Rhinelander v. Rhinelander

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0:32Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt and the reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave all at once. Why do people cheat? And why does it make us so mad even when we're not the ones it's happening to? That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

1:01This episode contains content that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. How did Leonard Rhinelander and Alice Jones meet? They had a meet cute. They had the 1920s version of a meet cute. He was driving on a road near her house and had car trouble. And actually, I should say, it was a meet-cute once removed because he actually met her sister Grace first. It was September of 1921. Grace Jones struck up a conversation with Leonard and his friends. The next day, Leonard met her older sister. Alice. And from then on, they were as inseparable as they could be. Writer and producer Laura Wexler.

1:58Alice was fiery. She was funny. She loved music. Leonard loved music, too. And they really, as they sort of courted each other, really bonded over music and film. Leonard and Alice would go to the movies together and liked to take long drives. When they met, Alice was 22. Leonard was 18. Leonard had grown up in a very wealthy family, the Rhinelanders. They were people who had come over from Europe to New Amsterdam and helped to settle and establish the town of New Rochelle, which actually is where Leonard and Alice met and where she lived. So his family had, you know, from the 1600s when they got here, had bought land, built ships, really expanded and grown their wealth until, you know, at the point at which Leonard and Alice meet, the Rhinelander family is second only to the Astors as owners of New York City real estate.

3:14So everybody knew who the Rhinelanders were. They were sort of the closest thing to American aristocracy. Leonard was the youngest child of Philip and Adelaide Rhinelander. When he was 13, his mother died in an accident. An alcohol lamp she was using to curl her hair exploded. Growing up, Leonard was known to be extremely shy. He also had a stutter. At the time, stuttering was seen to be a mental issue. And so even though he was part of the elite, he was not one of, you know, the shining stars of the family. At the time that Leonard met Alice, he was enrolled in a school that served as an inpatient clinic for people suffering from nervous disorders.

4:09He's kind of hidden away from the family and society, and it feels like it's kind of a last-ditch effort to try to cure him of this stutter and make him into a son that the father would be proud of. And what about Alice's family? Alice's family were immigrants. Her parents came over from England in 1891. So the Rhinelanders had already been here for more than 200 years. And Alice's parents, George and Elizabeth Jones, had both been servants on an English estate. Her father was a coachman and her mother was a cook. When Alice's parents arrived in America, her father worked a variety of jobs. Alice and her sisters eventually went to work as maids.

5:07So they were very much working class. In December of 1921, Alice and Leonard drove into New York City, where they were going to see a play. They ended up getting a room at the Hotel Marie Antoinette, where Leonard registered them as a husband and wife named Mr. and Mrs. James Smith. They stayed there for five days. The next month, they went back to the hotel. It's pretty clear that the chauffeur, the family chauffeur, lets Philip Rhinelander, Leonard's father, know that Leonard and Alice have taken a room at the Hotel Marie Antoinette and are having basically, you know, a love fest there. So acting on this tip, Philip Reinlander sends his lawyer to the Hotel Marie Antoinette.

6:04He bangs on the door and discovers them and then immediately separates them. Philip Reinlander sent his son away. Leonard went on long trips to Cuba, Bermuda, and San Francisco. His father even enrolled him at a ranch school in Arizona. They worried about Leonard being with a woman who was a maid. Philip Rhinelander's brother, about 30, 40 years before, had married a housemaid. And he had been excommunicated from the family and had died poor and sick and, you know, never was invited back into the family and, in fact, was buried outside the family mausoleum. So Philip Reinländer, in a way, was following the family rules.

7:02This was their playbook. But Alice and Leonard kept writing to each other. Over the next two years, they wrote 700 letters, maybe even more, back and forth to each other. When Leonard turned 21 in 1924, he inherited more than$300 ,000 from his grandfather. He immediately got on a train to New Rochelle, back to Alice. He sort of went rogue, went immediately to Alice's house before he even, you know, saw any member of his family, and they reunited. A few months later, Alice and Leonard got married in New Rochelle. And not only does his father not know, but her parents, or at least her father, they don't know that they're going to get married either until after it's done.

7:53Before they were married, Alice's father had told Leonard that he didn't think he should propose. George Jones basically says to Leonard, this marriage can never work because the class difference is too great. You can't span this class difference between you, you know, of the aristocracy, and Alice, who is of English working people. So his reservations about the marriage had everything to do with class, which had everything to do with how he understood society from his years in England. Still, once they were married, Alice's parents let them move in with them while they were busy setting up their new apartment.

8:40They bought dishes, they bought linens, and all of that was very romantic and wholesome. You know, as romantic as this was, Leonard was living a double life. Even though they were married, he still didn't want his father to know that he had married Alice. And so Monday through Friday, he was living at his father's house and working in the family real estate company. and after work on the weekdays he would come out and eat dinner with Alice and her family and go back and then on the weekends he would come and he would live with them. They were planning to tell his father that they were married by having a party once their apartment got set up and so So even as Leonard was prepared to be excommunicated, there was also this hope that once his father saw how happy he was, that the father and the family would welcome them.

9:55But they never got a chance to have the party because the news leaked to the newspapers. On Friday, November 14th, 1924, the Daily News ran an article about Alice and Leonard's marriage. The headline read, Blue Blood Weds Colored Girl. And from there, the newspapers say she's the daughter of a black man. Reporters wrote that George Jones, Alice's father, was, quote, a colored coachman, who was, quote, generally believed here to have West Indian blood in his veins. Alice's skin was described in the papers as, quote, coffee-colored. So it's not only the rich, poor, Cinderella angle, but it's the, you know, black and blue blood, you know, contrast.

10:52When the news breaks and the newspapers are publishing these headlines, How does the couple react initially? Initially, they both deny it. They say that they're going to sue the newspapers for printing lies. Alice told one reporter, I'm going to sue the papers that have called my father colored. I'm going to file suit for libel. One paper said that Leonard urged his wife to answer questions calmly, to, quote, help clear things up. Newspapers started printing stories about their marriage every day. Leonard and Alice went into hiding at her parents' house in New Rochelle. There's just, you know, crowds of onlickers, crowds of press.

11:42The police are called to kind of prevent people from getting too close to the house. You know, someone throws a rock through the window. So after a week, they're really looking to escape. Leonard Rhinelander's father had issued a statement that his son had married without his knowledge. Behind the scenes, of course, this is their worst nightmare. You know, he had been worried that Leonard had been found with a woman far below his social status and took extreme measures exiling Leonard from New York for two years because of that. But now, you know, this is orders of magnitude worse. You know, there is a threat that, you know, this bloodline of the Rhinelanders that they've protected and have been so proud of for 200 years is going to be, you know, contaminated.

12:43That's how they see it, contaminated by non-white blood. And this is horrific to them. The 1920s, this is the height of the Klan. They have four million members. They're absolutely a mainstream organization. And this is the height of the American eugenics movement. The Winelander family sent a lawyer to Alice's parents' house, who said he could help the couple relocate. Somehow he convinces them that the best way to do this is for him to take Leonard separately and go look for a place and then return for Alice the next day and take her to him. So that's the plan. He takes Leonard, they drive off in a limousine, and that is the last time that Alice sees Leonard until she sees him in court a year later.

13:43I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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15:22And then, about a week after Leonard left, the Rhinelander's lawyer came to the house again. Not to take Alice to meet Leonard so they can continue their married life, but to serve her with legal papers indicating that he is suing her for annulment, charging that she committed racial fraud by pretending to be a white woman when in fact she was not. That same day, a messenger delivered a letter from Leonard. It said, I hope you will win this case. Get the best lawyer.

16:08Both of Alice's parents had been born in England. Her father, George, didn't know much about his father, but described him as being a, quote, native of one of the British colonies. Alice's father, George, had brown skin. In Alice and her family's understanding, they are not Black. To them, the term Black means African-American. It means an American Black person. They are English. And Alice again and again and her family again and again say, you know, my father is English. He has dark skin because his father was from an English colony, probably India, but he's English and his mother was white. so we don't identify with being black, negro, or colored.

17:06That was how they had lived their lives. That, of course, was not the view of most Americans at the time, which was, if you have dark skin, you're black, you're negro, or you're colored, depending on, sometimes those terms had slightly different definitions, Sometimes they didn't. But she has to be either black or white, really. That's just how the American racial understanding went. So she's stuck in this racial binary as soon as this news comes out. In 1924, interracial marriage was illegal in more than half of the states. But it was legal in New York, where Alice and Leonard had gotten married.

17:56What that means for the Rhinelander family is that getting Leonard out of this marriage is not going to be as simple as it would have been, say, in Virginia or Georgia. where if, you know, he had been able to show proof that Alice wasn't white, automatically the marriage would have been invalidated. So they're in this tricky position here in New York, which is interracial marriage is legal and divorce is very hard to get. Like divorce, I think until the 70s in New York, was only allowable in cases of adultery. So he wasn't going to be able to get a divorce. There was no way he was going to prove that Alice had, you know, been adulterous to him.

18:48So annulment is really his only legal option. And the other benefit of annulment is that it, you know, it erases the marriage completely. So for the Rhinelanders who, you know, are losing their minds about the possibility of this stain on their proud family lineage, it would make it as if it had never happened. It would disappear the marriage and Alice completely. In order to get an annulment, the Rhinelanders would have to prove that Alice had defrauded Leonard by leading him to believe she was white when she wasn't. Her defense is, she is white, so she didn't commit fraud, therefore the marriage should stand.

19:39The annulment trial began in November of 1925 in White Plains, New York. Newspapers reported that Mrs. Rhinelander has repeatedly declared her faith in Leonard and has steadfastly refused huge sums of money said to have been offered to her by the Rhinelander clan in lieu of her husband Leonard's lawyer, Isaac Mills, began by describing his client as a, quote, quote, weak, utterly unsophisticated young man, upon whom, Mills said, no woman had ever smiled until he encountered Alice Jones. He said Leonard suffered from an illness that, quote, affects both his speech and his mind. Leonard's lawyer claimed that Alice had told Leonard before they were married that she was white, when in fact, quote, she was colored and of colored blood.

20:38The main piece of evidence that his lawyers present at trial is that on her birth certificate, Alice had been marked as black. Even though on the census, many years the family was listed as white and Alice was listed as white. And even though when she and Leonard got married at the new Rochelle City Hall, she was identified as white by the clerk. The fact that she had been identified as black on her birth certificate carried a lot of weight. When it was time for Alice's lawyer, Lee Parsons Davis, to present his opening statements, he did something that took everyone by surprise. He stands up during his opening statement and he says, we're going to concede that Alice Rhinelander has colored blood.

21:36Our defense will be that Leonard knew and that therefore there was no fraud. Alice's lawyer told the court that Leonard Rhinelander had spent lots of time with Alice's family at her house, including with her father. He said that Leonard's lawyer should not have claimed that Leonard was, quote, mentally unsound, but instead blind, when he asserted the young man was deceived about Alice's color. What happens once this concession is made is that the focus of the trial moves off of Alice and on to Leonard. So his lawyer needs to show that Leonard truly believed she was white, so he didn't know. And the reason he didn't know was, A, he was mentally backward, as he said, and B, Alice, through her, you know, according to him, lascivious ways, had bewitched Leonard to the point where, as he says during trial, Leonard could no longer tell Black from White.

22:52Against Leonard's wishes, his lawyers had taken letters that Alice had written to him and submitted them as evidence to be read aloud in court. In some ways, the letters were very conventional, romantic expressions of two young people who had fallen in love and were being kept apart. So they were remembering the good times they had. They were pledging their loyalty and their care for each other. One letter said, Len, I am true to you. A nice little chap came here the other day and wanted a date, but I refused, because I have one boy I love a lot. You always take care of your Alice. But there are also letters that are read that are meant to be embarrassing.

23:46Yes. In their letters, they recall in great detail the intimacy that they shared in their stolen days and weeks at the Hotel Marie Antoinette. And they depict her in the most negative light possible. These letters were also read aloud. Here is a young woman who's not only having sex before marriage, as her letters describe, but really taking great pleasure in it and really expressing that pleasure. And that really violated the norms of womanhood at the time. I mean, we are in the roaring 20s, but most people are not flappers. Most people are still kind of Victorian at this time. And so these letters absolutely destroyed her reputation as, you know, a good woman, so to speak.

24:45And then when her lawyer, when he cross-examines Leonard, he basically threatens him by showing Leonard a letter that Leonard had written to Alice, having Leonard read it silently, and then saying, Leonard, are you sure you want to go on with this trial? Alice's lawyer said that if the Rhinelanders would drop the annulment suit, he wouldn't read Leonard's two most explicit letters in court. The trial was paused for several days while the Rhinelander's lawyers considered what to do. You know, many people are betting that the Rhinelander family is going to drop the suit rather than have these letters read in court because whatever it is has got to be so damaging.

25:35And then court reconvenes and Leonard's lawyer says, we go on with the trial no matter what. We'll be right back.

26:04On November 23rd, 1925, Alice Rhinelander's lawyer, Lee Parsons Davis, prepared to read two so-called mystery letters from Leonard Rhinelander allowed in court. But before he reads them in court, the judge clears the courtroom of women and young people. And at that point, they had constituted the majority of these overflow crowds that had been coming to the trial every day. And, man, these women do not want to leave the courtroom. They are there for this. And some of them have to be dragged out. Some of them have their clothes ripped in the process. Like, it's a circus. So they get all the women out.

26:51They close and lock the doors. And suddenly the courtroom is so much more quiet than it has been for nearly four weeks. And Davis reads these letters aloud. and in the letters Leonard has recalled to Alice intimate experiences that they had together in which he performed oral sex on her and just as she talked with pleasure about their intimacy together, he does too. And after the lawyer finishes reading those letters, Leonard is absolutely destroyed. His reputation, oral sex was a crime at the time. I don't think that many people were prosecuted for it, but it definitely wasn't considered normal.

27:53And in fact, everything about the letters earns Leonard the label of deviant. What was Leonard's reaction? The lawyer, her lawyer, goads him by saying, you know, didn't you know this was deviant? Didn't you know this was filth? Didn't, you know, didn't you know this was wrong? This wasn't normal. and Leonard refuses to take the bait. He stands his ground and says, no, this was how we loved each other and I wrote these things because it was a way of, you know, maintaining my connection to Alice and to being true to her and I gave my word to being true and I was true And I'm, you know, I'm proud of that.

28:53The same day that the two letters were read, Alice's lawyer made another announcement. In the final moments of his cross-examination of Leonard, after he's read these damaging letters, he says, I want to have the courtroom cleared because I'm going to bring in Mrs. Rylander and have her show the color of her skin to the jury. Leonard's lawyer objected, saying it was indecent. He was overruled. And what ends up happening is that the jurors, who are 12 white men, the lawyers, the judge, the court stenographer, and Alice and her mother, and yes, Leonard, go into the jury room, and she goes into the bathroom that adjoins the jury room.

29:49She takes off her clothing, puts her coat on, and walks out into the middle of the jury room. First she lifts her coat so that the jurors can inspect her leg up to the thigh. And then she lets her coat fall from her shoulders, revealing her shoulders and her upper back and her chest so that they can inspect those regions of her body as well. and this is in her lawyer's mind the strongest evidence that he can present that Leonard had to have known that she had colored blood. Newspapers reported that Alice, quote, became hysterical after leaving the jury room. Alice's lawyer questioned Leonard on the stand.

30:59He asked if Alice's skin was the same color as it had been when they'd been together at the Hotel Marie Antoinette. Leonard said yes. Essentially, he says to the jury, now you've seen what Leonard saw, how could he not have known? Did Alice agree to this? Did she know that this was going to happen? she did agree to it one reporter noted that it had taken several days for Davis and and his assistant lawyer to convince her my strong suspicion is that it was a sacrifice that she made in order to defend the marriage even after all these days and weeks of being essentially tortured and destroyed in this trial she still believes that love will conquer all and that if she can win the case and the marriage is upheld that Leonard will return to her and they can have the life that you know they had planned and talked about and written each other about, she still believes that.

32:25But in his closing arguments, Alice's lawyer said to the jury, We are not going by our verdict to compel Leonard Rhinelander to live with Alice Rhinelander. You are only called here to decide whether at this juncture these two should be separated on the ground of fraud. He added, There is not a chance under heaven for these two human beings being brought together again. They could never live together after what has happened in this courtroom. The jury deliberated for 12 hours. From the start, 10 of them are in favor of voting for Alice. So 10 of them want to clear her of fraud, and they want to uphold the marriage.

33:13Then one juror who had been for Leonard changed his mind. One reporter wrote that persons outside the jury room heard loud argument and the banging of fists on tables. The last remaining juror holds out hour after hour. And people thought that this verdict would be decided pretty quickly. But it's getting up around 10 hours, 11 hours. I mean, everyone in the courtroom essentially goes home except the jury, and they're still there late into the night. Finally, they emerge from the jury room with a verdict that's put in a safe until it's revealed the next morning. In court the next day, the judge read the verdict aloud.

34:07Alice had won. Her marriage to Leonard would not be annulled. And the jurors, several of them later said, if we voted according to our hearts, we would have voted for Leonard. We don't believe in interracial marriage. But given the evidence we saw, we don't believe that he was defrauded. The black newspapers were really surprised and hailed it as one of the great moments in justice for black people in America. Yeah, racists thought it was a travesty and set about trying to get legislation passed that would outlaw interracial marriage in states that had never had anti-miscegenation laws. In an interview immediately after the trial, Alice was asked by a reporter, do you still love your husband?