THE GREAT ABSCONDING

 

I am sure you have heard of “Tricky Dick” Nixon, and probably “Slick Willy” Clinton, and maybe even Martin Van “Ruin”, or “Ruther-”fraud” B. Hays or maybe even  “Ten Cent” Jimmy Buchanan - who opined that a dime was a fair daily wage, and vetoed new colleges because “"there were already too many educated people",  But I'm willing to bet few have ever heard of James William “Honest Dick” Tate, even if they are from Kentucky. But you ought to have.

 

Sans his nom de plume, there was nothing special about James Tate (above). He was of average height and average weight. His forehead was made large by his retreating jet-black hair line. But his bushy “coffee strainer” mustache was the fashion in his day. However, it did hide a down turned mouth, that perhaps hinted at the tragic death of Howard, his three year old son. Still his daughter, Edmonia Lloyd Tate, survived, as did his loving wife Lucy Hawkins Tate. Then in 1867, after 13 years in various appointed positions in Kentucky politics, the 36 year old James Tate had so “materially contributed, by his personal popularity, to the great success of the Democratic party"  that he was nominated and elected State Treasurer.  Of course the racist propaganda also cemented the Democrat's hold on state politics.

The Treasurer was responsible for all funds collected in fees, permits, taxes, fines and rents, managed the state's bank accounts, paid state employees and dispensed benefits and verified and paid all bills. And despite it being around the time of this election that James acquired his cognomen, I cannot escape the suspicion “Honest Dick” Tate was not chosen for his probity, but for his “popularity”. In fact it was Democratic Party supporters who actually bonded him, pledging their wealth as a guarantee of Tate's “rock sand honesty”, as required by law before he could assume the position. But that guarantee was contingent upon other state officials verifying “Honest Dick's” work  And there is no evidence anybody ever actually did that.

To the public, James “Honest Dick “Tate was an average man, making an average salary, just $2,400 a year (barely $60,000 today), with perks worth perhaps a thousand dollars more. James' average unassuming home, at Second and Shelby Streets in Frankfort, cost all of $6,000 (about $100k today). But James was moving in powerful circles now, re-elected every two years for the next two decades. He was the “Treasurer for Life”.  

Inside Frankfort Democratic circles it became known that should a politician need to borrow a few thousand dollars, as Governor Preston H. Leslie (above) did in 1872, then “Honest Dick” would be happy to accept their IOU, and not be too bothersome about demanding prompt repayment. So amiable was “Honest Dick” that he had a safe filled with personal checks, cashed for Democratic friends, but never submitted for reimbursement.

James Tate also chased his own financial Eldorado, investing in land in Indiana, Virginia and Tennessee, along with several coal mines in Kentucky. However the land he bought does not appear to have appreciated in value, and the mines never seemed to produce enough coal to justify their purchase price. James also tried speculating in stocks and, it appears, when those investments failed, in even more direct forms of gambling. And like all gamblers, losing was just an excuse to risk even more.

All of this was below the surface, while in the public view the 1878 “Biographical Encyclopedia of Kentucky” noted that “Honest Dick” Tate was “successively re-elected by popular majorities, perhaps exceeding those obtained by any other candidate for office in the State...it would seem that his lease on the office might be regarded as a fixed fact.” And in 1886, John McAfee described James Tate as the “trusted and honored treasurer” with an “unblemished record for probity and principle...(James) is held in high esteem, and his integrity and forbearance are regarded as of the highest order.”. But rumors must have been floating about Frankfort, because during the 1887 campaign for governor, the perennial second place Kentucky party, the Republicans,  brought the issue to the surface.

Their candidate that year was the ex-prosecutor from Garrard County, orator William O'Connell Brady (above), and in what may have been the first Republican use of a “Big Government” attack, Brady charged the Democrats had created unneeded extravagant new offices, like Railroad Commissioners and an Agricultural Bureau. And almost as an aside, Brady suggested the time was past due for an audit of “Honest Dick” Tate's books

The Republicans had no evidence, but the attacks were so popular that after just one debate, ex-Confederate General and Democratic candidate Simon Bolivar Buckner, invented a reason to avoid any further debates.

Democrat Buckner (above) defeated Republican Brady, of course, but his 3 August, 1887 margin of victory was just 5 points, compared with a 19 point Democratic win in the 1883 election. 

Brady had made the strongest Republican showing since the Civil War, and it scared the hell out of the Democrats. In the same election, James “Honest Dick” Tate won re-election for the 11^th time, by a margin of 67,000 votes, far more impressive than Governor Buckner's 16,712 vote margin.

It was during the autumn of 1887  that newly elected Democratic State Senator John Kerr Hendrick (above), an ex-prosecutor from Livingston County, called for a full audit of “Honest Dick”'s books

But James Tate said a family illness required his attention, and he needed a little time to get the records together. Senator Hendricks thought Tate was stalling, but Governor Buckner agreed to put the audit off until the spring of 1888.

It was than that a change appeared in “Honest Dick's” modus operendi. Some on his staff noted cash deposits in the state's bank accounts slowed to a trickle. And, if any had noticed before, he paid in full a number of his personal debts. Then on Wednesday, 14 March, 1888, Henry Murray, a Treasury Clerk, noticed his boss in the office vault, filling two tobacco sacks with gold and silver coins, and an approximately 4 inch thick roll of paper money. Murray assumed the Treasurer was preparing to make a bank deposit. And even after “Honest Dick” was found to have slipped out of the office unseen, no one was alarmed. A note left on his desk informed the staff he was going to Louisville for two days. It caused little notice. And long time staffers knew better than to expect the boss to return to the office before Monday.

But “Honest Dick” did not return on Monday morning. A staffer dispatched to his home on Second Street, was told his wife Lucy had not heard from him since he left for Louisville, the previous Wednesday. Telegraphed inquires to the Ohio River town said the Treasurer was last seen on Friday evening at a bar, drinking heavily.  On Saturday, 17 March, he had been seen boarding a train for Cincinnati.  After that, James “Honest Dick” Tate simply vanished. Newspapers would call it the “Great Kentucky Absconsion”.

The scene left behind told the story of a desperately disorganized personality. Staffers said it had always been that way. The account books seemed written in barely legible hieroglyphics, filled with post dated transactions, erasures, corrections, and indecipherable notations. The safe contained a number of women's beaded handbags and purses, and a satchel belonging to a dead infant.  It was also brimming with $150,000 in IOUs and “cold checks” ranging from $5 to $5,000, some going back ten years. No hard cash was left behind except for a one thousand dollar bundle of $10 bills, found under the safe. How long it had laid there in the dust, no one could say.

In the afternoon of Tuesday 20 March 1888, the Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives,  the President of the state Senate and the Secretary of State, received the following message: “It having been learned this morning that said James W. Tate has been absent from his office since the 15th instant...there is in all probability a large deficit in his public accounts...we by virtue of the authority vested in us...hereby suspend said James W. Tate...” It was signed “S. B. BUCKNER, Governor”. From this day forward, “Honest Dick” Tate would be referred to as “The Defaulting Treasurer.”.

George Willis, a Democratic spin doctor, was left spinning. “Such (a) flash of lightning and peal of thunder as was never heard before or since came out of clear sky and rocked the state and the Democratic party as nothing had done since the (Civil) war."  Kentucky's state historian noted that “almost everyone was under suspicion either as an accomplice of Tate or because of owing the treasury money, and those who had borrowed money from the treasury were numerous.” Briefly, and perhaps for the first time in Kentucky history, the politicians were ashamed. The Governor made a personal loan to keep the state afloat for awhile.

So inaccurate and confused was The Defaulting Treasurer's record keeping that it proved difficult to make an accurate estimate of the missing funds. And it was not in the interest of those with checks and IOU's in the safe to make an accurate accounting. A week later Governor Buckner announced the missing tally at approximately $247,128.50 (almost $6 million in today's money). Within a week James “Honest Dick” Tate was impeached in absentia on six counts and removed from office, and then indicted by a grand jury.  A reward of $5,000 was offered for his arrest. But the reward was never claimed.

Honest Dick's wife Lucy had to leave Frankfort because the state of Kentucky seized the family home  and everything of value within it, all of James' bank and stock accounts, including 100 barrels of “Big Spring” bourbon whiskey – another bad investment by the “Defaulting Treasurer”.   Luckily, daughter Edmomia had married a man named Martin, and was living free and clear in distant Kansas City, so the abandoned Lucy could live with her. 

The house, the whiskey, the investments, were all sold at auction, and collected $50,000 (over $1 million today.) But that left the bond holders on the hook for the remaining $200,000 (about $5 million today). They paid, but thanks to a Kentucky Supreme Court decision in 1895, none of those who had authored checks or IOU's found in the safe were required to reimburse the bond holders. That judgement was marked “Not to be officially reported”, and sealed. Most of the names on the IOU's never became public.

But what happened to the “Defaulting Treasurer”, “the Great Absconder”, AKA James “Honest Dick” Tate? He was rumored to be everywhere from Bremen, Germany to Toronto, Canada. Some said he had joined the expiate Confederate community in Honduras, or Brazil, where slavery remained until May of 1888.  In October of 1893 there was a brief flurry of excitement when a newspaper reported he was “Said to have been seen on the “Cotton Belt Train.” in Arizona Territory. But that proved to be mistaken identity, since the New York Times had reported “friends who should know” said he had died in China three years earlier.  In 1894 Navy Ensign Hugh Rodman, who had known Tate back in Frankfort, reportedly had dinner with the “Defaulting Treasurer” in Japan, and said he was not well. That should not have been surprising, since he would have been well over sixty by then.

Edmonia later admitted to receiving letters from her father, posted from San Francisco, British Columbia and Japan. The last one read, in part, “I know I will be much denounced and by parties who forget former circumstances”. He professed to being interested in returning to denounce his partners in crime. In 1896 1,200 Kentuckians signed a petition asking the Governor to grant a pardon to James Tate, so he could return and name names.  No such pardon was ever offered. With time new scandals rocked Kentucky, and people forgot about “Honest Dick “ Tate. But we should remember our mistakes. That is how we learn.

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DEAD PRESIDENT

 

I contend William Henry Harrison (above) delivered the worst Presidential inaugural speech in history – and just in part because it was also the longest. By my count it ran to 8,424 words (the first sentence was 98 words long!), and it took darn near two hours to deliver. People in the audience that cold wet March afternoon must have thought they were dying.

When 68 year old William Henry Harrison (above) started droning on, at around noon on Saturday 4 March, 1841, it was barely 48 degrees, in a cold, cutting rain and wind. His audience of 50,000 were in agony, and he just kept talking.  And at the end of the sixth paragraph the new President actually delivered his punch line – he would not run for re-election. From that moment forward he was a lame duck. He had voluntarily surrendered half of his political power, and he wasn't even half way through his inaugural speech. And he just kept talking! In fact it has been alleged that this speech actually killed him.

“CALLED from a retirement which I had supposed was to continue for the residue of my life to fill the chief executive office of this great and free nation, I appear before you, fellow-citizens, to take the oaths which the Constitution prescribes as a necessary qualification for the performance of its duties; and in obedience to a custom coeval with our Government and what I believe to be your expectations, I proceed to present to you a summary of the principles which will govern me in the discharge of the duties which I shall be called upon to perform.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

After that it was all anti-climax. Harrison droned on and on about ancient Rome, and why the ancient Greeks had collapsed. He did not get around to discussing what he hoped to achieve while he was in charge until paragraph 17, just four paragraphs from his closing. This was not the speech most people huddled freezing in the bleachers had been expecting from the man his Democratic opponents had dubbed, “General Mum”, because he'd said almost nothing during the campaign. 

This was the “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign, the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign of nothing but empty phrases, when Harrison had kept his mouth shut because the only time he had ever been in a log cabin was when he had visited his "mistress" Dilsia, in her slave quarters. The overly fecund Virginian had fathered six children with the unfortunate lady, and ten more with his legal white wife. Did I mention it was snowing during his interminable speech? And raining? And cold? The second time George Washington took the oath, he disposed of his speech in 135 words, wham-ban, thank you, Ladies and Gentleman. But then the "Whig" President  Harrison had so much more to say about so much less than Washington did. 

“It was the remark of a Roman consul in an early period of that celebrated Republic that a most striking contrast was observable in the conduct of candidates for offices of power and trust before and after obtaining them, they seldom carrying out in the latter case the pledges and promises made in the former. However much the world may have improved in many respects in the lapse of upward of two thousand years since the remark was made by the virtuous and indignant Roman, I fear that a strict examination of the annals of some of the modern elective governments would develop similar instances of violated confidence.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

William Henry Harrison achieved a number of firsts as President. He was the first President to actively campaign for the office, and the first President to have received one million votes. Although he won by only 147,000 popular votes his electoral college victory was a landslide. He was the first (and only) President to have been born in the same county as his Vice President (Charles City County, Virginia). He was also the first President to arrive in Washington via a steam locomotive. 

And he was the first president (that we know of) to have sold four of his own children (by Dilsia), to avoid being embarrassed by their existence. The unlucky youngsters were sold “down the river” to a planter in Georgia. What a nice guy.  

You know, if Harrison had not been such a lousy human being, I would be a lot sadder that he was also the first President to die in office; 30 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes after starting his never ending inaugural address.

“Although the fiat of the people has gone forth proclaiming me the Chief Magistrate of this glorious Union, nothing upon their part remaining to be done, it may be thought that a motive may exist to keep up the delusion under which they may be supposed to have acted in relation to my principles and opinions; and perhaps there may be some in this assembly who have come here either prepared to condemn those I shall now deliver, or, approving them, to doubt the sincerity with which they are now uttered...”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

What was wrong with this man? He had been running for President since November of 1811, when he had "ginnned up" a war with the native peoples, and fought the battle of Tippecanoe.  But Democratic President James Madison had not even thanked him for removing the Indian threat to the western border on the eve of the war with Britain. You see, Harrison was a Whig.  And it took another quarter of a century before his own party was willing to name him as their nominee. What was wrong with this patrician that so few of his contemporaries, of either party, were willing to trust him with power? 

About the only friend Harrison had in Washington was Daniel Webster (above). The two men were close enough that Harrison named Webster his Secretary of State, and even - thank God -  allowed Webster to cut several minutes out of the never-ending speech. Webster later claimed that he had “killed 17 Roman Counsels” in the process. Can you imagine how many useless words Harrison would have used without Daniel Webster?  I bet he used all the lost words to fill his dictionary.

“... In other words, there are certain rights possessed by each individual American citizen which in his compact with the others he has never surrendered. Some of them, indeed, he is unable to surrender, being, in the language of our system, unalienable. The boasted privilege of a Roman citizen was to him a shield only against a petty provincial ruler, whilst the proud democrat of Athens would console himself under a sentence of death for a supposed violation of the national faith—which no one understood and which at times was the subject of the mockery of all—or the banishment from his home, his family, and his country with or without an alleged cause, that it was the act not of a single tyrant or hated aristocracy, but of his assembled countrymen....”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address.

He waited to take the oath (above) until he had almost finished his speech. But as soon as he had been sworn in by fellow slave owner and supporter Chief Justice Robert Taney,  he quashed his audiences' frigid hopes by starting to talk again, for two more rambling protracted paragraphs. It seems that William Henry Harrison, saw the anti-climax as his milieu.. Still, he felt fine after his speech. 

He even stayed around for the entire inaugural parade (above)  - the first President to watch the parade as opposed to marching in it. And this was the first inaugural parade with floats, little fake log cabins pulled by horses, sort of the first mobile homes. 

That night he attended all three of the inaugural balls – the official one, the "Tippecanoe Ball" , and... and the other one.  On Monday morning - 6 March -  Harrison felt healthy enough to meet with his Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing to discuss the current national financial crises, which he had not mentioned in his endless speech. He mentioned everything else in that rambling collection of platitudes, just not that the banking system which had collapsed. But, he seemed perfectly healthy, even after all that, which proves that this loquacious aristocrat was perfectly healthy until he fell under the care of a doctor.

“I proceed to state in as summary a manner as I can my opinion of the sources of the evils which have been so extensively complained of and the correctives which may be applied. Some of the former are unquestionably to be found in the defects of the Constitution; others, in my judgment, are attributable to a misconstruction of some of its provisions...”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

His fatal mistake was that on Saturday, 27 March  (three weeks after the endless speech)  he told Doctor Thomas Miller (above) he felt “mildly fatigued and under the weather.”  Doctor Miller was dean of the George Washington Medical School, and he diagnosed the President as suffering from “bilious pleurisy”.  Doctor Miller felt obliged to do something. So he slapped a mustard plaster on Harrison's stomach, and gave him a mild laxative. 

The next morning, Harrison felt worse. So Doctor Miller bled the President, until his pulse weakened. Then he subjected the 68 year old to another plaster, this time of laudanum, which caused the old man to fall asleep. While he was sleeping, Miller called in another doctor, and over the next few days these two healers gave the President opium, camphor, brandy, wine whey, and some petroleum. Oddly, after these treatments President Harrison felt so bad he was now certain he was dying. The doctors agreed, so they bled him some more. 

Anyone who inquired was told the President was “feeling better”,  right up until Harrison died, thirty minutes into Saturday, 4 April, 1841 - just one week after falling into the hands of two of the most respected doctors in the nation. So it wasn't the endless speech that killed the old man after all, it was modern medicine.  And it was worth every penny of their fee.

“Fellow-citizens, being fully invested with that high office to which the partiality of my countrymen has called me, I now take an affectionate leave of you. You will bear with you to your homes the remembrance of the pledge I have this day given to discharge all the high duties of my exalted station according to the best of my ability, and I shall enter upon their performance with entire confidence in the support of a just and generous people.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address  The End.

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MARY QUITE CONTRARY - Two

 

I am of two minds about "Typhoid Mary". The officials could not prove in court that Mary Mallon was spreading typhoid fever. The science of biology had not progressed that far. And that  made her arrest and detention unconstitutional. Thank God they locked her up, anyway - at least for awhile.

After Mary chased George Soper out of the Bowen family kitchen, it would appear that he was no longer welcomed in the house by either Mary or her employer, Mr, Bowen - which makes me wonder if George was as “diplomatic” as he claimed to be.  We know that the next time he tried to talk to Mary, George Soper approached her at the rooming house where she lived. This time he even brought along an actual medical doctor, Doctor Raymond Hobbler. But this did not strengthen his argument. Again Mary refused to hand over her urine, blood or feces. 

Defeated yet again, the Health Department decided to dispatch the assistant commissioner of health, who also managed the smallpox vaccination programs and sanitation issues for the city,  Doctor Sara Josephine Baker.  She brought with her an assistant, an ambulance with a driver and an attendant,  and five police officers.

By  the way; Mary Mallon was not a complete fool. She had consulted a chemist – what we would call a pharmacist.  He had examined her and assured Mary she was clear of the disease. Thus she felt it was the health officials who were crazy. 

So when Mary answered the knock on her rooming house door, and was confronted by Dr Baker and several police officers, she panicked. According to Dr. Baker, “As she lunged at me with the fork, I stepped back, recoiled on the policeman, and so confused matters that, by the time we got through the door, Mary had disappeared.”

They turned the tiny house upside down, and five hours later found Mary hiding in the supply closet of a neighboring house. Wrote Dr. Baker, “(Mary) came out fighting and swearing, both of which she could do with appalling efficiency and vigor…she was maniacal in her integrity…"

"The policemen lifted her into the ambulance and I literally sat on her all the way to the (Willard Parker Hospital (above))…it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.”

At last the health officials could obtain the precious samples. The blood and urine were negative. But the stool was described as “teeming” with "Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi". 

Under the city code 1169, requiring Health officials to avoid causes of disease, and code 1170 giving them the right to place any ill person in isolation, they now restricted Mary Mallon (above, foreground) to the hospital on North Brother Island, in the middle of the East River. She would remain there for almost three years. During which time she was not ill.  

But throughout that time Mary continued to fight back, writing letters and contacting lawyers. The hospital's tests showed 120 out of 163 of her stool samples tested positive for typhoid. So Mary sent her own samples to a private lab and consulted her own physicians. They reported her as free of typhoid. 

As she wrote to the courts, “I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime, and I am treated like an outcast - - a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems to me incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.” Clearly this was not an ignorant woman. 

A photo of patients taken from the hospital on North Brother Island is dominated by a glaring Mary Mallon (above, foreground). No wonder she is glaring because it is a staged photo. Except for her first few days there, Mary was not confined to a bed.  And in the photo she is fully dressed.

Because she was not ill, the hospital provided her a small cottage . But she was still not a woman to be ignored.

The civil engineer George Soper (above) fought back. “The state has the power to compel the ignorant, the selfish, the careless and the vicious to so regulate their lives and property so that they shall not be the source of danger to others. The welfare of the many is the supreme law…” It was an arrogant argument,  which in 1909 swayed Justice Mitchell Erlanger. “While the court deeply sympathizes with this unfortunate woman, it must protect the community.” But the public was now aware of Mary’s predicament, and public pressure began to build for her release.

In 1910 a new commissioner of the NYC Board of Health agreed to release Mary if she promised to no longer work as a cook, and checked in every three months with the board. Mary immediately agreed, and on 20 February, 1909 , she stepped off the ferry from Brothers Island and blended back into the city of New York. She reported to the Health Department a few times and then simply disappeared. She was not heard again for five years. 

In January 1915 there was another outbreak of typhoid fever at the Sloan Maternity Hospital (above). Twenty-five nurses and workers fell sick, two of whom died. In fact, that year some 300,000 cases of Typhoid Fever were identified in the entire city. Eventually the investigation narrowed to a new cook, at the Maternity Hospital named Mrs. Brown. And upon being arrested by the police Mrs. Brown confessed. She was actually Mary Mallon.  And the entire 1915 out break could be traced back to her.

Mr. Soper observed, “Here she was, dispensing germs daily with the food…” The press wanted her tried for murder and the public, which had supported her plea for freedom five years before, were now universal in their condemnation. But Mary herself was unrepentant, telling a reporter, “As there is a God in heaven, I will get justice, somehow, sometime.” She still refused to believe she was the source of infection. She told Life magazine, “I am doomed to be a prisoner for life!” 

And so she was. She was returned to her cottage on North Brother Island (above), and eventually was given a job helping out in the laboratory. 

Years later, there is Mary (above, right) wearing glasses now, standing next to bacteriologist Emma Sherman. Seeing her you can understand how the police and Doctor Baker had such trouble taking her into custody that first time.  

Mary must have been lonely. She had few visitors, usually only staff members. She never admitted she might be responsible for any illness or deaths, but for twenty-three years she was identified to all as “Typhoid Mary”.  

Then, in December of 1932 she suffered a massive stroke. Now, she was a patient again, and bed ridden. And in 1938 she died. She claimed to have never suffered from typhoid fever.  

But her  autopsy revealed her liver was heavily infected with the Typhoid bacteria, which it had been  periodically releasing her entire adult life. 

"Typhoid" Mary Mallon is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.

Her nemesis,  George Soper (above), was the director of the American Cancer Society from 1923 to 1928. He died on relative obscurity 17 June, 1948, in at the age of 78. 

He must have known that his subject, Mary Mallon (above, left), would be better remembered than he was; which was odd. She just wanted a normal life, while he hungered for fame.

Doctor Sara Josephine Baker (above) was appointed the director of New York City's Bureau of Child Hygiene in 1908. 

And when she (above, foreground, washing a baby), retired in 1923, New York City had the lowest childhood mortality rate of any major city in the United States. 

During the remainder of her life, Dr. Baker (above) resided in New Jersey with her life partner, novelist Ida Wylie. Between the 50 articles she wrote for profession journals, her 200 magazine articles on children's health and her five books, it is probable Dr. Baker saved hundred's of thousands of children's lives by the time she died in 1945. 

A vaccine, available since 1921, can prevent most Typhoid infections, but it has side effects. Since 1946 the standard treatment has been a course of the antibiotic streptomycin, invented by graduate student, Albert Israel Schatz, and stolen by his advisor at Rutgers, Professor Selman Waksman (above), This can cure an infected patient. Still prevention of infections through public health programs remains the most cost effective method to prevent its spread. And nothing developed over the past century would have made life any easier for  "Typhoid" Mary Mallon,   

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