Who's Who? An American Scandal, 1920s Style

Americans have long loved scandal. They have appeared at times to crave a shameful scene—have seemed sometimes in great need to express outrage to reaffirm or reassert feelings and values of community. They have eagerly pointed their fingers and shaken their heads. And gleefully have they wagged their tongues. Most often the press has led the parade against impropriety. From broadsheets to broadcasts of Court TV or program specials, scandals have ever served as spectacles. They put in public sight private misgivings. Sensationalized in skillful hands, behavior cast as offensive or shocking has been made the stock of brisk business. Americans have demanded to see, read, hear, and know more about outrageous actors and their reported actions.

Lawyer-turned-historian Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor has deftly plumbed the breadth and depth of American public fascination with a 1920s scandal. Property Rites covers the public indignities that developed from the October 1924 marriage of wealthy 22-year-old New York City socialite Leonard Kip Rhinelander to 25-year-old Westchester County chambermaid Alice Beatrice Jones.

The Rhinelander affair produced a sensationalized trial—Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (1926), and Smith-Pryor has dissected the proceedings. Using as her base the trial transcript and press coverage of events, she narrates the in-court maneuvering and out-of-court commentary that riveted public attention. Her introduction, nine chapters, and conclusion rehearse the facts of the case and offer broad commentary on what she casts as the cultural context for understanding the trial as American social drama.

Smith-Pryor casts the Rhinelander case as a prism for viewing color in the North in the 1920s. She sees the case as "the convergence of historically specific factors" that she elaborates as "the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans on northern states, American responses to immigration, class conflict, the rise of mass consumption, anxiety over the state of 'modern marriage,' and the growth of racial consciousness" (pp. 2-3).

From Smith-Pryor's view, the trial threw light particularly on race in modern America. And to see what the light revealed, she fashions a tripartite focus, attending to time, place, and personalities. The personalities are trial participants and commentators whom she develops largely from a veritable exegesis of the trial transcript and press reports. The place is the nation's leading and most heterogeneous city, where people of different races, national origins, and ethnicities were moving in, ever closer. Old identifiers became increasingly blurred, as New York's crush and rush smeared distinctions. Many who cherished venerable old families and exclusive long lineages shuddered at increasing urban intimacy, anonymity, and amalgamation. The growing mix of people was too much for them, especially as the crowding population complicated recognizing who was who.

The social welter generated confusion, Smith-Pryor notes. It generated reaction, too. Many reluctant to accept change insisted on entrenching distinctions. Eugenicists preached selective breeding for racial purity. Racial separatists pushed boundaries for physical distance. Among them, a revived Ku Klux Klan invoked terror to enforce group space and targeted people by race, religion, culture, and color. Persistent in championing a stark vision of a Christian, white America, the KKK enjoyed a popular groundswell in the 1920s. In August 1925 it mounted the then-largest-ever March on Washington D.C. Flying American flags, ranks of white-robed Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, 35,000 to 50,000 strong, to push their own brand of behavior and standards.

Seeing the people Smith-Pryor sketches as being bewildered by rapid and chaotic change is easy enough for those who know the area or era. The 1920s were, indeed, a trying time for many people in many places. Fear from The Great War, as contemporaries referred to World War I, lingered throughout the 1920s. Postwar radicals and reactionaries compounded insecurities. The Red Summer of 1919, with the Red Scare intensifying that year, hinted at...