A Predatory Congressman, His Jilted Lover and a Gilded Age Lawsuit That Foreshadowed #MeToo

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/books/review/patricia-miller-bringing-down-the-colonel.html

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BRINGING DOWN THE COLONEL A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age and the “Powerless” Woman Who Took On Washington By Patricia Miller Illustrated. 368 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

It was on a fateful train ride in 1884 that Col. William Breckinridge, a Kentucky congressional candidate described by his supporters as a silver-tongued orator with presidential prospects, met Madeline Pollard, a student with literary ambitions. She asked for his help in a personal matter. He visited her at school. They went on a carriage ride. Then stuff happened, including the birth of two children, and a breach of promise suit that made headlines in 1893. In her history of the Breckinridge-Pollard affair, “Bringing Down the Colonel,” Patricia Miller revisits a mostly forgotten saga that changed the way many Americans felt about women and sex.

What better time for a story about a prominent man taken totally aback when he discovers that the rules about what he can get away with have changed? During Breckinridge’s trial for breach of promise — a legal concept until the early 20th century enabling a woman to sue a man for breaking his engagement to marry her — one of his lawyers warned the jury that giving Pollard a victory would “encourage every strumpet to push her little mass of filth into court.” Flash-forward to President Trump announcing, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, that all this talk about sexual assault was making it a “very scary time for young men in America” since “you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of.”

When Breckinridge and Pollard first met, he was a middle-aged married man. She was younger. How much younger would be one of the many subjects of dispute in a trial that riveted Gilded Age America. Was she an “experienced woman” of nearly 21 or a confused girl of 17?

Whatever her age, Pollard was not a hapless innocent. Her education, at one of the best women’s colleges in the nation, was being paid for by another much older man, who definitely expected her graduation to be followed by their wedding. After meeting Breckinridge on the train, she wrote to him asking for advice on how to get out of the arrangement. Soon came Breckinridge’s visit to her school in Cincinnati and the carriage ride that launched a thousand headlines. She became his mistress, gave up their children to foundling asylums at his demand and was pregnant again shortly after Breckinridge’s wife died. Pollard assumed their legal union would come next, allowing for a decent period of mourning. When the congressman instead married a socially prominent widow, Pollard was enraged and went to court.

What followed was the second-biggest political sex scandal of the late 19th century. A decade before the Breckinridge trial, when Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for president, his political opponents charged — at the top of their lungs — that he had fathered an illegitimate child. Republicans all over the country appeared in political parades pushing baby carriages and yelling, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?”

The two stories should have a calming effect on 21st-century citizens who believe the nation’s political discourse has been ruined by the internet. The Gilded Age was a time when a booming population and cheap printing costs created a flood of newspapers competing to be a town’s equivalent of click bait. One of my all-time favorite headlines came from a Cincinnati paper: “Moral Monster: Grover Cleveland’s True Character Laid Bare. A Drunken, Fighting, Roistering Roué. A Boon Companion of Buffalo Harlots.”

Cleveland was actually a very staid character, but he had provided support for a pregnant widow named Maria Halpin and arranged for the adoption of her son. His backers said he was just trying to protect the real father — his friend Oscar Folsom, who had died in an accident, leaving behind a wife and daughter.

The debate about who sired the baby has gone on pretty much forever. Apolitical cynics suspected that Halpin had entertained Cleveland, Folsom and their pals on one of their fishing club’s periodic boys’ nights out. (It would explain why she named the baby “Oscar Folsom Cleveland.”) However, in “Bringing Down the Colonel,” Miller portrays her as a rape victim.

But the point of the story is that Maria Halpin never became the point of the story. She was a sad supporting character in a scandal that was all about Cleveland. Madeline Pollard, on the other hand, was no helpless victim. She had female friends in high places who championed her — and probably, Miller thinks, paid the cost of her lawsuit.

One friend, Julia Blackburn, the widow of a former Kentucky governor, gave a deposition saying that Breckinridge had told her after his wife’s death that he was engaged to Pollard. “There would have been no scandal but for Mrs. B,” Breckinridge grumbled later. “The girl would have gone away from Washington and behaved herself.”

Breckinridge’s idea of how a girl he seduced should behave herself was classic. Particularly, Miller notes, in the South, where well-to-do men had long felt free to sleep with slaves, servants and any other woman outside their class who came their way.

The trial over Pollard’s lawsuit provided a near-perfect presentation of 19th-century sexual mores. Breckinridge’s team, in a preview of his defense in Kentucky newspapers, claimed Pollard was fair game and “utterly depraved where morality is concerned.” Pollard, countering with her own version of events in The New York World, claimed she was a naïve girl betrayed: “With this man alone have I ever been guilty of a single impure thought or act.”

Well, that was an overstatement. At one point when Pollard was being supported by Breckinridge, she was engaged to another man, and still taking money from James Rhodes, the patron who had paid her college tuition under the impression they were going to be married.

But what drove many observers crazy was the way Breckinridge confidently assumed he had the right to seduce any woman who was not “a maiden” and bore no responsibility for the relationship that ensued. Under cross-examination, denying he had ever promised to marry Pollard, he amended: “It was not a promise. I was in a frame of mind that was excited and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll marry you at the end of the month,’ and I went right on talking.” Quotes like this, which Miller dug up during her extensive research, make for captivating drama.

Throughout American history, an endless procession of respectable men operated according to Breckinridge’s rules, but they had never been forced to stand up in court and defend themselves while the whole nation listened in. Miller spent years plowing through Breckinridge family documents and newspapers from the era; the media coverage, she says, provided the country with a new kind of sex education and created an opening for reformers “who for decades had been pushing without much success the idea of a single standard of morality for men and women.”

It took the jury less than 90 minutes to award Pollard her moral victory — plus the hefty sum of $15,000. Breckinridge became the emblem of everything that women hated about men’s sexual behavior. When he ran for what should have been an easy re-election the nation watched in fascination as opposition mounted. Female students at a Kentucky college vowed not to accept Breckinridge supporters as suitors. Women in Lexington held a monster picnic for his opponent, with a parade, banners and 30,000 attendees, who devoured refreshments made from 80 sheep, 11 cows and 40 hogs.

Breckinridge gave a weepy speech apologizing for his weakness and citing his talents as a legislator. But, Miller notes, the real combatants in the election “were two worldviews about women and sex.” The reformers won. “The Silver Tongue Is Silenced,” announced one of the many, many headlines.

None of the stars of the story had much of a career after the trial. Breckinridge became an editorial writer for a Lexington paper owned by his son. Pollard eventually went to Europe, befriended a wealthy widow and lived the good life traveling around the continent on her patron’s dime. After a while, their saga vanished from the national memory. Congratulations to Patricia Miller for bringing it back.