Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line (review)

Passing Strange, by Martha A. Sandweiss, is the biography of nineteenth-century explorer and geologist Clarence King. According to historian Henry Adams, men of the era “worshipped” King “as the ideal American they all wanted to be” (3). Appointed in 1867 as the Geologist-in-Charge of the US Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, King shaped “American exploration of the West for the next decade” (45). The surveys led by King, Sandweiss writes, “represented American ambitions for the West writ large,” and King’s organizational skills and innovative “more rigorous methods of topographic mapping provided a model and standard for the rest” (50). In addition to an impressive record of scientific discoveries, King also emerged as a popular public figure. His discovery that a purported diamond field find in Colorado was in fact “a colossal fraud” made him a public hero—saving investors from huge losses and helping “the nation avoid a disastrous economic bubble” (68). Additionally, King’s popular account of his western adventures, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevadas (1872), further positioned him “as a virile young hero of this new American place” (62–63).

Passing Strange is also the biography of Ada Copeland Todd King, the African American woman who would become secretly married in 1888 to Clarence King, with whom she later had five children. The couple remained married until King’s death in 1901, their union completely hidden from even the most intimate of King’s friends. Not until 1933 did the marriage of Ada and Clarence King become public knowledge (and the cause of a brief sensation in the press), when Ada’s lawsuit claiming right to a trust fund King supposedly established for her finally came to trial. To keep his marriage secret, King invented a new persona for himself, passing as James Todd, a black porter, and ultimately leading an “extraordinary double life as an eminent white scientist and a black workingman” (5). In the context of American legal restrictions and social taboos circumscribing interracial marriages, this elaborate ruse seemed to King the only way he could enjoy a private life with the woman he loved and still protect his public reputation.

As Sandweiss observes, the story of King’s public life has been told and retold. However, even the most recent biographers of King have “steered away” from addressing his marriage to Ada, “concerned more with King as an exemplar of American science than with what his life might reveal about the nation’s complicated politics of race and class” (304). If King biographers have been unwilling to address the marriage, they have been even more reticent to discuss Ada King’s life. One of Sandweiss’s accomplishments is to tell the story of an individual who earlier biographers have either passed over or treated disdainfully, but one whose life history does tell us much about America’s “complicated politics of race and class” (304).