “agreed to set her right before the world,” and therefore she would drop the suit. The reporter went to Byrnes for confirmation. The crafty Byrnes held off saying anything until Victoria’s comment about his having apologized appeared in print. Then Byrnes denied it—“I made no apology,” a boast that ran in newspapers across the country. Thus he received the publicity he craved, as the press labeled Victoria a liar. Byrnes had sandbagged her. When the reporter told her of Byrnes’s ploy, Victoria angrily cried persecution and raved “like a mad woman… And then she burst into a strain of impassioned eloquence that I have never heard equaled by man or woman since.” The reporter sided with Woodhull: “Byrnes would not hesitate to sacrifice the truth.”

Byrnes’s rule came to an end in 1895 when a young man named Theodore Roosevelt, the new president of the New York City Police Commission, forced him to resign in his sweep to clean up police corruption.

Martin gave an amazing excuse for their plight. “There were any number of people who traveled under the names of Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin, and we were made the scapegoats of all their misdeeds.”

Tennie lashed out, saying that her husband, “a man who has made millions” and continued to oversee his business, was no imbecile, and the charge that she was a bigamist was slander. “The circulation of these vile rumors about me and my sister is epidemic. It is rumor that is killing us. The handle is in New York, but the blade is all over the world. It is cutting us to pieces.”

Helping to cut them to pieces were brother Hebern Claflin and sister Polly Sparr. While the sisters were presenting a new face, Polly made headlines by exhuming her daughter’s body. Rosa Burns, the daughter by Polly’s first husband, Ross Burns, had died of stomach cancer in 1883. She had fled her mother’s “boarding house” years before to live with a decent family. Polly now charged that Rosa had been poisoned, hoping to void her daughter’s will, in which she had left $40,000 to the family with whom she was living and nothing to Polly. The widower and daughter who had supported Rosa countered that Polly had tried to blackmail them and that Rosa was “too pure to mix with the set with which her mother was surrounded.”

Rosa had received the money, now in her will, from her father, a successful lawyer out west, whom Polly had said was dead but with whom Rosa had become reunited. The press once again dragged in the sisters, citing them as relations of Polly, a woman willing to wreck her dead daughter’s reputation. Ross Burns had held little love for any of the Claflins. “I hope those cusses will never return to America.”

Tennie, however, had attempted to deflect Polly’s fights, writing in 1880 to the man who was taking care of Rosa and thanking him for kindness shown to Victoria and her, Tennie: “You may rest assured that if we can aid to brighten your future Vic and I will do so, for I am satisfied that you have taken good care of Rosa, who is the flower of our family.” (Polly Sparr got not one cent of her daughter’s will, as the courts ruled against her.)

Ten years after Tennie wrote that letter against Polly, the older sister was still causing trouble. Brother Hebern and Polly “have kept it very hot here for me” with blackmail threats, Tennie wrote to Victoria from Monserrate in 1890. She had brought Hebern and his wife to Monserrate, as “I wanted them to see me in my sane state & to let them feel I never should be played upon any longer.” Yet Hebern continued to make trouble, trying to link his sisters and their aristocratic husbands in a bogus claim of acreage in the “heart of New York City, said to be worth $200,000,000.” Martin sent Victoria the
Chicago Tribune
piece about it that he had received from “your ‘worthy’ brother.” He instructed a New York lawyer to tell reporters that he and Victoria knew nothing about it, “but it will be better still if possible to say nothing.”

In the midst of her battles to clear her name, Victoria decided to run for president of the United States again, in 1892. It was her “destiny,” certainly an idea that had to come from spirits gone daft. She had tried an abortive run in 1882, and now, twenty years since her first attempt, she had no base in America.
The Humanitarian
was published in the States to advertise her campaign. She gathered a small group of old Victoria League members, called in the press, and went to Washington, DC, where a remnant of the Equal Rights Party nominated her for president. She did not have the backing of suffragists.

When Martin and Woodhull traveled to Chicago in May 1892, to stir up interest in her presidency, headlines hit them head-on. The publisher of the
Chicago Daily Mail
, a scandal rag, had assured detective Byrnes when he was writing his opus on the sisters two years before that a detective “could unearth a quantity of unsavory and ill-smelling” information on the sisters. When Woodhull and Martin got off the train in Chicago, the Byrnes story of two years before was facing them again, recycled by the
Daily Mail
. The paper railed that Victoria was unfit to represent women or run for president. When the sisters and Martin threatened a lawsuit, no one was more pleased than the publishers. The
Mail
threw everything it had on the sisters into the following edition: the details of
con artist Buck’s scams, their alleged brothel enterprises, claims of blackmail. Nearly thirty years after the fact, the public learned about Tennie’s manslaughter indictment in the death of the Ottawa, Illinois, cancer patient. Woodhull and Martin learned the hard way the old adage “Never do battle with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” Loathing the publicity of a trial, they dropped the suit, as well as Victoria’s incipient candidacy.

Back in England, Victoria and Martin became the first people ever to sue the British Museum, that august archival repository. Following the Claflin tradition of taking their battles to court, Victoria acted with amazing audacity, even for her. She argued that the museum library harbored libelous material about her on its shelves—even material that she herself had written, dictated, or authorized. John Martin baldly stated that an article in an obscure magazine, in fact a reprint of the Tilton biography of Woodhull, “contains a gross and false libel on Mrs. Martin’s parents and family,” even though this was the very same material Victoria had provided Tilton in the biography she proudly distributed widely in 1871.