Passing Strange (43 page)

The press hung on every word of King’s letters, breathlessly quoting excerpts for their readers. And the very private life of Clarence King and Ada Copeland, otherwise known as James and Ada Todd, became the stuff of public speculation. It was “a two day sensation,” wrote a reporter for the black press, a tale of sex, race, and false identity made all the more salacious for its evocation of famous names and a hint of social scandal .
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The mainstream press focused on Ada King’s race: “Colored Woman Sues as Widow of Society Man”; “Mammy Bares Life as Wife of Scientist”; “Old Negress Suing Estate, Reveals Love.”
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A New York tabloid described her as a “huge, kinky-haired, pleasant-faced colored woman of 70 years.”
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Her race seemed to render her both an improbable plaintiff and an improbable spouse for the distinguished Clarence King. The black press played the story differently, extending its empathy to Mrs. King and painting her husband as the one whose race merited notice. Even so, the
Amsterdam News
evoked the stereotype of a black “mammy,” characterizing Ada as a “stoutish, grandmotherly type.” The
Chicago Defender
remarked that she “still bears marks of a once beautiful woman.”
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The
New York Age
headlined its coverage, “Court Hears Suit for $80,000 against White Man’s Estate.”
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Clarence King’s luster had faded in the decades since his death. In 1908 the sculptor Louis Amateis cast King’s likeness in bronze for the elaborate new door at the west entrance of the U.S. Capitol that celebrated the role of the arts and sciences in the “apotheosis of America.”
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In 1921 Yale University carved King’s name in stone over an entryway in Branford Court, its new neo-Gothic “memorial quadrangle.” King was the only graduate of Sheffield to be honored in the new Yale College buildings. As an early chronicler of the project wrote, “There are few names carved upon these stones that represent so great a wealth of human genius.”
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But by 1933, when Ada finally appeared in court, the press could barely explain who he was. Reporters misidentified him as a “man who made his fortune in the Arkansas oil rush in the ’90s”; “an oil millionaire”; “the scion of an old New York family.”
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His alleged marriage seemed an odd and distant story from the so-called mauve decade, a popular term for the 1890s. Ada King’s presence in a Manhattan courtroom, however, brought his story back to light.

Even for a generation of Americans unfamiliar with Clarence King, the trial provided the prurient fascination of a social scandal made all the more engaging because it played out against a backdrop of intractable worries about money and race. The Depression left all Americans in 1933 uncertain about their economic fortunes, easy prey for stories of poor women being swept off their feet by wealthy men or penniless girls rising to middle-class comfort. And the news from abroad, as well as home, underscored the continuing social potency of race. In Hitler’s Germany, the plan “to multiply and ‘purify’ ” the German race seemed to be gaining steam, and the very week Ada appeared in court Nazi leaders expressed delight at the rising German marriage rate.
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Closer to home, President Franklin Roosevelt entertained pleas to intervene in the case of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, a group of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in the racially tense world of Jim Crow Alabama.
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These more prominent unfolding stories served as background for the King trial, priming newspaper readers to see Ada’s story in terms of the broader themes of class and race. But at its core, this remained a deeply human tale. As one reporter remarked, “Love knows no race, creed or color.”
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THE FINAL CHAPTER OF Ada King’s thirty-year effort to gain control of the money her husband left her opened on March 30, 1931—more than a year and a half before Ada finally appeared in court—when she and her children Wallace and Ada filed a formal complaint in the New York Supreme Court. Since Sidney’s mental illness rendered him legally “incompetent,” his mother represented him, too. The complaint targeted a large group of defendants associated with Clarence King’s long-dead friend James Gardiner and focused on a straightforward question: where was the money Clarence King left for his family?
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The Kings’ attorney, now a thirty-three-year-old Russian immigrant named Morris Bell, laid out Ada’s case.
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As the lawful wife of Clarence King, she was entitled to the trust fund he had created for her. Bell contended that before King died in 1901 he transferred to Gardiner money and property totaling around $80,000. Gardiner accepted it with the “express agreement” that he would hold it in trust until King’s death, use it for the benefit of Ada and her children, and eventually transfer the money to her.
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Gardiner had confirmed the trust’s existence to Ada, Bell said, and provided her with monthly checks, “which monthly installments in lesser amounts, she still receives from a source unknown to plaintiffs.”
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Since Gardiner’s death in 1912, Ada no longer had any idea who controlled her money or even where the stipends came from.

Her complaint targeted Gardiner’s executors, heirs, and former secretaries—everyone who might know the details of his financial affairs or have a continuing interest in his estate. Ada long suspected that one of Gardiner’s secretaries, either Howard Dutcher or William Winne, controlled her trust. But they would never tell her a thing. She could not even describe for the sake of her lawsuit the precise nature of the property held in trust.

The Kings’ questions, if not their demands, seemed straightforward: where was the money, how much was there, how had it been disbursed, who controlled it? But the defendants maneuvered to delay the case, hoping that Ada and her attorneys would give up in frustration. They flat-out refused to say where the money came from. An “unnamed benefactor,” they insisted.
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For two and a half years, the case slowly wound its way through the discovery phase of the proceedings.

 

 

BOTH SIDES HAD MUCH they wanted to know. The seven Gardiner heirs named in Ada’s complaint claimed absolute ignorance of the legal situation and urged the judge to dismiss the case.
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The three trustees of Gardiner’s estate likewise expressed legitimate bewilderment. Who was Ada King?

Attorney Henry W. Jessup, who represented the three trustees of Gardiner’s estate and most of the family members named in the complaint, derided Ada’s assertions as baseless and without legal merit, especially after so many years. Why had she made no claims before? Jessup’s life mirrored those of his well-heeled clients. Born in Syria to American missionary parents, he was a Princeton graduate who now lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his wife, a grown son, and a black West Indian-born servant. Like Clarence King, he belonged to the Century Association. And he was something of a polymath: an authority on estate law, a novelist, a legal writer, and a frequent contributor to the letters column of the
New York Times,
sounding off on everything from college football to the “regretted paucity of white horses in the modern scene.”
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His clients likely viewed him as a man of discretion who could keep their names out of the paper. After all, they contended, they had no idea what this case was about.

The contrast between Jessup’s life and that of the Kings’ lawyer, Morris Bell, echoed the social divides that separated Ada from her husband’s associates. Bell lived with his in-laws on a polyglot street in the Bronx. His father-in-law ran a grocery store; his wife worked as a secretary. He harbored doubts about Ada’s case but took it on after “constant and determined pressure from the plaintiffs.” Although the Kings could not afford his fees, they promised a percentage of the money they recovered.
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The case seemed a clash of David versus Goliath. It pitted Ada and her children against the sort of powerful men Clarence King knew well but from whom he hid his secret family. King had kept his worlds separate during his lifetime, but now, more than three decades after his death, they collided in a courtroom. Two of the trustees of Gardiner’s long-settled estate were retired attorneys long active in New York civic affairs. John S. Melcher, who summered near the Gardiner family vacation home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, spent fifteen years on the Grievance Committee of the New York City Bar Association, and in retirement served as president of the New York Society for Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled.
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Seth Sprague Terry, an active political reformer and a leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, served from 1895 to 1898 as New York City’s commissioner of accounts. Like King, he was a clubman, and he took pride in his stamp collection and in an ancestry he traced back to the
Mayflower.
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The third Gardiner trustee named in the suit, retired investment banker George Foster Peabody, was an even more improbable defendant. He had just completed a remarkable forty-six-year stint as a trustee of Hampton Institute, the historically black school in Virginia, where he had created a special library collection devoted to African American history. A reporter covering the trial for the black press identified him as “a widely-known patron of Negro art and education” and “a backer of the Southern Commission on Interracial Co-operation.”
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Others knew him as a passionate advocate for women’s suffrage and free trade, a champion of world peace, a proponent of government ownership of the railroads. To acknowledge his philanthropic largesse, the University of Georgia had named its distinguished journalism awards in his honor. Moreover, Peabody would have known something of Ada King’s childhood world. Born in 1852 in Columbus, Georgia, about forty miles south of her home near West Point, he moved to Brooklyn in 1866, just after the Civil War. But he retained his Georgia ties and in 1923 acquired property in Warm Springs, not far from Ada’s girlhood home. Peabody subsequently introduced Franklin D. Roosevelt to the therapeutic waters at Warm Springs, and there Roosevelt later established his “Little White House.” Indeed, the president was in Warm Springs when Ada took the witness stand in New York.
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Anyone searching for traces of Ada Copeland in the still-rural part of Georgia where she grew up will come upon the Little White House museum and FDR State Park, lasting legacies of the president’s friendship with the man Ada now targeted in her complaint.

Not until Jessup found William Winne, the Gardiner secretary also named in the complaint, did he and his clients have a clue as to what this case was all about. Winne, at least, “was conversant with the occasional relations which [Gardiner] had to the plaintiffs,” and he had met Ada King.
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THE PRETRIAL PHASE OF the lawsuit stretched out for more than two years. Time, money, and social power all lay with the defendants. They moved slowly, hoping the seventy-year-old plaintiff would simply give up. Ada King did not, but her lawyer did. When the defendants refused to give straight answers about the money, Morris Bell dropped the case. He said he had taken it against his better judgment, and in August 1931, with no quick solution in sight, he quit.
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Ada promptly hired another attorney. Herman Schwartz, like Bell, was a Russian Jewish immigrant.
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He became Ada’s eighth legal adviser in a struggle that had gone on for nearly three decades, and he would be the one to finally take her case to trial.

Schwartz pressed Winne, who became Gardiner’s stenographer and secretary in 1904, to be explicit about the source of Ada’s monthly checks. But Winne evaded the question. “Not one cent I have transmitted to the Legal Aid Society since 1912, for the benefit of these plaintiffs, came from Mr. James T. Gardiner or anyone else interested in this Estate.” He coyly explained where the money did
not
come from. But he refused to identify its source.
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Winne explained that shortly after King’s death, “a non-resident friend” who wished to keep King’s “financial and personal memory free of attack and criticism, provided moneys with which to pay his debts and to provide for the support and maintenance of the said King’s aged mother.” When this friend learned about Ada, he feared “the shock to King’s aged mother, Mrs. Howland, of this scandalous claim.” He then “voluntarily provided, from time to time, about $50 a month to be paid to [Ada] for her support and maintenance” and gave Gardiner $2,000 to buy her a home. Later, he supplied additional money for home repairs and property taxes. Winne said that he transmitted the monthly checks to Ada during the benefactor’s lifetime. Following this unnamed donor’s death, Winne said, he received money from an anonymous family member “interested because of the father’s interest in the good name of his friend, Clarence King.”
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In other words, Ada had no trust fund. Her monthly cash came from a secret benefactor. And it was hush money meant to keep her quiet and to protect Clarence King’s good name from the taint of scandal.

Steadfastly refusing to identify Ada’s mysterious benefactor, Winne—the figure on whom the defense rested its case—attacked Ada’s character. “The self-styled Mrs. King,” he called her. “From time to time,” he claimed, “and especially since the children have grown up and proved more or less shiftless and unwilling to earn their self-support, they and their mother have made claims.” He conflated character and race. He spoke of “these negro plaintiffs,” as if their skin color denoted their moral probity, and contrasted “the negro claimants” to “Clarence King, a distinguished American,” as if an American identity hinged on whiteness. He suggested that Ada’s previous lawyers had dropped the case because it had no merit.
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