Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone.
Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. xiii + 301 pp. Notes,
acknowledgements, index. $26.95 (cloth) ISBN 0-393-05013-0; $15.95
(paper), ISBN 0-393-32309-9.
Reviewed by:
Taja-Nia Henderson , Department of History, New York University.
Published by:
H-Law
(August, 2002)
Scandal
American Style: Race, Identity, and the Rhinelanders of New Rochelle
When, on a warm September day in 1921, Leonard "Kip"
Rhineland and Alice Jones met along the roads of Westchester County, New
York, we can be sure that the couple never anticipated the microscopic
lens under which their romance would eventually come. In their
collaboration, Love on Trial, Earl Lewis (Dean of Graduate Studies
at the University of Michigan) and Heidi Ardizzone (Visiting Assistant
Professor at the University of Notre Dame) apply such a lens to explore
the intricacies of perhaps the most notorious annulment trial in American
history.
Over the past decade, students and practitioners of history
have devoted considerable attention to historicizing race and racial
categories. If the overarching theses of this canon can be summed up by
the phrase "race is an historical construct with changing definitions and
connotations over time," then few of these works have gone beyond what now
appears to be obvious in their analysis. As such, there have been few
historical considerations of the intersections of multiple
"categories"--including self-perception, nation, gender, sexuality, and
the law--in the lives of historical actors.[1] Love on Trial is a
welcome attempt to fill this analytical void.
Using the infamous Rhinelander trial as their backdrop,
Lewis and Ardizzone deftly examine shifting categories of race, class,
gender, and identity in the twentieth-century United States. Love on
Trial provides a critical examination of the trial itself, while
devoting considerable space to the importance of the trial in American
culture. The only published monograph to date on the Rhinelander case,
Love on Trial is an attempt not only to bring the Rhinelanders' story
to light, but also to consider the case in the context of 1920s America,
the period commonly known at the Jazz Age. Although the text is
overwhelmingly dependent on contemporary news accounts as source material
(primarily because the original trial transcript was unavailable at the
time of publication), the authors do not shrink from using other, more
seemingly "objective" sources, including cemetery records, birth and death
records, court records, and manuscript collections. The authors weave
these sources together in an analysis that reads in the jazz tempo of its
subject matter.
The "love" in question began on that September day in 1921
and continued for three years--through both forced and voluntary
separations--culminating in the couple's marriage in October 1924. Lewis's
and Ardizzone's account of the Rhinelander affair begins in November 1925,
with an account of a trial delay prompted by Leonard's tardiness. The
story proceeds smoothly from the courtroom to an account of Alice's and
Leonard's wedding. The two had been married on October 14, 1924; following
their spartan ceremony, the newlyweds began their married life living in
the Jones family home in New Rochelle, New York, with Alice's parents,
George and Elizabeth Jones.
George and Elizabeth Jones had immigrated to the United
States from England at the turn of the century. In New Rochelle, the
family raised three daughters and enjoyed a modest lifestyle based on
George's career as a cab driver. The Rhinelanders, on the other hand, were
one of New York's oldest families, real estate tycoons who amassed an
extensive fortune participating in the eighteenth-century West Indian
trade of sugar and foodstuffs. At the time of their first meeting, Alice
had been employed as a domestic and Leonard was a "student" at the Orchard
School, a haven for people with "nervous disorders" (p. 80). The two
lovers were, however, not only from different class backgrounds: Leonard
was from a long-established white family, whereas Alice's father was a man
of unspecified nonwhite descent. They seemed an "odd couple" from the
beginning of their romance; with Leonard's social ineptitude, stuttering,
and apparent shyness, and Alice's cosmopolitan upbringing, one wonders how
he and Alice ever jumpstarted the torrid affair that threatened to destroy
them both.
Somehow during the first weeks of Alice and Leonard's
marriage, the New Rochelle Standard Star caught word of the
marriage and printed the announcement on the front page of the local
paper. The headline that sparked the press firestorm read: "Rhinelander's
Son Marries Daughter of Colored Man." Within days, newspapers from
throughout the country picked up the story, and the Jones and Rhinelander
families were forced to meet the incessant inquiries of the press with
guarded comments and skillful evasions. The Jones family chose to retreat
quietly into their New Rochelle home; the Rhinelander family, headed by
Leonard's father Philip, tried to close ranks as well--by pitting Leonard
against his new bride. The result was an annulment suit alleging that
Alice, by claiming to be white, had lied to Leonard about her racial
status--a fact that was all too evident when it became known that her
father was of nonwhite (and possibly "colored") descent. How could the
daughter of a "colored" man be anything other than colored?
The Rhinelander attorneys may well have prevailed had the
Jones family not conceded early in the trial that Alice Jones "admits she
has some colored blood" (p. 63). The claim was accompanied by the charge
that Leonard had known all along that Alice's father was a colored man,
and that, by application of the "one-drop rule," Alice was also colored.
These charges turned on the widely-held assumption that blackness was
visually perceptible; if Leonard Rhinelander (or anyone else) could not
look at George Jones and his daughters and see that they were "colored",
then Leonard must be blind. (Of course, the corollary to this defense was
that if Leonard could not tell that the Joneses were colored, then the
possibility exists that race is not visually perceptible.)
By charging Leonard, instead of Alice, with dissemblance,
the Jones family attorneys played on some widely-held assumptions about
gender and sex in Jazz Age America. For one thing, the charge that Leonard
must have known Alice's background, and yet married her anyway, suggested
that Leonard was not a champion of whiteness. The Jones defense team used
Leonard's perceived physical, mental, and apparently cultural weaknesses
to paint Alice as the wronged party in the marriage. The trial's
examination of the sexual relationship between Alice and Leonard also
occasioned similar criticisms against Leonard. When Leonard admitted
during his own testimony that he had not intended to marry Alice, even
while strengthening his efforts to have sex with the young woman,
newspapers throughout the nation condemned him for his seeming lack of
manliness and respectability.
In Love on Trial, Lewis and Ardizzone interlace
their accounts of the annulment trial with considerations of the
historical context in which it occurred. The story of Leonard's and
Alice's love takes on a new character when viewed in the context of the
1920s, the decade that "saw the rebirth and ascendancy of the Klux Klan,
the hardening of segregation in the South, and a national commitment to
quieter racial times after the summer of race riots in 1919" (p. 22).
According to the authors, this charged racial atmosphere accompanied
increased efforts toward "the policing of racial boundaries" (p. 22).
Such efforts were evident in the expansion and further
codification of Jim Crow segregation throughout the American South. The
charge to keep the races separate was also taken up by several state
legislatures; these anti-miscegenation laws remained in effect until the
U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967)
held such barriers unconstitutional.[2] Although no such
anti-miscegenation laws existed in the state of New York, the Rhinelander
family attorneys assumed that the spirit of the laws would prevail in this
case.
Love on Trial
tackles such issues of race and identity head-on. According to the
authors, the story of Alice and Leonard Rhinelander is also a story about
the permeability of racial categories across space. At the time of the
trial, New York was one of nineteen states without a legal definition of
blackness (p. 32). The absence of a positive law declaring Alice "black"
made possible the multiple readings of her legal identity as "mulatto,"
mixed, colored, and "of color." Alice's parents, raised in England during
a period of vast British colonial expansion, may well have raised their
three daughters to have an Anglo identity. Alice's attorneys, at least,
made this claim during the case. Never denying the nonwhite ancestry of
George Jones, the Jones family also found themselves racially damned by
their Anglo consciousness. By admitting that George Jones was "colored"--a
term that held an entirely different connotation in the British Empire
than in the United States--the Jones family opened themselves up to the
dogged "one-drop" rule prominent in segregationist theory, which
determined that any person with identifiable African ancestors was thereby
"black."
The book's subtitle, "An American Scandal in Black and
White," holds multiple meanings in the context of the Rhinelander case.
The more obvious connection is the admitted "race" of the claimants. One
other possible connection is the "black and white" of the newspaper
press--the dailies and weekly papers from Brooklyn to the San Francisco
Bay that focused intently on the happenings in the courtroom. In 1925, the
Rhinelander case made front-page news in nearly every major newspaper in
the United States. The papers printed trial transcripts throughout the
case, providing much of the source material for Lewis's and Ardizzone's
work. The political agendas of these newspapers were exemplified in their
coverage of the trial. For example, the Chicago Defender (a black
weekly) used its coverage of the case to rail against white men of means
who take advantage of poor black women. Surprisingly, newspapers in the
South unfailingly supported Kip only until he admitted to having spent
considerable time with the Jones extended family--composed almost entirely
of people of visible African descent.
Lewis and Ardizzone argue convincingly that the Rhinelander
case is critical to our understandings of twentieth-century social and
legal history. It is often in this narrative of the history surrounding
Rhinelander, and less in the accounts of the trial itself, that the
particular strengths of Love on Trial become apparent. In a
brilliant account of the multiple meanings of race embodied by famed
performer Al Jolson (Chapter 7), the authors argue that Jolson's identity
as a Jew, along with his performative identity in "blackface" as a black
man, collided to produce a character that exemplified racial ambiguity
while strengthening the racist underpinnings of Jim Crow segregation.
Co-authoring a coherent, even-toned text is no easy task,
and in this area Lewis and Ardizzone have shown considerable care and
ability. Although the prose suffers a bit from ambiguity, the text is
above all else readable and impressively researched. At times, however, I
wished that the book's various arguments were set out up front in an
introduction. The absence of an introduction tends to privilege the
"story" over the "history", producing a historiographical dilemma further
exacerbated by Lewis's and Ardizzone's extensive use of newspaper sources.
This work will undoubtedly garner criticism from those
scholars (including some legal historians) who believe that academics
should write only for other academics. Nonetheless, I found the book not
only rigorous, but also refreshing in its obvious appeal to wider
audiences. This book will go over especially well with undergraduate
students, particularly due to the popular-culture aspects of the analysis.
For undergraduate audiences, Love on Trial provides exceptional
entry into questions of race, class, and the law in the early twentieth
century. In the tradition of jazz, the authors do an impressive job of
weaving together multiple narratives and perspectives, including their
own.
Notes
[1]. Notable exceptions include Michael Gomez's
Exchanging our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998); and Ariela Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of
Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South," Yale Law Journal
108 (1998): p. 109.
[2]. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
Library of Congress
Call Number: HQ1031+
Subjects:
* Interracial marriage -- New York (State) --
Westchester County -- History -- Case studies
* Marriage -- Annulment -- New York (State) -- Westchester County
-- History -- Case studies
* Scandals -- New York (State) -- Westchester County -- History --
Case studies.
Citation: Taja-Nia Henderson . "Review of Earl Lewis and
Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White,"
H-Law, H-Net Reviews, August, 2002. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=131611032547923.
“In Love on Trial,
Lewis and Ardizzone draw on recent whiteness studies in order to analyze
complex issues of race that permeated both the trial and the extensive
newspaper coverage it spawned. In their hands, the Rhinelander Case
becomes a vehicle for explicating the means by which Americans in the
1920’s actively constructed race…[W]hether or not readers agree with all
of Lewis and Ardizzone’s conclusions, they will benefit from their
refreshingly clear analysis of these themes.”
Michael A.
Ross, review of Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White,
by Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone, Law and History Review 21
(Summer 2003): 425-428.