Strange Times 150: Tarred & Feathered
Have you heard the news, folks? The news about WESTSIDE LIGHTS, a rollicking mystery novel that Library Journal calls “highly recommended”? The news is: this book is fantastic and you should buy it now.
Today marks the 150th issue of this deranged voyage through time, and we are celebrating with twin stories of marriage—one that healed and one that destroyed. It’s a long one, so let’s plunge headlong into…
May 30, 1921
Hawaiian officials decree that all beach bathers must wear swimming garments that cover them to the knee, but the public refuses to comply.
A posse is dispatched after a party of moonshiners gun down a Georgia sheriff during a raid.
A cat burglar accused of robbing guests at a Baltimore hotel is captured after a “lively chase” with police officers.
After promising his wife and the public that he would begin his week’s sentence of housework, George Watson instead takes Sunday off to spend time with his mother.
The Weather: Unsettled today; fair tomorrow; moderate north winds.
A lot here to make the savvy reader raise their eyebrows, but sure. Fine. At least it ends happily.
BERLIN, May 29.—“When I stood before a jeweler’s window and saw glittering jewels a mysterious, irresistible force drove me into the shop to steal.” Such was the only excuse which could be given by a wealthy society kleptomaniac who was defendant in an amazing case before the Berlin court.
Frau Lisbeth Strick belongs to a rich provincial family, is highly educated and frequented the best society in the capital and elsewhere. Three years ago she committed a number of thefts in Berlin and Dresden. She visited high-class shops where her perfect manners and fine clothes disarmed suspicion.
Giving herself out as Countess Baudissin or Baroness von Stork, she asked to see expensive jewels, and while examining them would steal some. She then went to the next jeweler’s shop and sold what had been stolen. When her thefts were eventually discovered she frankly confessed, being able, she said, to give no other excuse than that she was the victim of some mysterious power and could not control herself. As a very wealthy woman she had no need to resort to theft to obtain such things.
Since the discovery of thefts in 1918 she has been under observation of numerous medical experts. One of them declared at the trial that she was at one time enthusiastic about founding a home for the blind, and she resorted to thefts in order to obtain the necessary funds. He was convinced that the state of her mind was such that she was quite unaware of having done wrong and was surprised to hear her actions described as theft.
Another doctor gave what he called a picture of her soul and said she had a curious psychic lack. She was wholly unconscious of wrong doing and made no effort to conceal what she had done.
The family doctor said in her youth she suffered from “soul phantasies” and he believed she had a “degenerate psycho-pathological constitution.”
Two years after committing thefts she married a high official, is perfectly happy and has a child who is in every way normal. Strange to relate, her own mental abnormality quite vanished after her marriage.
The court gave a verdict of acquittal.
This epic yarn has the makings of a play or a mystery novel or, I don’t know, something. I am sorry that the leftist occupying the most space in the ‘21 Times has turned out to be such an utter bastard.
MARLBORO, N.Y., May 29.—Twelve men in three automobiles stopped in front of the mountainside shack of Charles Bouck White, self-styled pastor of the “Church of the Social Revolution,” on Monday night last. They took the unfrocked preacher of social disorder from his bed, tied a rope around his waist, and hauled him, vehemently protesting, to the road.
Then they stripped him, horsewhipped him, applied tar, carbolic acid and feathers, shanghaied him in his scorching covering and whirled down through the sleeping countryside to a desolate spot in the outskirts of Newburg. The former clergyman was dumped out and two of his captors took him aside.
“Will you promise to treat your wife right?” they asked.
“Yes, I’ll take care of her,” he answered.
“All right,” was the reply; “get along the road home.”
The men then climbed into their machines and sped away, and white turned around and hiked back along the thirteen dark, dismal miles to what he calls his “monastic retreat.”
Neighbors Spurred by Wife’s Suit
This, according to statements made today to a reporter for The New York Times, was the answer of his neighbors to allegations of cruelty made by Andree Emilie Simon White and disclosed yesterday when she filed annulment papers in the Supreme Court at Poughkeepsie. For, although that was the first hint the public had of White’s matrimonial troubles, his neighbors had known of the affair for several days.
Back of the rough handling accorded the advocate of radical doctrines, and only spurred by his wife’s charges of fraud, cruelty and subnormal matrimonial ideas, was the desire of the Marlboro section of Ulster County to rid itself of a decidedly unpopular figure.
The former pastor’s preachings against the Government, his flag-burning record and a recent attempt to win followers here have stirred the community to deep anger. Several months ago, it was said, White advertised a meeting to discuss social problems. He began his usual outbursts against the Government and several girls—apparently they were there just for that purpose—arose “and shut him up.”
Forced to Sing National Anthem
Before White left the meeting place, it was disclosed today, he had declared this country a pretty good sort of place, had said time and again that he was “for it,” and had quaveringly sung “the Star Spangled Banner.”
Supplementing the cut-and-dried legal phraseology of the complaint in the annulment proceedings, which Bernard F. Cecire, Poughkeepsie attorney, handed up to Supreme Court Justice A.F.H. Seeger, there came this afternoon from four sources other facts concerning white and his bride of five weeks.
According to Mr. Cecire the complaint related how Miss Simon had married White in Paris on April 21 after a swift courtship. She, the daughter of Marcel Simon, once wealthy resident of Rheims and now a chemist and superintendent of the Panhard-Levassuor motor works in Paris, was introduced to White at a bazaar in Paris. After relating how they had come to this country, arriving nine days after the marriage ceremony in a Protestant chapel in Paris, the complaint set forth how White had attempted to inoculate the cultured French girl with the germs of radicalism.
Finds She Was Deceived
Failing in this, the document continued, White took the girl to his “Summer estate.” It was when he arrived at the “estate,” the complaint alleged, that the former Miss Simon realized that she hadn’t married a wealthy American, for, according to her allegations, that was the pose of White in Paris.
Educated at St. Joseph Lyceum and having taken a course at the Sorbonne, the slender French girl, fitted only for a life of refinement, arrived at White’s shack in Snake Hollow, three miles from here, and found the “estate” of her “wealthy” husband to consist of:
A tumbled down farm house of diminutive dimensions; a tangled plot of thirty acres near jungle, rocks and quietness; a flock of five white Leghorn hens, a discouraged pig, one cow and an elderly “flivver.” She also found that the unvarying menu for all meals was milk and eggs.
She lived there five days and then a week ago last Thursday morning a weeping, luggage-laden figure came tottering down the narrow grass-clogged road winding from “Bouck White’s place” down to the Marlboro Mountain House, a Summer boarding house where William McElrath, proprietor, and Mrs. Leonia Swifle, his housekeeper, were waiting for the Summer boarders to arrive.
Comfortably rocking back and forth on the hotel’s wide porch this afternoon, and frequently punctuating her story with indignant statements of what she’d “like to do to him” (White), the housekeeper went back to the morning of Mrs. White’s arrival.
“I was sitting in the office,” she said, “looking out of the window, watching for automobile parties, when I saw a girl come around the bend in the road up there” —she waved her hand toward a curve skirting a drop 1,400 feet down to the valley below.
“As she came closer I noticed that she had her hand up to her face and was weeping. She was carrying a heavy suitcase. Pretty soon I made her out to be that French girl that White married. She came down the road, and when she got in front of the house she hesitated a bit, as though uncertain, and then came in. She came up to the porch, and as I went out to meet her she dropped the suitcase and fainted into one of the chairs.
“I brought her around and then she told me that White had just beaten her. She showed me her arms. Blue marks showed where somebody’s fingers had been dug into her forearms. She told me that White had seized her, thrown her to the floor and had called her names, and all because she had thrown egg shells into the cooking stove.
“It was the second time that White had tried violence on her, she told me, and she had fled from him because she feared that he had hurt her seriously. I called Mr. McElrath from his work and told him about it. He—”
But just then McElrath himself came out of the door. He is about 45 years old, more than six feet tall, bearded, and of massive bulk—a combination of hard-working farmer and mountaineer, his jobs when the hotel business is not good.
“Yes,” he said, taking up the narrative, “that’s the fact, but don’t forget that Andree properly scratched White’s face. I took her in and I told her that she could live here, provided she liked the place and the folks, for the rest of her life and that if White came around here trying to bother her—I’d, I’d—” McElrath doubled up a fist that Andree’s countryman, Carpentier, might be proud of, and added: “Knock his head off his shoulders.”
The big mountaineer, farmer, and now and then Boniface paused to let his anger cool and went on:
“Along about 2 o’clock the next day after Andree came here to us, White came loafing down the road. He had a couple of written notices that his wife and left his bed and board and that he would not be responsible for her. I listened to him tell me all about it—we were standing over by the barn—and then I told him what the girl had told me and Mrs. Swifle.
“‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I can explain that,’ but I didn’t let him explain any. I just looked right at him and I says:
“‘Get the hell off the place.’ He went on up the road. He didn’t say anything.”
What happened Monday night at White’s house was told by Mr. McElrath, who didn’t say that he was in the party but added that he “had heard that some of the leading citizens had a part in it.”
“White’s been saying the last few days that those blisters on his neck,” he said half to himself, “came from sunburn. Well I don’t know, but he’s had flour on his neck ever since that day. Funny thing—what, you’d like to talk to Andree? Sure, but she isn’t much on the English.”
McElrath got up and shouted up the Marlboro Mountain House stairs: “Hey Andree,” and Andree came from a side room, where she had been listening to the talk. The girl is tall and her height is accentuated by a figure of schoolgirl slenderness. She has large brown eyes, dark brown hair, brushed smooth to the head, and a quick, pleasant smile.
Dressed in a brilliant yellow sport hat, an orange silk vestee, plaid sport skirt, tan oxfords and tan silk stockings, Mrs. White came, plainly a trifle abashed. Despite the contempt she endeavored to express for the former clergyman she still wore her engagement ring, a large white diamond, and the wedding band. Around her neck was a gold necklace, Roman finished and fashioned to represent rose leaves.
Haltingly she repeated the story told by the housekeeper and McElrath, but could add little to it, due to her lack of English. In answer to the question, “Do you still care for Mr. White in any way?” she shrugged her shoulders, smiled and said:
“But why do you ask?”
Up the road half a mile the reporters found White. He was lying on his side on a home-made white birch sapling swing. Nearby was William Sanger, husband of Margaret Sanger, birth-control advocate. Sanger said that he was merely a visitor “seeking inspiration for my art.” As the reporters approached him, White pulled a white silk handkerchief from his pocket and quickly fastened it around his neck. Long, red blisters still showed, however, but White said it was “merely sunburn.”
He was told of the charges of his wife, and as he gingerly raised himself to a sitting position he smilingly remarked:
“It’s all true. I guess you boys can go the limit. It’s simply that the French and American marriages don’t turn out well. It’s a different temperament. It’s a different strain—they don’t turn out well. Thirty-three per cent of these war marriages don’t turn out well, so what does it matter if one more fails?
“Last Winter I went to Paris to study peasant pottery. I am interested in it and I expect to import some to this country. I met my wife there—Oh, I met her at a bazaar. A mutual friend, a widow, introduced us. It was a case of love at first sight and, in addition to my affection I really believed that I could elevate this girl, my wife, to a higher plane.
“But I failed, it seems. It’s plainly another instance of the inability of the French and American temperaments to get together. Really, I think there is a whole lot of good in the girl, this wife of mine. I hope that in the present case she wouldn’t do anything to darken herself in order to shield me.
“Yes, I told her that I was an agitator, but I don’t really believe I made her fully perceive my commitment to the cause of social reconstruction. I am not a Bolshevist, I am not an anarchist, and I am not a Socialist. I am merely seeking a readjustment of conditions along Christian lines.”
Then White denied that he had been tarred and feathered, and denied that he had ever used force against his wife. He admitted that “four or five men, city toughs and not a typical crowd,” had hauled him out of bed and had abandoned him near Newburg. But he continued, they had not tried violent methods on him because he had “talked to them.”
He admitted that he had sought to transfer some of his ideas to his young wife, through tutors from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Among those he named as enlisted to teach new ideas to the French girl was Miss Louise Adams Gout. None, he said, had had success.
The annulment proceedings, he continued, would not be contested, and he was perfectly willing that the former Miss Simon return to Paris at “my expense.” As for his own future, he said he intended to rest a while “in my monastic retreat,” and when the time was ripe “emerge and deliver a message which will find an audience.” He denied that he had ever told his wife that he considered himself “the second Messiah,” saying this was a delusion of hers inspired by his custom of “saying a silent grace before every meal.”
Another angle of the former clergyman’s predicament came from Harry G. Harper, City Statistician of Poughkeepsie, an attorney appointed guardian ad litem for Mrs. White. He said:
“She has no friends or relatives here and wants to go back to France. She is only 20 years old and has had a very unhappy experience in her life with White. He made her acquaintance on the street in Paris under romantic circumstances. He bumped into her in a crowd. He stopped and apologized. She smiled and he began a conversation.
“Their troubles began immediately after the marriage, because of her husband’s peculiar ideas. Mr. White wanted her to help him in his revolutionary work, especially in his writing. He gave her a copy of Kingsley’s ‘Hypatia’ to read and told her he wanted her to be his Hypatia.
“I am uncertain as to what the next step in the matter will be, but there is a hearing on counsel fees and alimony scheduled in the Supreme Court at Poughkeepsie for next Saturday.”
