WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

Ben” Till-man boasted of terrorizing freedmen as a member of the “Red Shirts” in the late 19th century, whose exploits included a violent racial confrontation in 1876 known as the Hamburg Massacre. An unabashed white supremacist, he won election as governor in 1890 and engineered the adoption of the state’s 1895 constitution that stripped the right to vote from most blacks and poor whites for more than two-thirds of a century. Enraged by Booker T. Washington’s dinner with President Roosevelt, Sen. Tillman rallied his followers with calls for a thousand retaliatory lynchings. Southern politicians continued to encourage lynching as a power ploy for decades. A statue in Tillman’s honor remains at the South Carolina Capitol in Charleston to this day.

      Source: This reprint is from the Kentucky New Era, March 13, 1903. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggers_in_the_White_House

      How much have times changed? Written in 1901, this inflammatory poem was published following news that President Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to join the First Family for dinner at the White House earlier that fall. The poem recirculated in a number of Southern newspapers in 1903 and again in the 1920s. A copy has been preserved in the Library of Congress. Those who today disparage the Obamas as having “embarrassed” the country by their tenure in the White House have recently been called out for harboring the exact same racist sentiment. See John Pavlovitz, “No, White Friend -- You Weren’t ‘Embarrassed’ by Barack Obama,” May 26, 2017, http://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/05/26/no-white-friend-you-werent-embarrassed-by-barack-Obama/.

      Mississippi Senator James Vardaman complained that “the odor of the nigger” at the White House forced the rats to take “refuge in the stable.” In a speech to Congress, South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, another leading white supremacist, characterized the invitation as a grave insult to 7,000,000 Southerners and two-thirds of Northerners. Back home addressing his constituents, Tillman explicitly called for renewed terrorism like that he had engaged in as a youth during the Reconstruction Era: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”¹⁶ Credible death threats were made against Booker T. Washington. The backlash felt by the White House was so powerful that no president invited another black person to dine at the White House for another three decades. All the while, Southern politicians encouraged lynching as a power ploy for more than half a century after Senator Tillman’s blood-thirsty appeal.

      When anger at Hearst had subsided following McKinley’s assassination, the ambitious publisher again tapped into labor’s ongoing resentment of corporate power. Denouncing members of his own class, Hearst won a seat in Congress as a populist Democrat. Yet the maverick millionaire’s personal life differed little from the decadent circle of wealthy degenerates his readers loved to hate. In New York, the handsome transplanted Californian cultivated the backing of Tammany Hall’s new top man, political fixer “Big Tim” Sullivan of the Lower East Side.

      Hearst had helped himself get elected to Congress in 1902 by offering free trips to Coney Island Amusement Park to every resident, recognizing that workers did not resent the wealthy when they shared their bounty with the public. He then celebrated with an extravaganza at Madison Square Garden, including fireworks that exploded prematurely and killed eighteen supporters. In 1903, the playboy forty-year-old bachelor married a twenty-one-year-old chorus girl, whose mother ran a brothel protected by Big Tim Sullivan. In 1905, Hearst took on Tammany Hall incumbent Mayor George McClellan (the Civil War General’s son) and almost beat him.

      Hearst now had his eye on becoming Governor of New York and ultimately President of the United States. The setback over the McKinley assassination had not dampened Hearst’s enthusiasm for using his newspapers to expose the excesses of his own privileged class. So it was not surprising in 1906 when newsies hawked the very first “trial of the century” – a spectacular shooting death that featured wealthy degenerates, drugs, sex with Broadway chorus girls and defense of traditional moral values by an outraged husband. Hearst instantly realized that a murder trial focused on the dark secrets of New York’s elite social circle was a gold mine. Other papers followed suit. No matter their class or occupation eager readers of daily papers focused on the same question: Would murder charges stick when one tuxedoed vulture killed another in full view of a large crowd?

       2. DEMENTIA AMERICANA

       A Dramatic Murder Brings the Curtain Crashing Down on the Gilded Age

       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