Vengeance Is Mine: The Scandalous Love Triangle That Triggered the Boyce-Sneed Feud

To the Courts: From Guns to Gavels

56 5 C H A P T E R To the Courts From Guns to Gavels AS THE STORY OF THE BLOODY Boyce-Sneed feud continued to unfold for more than two years—more melodramatic than any modern soap opera—lurid newspaper accounts of a scandalous romance, the stalking, the killings, and the sensational murder trials titillated readers all across America and Canada (where the press continued to take an unusually condescending and voyeuristic interest ). Every twist of the tale seemed even more unbelievable than the last, and it not only shocked the nation but shook the pillars of West Texas society. The courtroom dramas, riveting enough as they were in their own right, also served to bring into sharp focus the marked differences between the liberal values emerging in the northern states and the traditional Victorian morals, customs, and religious beliefs still so deeply imbedded in southern culture—all this at the dawning of the new century when these “Old South” values were first beginning to be seriously challenged. <= When they slammed shut the jailhouse door on John Beal Sneed for the killing of Colonel Boyce, the entire drama abruptly shifted To the Courts 57 from guns to gavels. Beal filed a habeas corpus petition to get out of jail. Lena filed a habeas corpus petition to get out of the asylum. The Fort Worth district attorney called a grand jury to get a murder indictment against Beal. The district judge set the wheels of justice in motion to try Beal for murder. Al Boyce, meanwhile, paced the sidelines in Canada, frustrated, embittered, forlorn, heartsick . . . and debating what to do next. Lena’s Sanity Hearing First up to bat in the judicial ballpark on January 19, 1912, was Lena’s habeas corpus hearing in which she challenged the right of the Arlington Heights Sanitarium to imprison her. The hearing was in the Sixty-Seventh District Court of Tarrant County, Judge Tom Simmons presiding. The sole issue to be determined was whether Lena was, or was not, insane—or more specifically, “morally insane,” as John Beal Sneed and the sanitarium contended. Dr. Wilmer Allison at the sanitarium concurred in the “morally insane” diagnosis originally made by Dr. John Turner at the behest of John Beal Sneed. Now Dr. Allison would be called on to defend it—and explain it. In anticipation of that onerous task, he hired highpowered legal talent to represent himself and the sanitarium: a former Texas attorney general and a former county judge. The Boyce family, by virtue of the power of attorney Lena had given them, employed state senator O. S. Lattimore to represent Lena; to bolster their team they added another state senator to the roster, W. A. Hanger of Fort Worth, putting two very expensive lawyers in Lena’s corner. Not to be outdone, John Beal Sneed hired the most ferocious and feared criminal defense lawyer in Fort Worth, W. P. “Wild Bill” McLean, a courtroom predator as brilliant and articulate as he was ruthless. McLean was a member of a dynasty of prominent and successful Fort Worth lawyers consisting of his father (Judge William Pinckney McLean), a brother (Jefferson Davis McLean), two sons (W. P., Jr., and John), and a grandson (W. P. III).1 But “Wild Bill” McLean was the star litigator of the family. He first distinguished himself even before he received his law license. While a law student 58 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E at the University of Texas, he became the captain and quarterback of the school’s first football team. After graduation he served a short stint as a prosecutor, but soon found his true niche in the legal profession as a criminal defense lawyer. During the last thirty-five years of his legal career he successfully defended seventy-five clients charged with murder. The fiery, combative McLean earned his “Wild Bill” title by virtue of a booming voice, a forceful demeanor, and brash trial tactics in the courtroom. Assisting “Wild Bill” in his effort to keep Lena locked away in Allison’s asylum was his talented law partner, Walter Scott. To add even more beef to McLean’s team, Beal Sneed summoned his own bought-and-paid-for public official, Will Atwell, U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District of Texas. Money, scruples, and ethics were beside the point—the point was to win. Whatever it took. On the day the hearing began, McLean, Scott, and Atwell, upon behalf of John Beal Sneed, filed a motion contending that Lena “should not be turned loose in the world at this time.” Will Atwell, TARRANT COUNTY COURTHOUSE as it appeared in 1920s. Judge James Swayne presided over the Seventeenth District Court on the second floor of this courthouse when John Beal Sneed was tried there in 1912 for the murder of Colonel Albert G. Boyce. Postcard image. Courtesy Fort Worth Public Library, Genealogy, Local History, and Archives Unit. To the Courts 59 probably hoping that Lena would be intimidated by the impending ordeal she faced, told the court that he believed “Mrs. Sneed wished to withdraw the [habeas corpus] application and ‘go with her family.’”2 He grossly underestimated Lena’s indignation and resolve. She did not wish to withdraw her application, and she most definitely did not wish to “go with her family.” After Beal’s lawyers put Dr. Allison on the stand and extracted the anticipated “morally insane” diagnosis, Senator Lattimore took him on cross-examination. From a spectator standpoint, the observers must have eagerly awaited an answer to the burning question of the day: What the heck is “moral insanity” anyway? The good doctor proved something less than forthcoming. “Disingenuous” and “forgetful ” and “vague” more accurately described his performance. He seemed most adept at forgetting inconvenient facts. First off, however , he had to admit that Lena had been locked up in his institution on John Beal Sneed’s diagnosis alone; there had been no prior FUTURE ALL-STAR DEFENSE LAWYER “WILD BILL” MCLEAN was quarterback of the first University of Texas football team in 1893. “Wild Bill” is seated, front row, second from left, holding the game ball. Photograph courtesy of the University of Texas at Arlington Library Special Collections. 60 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E court proceedings, no sanity hearing, and no judicial determination that she was insane. In fact, after she was incarcerated John Beal Sneed had to send Dr. John Turner back to examine Lena three times before he came up with the right answer—that is, an answer that suited Beal. The January 19, 1912, edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram recounted a verbatim account of the cross-examination of Dr. Allison. It read, in part, as follows: Q: You say you treated her—how did you treat her? A: That is hard to say. Q: Did you treat her this morning or yesterday? A: I could hardly say without looking it up. Q: What medicine did you give? A: Calomel, for one thing, and a tonic. Q: Isn’t she your highest priced patient . . . paying $65 while the regular price is $35? A: The rate varies according to the amount of attention a patient demands and the amount of care necessary . . . Dr. Allison said that when Mrs. Sneed was brought to the sanitarium she protested violently and “screamed and hollered and fought.” Afterward she “caused a great deal of trouble by often asking to talk to him, and by constantly wanting to do something or to go somewhere.” Q: Do you think she was of unsound mind? A: I think she was in a condition of moral insanity . . . Q: What do you mean? A: That is hard to explain. Q: I think so too, but you are an expert. A: I mean a person that has lost their moral sense to a certain extent. Q: Is calomel a remedy for moral insanity? A: That was part of the treatment . . . To the Courts 61 Dr. Allison then testified that in his opinion a lack of proper regard for the truth evidences moral insanity. Q: Is every liar insane? A: No. Dr. Allison added that evidence of impairment of one’s moral compass is detected “when a woman who has been reared under every proper surroundings becomes immoral.” He also cited Lena’s seemingly lack of remorse at running off with Al Boyce. “She seemed to regard the whole affair as an individual matter,” he marveled. In those two brief answers, Dr. Allison succeeded in revealing much about the conventional Victorian views on class, gender, and family, which, even in the early twentieth century, still retained considerable potency.3 Dr. Allison finally concluded that “moral insanity affects the moral side of the brain.” When asked if he regarded Lena’s “mental faculties as unbalanced,” he dodged again. Dr. Allison, the selfproclaimed mental health expert, replied, “I don’t know.” Senator Lattimore’s cross-examination of Allison was considerably less than exhaustive, and he let Allison off the hook with a few generalizations without pressing for many obvious follow-up questions—such as a more specific definition of “moral insanity,” for openers. Exactly how does it differ from ordinary insanity? What are its symptoms, causes, usual duration? What, if any, harm is the patient likely to cause to others? To herself? How many previous cases of moral insanity, if any, had he diagnosed? Treated? What were the results? Case histories? Length of confinements? Therapy? Medicines? Also, what authorities on the subject had he studied? Is “moral insanity” a mental disease recognized by the medical profession ? Since when? Any dissenting opinions? What other experts in the field, if any, had he consulted concerning Lena’s case? The list goes on. One thing is certain: had John Beal Sneed’s pugnacious lawyer, “Wild Bill” McLean, been in charge of that cross-examination of Dr. Allison, the good doctor would have been on the hotseat for hours on end, if not days, composing a treatise on “moral insanity.” 62 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E All of which demonstrates that politicians, however effective they may be on the campaign trail or in the legislative hall, are not necessarily great—or even good—trial lawyers. Actually, there had been a few previous murder trials in which female killers had relied upon “moral insanity” (or something closely akin thereto) as a defense. On May 3, 1870, San Francisco’s most respected lawyer, A. P. Crittenden, together with his wife and two children, was seated on a crowded ferryboat crossing San Francisco Bay. Suddenly a woman wearing a heavy black veil came out of a group of passengers, walked over to Crittenden, and exclaimed, “You have ruined me and my child.” With that she drew a pistol and shot him in the heart. Then she dropped the pistol and walked away. When she was arrested a short time later she said, “Yes, I did it. I don’t deny it, and I meant to kill him.” Laura D. Fair had been the mistress of Crittenden for seven years, during which time they carried on an open affair. Crittenden had repeatedly promised to divorce his wife and marry Laura. But each time, he reneged on his promise. Finally, when she witnessed the happy scene of her lover and his wife and family enjoying their cruise, she snapped. A public outcry for Laura’s noosed neck was promptly raised by an outraged community when it heard of the murder of its popular attorney. The district attorney made the sweeping assertion that it could be regarded as “the most important case in the annals of criminal jurisprudence of the United States.” San Francisco and other area newspapers followed the trial, never missing any detail, and wailed like a Greek chorus in the background for swift and deadly vindication. One commentator would later describe it this way: “As Laura’s trial for her life proceeded, it became a dramatic production of the first order, a morality play that put on public exhibition not only the moral values of the criminal but also the values of the community in which she lived, of the jurors, of the lawyers, and even of the judge.”4 The trial lasted twenty-six days. In the end, the jury found Laura Fair guilty. The judge sentenced her to be hanged. But she appealed and won a reversal of the conviction. To the Courts 63 Upon retrial, the defense shifted tactics dramatically and played the “moral insanity” card, claiming that at the time she shot Crittenden her “reason was dethroned.” According to the defense experts, there existed three types of insanity: total (permanent) intellectual insanity, partial (temporary) intellectual insanity, and “moral and partial insanity.” The defense contended Laura was not guilty since at the time of the shooting she suffered from “partial moral insanity ,” brought on by “delayed menstruation.” The jury agreed and acquitted Laura Fair. Several other nineteenth-century female murder defendants played the same card with varying results. It became known as the “dysmenorrheal-temporary insanity” defense. Today, the terminology has changed from “dysmenorrheal” to premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. The first female to rely on the premenstrual syndrome temporary “moral insanity” defense in a murder case was Mary Harris. She was tried in Washington, D.C., in May 1865 for shooting and killing Adoniram J. Burroughs, a clerk in the U.S. Treasury Department. Tearfully, she explained to the jury that Burroughs had promised to marry her, ruined her, and then married someone else. Mary was acquitted after her expert, Dr. Charles Nichols, superintendent of Washington’s Government Hospital for the Insane, testified that Mary was “paroxysmally” morally insane from the “combination of being crossed in love and suffering from painful dysmenorrheal at the time of the shooting.”5 Lawyers in some other nineteenth-century trials attempted to stretch the “moral insanity” diagnosis to cover cases in which that condition was supposedly caused by something quite different from premenstrual syndrome. In 1881 Charles Guiteau raised that defense (unsuccessfully) when he was tried for assassinating President James Garfield. One psychiatrist for the defense testified that Guiteau suffered from moral insanity, and another, testifying for the prosecution, concluded that he was just a “moral imbecile.”6 The scholar John Ellard later commented that it was about that time (late in the nineteenth century) that the distinction between moral insanity and wickedness was lost. Ellard went on to contend that moral insanity existed 64 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E “only in the psychiatrist’s imagination.” He made this comment in rejoinder to a nineteenth-century expert who had written that moral insanity could be distinguished from ordinary garden-variety depravity because it was always preceded by “some diseased function of organs, more or less intimately connected with the brain and nerves.” “Moral insanity,” he concluded, was “so subtle that it could be detected only by a psychiatrist, but not a court or a jury.”7 Another noted scholar, however, went even further. Dr. John P. Gray, the superintendent of the Utica [New York] Lunatic Asylum who in 1865 criticized Mary Harris’s psychiatric expert, in 1881 voiced the opinion that “moral insanity is indistinguishable from moral depravity”—this while testifying for the prosecution in the Charles Guiteau murder trial. It was he who pronounced Guiteau a moral imbecile.8 <= When Dr. Allison declared that Lena was suffering from “moral insanity,” he was not pressed to give a precise and detailed opinion as to the cause of her condition. Indeed, to have attributed it to a menstrual cycle problem would not have suited John Beal Sneed at all. It wouldn’t have been consistent with his diagnosis of the cause of Lena’s “moral insanity.” It was crucial to Beal’s game plan that the whole thing be blamed solely on the evil influence of that libertine Al Boyce. In addition, blaming Lena’s insanity on some menstrual problem would not have justified Dr. Allison in keeping Lena locked up indefinitely in a mental institution. Before resting their case, Beal’s lawyers called Lena’s father, Tom Snyder, age seventy, to the stand to testify on behalf of Beal. Snyder identified himself as a real estate broker in Clayton, New Mexico, a stockholder in the State Bank of Commerce of that place, and a former trustee of Southwestern University in Georgetown where the Snyder, the Sneed, and the Boyce families had been neighbors and intimate friends for years. He testified as follows: I and my entire family will stand by Beal Sneed who has stood by my daughter in a manly way . . . I love him like a son and a To the Courts 65 brother . . . As to our daughter, our hearts and our homes are all open to her. We feel that she has done no wrong, because she was not responsible for what she has done. It was upon my advice that her husband placed her in the sanitarium . . .9 After that, Lena’s legal team called to the stand three physicians who had examined Lena. They all testified that they detected no evidence of insanity in Lena’s behavior. Dr. R. O. Braswell put it bluntly: “She is not insane.” Meanwhile, Lena, described in the Star-Telegram, as being neatly attired in a tailored blue serge dress with a red ribbon trimming and also wearing a black seal fur hat and coat, remained “wonderfully composed” throughout the ordeal. She lost control only once, and that was when Dr. Allison testified that she did not love her children. Finally, Lena was called to testify. She asked Judge Tom Simmons to allow her to tell how she had been treated at the sanitarium. He granted the request. The Star-Telegram reported this: Then she told her story in a quiet, unhesitating way, answering every question without a moment’s reflection . . . She declared that she was put in the sanitarium by force . . . “Dr. Allison and his brother and the matron grabbed me and I was taken away from my two children . . . My husband said to Dr. Allison, ‘Here she is,’ and they carried me and put apomorphis [a powerful crystalline emetic obtained from morphine] in my arm, right here (indicating), and that was the last thing I remember until I came to, upstairs, locked in the room” . . . She denied that she had any treatment for three weeks and had one bath. She complained she had no clothes to wear except for a nightgown and a “kimono.”10 Up to this point in the sanity hearing, the Star-Telegram had printed a detailed account of the testimony of witnesses, yet when Allison’s and Beal’s attorneys began their cross-examination of Lena, the newspaper abruptly balked, presumably in deference to the chivalrous notion that any sexually explicit testimony was “not fit for the delicate ears of ladies” or the public. 66 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E The Star-Telegram’s censorship of Lena’s testimony was partially explained by Lena a few days later when she wrote Al in Canada: Mr. Boyce had been dead three days before I knew anything about it—you know Beal had shut me up again at Arlington Heights— killed your dear father at the Metropolitan about one hour afterwards—this was on Sat. and I was summoned [sic] before the Grand Jury Tues. after [January 16, 1912] plus didn’t know anything about it until I left the Grand Jury room—I had my trial for my sanity on Friday [January 19, 1912] plus was released from the Sanitarium—Darling it was horrible—they asked the vilest most horrible questions and I had to answer them. It was so horrible all of it was not allowed to be published in the newspapers . . .11 In his cross-examination of Dr. Allison, Lattimore forced him to admit that he had tried to persuade Lena to withdraw her application for a habeas corpus hearing, warning her that if she went through with it, it would be a “most humiliating experience” for her. (One wonders if Dr. Allison was more concerned with Lena or himself having to go through a “most humiliating experience.”) At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Simmons made his finding. He announced: “After hearing this testimony, I could not conclude there was a semblance of insanity developed here in this case, and I am clearly of the opinion that the applicant ought to be discharged, and I will discharge her.”12 <= The Boyce family, meanwhile, urged Al to remain in Canada for three reasons: to forestall a feared bloodbath, to facilitate a conviction of Beal, and hopefully, to put an end to Al’s relationship with Lena. In response, Al wrote Lena this: My desire and impulse was to return, but have received telegrams asking me to stay in Canada, and everyone here has told me my presence there would only aggravate the situation and weaken the prosecution. That I would be arrested upon crossing the line, would only mean more trouble.13 To the Courts 67 After Lena was released she made a short trip from Fort Worth to Plano where her sister Eula and Eula’s husband, Henry Bowman, resided. The Bowman family had kept Lena’s two daughters since her initial commitment to the sanitarium. After a tearful reunion with the two girls, Lena was informed that she could not remain in the Bowman home unless she would publicly admit that Beal was justified in what he had done. She refused, and called her sister Pearl Snyder Perkins, who lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, for help. Pearl alone among Lena’s family “stayed hitched” with Lena and supported her relationship with Al. Pearl then obtained funds from the Boyce family, traveled to Plano, rescued Lena, and took her back to Lake Charles. Beal’s Bond Hearing Meanwhile, John Beal Sneed was imprisoned in the Tarrant County jail awaiting trial for killing Colonel Boyce. He had been denied bail, an imposition that he was not about to accept without a fight. He had McLean and Scott file his own habeas corpus action demanding bail. Judge Tom Simmons of the Sixty-Seventh Judicial District Court heard the application. When he took the bench on January 23, 1912, tension was crackling as the Boyce, Sneed, and Snyder factions and their respective supporters crowded into the courtroom and glared across the aisle at one another. Wisely, Judge Simmons announced that no guns would be allowed in his courtroom, and he ordered anyone carrying a sidearm to disarm himself at once or go to jail. He called a ten-minute recess to allow anyone with a pistol to exit the courtroom and “stack arms” before returning. Then the hearing began. Ordinarily, any person charged with a crime is entitled to bail set at a reasonable sum to ensure appearance at trial. However, in a capital murder case where the accused is charged with a deliberate and premeditated first-degree murder (a death penalty offense), and “the proof of which is evident,” bail may be denied, as it initially was for Beal Sneed. Beal’s habeas corpus bond hearing was a dress rehearsal for the real thing. The state had the burden of proving that the killing was deliberate and premeditated and without any legal defense. The state’s case seemed clear and unassailable. After all, Colonel Boyce 68 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E was unarmed, had made no prior threats to Beal, and, at most, had simply tried to keep Beal from railroading his son to the penitentiary. The only defense advanced by McLean and Scott at the bond hearing didn’t suggest exoneration; it only aimed at mitigation of the offense—“manslaughter” rather than “not guilty” of premeditated murder. If manslaughter were a viable option for the jury, then Beal would be entitled to bail. The essence of the manslaughter offense in Texas is that the defendant killed his victim while in the throes of a “sudden passion arising from adequate cause.” The defense team contended that there was a conspiracy by the entire Boyce family, headed up by Colonel Boyce, to alienate Lena from her husband and reunite her with Al Boyce. Heroic John Beal Sneed had just spent $25,000 tracking Lena down and bringing her home in an effort to restore her moral sanity, and now Colonel Boyce and his family were plotting to wrest her away from her husband again— thus causing Beal to fall into the throes of a “sudden passion” that was provoked by an “adequate cause.” Lena’s father, Tom Snyder, weighed in for the defense. He said he had known the Boyce family for more than fifty years and had been an intimate friend and business associate of Colonel Boyce since 1858. Now, he continued, he felt that Colonel Boyce had betrayed that friendship and sacrificed the Sneed and Snyder families “and everybody else” to save his “drunken, cigarette-smoking fiend son.” He concluded by exclaiming, “If I had a gun and Al Boyce was here, I would kill him!”14 In the process of proving its case, the state called Ed Throckmorton , Colonel Boyce’s companion in the Metropolitan Hotel lobby at the time of the shooting. Throckmorton gave his eyewitness account of the fatal shooting of Colonel Boyce and the events leading up to it as recounted in the previous chapter. Throckmorton’s testimony— particularly the part where he told of Beal Sneed standing over the dying Colonel Boyce and exclaiming, “Now you’re done with. You’re out of it!”—was crucial to the state’s case because it tended to show premeditation on Sneed’s part, and it tended to ward off any subsequent attempt by the defense to raise a self-defense issue. In the end, the trial judge granted the defense motion for bond, his decision based not on the premise that Beal was innocent of the To the Courts 69 killing of Colonel Boyce, but only that there was a viable manslaughter issue involved in the case. He set bond at $35,000—which Beal Sneed made immediately. It is interesting at this point to pause and note the support that John Beal Sneed commanded from affluent Texans. The Star-Telegram reported that “Sneed’s $35,000 bond was immediately signed by his father, Joe Sneed, Sr., of Georgetown; his father-in-law, T. S. Snyder of Clayton, New Mexico; his brothers, Joe and Marvin Sneed of Dalhart; and by 100 prominent businessmen from different parts of the state who had given Joe Sneed, Jr. power of attorney to sign their names . . . to a bond in any sum.”15 That one hundred prominent Texas citizens would volunteer to go on Sneed’s $35,000 bond (a sum equal to more than a half a million dollars in today’s money) is indicative of the intensity of feelings this case generated and the depth of the rift it caused between the factions . In Amarillo, the town’s social fabric was ripped down the middle , and it was not until decades later that anybody there would even acknowledge that these events occurred—at least to an outsider. The district judge, in granting the defense motion for bond, made a curious remark from the bench: I have great sympathy for both sides in the case—they are all good people—but I can understand how Captain Snyder feels— how he can’t conceive that his daughter lost her virtue before she lost her mind.16 That quote not only reflected the mores of the day but also was an ominous harbinger of things to come in the courtroom battles. In wrapping up the news story of Sneed’s bail bond hearing, the Star-Telegram noted that John Beal Sneed evidenced confidence in a favorable decision from the start, and that he “sat composedly smoking his pipe throughout the proceeding.” Only Throckmorton ’s testimony seemed to provoke his ire. <= The preliminaries were over. Now the curtain was about to rise on a much anticipated drama, the trial of a killer who had assassinated a Texas icon—a bedrock antebellum pioneer, a Civil War hero, an 70 V E N G E A N C E I S M I N E early trail driver, the longtime and successful manager of the famous XIT Ranch, a wealthy West Texas banker, a staunch Methodist, and an esteemed citizen. Newspaper headlines across Texas and beyond had keyed the audience to a fevered pitch. The trial was to be held in Fort Worth—“Cowtown” as folks called it. How fitting it was that Beal Sneed’s murder trial would be played out in Cowtown, fitting because all the principals involved— Beal, Lena, Al, Colonel Boyce, as well as the three pioneer families they represented—were all cow country royalty with intertwined roots reaching far back into Texas history. On the eve of the 1912 Sneed murder trial, Fort Worth was not yet a city; it was still an overgrown, provincial country town of around 75,000, which had earned its well-deserved “Cowtown” handle. After the Civil War when thousands of Texas cattle were trailed north to railheads in Kansas, the little village on the banks of the Trinity River was along the well-trodden path of the famous Chisholm Trail. But by the mid-1880s, railroads had linked Fort Worth with the rest of the nation, and it was no longer necessary to market Texas cattle by making those long trail drives. Fort Worth soon became a major, area-wide cattle-marketing center, and by 1912 the sprawling stockyards in the north part of town and the adjacent meat-packing factories were the city’s largest industries. Across town, another thriving industry had come to life and a very lively one at that. They called it “Hell’s Half Acre.” That was also a well-deserved handle. Many a thirsty, trail-weary cowboy shook off the trail dust and looked for a little heaven down in Hell’s Half Acre—name your poison. Saloons, bordellos, and gambling joints had no curfews or overly civilized rules of conduct.17 But trail-weary cowboys, railroad workers, and other unrepentant sinners were not the only ones who enjoyed Hell’s Half Acre. A sizeable cadre of civic -minded reformers as well as some noisy “hellfire-and-damnation” Bible-thumpers, loved to loathe and denounce the Half Acre, but with only limited success—at least until well into the twentieth century .18 As one semi-repentant sinner was once prayed: “Lord make us good . . . but not right now.”19 ...