Death of a Robber Baron (26 page)

The district attorney had released Tom Parker. He and Maggie Rice would work on the estate for the time being.

As Pamela recalled Lydia, her eyes begin to tear. Scenes from Broadmore now raced before her mind's eye—like John Jennings at the piano with Lydia. He was facing trial for the unpremeditated assault on his father. Pamela had visited him in jail; no longer a playboy, he was a much-chastened man.

On the strength of Wilson's evidence, George Allen was arrested for jewelry theft. He also pleaded self-defense in Wilson's death. His wife, Helen, moved out of New York and began divorce proceedings.

Pamela sighed at this panorama of human misery and finished dressing. A letter from Brenda Reilly that had come in the morning mail now lifted her spirits. Brenda and Peter O'Boyle had gone off together to the state agricultural college in Amherst. Her father was securely in prison. The letter was full of excitement and joy at the prospect of higher learning and gratitude for Pamela's support.

The doorbell rang. Prescott had arrived. Pamela glanced in the mirror and pushed back an errant lock of hair. She had returned to New York with him and moved into decent rooms near his office. The work of a private detective appealed to her. Prescott had become her friend. Where that might lead she didn't know. Life was so uncertain. But for now she was content.

Mark Twain coined the term “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 satirical novel,
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
. The application of a thin layer of gold to lead or other base metals is widely taken as an apt metaphor for the unbridled greed and other excesses of the decades following the Civil War. “Robber baron” is an old concept going back to medieval German knights who extorted money from travelers and merchants passing through their lands. In the late nineteenth century it was applied in the United States to rapacious, lawless, so-called captains of industry, like the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt or the real “Copper King,” William A. Clark.

 

See H. Wayne Morgan, ed.,
The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal
(Syracuse, 1963) for a variety of views. Barry Werth,
Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America
(New York, 2009) deals with the penetration of Charles Darwin's ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest into late nineteenth-century American social thought. They profoundly influenced prominent business leaders, like Andrew Carnegie, as well as the fictitious Henry Jennings.

 

For a time in the late nineteenth century Michigan's Upper Peninsula produced not only more copper than any other region but also the highest quality. The industry was concentrated in Calumet and its vicinity. The story's Christmas Eve incident of 1887 is based on the Italian Hall Disaster of Christmas Eve, 1913, also in Calumet. Seventy-three persons died. The perpetrator has never been determined. Well-informed opinion leans toward the view that management's agents were responsible. See Steve Lehto,
Death's Door: The Truth Behind Michigan's Largest Mass Murder
(Troy, MI, 2006).

 

Broadmore Hall is a lightly edited version of Charles and Sarah Lanier's great cottage, Allen Winden, 1881. The main building was destroyed shortly after Charles's death in 1926. See
Houses of the Berkshires, 1870-1930,
by Richard S. Jackson and Cornelia Brooke Gilder (New York, 2006; 2nd edition, 2011), for excellent commentary, floor plans, and superb photographs of Allen Winden as well as thirty-four other “cottages,” including the Morgans' Ventfort, 1893. At present, Ventfort is undergoing restoration while it serves appropriately as the Museum of the Gilded Age. See also Carole Owens,
Berkshire Cottages
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970, 1984) for informed comment on the cottagers' social lives. In the 1890s, their season in the Berkshire Hills extended from May into October. In 1893 Lake Mahkeenac was also known as the Stockbridge Bowl, the name commonly used today.

 

With the depression of 1893 many tramps drifted into Berkshire cities and towns in desperate pursuit of work. The rich and respectable found them dangerous. For an overview of the phenomenon, consult
Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935,
a collection of eight essays edited by Eric H. Monkkonen (Lincoln, NE, 1984). For an analysis of social and economic conditions in the U.S., go to
Democracy in Desperation: the Depression of 1893,
by Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten (Westport, CT, 1998).

 

Elaine S. Abelson's book,
When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store
(New York, 1989), presents a social and psychological analysis of shoplifting. For a detailed view of the department store in 1893, see Ralph M. Hower's
History of Macy's of New York 1858–1919
(Cambridge, MA, 1943). Susan Porter Benson's
Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940
(Chicago, 1986) describes the challenges facing salesgirls.

 

Frank Morn's
“The Eye That Never Sleeps”: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency
(Bloomington, IN, 1982), offers a brief account of Kate Warne (1833–1868), the first female detective. In the late nineteenth century the Austrian magistrate and professor Hans Gross (1847–1915) developed a widely adopted scientific approach to criminal investigation. For “Clubber” Williams and policing in nineteenth-century New York City consult James F. Richardson's
The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901
(New York, 1970).

 

Moses King,
King's Handbook of New York City 1893
(Boston, 1893; New York, 1972) and Karl Baedeker,
United States 1893
(New York, 1893, 1971) are detailed, accurate sources of information. For the value of money in 1893, consider the following examples: The price of a high-season night at the Curtis Hotel in Lenox in 1893 was four dollars. A cup of coffee cost ten cents. A domestic maid might earn one hundred dollars in a year. As chief of the New York Detective Bureau, Thomas Byrnes drew an annual salary of two thousand dollars, exclusive of “gifts” from wealthy patrons.

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ISBN: 978-0-7582-8636-9

 

eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8637-6
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First Kensington Electronic Edition: August 2013