America's Secret Aristocracy (41 page)

And it was at Harvard that John Jay Chapman committed the bizarre and grisly act that would indeed make him famous, in a limited sort of way, within his own circle, but for all the wrong reasons and not for anything he himself could have wished to be famous for. He had fallen madly in love with a young woman named Minna Timmins, the daughter of a wealthy Bostonian, George Henry Timmins. Minna, it seemed, had fallen in love with him. The two would eventually marry. But love, according to those who observed him that autumn of 1886, had made him moody, withdrawn, and
forgetful—even forgetting dates with his beloved, which must have made Minna wonder how sincere his protestations of love might really be. He brooded and walked about the Harvard campus talking and arguing with himself over arcane matters no one could understand, while Minna's parents (who were rich but not quite Brahmins) waited breathlessly for the romance to develop further. After all, their daughter was not exactly pretty and was a bit on the plump side, but she was being courted by a
Jay
. Yet to those who had observed Chapman's behavior in the past, there were ominous signs that an explosion was coming.

The occasion for it was a black-tie soirée at the Brookline home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Cabot. John Jay Chapman had of course been invited and was already in attendance. Up the Cabot front walk strolled another male guest in full evening dress. He was Percival Lowell, aged thirty-two—seven years Chapman's senior—handsome, urbane, and considered one of Boston's great bachelor “catches.” His brother Abbott Lawrence Lowell would become president of Harvard, and his sister Amy would become a leading Imagist poet. Percival Lowell himself would go on to become a leading astronomer whose controversial theories about intelligent life on Mars would be widely circulated. All at once, out the Cabots' front door and down the front steps charged John Jay Chapman, brandishing a heavy walking stick; to the horror of other guests who watched the scene from the doorway, he began beating the more slightly built Lowell over the head with the stick. When Lowell finally fell, bloodied, upon the walkway, Chapman ran off into the night.

The attack, and the viciousness of it, seemed totally unprovoked. It was true that Lowell was considered something of a ladies' man and belonged to the same dramatic club as Minna Timmins. But if it was jealousy that provoked Chapman's murderous rage, there was no foundation for it. Percival Lowell had not been a suitor of Minna's. In fact, he had not shown the slightest interest in her. Lowell was picked up and carried into the house, and his cuts and contusions were bathed and bandaged. As for Chapman, he had disappeared and for the next two days could not be found—two days about which, as he later recounted, he had absolutely no recollection.

Naturally, no charges were pressed against Chapman for the assault, nor was the incident reported in the newspapers.
It was written off as simply an altercation between two gentlemen of the same social class who were both members of Porcellian, though Mr. Lowell was no longer an undergraduate.

Since the attack on Lowell seemed so mindless, it would soon be forgotten, but what happened in its aftermath would never be by those who knew John Jay Chapman. After his two “lost” days, as Chapman wrote almost matter-of-factly in his memoir, “Retrospections”:
*

The next thing I remember is returning late at night to my room. At that time I was rooming alone in a desolate side-street in Cambridge. It was a small, dark horrid little room. I sat down. There was a hard-coal fire burning brightly. I took off my coat and waistcoat, wrapped a pair of suspenders tightly on my left forearm above the wrist, and plunged my left hand deep in the blaze and held it down with my right hand for some minutes. When I took it out, the charred knuckles and finger-bones were exposed. I said to myself, “This will never do.” I took an old coat, wrapped it about my left hand and arm, slipped my right arm into an overcoat, held the coat about me and started for Boston in the horsecars. On arriving at the Massachusetts General Hospital I showed the trouble to a surgeon, was put under ether, and the next morning waked up without the hand.…

Chapman added that he found himself the next morning feeling “very calm in my spirits.” In his macabre act of self-mutilation, he had had what amounted to a religious experience. It had been a rite of exorcism, and he had heeded the biblical injunction “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” Of course Chapman, who was right-handed, had cut off his
left
hand. In the course of his hospital stay, Chapman wrote, he was visited by “the great alienist Dr. Reginald Heber Fitz, an extremely agreeable man. He asked me among other things if I was insane. I said, ‘That is for you to find out.' He reported me as sane.…”

To his mother, Chapman wrote home about the amputation
with the unlikely explanation that his hand had been run over by a streetcar. “I am perfectly well and happy,” he added. “Don't mind it a bit—it shall not make the least difference in my life.”

In his own, almost breezy account of the episode, Chapman omitted only one fact, which was that during his two days in an amnesiac state Minna Timmins had written him a letter demanding that he apologize to Percival Lowell. It may have been the effect upon him of this letter, more than contrition, that caused him to plunge his hand into the blazing coals.

Unfortunately perhaps, the loss of his hand, as Chapman had assured his mother, did not make the least difference in his life as it continued in its erratic course. Following his graduation from Harvard and its law school (as a Jay, he would be expected to practice law only in a most dilatory way) and his marriage to Minna, Chapman was still not ready to settle down. As for Minna, the advantages of being married to a Jay seemed to outweigh the vicissitudes of being the wife of a man who, from time to time, behaved like a lunatic. Her husband continued to be subject to emotional outbursts and tantrums. He still dreamed of lighting up the skies in some important and dramatic way. With only one hand, he had pretty much abandoned his hopes of becoming a concert violinist, though he would never give up trying to be a playwright. Then, in 1890, he had a new idea. He would become a great reformer.

New York, in the 1890s, was very much in the political grip of the Tammany Hall machine, and to reform that situation became Chapman's goal. With others of similar bent, Chapman helped form the People's Municipal League, whose aim was to defeat the Tammany candidate in the 1890 mayoralty race. Though the league succeeded in exposing the huge bribes that the candidate had paid to Tammany's chiefs, the result of their efforts was that the candidate was reelected by a sizable margin. In defeat, the league consoled itself with the fact that it had probably given the Tammanyites a good scare.

Chapman's next targets were New York City's saloons. Chapman was not a Dry, but many saloons had become centers of Tammany influence, and since saloons were subject to licensing and inspections, they offered splendid opportunities for bribery and graft. Liquor regulation, blue laws, and Sunday closings of bars had become powerful political
weapons used by both parties, and there were certainly a great many saloons in the city—by 1890, there was one for every two hundred citizens. In 1896, the Republican administration of the state had pushed through the Raines Liquor Law to meet the demand for Sunday closings. According to the new law, only hotels and restaurants serving food could serve liquor on the Lord's Day. To comply with this law, saloons merely began calling themselves restaurants and offered “Raines Law sandwiches” of cheese or peanut butter, which no one ever ate. Others restyled themselves hotels and let out upstairs rooms at hourly rates to prostitutes and other guests without luggage.

As secretary of the Excise Reform Association, Chapman toiled for the repeal of the Raines Law. He published and passed out pamphlets and screeds and wrote letters to the editors of newspapers, itemizing the abuses of the Raines Law. He traveled to Albany to address the state legislature on the problem. He even managed to write and have published in the
New York Times
a new and more workable liquor law of his own devising. But after six years of feverish activity on Chapman's part, the Raines Law remained the law of the land, and it would remain so until the advent of Prohibition in 1919.

It had to be admitted that there was a certain logic to Chapman's enthusiasms as he moved from one crusade on to the next. By his interpretation, his failure to defeat Tammany Hall was due to the situation in the saloons, and his failure to remodel the liquor law was due to—what else?—commercialism. Commercialism became his new villain. Everything that was wrong in America was due to the country's overemphasis on commercialism. Commercialism explained why saloon keepers wouldn't close their bars on Sunday. Publishers published bad books because trash made money. Artists painted banal and sentimental pictures because that was what sold. Cheap music made its way to vaudeville stages because that was what sold tickets, and so on. Culture in America was being defeated by commercialism. More pamphlets and screeds and handouts and letters to the editor appeared over John Jay Chapman's signature decrying Americans' submission to the Baal of commercialism, the false god Mammon. Of course, in a capitalist economy based on supply and demand, there was little hope that Chapman's righteous indignation would have much effect on the scheme of things. And, after the
failure of each new campaign, there was usually a breakdown.

Minna Timmins Chapman died from complications following the birth of the couple's third son, and for a while Chapman's life seemed to have lost its emotional footing. But then he married the former Elizabeth Chanler, an old friend of the family. Elizabeth Chanler was a cripple and walked with a pronounced limp, but at least Chapman and Elizabeth became two disabled people who could lean on one another. Elizabeth had an additional, much more pleasant attribute. She was an Astor. Her mother, Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, was the granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor and his Livingston bride, and she brought Chapman financial independence from his parents, who had largely supported his activities up to then.

She also brought with her a high-living, convivial, and somewhat dotty brother, William Astor Chanler, who had some ideas that immediately interested his new brother-in-law. Among Chanler's theories were these: that President Wilson had promised to support the pope and make Catholicism the official American religion in return for the use of the Vatican's spy system; that the League of Nations was a Jewish plot to rule the world; and that Wilson's Fourteen points had been written by Jacob Schiff, Judge Louis Brandeis, and the Jews.

Chanler's rantings served to uncover in Chapman an unpleasant streak of anti-Semitism that had always been seen lurking there. To be fair, however, social anti-Semitism was commonplace in America in the 1920s, and even the famously democratic Eleanor Roosevelt had been known to make slurring comments about Jews. But what really excited Chapman most were his brother-in-law's sentiments about the Catholic Church. Anti-Catholicism became his new crusade, and a new barrage of literature and letters emerged from Chapman's pen. Catholicism, with its emphasis on commercialism—think of all those religious stores that sold crucifixes and rosaries and votive candles and icons depicting the Blessed Virgin!—was to blame for America's dangerous swing toward commercialism. The pope wanted to take over America! Because of its anti-Catholic stance, Chapman found himself publicly praising (of all things, for a member of a great abolitionist family) the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan, he felt, could profit from a bit of refinement and gentrification, and a coalition between the Klan and the eastern
establishment might accomplish this. Wrote Chapman, “Being an old agitator, I see the game so clearly—the needs of the moment—i.e., to connect up the Ku Klux element with the better element in the East. The K.K. are on the
right track
, i.e. open war, and the rest of the country is in a maze of prejudice against the K.K. due to R.C. manipulation of the Eastern Press.”

Naturally, the Klan was delighted with this praise from a member of the eastern aristocracy. And yet, as Emerson wrote, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and Chapman could be nothing if not inconsistent. While extolling the wisdom of the Ku Klux Klan, he was simultaneously taking up the cudgel against his alma mater, Harvard, for its refusal to let a Negro student live in a freshman dormitory. In a letter to the
New York World
, Chapman accused Harvard of trying “to keep alive the idea of white supremacy,” and added that “such negroes among us as can receive a college education must be offered one that is without stigma.”

There is also the touching episode of his pilgrimage to the little town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1911. Reading an account of the lynching of a black man named Walker, John Jay Chapman was so moved that he decided to journey immediately to Coatesville and to conduct a memorial prayer service there for Mr. Walker. Arriving in the still-tense town the day after the lynching, the outsider Chapman, and his mission, were viewed with understandable wariness. The local newspaper refused to print an announcement of the prayer service, but Chapman went gamely around the town tacking up notices announcing it anyway, despite the fact that his posters were quickly torn down. He rented a vacant storefront, brought in chairs, and labored with his usual fervor over the sermon he planned to deliver.

Two people—an aged black woman who may have been a relative of the victim and a white man who had been appointed as the town spy to report on what went on—attended the service.

Chapman had just recovered from his longest and most severe breakdown. It had begun in 1902, when he was forty, and lasted nearly a decade. Most of this period he spent at Rokeby, the Chanler family estate on the Hudson. (Originally, Rokeby had been a Livingston house, but with the Livingston-Astor union it had passed into the hands of Astor
heirs.) During much of this time, Chapman was bedridden, claiming he had lost the use of his legs, curled in a fetal position, his legs drawn up under his chin, babbling incoherent prayers, quoting snatches of poetry, demanding absolute silence, solitude, and darkness. For most of this time, he was unable to feed, clothe, bathe, or otherwise care for himself, and it must have been painful for his long-suffering wife to see her husband, when he did emerge from his bed, crawling about naked on the floor on all fours like a baby. Why he was never hospitalized during these years is unclear, except that perhaps his Astor in-laws' declaration that Chapman was “sane, though imaginative” carried some weight. If it was just imaginativeness that pushed the man into these horrible straits, his must surely be the longest case of feigned insanity in history. During these years he grew his long, black beard that made him look like Jove or a Hebrew prophet from the Old Testament.