September 14, 2011
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale
of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
Martha Sandweiss
Professor of History, Princeton University
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale
of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
Martha Sandweiss
Professor of History, Princeton University
Minutes of the First Meeting of the 70th Year
The first meeting of the seventieth year of Old Guard of Princeton started with the bang of the presidential gavel wielded by Robert Varrin at 10:15 am. Most of the 103 members present had attended the social hour which preceded the meeting.
Don Edwards led the invocation and Scott McVay read his minutes of the May 18, 2011 meeting. Al Kaemmerlen, Larry Parsons and Philip Cruickshank introduced guests David Scott, Alan Zetterberg and Natalie Cruickshank, respectively.
Robert Varrin asked for a moment of silence in memory of three members who died during the summer: Elizabeth Sanford, Robert Williams and Charles Gray.
John Schmidt and Arthur Eschenlauer from the Membership Committee presented a slate of nominees for membership to be voted on at the next meeting and the list of members who have achieved emeritus status.
Nominated for membership:
Charles Jay Ascher, Richard Bergman, Michael R. Curtis, Aiden Doyle, Helen Hamilton, Alan Hegedus, Allen H. Kassof, Michael Mathews, Dennis Minely, Hans deRuyter, David Tierno, Charles Westoff.
New emeritus members:
William J. Bolger, William F. Haynes Jr., Thomas M. Poole, David Kenny Reeves, Jerome Rose, Stanley Tarr, William E. Bonini, Moore Gates, Nathaniel H. Hartshorne, C. Roome Parmele,
Landon Jones introduced Martha Sandweiss, Professor of History, Princeton University. Professor Sandweiss received her Ph.D. in history from Yale and taught American studies and history at Amherst College for twenty years before coming to Princeton. She is the author or editor of numerous award-winning books on American history and photography.
Professor Sandweiss began her talk by reading the first few pages of her book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. She reported the 1900 census information given by Ada Todd, the mother of a black family in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York. Practically nothing recorded on the census card (now available on-line) was true. Yes, Ada Todd was black and the time and location of her birth indicated she was born a slave, but she took two years off her age and six years off the time she had been married. But more important information that Ada Todd believed to be true was not. Her husband was not born in Jamaica. He was not a traveling steel worker. His real name was not James Todd. He was not black.
Her husband was, in fact, Clarence King, a celebrated public figure and a person Secretary of State John Hay once called the best and brightest man of his generation. King was a larger than life character, a western explorer, a geologist and accomplished writer and story teller. He hobnobbed with political leaders and counted some of the nation’s most distinguished artists and writers among his closest friends. The historian Henry Adams wrote that King’s friends saw him “as the ideal American they all wanted to be.”
Ada King learned who her husband really was in late 1901 when he wrote her a death-bed letter from Arizona where he had gone in a futile quest to recover from tuberculosis.
After that summary of the story of Clarence/James and Ada, Professor Sandweiss began a discussion of the challenges of writing a history of two people where a great deal is known about one and very little about the other. And yet, she wanted the reader to be equally engaged with both characters in the story, a ‘micro-history’ of two people whose lives illuminate larger aspects of late nineteenth-century life.
Clarence King was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1842. His father, a China trader, died at sea when Clarence was five and he grew up in a household of women: his young, protective mother and her mother, a well-known abolitionist. He studied natural science at Yale and developed a strong interest in geology. Having no wish to fight in the Civil War, he headed west and worked with a team surveying the Yosemite area of California. After the war, this ambitious 25-year old presented Secretary of War Edwin Stanton with a plan to survey the Western United States and within weeks he was leading that effort. His book “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada” has remained in print since 1872. In 1879 he became the first director of the United States Geological Survey.
By the early 1880s he began speculating in his own investment and mining opportunities. Scientist, celebrity, man-about-town he reigned over Manhattan’s Century Club as its wittiest, most sought-after eminent speaker. Among his closest friends was John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary and later McKinley’s Secretary of State. And in late 1880s he met a black nursemaid named Ada Copeland on the streets of Manhattan and introduced himself as a black Pullman porter named James Todd.
In contrast to the information available to a diligent historian about Clarence King, details of the early life of Ada Copland are hard to discern. She was born a slave in 1862 in Georgia near the Alabama border. She learned to read and write and, showing independence and ambition, she moved to Manhattan in the late 1880s. She worked as a nursemaid, probably living in someone else’s house. In 1888 she married the man she knew as James Todd.
Not surprisingly, there is little record of details of the lives of James and Ada Todd. No paper exists with both of their signatures. No pictures of the two of them together. No public record at city hall of their marriage: they were married in a private ceremony at the Manhattan home of Ada’s aunt by the minister of her black church. No inscription in Ada’s wedding ring.
Professor Sandweiss shared her frustration of at times wishing she were a novelist, but said has an historian she “lives and dies by her footnotes.” However, there is much that can be inferred from knowing about what life was like for similar people at that time and the author can use ‘perhaps’ to alert the reader that what follows is the best idea of what happened.
Our speaker then reflected on what this story means regarding privacy, urban life, changing attitudes towards race and Clarence King’s own ideas on race.
The story provides an interesting window on the changing nature of privacy in our culture. Today an indiscretion by a public figure is publicized globally in a matter of seconds. How could a public figure like Clarence King maintain a secret double life for thirteen years? Even though there were telephones, there were few residential phones. Ada might read about a ‘Clarence King’ in the newspaper, but the article would be unaccompanied by his picture.
It also illustrates the changing nature of urban life. This double-life could have happened only in New York City. Then, as now, it was divided into many neighborhoods separated by race and ethnic background and class. But there was an excellent urban transit system to facilitate movement from one to another. King could take his meals and live his public life in any of the many men’s clubs he belonged to. Although he had rooms in a residential hotel, his friends would never know he would cross the Brooklyn Bridge to be with Ada and their five children at night.
But most importantly, what does this story say about race, that most vexing problem in America’s past? The fact that King crossed the color line as James Todd indicates that he truly loved Ada Copeland and that he knew an interracial marriage would upset his friends in the white world. His financial situation was precarious and he could not afford scandal.
A more compelling piece of this story is that although he was a light-skinned, blue-eyed blond, King could cross the color line. The reason is that in the late nineteenth century your race was legally defined by who your ancestors were, not what you looked like. If one of your great-grandparents were black, then you were black. There are many kinds of “passing” and all are usually to gain greater social, economic, or political privileges. None of these were the case with Clarence King who in essence was ‘reverse passing.’
King had unusual ideas about race. He wrote that he “liked women in the primitive state. Paradise for me is a garden and a primeval woman.” He thought that miscegenation was the hope of the white race and envisioned an American future when the composite elements of the American population are melted down into one race alloy.
The arbitrary definitions of race haunted his mixed-race children long after his death in 1901. His two daughters were married at city hall and each, as witness for the other, swore the bride was white when she took a white husband. When his two sons joined the Army to fight in World War I they were deemed black and served in a Jim Crow division. Years later one of them died in a mental hospital, officially listed as a white man.
In King’s letter to Ada revealing his true identity he told her he had left a trust fund for her. Ada had no idea of how to get it. An old childhood friend of King responded to an item Ada placed in the personal column of the newspaper and arranged a monthly stipend of $65. He told Ada if she presses him for details about the trust, the money would stop.
Ada persisted and after thirty-two years and a succession of lawyers, Ada had her day in court and found there was no trust fund. King’s old friend John Hay had arranged the payments to protect King’s reputation. Hay’s estate had continued the payments until the source was revealed.
Ada Copeland Todd King died in 1964 at the age of 103, spanning the century from civil war to civil rights.
During an informative Q & A session after her talk, Professor Sandweiss said she found little information about details of the Todd’s life in Queens. She did find a note in a social column that Mrs. James Todd was having a party to welcome in the New Year on January 1st, 1900.
It was a masquerade.
Respectively submitted,
Jock McFarlane
Notes:
An abbreviated version of these minutes was read to the members.
A talk by Martha Sandweiss about her book is on C-Span Book TV at
https://www.c-span.org/video/?284261-1/passing-strange
Should this link have been changed, go to https://www.c-spanvideo.org and search Professor Sandweiss's book Passing Strange.
Don Edwards led the invocation and Scott McVay read his minutes of the May 18, 2011 meeting. Al Kaemmerlen, Larry Parsons and Philip Cruickshank introduced guests David Scott, Alan Zetterberg and Natalie Cruickshank, respectively.
Robert Varrin asked for a moment of silence in memory of three members who died during the summer: Elizabeth Sanford, Robert Williams and Charles Gray.
John Schmidt and Arthur Eschenlauer from the Membership Committee presented a slate of nominees for membership to be voted on at the next meeting and the list of members who have achieved emeritus status.
Nominated for membership:
Charles Jay Ascher, Richard Bergman, Michael R. Curtis, Aiden Doyle, Helen Hamilton, Alan Hegedus, Allen H. Kassof, Michael Mathews, Dennis Minely, Hans deRuyter, David Tierno, Charles Westoff.
New emeritus members:
William J. Bolger, William F. Haynes Jr., Thomas M. Poole, David Kenny Reeves, Jerome Rose, Stanley Tarr, William E. Bonini, Moore Gates, Nathaniel H. Hartshorne, C. Roome Parmele,
Landon Jones introduced Martha Sandweiss, Professor of History, Princeton University. Professor Sandweiss received her Ph.D. in history from Yale and taught American studies and history at Amherst College for twenty years before coming to Princeton. She is the author or editor of numerous award-winning books on American history and photography.
Professor Sandweiss began her talk by reading the first few pages of her book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. She reported the 1900 census information given by Ada Todd, the mother of a black family in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York. Practically nothing recorded on the census card (now available on-line) was true. Yes, Ada Todd was black and the time and location of her birth indicated she was born a slave, but she took two years off her age and six years off the time she had been married. But more important information that Ada Todd believed to be true was not. Her husband was not born in Jamaica. He was not a traveling steel worker. His real name was not James Todd. He was not black.
Her husband was, in fact, Clarence King, a celebrated public figure and a person Secretary of State John Hay once called the best and brightest man of his generation. King was a larger than life character, a western explorer, a geologist and accomplished writer and story teller. He hobnobbed with political leaders and counted some of the nation’s most distinguished artists and writers among his closest friends. The historian Henry Adams wrote that King’s friends saw him “as the ideal American they all wanted to be.”
Ada King learned who her husband really was in late 1901 when he wrote her a death-bed letter from Arizona where he had gone in a futile quest to recover from tuberculosis.
After that summary of the story of Clarence/James and Ada, Professor Sandweiss began a discussion of the challenges of writing a history of two people where a great deal is known about one and very little about the other. And yet, she wanted the reader to be equally engaged with both characters in the story, a ‘micro-history’ of two people whose lives illuminate larger aspects of late nineteenth-century life.
Clarence King was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1842. His father, a China trader, died at sea when Clarence was five and he grew up in a household of women: his young, protective mother and her mother, a well-known abolitionist. He studied natural science at Yale and developed a strong interest in geology. Having no wish to fight in the Civil War, he headed west and worked with a team surveying the Yosemite area of California. After the war, this ambitious 25-year old presented Secretary of War Edwin Stanton with a plan to survey the Western United States and within weeks he was leading that effort. His book “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada” has remained in print since 1872. In 1879 he became the first director of the United States Geological Survey.
By the early 1880s he began speculating in his own investment and mining opportunities. Scientist, celebrity, man-about-town he reigned over Manhattan’s Century Club as its wittiest, most sought-after eminent speaker. Among his closest friends was John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary and later McKinley’s Secretary of State. And in late 1880s he met a black nursemaid named Ada Copeland on the streets of Manhattan and introduced himself as a black Pullman porter named James Todd.
In contrast to the information available to a diligent historian about Clarence King, details of the early life of Ada Copland are hard to discern. She was born a slave in 1862 in Georgia near the Alabama border. She learned to read and write and, showing independence and ambition, she moved to Manhattan in the late 1880s. She worked as a nursemaid, probably living in someone else’s house. In 1888 she married the man she knew as James Todd.
Not surprisingly, there is little record of details of the lives of James and Ada Todd. No paper exists with both of their signatures. No pictures of the two of them together. No public record at city hall of their marriage: they were married in a private ceremony at the Manhattan home of Ada’s aunt by the minister of her black church. No inscription in Ada’s wedding ring.
Professor Sandweiss shared her frustration of at times wishing she were a novelist, but said has an historian she “lives and dies by her footnotes.” However, there is much that can be inferred from knowing about what life was like for similar people at that time and the author can use ‘perhaps’ to alert the reader that what follows is the best idea of what happened.
Our speaker then reflected on what this story means regarding privacy, urban life, changing attitudes towards race and Clarence King’s own ideas on race.
The story provides an interesting window on the changing nature of privacy in our culture. Today an indiscretion by a public figure is publicized globally in a matter of seconds. How could a public figure like Clarence King maintain a secret double life for thirteen years? Even though there were telephones, there were few residential phones. Ada might read about a ‘Clarence King’ in the newspaper, but the article would be unaccompanied by his picture.
It also illustrates the changing nature of urban life. This double-life could have happened only in New York City. Then, as now, it was divided into many neighborhoods separated by race and ethnic background and class. But there was an excellent urban transit system to facilitate movement from one to another. King could take his meals and live his public life in any of the many men’s clubs he belonged to. Although he had rooms in a residential hotel, his friends would never know he would cross the Brooklyn Bridge to be with Ada and their five children at night.
But most importantly, what does this story say about race, that most vexing problem in America’s past? The fact that King crossed the color line as James Todd indicates that he truly loved Ada Copeland and that he knew an interracial marriage would upset his friends in the white world. His financial situation was precarious and he could not afford scandal.
A more compelling piece of this story is that although he was a light-skinned, blue-eyed blond, King could cross the color line. The reason is that in the late nineteenth century your race was legally defined by who your ancestors were, not what you looked like. If one of your great-grandparents were black, then you were black. There are many kinds of “passing” and all are usually to gain greater social, economic, or political privileges. None of these were the case with Clarence King who in essence was ‘reverse passing.’
King had unusual ideas about race. He wrote that he “liked women in the primitive state. Paradise for me is a garden and a primeval woman.” He thought that miscegenation was the hope of the white race and envisioned an American future when the composite elements of the American population are melted down into one race alloy.
The arbitrary definitions of race haunted his mixed-race children long after his death in 1901. His two daughters were married at city hall and each, as witness for the other, swore the bride was white when she took a white husband. When his two sons joined the Army to fight in World War I they were deemed black and served in a Jim Crow division. Years later one of them died in a mental hospital, officially listed as a white man.
In King’s letter to Ada revealing his true identity he told her he had left a trust fund for her. Ada had no idea of how to get it. An old childhood friend of King responded to an item Ada placed in the personal column of the newspaper and arranged a monthly stipend of $65. He told Ada if she presses him for details about the trust, the money would stop.
Ada persisted and after thirty-two years and a succession of lawyers, Ada had her day in court and found there was no trust fund. King’s old friend John Hay had arranged the payments to protect King’s reputation. Hay’s estate had continued the payments until the source was revealed.
Ada Copeland Todd King died in 1964 at the age of 103, spanning the century from civil war to civil rights.
During an informative Q & A session after her talk, Professor Sandweiss said she found little information about details of the Todd’s life in Queens. She did find a note in a social column that Mrs. James Todd was having a party to welcome in the New Year on January 1st, 1900.
It was a masquerade.
Respectively submitted,
Jock McFarlane
Notes:
An abbreviated version of these minutes was read to the members.
A talk by Martha Sandweiss about her book is on C-Span Book TV at
https://www.c-span.org/video/?284261-1/passing-strange
Should this link have been changed, go to https://www.c-spanvideo.org and search Professor Sandweiss's book Passing Strange.