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He had it coming to him!

– HARRY THAW¹

Harry Thaw must have played the scene out in his head many times before. He could not have picked a more theatrical moment to kill the fifty-two-year-old premiere architect of the Gilded Age. The setting was a crowded performance of an open-air musical atop the city’s tallest building – a landmark Stanford White himself had designed. The delusional Thaw saw himself as God’s emissary to avenge the many teenage girls White had abused and to save countless others. At first, Thaw appeared to the public as a hero upholding old-fashioned values against the decadent new era. Yet Thaw was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde whose history of sadistic outbursts made White’s predatory behavior pale in comparison. By the time the saga played out, the tarnished Gilded Age was history, as was public respect for the superiority of the sophisticated high society that bred such evildoers.

The object of both men’s desire was Evelyn Nesbit. The wide-eyed Gibson Girl with lush chestnut curls and an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile was instantly recognizable everywhere. Her face sold products from soup to sewing machines, toothpaste to playing cards. The former model and Broadway chorine personified the “It” girl before America ever thought to apply the term to a sex symbol.² Like the dream of many showgirls, at twenty, Nesbit traded her career for a handsome millionaire. She married Thaw in April of 1905, disappearing from the limelight to the Thaw family mansion in Pittsburgh, ruled with an iron hand by Thaw’s deeply religious and disapproving mother, Mary Copley Thaw.

Sources: Postcard of Madison Square Garden, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madison-square2.jpg; close up of Diana statue, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diana_MSG.jpg; Stanford White photo circa 1900, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_White

Left: Madison Square Garden in 1890 as designed by Stanford White (lower right) at 26th and Madison to replace the original building of the same name at that location. Its rooftop theater was the site chosen by Harry Thaw for avenging his wife’s earlier seduction by White. When fatally shot, the architect was listening to a performer sing, “I Could Love a Million Girls.” Top right: The scandalous nude statue of the Goddess Diana by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens that adorned Madison Square Garden’s tower made it the highest point in New York City – taller than the Statue of Liberty. Even in daylight, “Diana of the Tower” could be seen from New Jersey. At night, it had the distinction of being the first statue ever lit up by electricity. The statue appalled ministers in their pulpits and other defenders of traditional morality -- a tension that underscored life in the newly emerged metropolis, rapidly on its way to becoming a center of world trade.

As the public would soon learn, thirty-five-year-old Harry Thaw and his celebrity wife had only returned to Manhattan for a few days’ stay before heading on a luxury cruise to England for a vacation with Thaw’s family – a vacation they never got to take. On the evening of June 25, 1906, Evelyn looked as spectacular as ever as her maid fastened the pearl buttons on her white satin, black-trimmed gown. Evelyn completed her fashion statement with matching black accessories, long gloves and an oversized hat with a bow. As usual, Harry had done all the planning.

Later that night Evelyn’s heart sank when she realized her husband had arranged for dinner and a show at two of Stanford White’s known haunts. Evelyn knew how obsessed Thaw was with “the beast” as he insisted they both call White. Ever since Thaw learned that White had deflowered Evelyn at sixteen, Thaw became preoccupied with the subject, making Evelyn repeat the details ad nauseam. He started having White followed by private detectives and made Evelyn report to him whenever she saw “the beast” passing on the street. Though she still had a soft spot in her heart for White, Evelyn always complied, realizing Thaw had spies tracking her, too.

Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most celebrated beauty of her day. Hers was a Cinderella story with a twist. In Evelyn’s case, she exchanged a life of poverty for one with a dangerous loon in a gilded cage. She started out a small-town Pennsylvania girl, the daughter of a doting lawyer. Winfield Nesbit paid for music and dance lessons and encouraged Evelyn’s interest in literature. Then in 1895, shortly after the family moved to Pittsburgh, Winfield Nesbit died suddenly, leaving his wife and two children nearly destitute. When the sheriff put them out on the street, Mrs. Nesbit sent her children to stay with relatives and friends, but eventually scraped by with money she borrowed to run a boarding house. Evelyn, her mother, and her younger brother Howard shared one bedroom while the rest were rented out.

A professional photographer first spotted the twelve-year-old naïf sweating in the August sun on the boarding house stoop, wearing a fetching homemade blue dress. Not long afterward the family was again evicted from their home. Evelyn and Howard stayed once more with relatives while Mrs. Nesbit found work in Philadelphia as a seamstress. After the family reunited, Evelyn obtained steady work as an artist and photographers’ model. In the summer of 1900, Mrs. Nesbit again sent her children to live with friends and relatives while she spent months looking for work as a dress designer in New York. In December of 1900, both teenagers rejoined their still unemployed mother in Manhattan. Letters of introduction from Philadelphia artists led to Evelyn being hired to pose for a prominent portrait painter. Word spread to others of the “perfectly formed nymph.” The sixteen-year-old’s modeling work quickly became the small family’s principal source of income.³ The days of making do with sometimes only bread to eat were now behind them.

Several months later, a newspaper interview with alluring photographs of “The Little Sphinx” prompted a theatrical agent to contact Mrs. Nesbit. He arranged for Evelyn to join Broadway’s most popular show, “Florodora.” The new five-foot-tall, childlike beauty in the chorus quickly caught the eye of one of its regular patrons, Stanford White. White had become the most sought-after architect of an era when America’s superrich favored ostentatious displays of their wealth. White asked an older chorine to introduce him to Evelyn, whose first impression was of an ugly old man. The architect was a contemporary of her deceased father. But unlike the quiet and unassuming Win Nesbit, White was large and gregarious with close-cropped red hair, an untamed moustache, and a huge appetite for delicacies from gourmet food to new sexual conquests. White was willing to bide his time. He ingratiated himself with Mrs. Nesbit and became Evelyn’s benefactor. He sent her flowers, paid for an upscale apartment with the luxury of its own private bathroom, and sent her to the dentist at his expense. He suggested books for Evelyn to read to expand her cultural awareness as her father had done. White also indulged Evelyn’s sweet tooth, and invited her to taste exotic foods at private lunch and dinner parties with other guests.

During the first several weeks of their acquaintance, White never let Evelyn drink more than one glass of champagne or stay up too late. After two months, White had completely won their trust and convinced Mrs. Nesbit that it was safe for her to take a trip back to Pittsburgh and leave Evelyn in his charge. In November of 1901, White lured Evelyn to his love nest on 24th Street on the pretense of another dinner party, plied her with champagne and led her to his bedroom. Over the next several months the two became lovers, which they kept secret from her mother.

Source of photos: Wikipedia.https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Nesbit.

America’s first sex symbol, Evelyn Nesbit. (Photographer: Otto Sarony, 1901.)

Source of photos:Wikipedia.https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Nesbit.

Gertrude Käsebier’s famous 1903 photo of “Miss N.”

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Eickemeyer_Jr.#/media/File:IN_MY_STUDIO,_EVELYN_NESBIT,_TIRED_BUTTERFLY,_1909.jpg

Rudolf Eickemeyer’s prize-winning 1909 photo of Evelyn Nesbit in his studio asleep on a bearskin rug, dressed in a loose kimono, and captioned the “Tired Butterfly.”

Though White considered his adorable “Kittens” quite extraordinary, she was only one of many under-aged chorines the married lecher turned into temporary concubines. Rumors of his debauchery thoroughly scandalized old-fashioned guardians of female purity. The President of the Society for the Suppression of Vice fumed even more when White placed a large, spot-lit statue of a nude Goddess Diana atop Madison Square Garden, higher than any other feature of the cityscape. It was a slap in the face of traditional morality, a tension that underscored life in the newly emerged metropolis, rapidly on its way to becoming a center of world trade.

Harry Thaw’s enmity toward White had a different source, dating back at least a year before Evelyn Nesbit first arrived in New York. Thaw envied White as a charter member of the elite New York social circle to which Thaw had been denied entry. White hobnobbed with the Vanderbilts and the Astors, whose Fifth Avenue mansions he designed, and socialized with other millionaires in exclusive clubs which White also designed. Thaw was convinced White had badmouthed him to prevent Thaw’s acceptance by the New York “Four Hundred.” What fueled Thaw’s fury even more was White’s interference when Thaw tried to pick up chorus girls at Broadway shows. For their own protection, White persuaded a number of dancers to steer clear of the baby-faced younger Lothario with the glazed expression and weird giggle. Thaw had developed a reputation as a dope fiend with a violent temper.

Thaw’s mother had used hush money to quash stories about his prior bouts of scandal, but some negative publicity had still emerged. One college peccadillo that hit the newspapers was a striking example of Thaw’s often erratic behavior. It occurred during the brief time the family’s influence got the below-average prep school student enrolled at Harvard. At a bar, Thaw might ostentatiously leave a hundred-dollar bill for a three-dollar tab. Yet he had run after a Cambridge cab driver, waving an empty shotgun because he thought the man had stiffed him out of ten cents’ change. Soon afterward, Thaw got expelled for unspecified “immoral practices” and threats to fellow students and staff.⁴ Thaw later bragged that, while at Harvard, he had spent more time playing poker than attending class; he divided his remaining time among women, cockfights and benders.

Since his expulsion, Thaw had been publicly charged with whipping a woman he dated in New York. Thaw made frequent use of laudanum and carried a special silver case filled with syringes for injecting his own drug cocktails, which reportedly included the original “speedball” mixing cocaine, morphine and heroin. In courting Nesbit, Thaw kept his inner demons well hidden. He even disguised his identity at first, sending her flowers and other gifts under an assumed name.

In 1902, Stanford White still took a strong paternalistic interest in seventeen-year-old Evelyn. White maintained close ties with her mother and paid for her brother’s schooling, while he added other young chorines to his list of conquests. At Mrs. Nesbit’s urging, White broke up a budding romance between Evelyn and twenty-one-year-old (future matinee idol) John Barrymore by getting Evelyn admitted to a New Jersey boarding school. White also warned Evelyn against Thaw. Evelyn remained at the school through the spring of 1903, visited occasionally by White, but also receiving presents and correspondence from Thaw, who kept proposing. In April, when Evelyn fell ill with appendicitis, it was Harry Thaw who rushed to her side oozing solicitude for the girl he nicknamed his “Boofuls.”

When doctors suggested that Evelyn convalesce following surgery, Thaw offered to pay for Evelyn and her mother to take a cruise to Europe. Thaw did not tell them before they embarked that he planned to join the pair in England. Once in Europe, the three traveled together to Paris in June. Thaw again proposed and Evelyn emphatically turned him down, convinced that he would not want her. At Thaw’s insistence, she tearfully confessed her reasons. Stanford White had taken her virginity when she was sixteen and kept her as his mistress. Soon after, Thaw succeeded in alienating Mrs. Nesbit and sending her home on his promise to hire a chaperone to take her place. Instead, Thaw isolated Evelyn in a rented Austrian castle where he barged into her bedroom naked in a wild-eyed, drug-induced frenzy. He then beat her legs bloody with a whip, tore off her nightgown, and raped the terrified teenager, saying it was retribution for her past sins.

After they returned to America, Evelyn’s mother and Stanford White persuaded Evelyn to avoid all contact with Thaw as she resumed her career in New York. White also had Evelyn sign an affidavit accusing Thaw of abducting and attacking her. White’s lawyer kept it safe. Thaw’s detectives then gathered dirt on White, and White hired his own men to trace Thaw’s gum shoes to their source. Evelyn stayed under White’s strong influence for a time, but ultimately chafed at neither being the sole love of White’s life, nor in a position to marry anyone else. Thaw resumed the role of solicitous lover. He apologized for his attack on Evelyn and focused his anger instead solely on White.

After being showered with gifts and love letters, Evelyn succumbed to Thaw’s incessant pressure and married him in April of 1905. The news horrified Stanford White and greatly dismayed Mother Thaw, a woman devoted to religious salvation who forbade any mention of Evelyn’s shameless past. Evelyn soon lamented her decision, trapped in a household of Presbyterian piety that treated her with disdain. Harry Thaw’s obsessive jealousy continued unabated. He sent Evelyn to his own dentist to have every bit of dental work White had paid for removed and replaced. She was now his trophy, not White’s.

Back in Manhattan at a mid-town luxury hotel on the evening of June 25, 1906, Thaw dressed in his tuxedo and asked Evelyn to meet him at a nearby high-end restaurant for drinks and dinner. Thaw wore a long coat which easily concealed the hand gun he packed. They would be joined by two dinner companions: Tommy McCaleb, an old friend who accompanied them to New York from Pittsburgh; and Thaw’s new friend, Truxton Beale. Evelyn mistrusted Thaw’s fascination with Beale, who was rumored to have committed an honor killing in California. It fit in too much with Thaw’s morbid preoccupation with Stanford White. Yet Evelyn did not attach significance to Thaw’s first choice of Sherry’s for drinks and dinner, a showplace designed by White’s architectural firm. The evening took a different turn when Beale came dressed too casually for Sherry’s. Thaw then suggested the foursome go instead to another popular eatery, the Café Martin. By the time they left Sherry’s, Thaw had already consumed several drinks.

Evelyn spotted Stanford White entering Café Martin and tried not to react visibly. It now occurred to her that her husband was deliberately trying to force a confrontation. White headed to the restaurant’s porch with his son and a friend who were down visiting from Harvard. It would turn out to be the architect’s very last meal. Soon, Evelyn realized she could not disguise her angst. Evelyn borrowed a pencil from one of their dinner companions and wrote a brief note to her husband that “the B” had come and gone. Thaw was livid that he had not seen his quarry.

After dinner, the Thaws and their two friends headed for the new musical “Mamzelle Champagne” at the open-air theater atop Madison Square Garden. Thaw had purchased the tickets that same afternoon. He knew White had a regular table five rows from the stage and may have heard from his detectives that White was expected there that evening. The foursome was seated at a table further back in the crowd. They drank more champagne. Evelyn’s anxiety lessened when she saw that White’s table remained empty. But many people noticed how agitated Thaw appeared as he repeatedly got up during the show, paced, and looked around before sitting back down.

Just before 11 p.m., Thaw was once again out of his chair when Evelyn noticed that White had just arrived. White spoke briefly with the manager to remind him he wanted an introduction to the latest seventeen-year-old ingénue. The architect then headed for his table to catch the last few minutes of the show. When her husband came back to his seat, Evelyn nervously suggested they leave. Thaw and their two guests agreed. The show was painfully amateurish. Evelyn was relieved that Thaw apparently had not seen White enter. The couple headed out to the elevators with their two companions. Then Evelyn noticed her husband was gone; he had darted back into the theater.

By the time Thaw spotted him, White had been served a glass of wine and had his elbow on the table and his chin cupped in his right hand, apparently deep in thought. A male vocalist was just starting to sing “I Could Love a Million Girls.” Thaw looked pale as a ghost as he approached White, who likely did not see him coming. Thaw pulled the pistol from under his coat and came within two feet of White’s face. Thaw fired three quick shots. One entered through White’s left eye; one broke his jaw; and a third penetrated his arm. White’s elbow slipped and the table overturned, breaking his glass as the architect thudded to the floor. The singer stopped. Thaw raised his gun high in the air and attempted to reassure everyone he posed no further danger, exclaiming, “He had it coming to him.”⁵ Then Thaw left for the exit, holding the barrel of the gun, looking for someone to whom he could hand it over.

It took a couple of minutes for the audience to realize this was not part of the show. As blood pooled around White’s body, a woman leapt up and became hysterical. Others rose in panic as well. The manager jumped on a table, urging the performers to resume the musical, but the chorines were far too horrified. Then the manager announced that a terrible accident had occurred and asked people to try to leave in an orderly fashion. As patrons rushed for the exits, Evelyn Thaw hurried to White’s body and then ran back to her husband by the elevators, crying, “My God, Harry, you’ve killed him.” He asked her for a kiss, and they embraced.

A policeman responding to the sound of gunfire arrived to see White’s body on the floor and a woman who had fainted nearby. The officer asked Thaw if he had shot the man lying on the theater floor and Thaw said, “Yes, he ruined my wife.” Thaw then asked, “Is he dead?” The policeman told him that he was. Thaw responded: “Well, I made a good job of it, and I’m glad.”

Evelyn gave him another hug and kiss, whispering, “I didn’t think you would do it in this way.”⁶

Having killed the “Beast” who had deflowered his wife, Thaw seemed inordinately calm, some thought dazed. He gave his name to police as Mr. John Smith, though he carried calling cards which revealed his true identity. At the police station, he asked to have his lawyer notified and lit up a cigarette. A doorman familiar with White’s many young conquests told a New York Times reporter that the shooting came as no shock. He later testified at trial that the only surprise was that White was killed by a husband: “Everyone always figured it would be a father.”⁷

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stanford_White_33_crop.jpg

Front page of the New York American newspaper June 26, 1906.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kendall_Thaw

Harry Thaw around 1905 -- the year before he murdered Stanford White.

Though a serial sexual predator himself, Stanford White had warned a number of Broadway chorus girls to steer clear of Thaw, a baby-faced younger Lothario with a glazed expression and weird giggle. Thaw developed a reputation as a dope fiend with a violent temper. He made frequent use of laudanum and carried a special silver case filled with syringes for injecting his own drug cocktails, which reportedly included the original “speedball” mixing cocaine, morphine and heroin.

Like the lawyers for Czolgosz, Thaw’s lawyers pleaded insanity as a defense to gunning down his victim in front of hundreds of witnesses. Yet the public reaction to Thaw’s crime, the nature of the trial, and its outcome were vastly different – a reflection obviously of the magnitude of Czolgosz’s crime, but also of the difference in the two men’s class, their wealth and their rationale. With Mother Thaw footing the bill, Thaw had the best defense they could buy. In an era when so many Americans openly supported vigilante justice, Thaw invoked an age-old chauvinistic code of ethics that reinforced traditional community values vilifying debauchers of young virgins. His crime was not perceived to threaten society; it provided an entertaining lesson in morals.

Within a week of White’s shooting, inventor Thomas Edison’s New York movie studio churned out a short, dramatic reenactment, Rooftop Murder, which instantly attracted the most nickels in thousands of arcades across the country. By then, the new art of silent picture shows was well on its way to drawing 30 million fascinated people a week. Postcards of Evelyn Nesbit sold out so quickly that printers kept their presses going around the clock, generating millions more. As voyeurs flocked to nickelodeons and souvenir vendors, moralists on and off the pulpit, appalled by the city’s sexual permissiveness, applauded Thaw’s defense of his wife’s honor. Monsters like White who ruined young girls deserved to be shot.

When even Adolph Ochs’ dignified New York Times played up the murder of Stanford White in effusive detail, a consensus was reached. The prosecution of millionaire Harry Thaw for killing high-society architect Stanford White would be the “trial of the century.”⁸ The New York World’s editor Frank Cobb drooled over the irresistible cast of characters: “rich old wasters, delectable young chorus girls and adolescent artists’ models . . . artists and jaded debauchees . . . Bowery toughs, Harlem gangsters, Tenderloin panderers, Broadway leading men, Fifth Avenue clubmen, Wall Street manipulators, uptown voluptuaries and downtown thugs.”⁹

The seamy side of the city’s elite captivated everyone from housewives to professionals, society matrons and political reformers. Most members of the public responded with gratitude to Thaw for the public service he performed. Exposure of the dirty linen of society leaders like White who did not follow rules of behavior expected of everyone else had great appeal to the disgruntled laboring class: Jews in the lower East Side, the denizens of Little Italy and Harlem, the Irish, and other European immigrants riding on the new subway system to and from their back-breaking, underpaid jobs and overcrowded slums.

In 1906 the desperate poverty and exhausting work schedules of millions of new immigrants caused simmering resentment of the upper class, but little concerted action. In exploiting the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of Stanford White, Hearst delighted in creating a wide audience for salacious details about White’s immoral social circle of plutocrats and the sordid side of New York’s theater life. Soon everyone who read the tabloids learned of the “girl on the red velvet swing” that White had hung from the ceiling of one of his Manhattan love nests. They read every horrifying detail of how the debaucher asked each of his young conquests to swing back and forth both in childlike innocence and in various stages of undress while he looked on in lecherous anticipation of bedding his prey.

By the time of trial in January of 1907, publicity about the case had become so pervasive that the lawyers had to question six hundred men before they could agree on an unbiased jury. Women were not eligible for jury service at the time. The judge decided to sequester the jury to keep them from being tainted – reportedly a first. Journalists swarmed all over, including newly hired female reporters mockingly dubbed “The Pity Patrol” for their maudlin descriptions of Evelyn Nesbit’s plight. Soon newswomen who appealed to their readers’ sympathy would become known as sob sisters.¹⁰

The prosecutor was a Republican, former judge William Travers Jerome, a talented district attorney with his eye – like Hearst – both on the governor’s office and the White House. Why not? President Teddy Roosevelt was himself former Governor of New York. Though Jerome had earned his reputation by routing out vice and corruption, he did not let marriage impede him from dallying with a woman twenty years his junior. In fact, Jerome traveled in the same social circles as White and should not have accepted the lead role in a trial involving so many friends as potential witnesses.

Thaw’s original trial counsel was veteran New York attorney Lewis Delafield. Delafield came highly recommended by the family’s corporate lawyers, but soon lost Thaw’s trust. Jerome had originally approached Delafield with a practical solution: to have Thaw sent to an asylum instead of an expensive trial where he might risk execution. The very idea of pleading insanity met with strong resistance from both Thaw and his mother. Thaw fired the man he called “the traitor.” The family only agreed to try the case on a plea of temporary insanity based on provocation by White’s conduct. Mrs. Thaw had no intention of airing family secrets, including her son’s history of bizarre behavior.

The trial opened with Delafield’s partner Gleason presenting a confused array of defenses. Contrary to the Thaws’ instructions, the defenses included inherited tendencies toward mental instability. After a heated conference, Gleason volunteered his resignation. His replacement was renowned San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Delphin Delmas. “The legal Napoleon of San Francisco”¹¹ had never lost a case. His celebrated victories included a murder trial of a Californian who had similarly avenged the honor of a close female relative by killing her debaucher.

Delmas had a term for the defense he would present for Thaw: “Dementia Americana.” The concept first surfaced in a United States courtroom shortly before the Civil War. Lawyers for New York Congressman (and future Union general) Daniel Sickles had used it successfully to exonerate Sickles for killing his wife’s lover, the son of famed lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key. Unlike the Sickles case, by the time this trial ended, Mrs. Thaw would pour more than a million dollars into her son’s defense, including $500,000 for Delmas and an equal amount on a dozen medical experts. The doctors would offer testimony on a new concept they called a “brain storm,” by which they meant temporary interference with rational functions. Mrs. Thaw embraced the opportunity to avoid reference to her son’s past behavior patterns as well as his feeble-minded uncles.

Delmas focused on transforming Stanford White from victim to villain, the man whose lechery caused Thaw’s brain storm. To accomplish his aim, Delmas turned to Evelyn Thaw as his star witness. He would leave his unpredictable client off the stand. With limited questions on direct examination, they could avoid having Evelyn mention Harry’s attack on her in Austria, his attempted suicide with laudanum, and other bizarre behavior. The risk was on cross-examination, but Evelyn gladly undertook to paint her husband in the best light possible. She did not want to see Harry executed; her own future support depended on doing her mother-in-law’s bidding and saving Harry’s life.

The day Evelyn Nesbit Thaw was called to the stand, thousands of would-be spectators tried to get in. But police and temporary barricades kept most of them out in the street. Dressed demurely in a long, navy blue suit and prim white blouse, Evelyn spoke in a soft, childish voice. The whole courtroom strained to hear her much-anticipated account. The basis for allowing Evelyn to tell her life story was that it had all been told to Harry Thaw and had motivated him to kill Stanford White. So Delmas started by having Evelyn explain how Thaw had proposed to her in Paris and how she had tearfully told Thaw that she could not marry him. Evelyn then revealed that she spent one long night explaining to Thaw why she would not make him a good wife. “He wanted every detail and I told him everything. He would sit and sob or walk up and down the room as I told him.”

At the defense table, Thaw became upset all over again. He sank down into his chair and shuddered. Evelyn described the poverty of her childhood after her father’s death; her life as a model in Philadelphia and New York and the publicity that led to her getting selected as a chorine, giving all the money she earned to “momma.” She had turned down the first invitation to a party at White’s apartment as not proper, but was reassured by another chorus girl that the architect came from one of New York’s best families.

The incredulous prosecutor periodically interrupted Evelyn’s answers to defense counsel Delphin Delmas: “You told all this to Harry K. Thaw that night in Paris?” Evelyn affirmed she had. White and another man took her and a girl friend to see his three-story apartment on West Twenty-Fourth Street. The two girls took turns being pushed on a red velvet swing. A Japanese paper parasol hung from the ceiling that the two girls each punctured with their feet when they swung forward. White let her sip champagne. He offered to have a dentist fix her teeth. Finally, Evelyn reached the crux of the story – the night in November of 1901 when White invited her to a party at his apartment on West Twenty-Fourth Street. She said that she almost left when she saw no one else present, but White convinced her to stay for dinner, telling her perhaps the others had forgotten. He gave Evelyn a glass of champagne and after dinner took her up a back staircase to a sitting room filled with fine art and a piano. She played the piano briefly, and then he suggested she join him in the next room, a small bedroom all decorated in chintz.

Another split of champagne sat on a bedside table from which White poured her a glass. Evelyn put it down after a sip, not liking the taste, but at White’s urging she downed it all. Thaw hid his face behind his handkerchief. Evelyn said that her head began to buzz and she passed out. Thaw wept, his body heaving with emotion. The whole courtroom was otherwise still. Delmas paused for effect and then asked, “And, will you please, Madam, tell what happened when you regained consciousness?”

“I found myself in bed,” Evelyn replied. White was naked beside her. The walls were covered with mirrors. Blood now stained her leg. She told the courtroom that she started screaming. White took her home and she cried through the night.

“And you told all of this to Harry Thaw that night in Paris after he had asked you to marry him?” Delmas finished with a flourish.

“Yes,” Evelyn responded simply.¹²

Evelyn was forced to go through the whole story again under harsh cross-examination by Jerome. Jerome’s strategy was to demolish both Evelyn Thaw’s and Harry Thaw’s character. His witness list included handsome young John Barrymore. But Barrymore had left the state after being interviewed and declined to return, claiming he was ill with pneumonia. Jerome made do with a prize-winning 1901 photo of Evelyn sleeping on a bearskin rug, provocatively dressed in White’s borrowed kimono, as the “Little Butterfly.” As a surprise blow against both Evelyn and Harry, Jerome produced the affidavit Evelyn had signed and given White’s attorney, accusing Thaw of attacking her in Europe and of being a drug addict. The newspapers found that evidence sensational. Yet Jerome took the risk that he painted Harry Thaw as even crazier than the defense did.

In his argument to the jury after three months of trial, Jerome characterized Thaw as paranoid and dangerous, but technically sane. He knew right from wrong when he killed Stanford White. Delmas closed with his plea of insanity based on Dementia Americana:

The species of insanity which makes every American man believe his home to be sacred; that is the species of insanity which makes him believe the honor of his daughter is sacred; that is the species of insanity which makes him believe the honor of his wife is sacred; that is the species of insanity which makes him believe that whosoever invades his home, that whosoever stains the virtue of this threshold, has violated the highest of human laws and must appeal to the mercy of God, if mercy there be for him anywhere in the universe.¹³

The jury took two full days before they returned deadlocked, with seven jurors convinced of Thaw’s guilt and five convinced he was not guilty by reason of insanity. The standing-room-only courtroom erupted in a roar. Reporters rushed for the exits to write the result up for their papers. Thaw was deeply disappointed. He was headed back to jail pending a retrial when he had hoped to go free as the acclaimed defender of innocent girlhood.

The following January, in a less sensational retrial Thaw had a new chief defense counsel, Martin Littleton. Mrs. Thaw had finally realized that she could best save her son from conviction by giving far more ammunition to the temporary insanity defense. She offered up details of trauma experienced by Thaw in utero, serious illnesses he suffered as a child, and many instances of weird behavior. The tales his mother had done her best to keep private over the years included Thaw’s history of writhing uncontrollably with a movement disorder (either from rheumatic fever or epilepsy), wild temper tantrums in which he threw china and heavy objects at servants, an attention-grabbing suicide attempt as a teenager, and his propensity for babbling like a baby even as a young man.

During the first trial, the names of White’s friends and associates as well as chorus girls other than Evelyn were deliberately kept from public airing to protect their reputations. By the time of the second trial in 1908 no one involved came out unscathed. The public did not feel sorry for the victim, nor did they empathize much with his crazed, self-indulgent attacker. Evelyn Nesbit also was impugned as a gold digger with the spread of false rumors that she was paid a million dollars for her teary-eyed testimony. No faith remained in innocence as the 20th century emerged with a full-blown exposé of the immoral excesses of New York’s moneyed class.

Thaw’s tendency to lash out violently when angry and Evelyn’s new testimony about his suicide attempt with laudanum made it far easier for the second jury to decide that Thaw was not guilty of murdering White by reason of insanity. The judge announced that Thaw was a danger to public safety and would be committed to an asylum. Thaw flew into a rage. He had expected to be set free. Seven years later, in 1915, Thaw was declared sane and released. He and Evelyn divorced soon afterward. By 1917, Thaw was rearrested for whipping a teenage boy and was sent back to an asylum for another seven years. Even after his final release, Thaw faced periodic civil claims from showgirls he dated, who claimed he whipped them. None of these claims ever went to trial as his enormous inheritance came in handy yet again.

Evelyn Nesbit later penned two memoirs, one in 1934, Prodigal Days: The Untold Story of Evelyn Nesbit, and one twenty years earlier that would not be edited and published for ninety years – Tragic Beauty: The Lost 1914 Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit. Harry Thaw wrote his own memoir, The Traitor. Stanford White’s murder inspired several other books and movies. Among them, E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 fictionalized Ragtime became the best known and was later adapted as a musical. In 2008, historian Paula Uruburu entranced audiences with her dramatic retelling of the tale in her book American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl and the Crime of the Century.

The first “trial of the century” was practically a scripted melodrama. Audiences found compelling the rags-to-riches story that Evelyn Nesbit Thaw told, raged against the power imbalance that led to her deflowering, and applauded Thaw’s revenge against the man who had “ruined” his wife. It gave new fodder to those who still viewed females as protected possessions of fathers and husbands. They condemned the decadence of big city life and agreed the lecherous victim had it coming to him. Yet what gave ubiquitous coverage of Stanford White’s murder its special oomph was how Thaw triggered new insights into the Gilded Age and permanently tarnished its most vaunted members.

As riveting as Thaw’s first trial had been, it was eclipsed within a month by a political murder trial that had labor directly pitted against capital. The charges that radical labor leader Big Bill Haywood ordered the assassination of Idaho’s ex-governor had obvious national implications. Though far to the left of most Americans, Haywood had developed a large following in the previous decade as an outspoken champion of the eight-hour day. In June of 1905 he helped convene representatives of militant unions, Socialists and anarchists at a “Continental Congress of the working class.” At that meeting, the revolutionaries co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies.”

The IWW was dedicated, like anarchist Emma Goldman and her followers, to the overthrow of the capitalist structure. The potential for the IWW’s radical message to rally millions of underpaid recent immigrants unnerved industrialists and Progressive reformers alike. President Roosevelt made it his personal mission to see Haywood executed and thereby decapitate his radical union. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs called the upcoming confrontation the “greatest legal battle in American history.”¹⁴