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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BLOODY JACK Chapter Nine

 

I don't think it was more than a few seconds after lorry driver Charles Cross and his reluctant companion disappeared around the eastern corner of Buck's Row and Court Street, before Police Constable John Neil appeared at the far western end of the passage called Baker's Row. The dangers of his beat were manifest by the length of PC Neil's nightly walk. 

Working at the outer edges of Bethel Green - “J” - division -  the debonair PC Neil (above) had last passed down Buck's Row, walking on the north side of the street, at about 3:15 that Friday morning, 31 August, 1888. Now, just about 3:45,  he was walking down that dark canyon again, west to east, on the south side of the street. As P.C. Neil said later, “There was not a soul about”.

As he approached where the Row narrowed,  PC Neil saw what he called “a figure” lying on the sidewalk, her head to the west, toward Bakers' Street, “...lying length ways... her left hand touching the gate.” The gate was the locked stable gate and the woman was lying in the short “driveway” of the Brown and Eagle Wool Warehouse (below, #1). Neil later testified, “I examined the body by the aid of my lamp, and noticed blood oozing from a wound in the throat. She was lying on her back, with her clothes disarranged. I felt her arm, which was quite warm from the joints upwards. Her eyes were wide open. Her bonnet was off and lying at her side, close to the left hand.”

At that moment, Neil heard the distinctive footsteps of a fellow Bobby's wooden souled shoes, and he flashed his lamp toward Brady Street. The Bobby crossing Buck's Row at Brady Street was PC John Thain. He hurried to Neil's assistance. Neil told PC Thain that a woman had been murdered, and added, “Run at once for Dr. Llewelklyn."  The doctor, Rees Ralph Llewelklyn, lived at 157 Whitechapel Road, just one block south and half a block west (above, #4), about 300 yards away - and opposite the London Hospital. And as Thain rushed off to fetch the doctor, Neil heard the approach of yet another constable. Neil did not inquire as to where this officer had come from, just sent him immediately to Bethel Green station house at the corner of Ainsely Street and Bethel Green Road, to fetch an ambulance cart. PC Neil knew that mission would take half an hour or more, and so alone in the dark with the dead woman, he waited for the arrival of the doctor.

It was now just before 4:00 in the morning. On his way to Whitechapel Road, PC Thain made a deter to Harrison, Barber and Company,  a slaughter-house (map above, #3)  on Winthrop Street, where his cloak had been left by the day constable, who had borrowed it. As he retrieved his garment, Thain told the three men working that night  -  Henry Tomkins, James Mumford and Charles Britten – that a murder had been committed on Buck's Row, and then hurried off with his cloak to fetch the doctor. The men had been working since 8:00 p.m. Thursday night, and since the murder scene (above, white arrow) was literally just around the corner, Thomkins and Bitten decided to have a look. They left James Mumford behind to watch the premises.

Dr. Llewelklyn (above)  was a 38 year old unmarried graduate of the University of London, who had received his Medical degree in 1874, and was accepted into the Royal College of Surgeons a year later, and made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1876. After 12 years in practice at the same location, he was also the official Medical Officer for the Metropolitan Police Holborn (E) division on Bow Street. And in one other way he was uniquely qualified to respond to this particular murder scene - although why would not be apparent for several hours. Dr. Llewelklyn was a member of the British Gynaecological Society.

By the time PC Thain returned with Doctor Llewelklyn, it was well after 4:00 in the morning. Thain was surprised to see  Thomkins and Bitten had beaten him back,  and he took it as his duty to keep those two men away from the body.  Dr. Llewelklyn immediately determined the woman (above) was dead, and that she had “severe injuries to her throat. Her hands and wrists were cold, but the body and lower extremities were still warm...I believe she had not been dead more than half-an-hour.” That would have timed the murder just after PC Neil had made his previous pass down Buck's Row. After noting that there were no indications of a struggle and there was very little blood around the neck wounds, and no more than a half a wine glass of blood on the pavement around her - indicating most of the injuries were inflicted post mortem – Dr. Llewelklyn “...told Officer Thain to see she was taken to the mortuary...” and left to return to his home.

While the doctor was making his exam, PC Neil ordered Constable Thain to take control of the scene while he began pounding on the gate of the Brown and Eagle stable. When no one responded, Neil then went back down the street to the Essex Wharf warehouse, where the night watchman said he had heard nothing. Neil returned to the scene just as the third officer, PC Jonas Mizen,  returned from Bethal Green station with the ambulance cart (above). Once the doctor released the body, the two officers loaded the dead woman onto the cart and they began to push her toward the Montegue Street Mortuary.

Just about then, Sargent Kirby from the Bethal Green station arrived to take charge of the scene - or what remained of it. PCs Neil and Mizen were pushing the ambulance toward the Montague Street mortuary, so, by 4:20  that morning, less than an hour after her murder, not much more than 30 minutes after the discovery of her body,  and with two gawkers having already peered at her corpse, the dead woman had been removed from the scene, and a young boy from a house across the street had commenced to washing the blood off the cobblestones. And so far everything that had been done, was according to Metropolitan Police regulations.

It was at the mortuary that things went "pear shaped". It was after 4:30 in the morning when 53 year old Robert Mann, a ten year Whitechapel Workhouse resident because of “confusion” and a Mortuary attendant, opened the shed for Constables Neil and Mizen. They transferred the body to an exam table (above), and left. And then Mann locked the shed again, and went to his spare institutional breakfast. After eating,  Mann and his 68 year old assistant and fellow workhouse inmate, James Hatfield, returned to the mortuary, and, trying to be helpful, decided to strip and wash the body.

Perhaps the infirmary nurses who were supposed to preform this function, were unavailable at this time of day.  But the two men, one easily confused because of an injury and the other given to “fits”,  were left alone with the only valuable piece of evidence in this murder case, to exercise their own intuitive. With Mann's assistance Hatfield cut the clothes off the body, and dropped them on the dirt floor. Before they could do more damage,  Detective Inspector John Spratling from Bethnal Green Division arrived. He stopped the morgue attendants from any further tampering with the evidence, and sent for Dr. Llewelkyn to come at once.

It seems likely that neither Mann nor Hatfield ever had any idea what they had done wrong. And it also seems likely that their transgression had no substantial impact on the case. But their errors provided their “betters” with some one socially beneath them to blame for the failure to stop a horror they had not yet even begun to understand.

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TOWER OF BABBLE THREE

 

I believe that Michael Ventris dozed off when, well after one in the morning of 6 September, 1956, his car crossed the center line at high speed and slammed head on into a truck pulled over in a “lay-by” on the Barnet Bypass (above)  20 miles from his London home. Seatbelts were still not standard, so the man who broke the "“Linear B code" was killed instantly. The lorry driver insisted the headlamps of his disabled truck were on. And a coroner’s jury even ruled the tragedy an accident. Yet, to this day, there are many who suggest it was a suicide.

There is no question that Michael George Francis Ventris  fit the profile of a person at risk. His upbringing had been coached by the step father to psychoanalysis, Carl Jung (above), who had treated and maybe seduced Michael's mother, Dorothea. He drilled in to her that “Michael was not to be touched by anybody. This was to avoid him having complexes,” she said.  

His genetic father, a gentle and loving man, died of tuberculosis when Michael was a teenager. While still in college Michael married a “rich society beauty”. But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, his mother lost the income she had inherited from Michael's domineering grandfather. In July of 1940 Dorothea was found dead in a Welsh seaside hotel, having taken an overdose of the first commercially available barbitruate sleeping pill - Barbitone.

Michael dropped out of college in 1942, and then served three years as a navigator aboard a Royal Air Force bomber - a service which suffered a 44 ½ % death rate. Michael's son would say decades later, “My father was a private person...In fact he seemed rather remote” That isolation from his family led to his divorce. Three years before his death Michael Ventris was hailed as having scaled “the Everest of Greek archeology” by decoding the Minoan texts. But it seems that left him with perhaps the most epic case of post-partum depression in history.

Michael's career as an architect had been built promoting team work, but after reaching the linguistic summit of solving Linear B, there were few colleges interested in hiring him.  At 34 years of age he lacked academic credentials in that field. But I still don't think he intended on hitting that truck.

Those who decipher ancient texts often earn a reputation for instability.  In the 1870's George Smith (above), then an assistant at the British museum, was the first man in 5,000 years to read the story of the Assyrian holy man named Utnapishtim,  who survived a great flood by building a boat for his family and animals. 

Smith was so excited by the discovery of what was clearly an early version of Noah's Ark written in cuneiform Assyrian, that he began rushing about, tearing off his clothing. But despite the legends, he was stopped before he got completely naked, and never made it into the hall. Insanity, is not the greatest danger to archaeologists or linguists.  That threat is just being human.

Arthur Evans (above), the legendary archaeologist who between 1900 and 1906 had uncovered the palace at Knossos, on Crete, and had struggled for forty years to read the 5,000 year old language he uncovered scattered about the place.  Evans had engaged and encouraged the greatest linguists in the world to examine the 3,000 baked clay fragments recording the culture's language. He was certain it represented something new in history, and referred to the culture as Minoan and the language as “Linear B”. But when Evans died in May of 1941, he had managed to deciphered just one word: “total”,. It appeared at the bottom of many of the tablets.

Next the American, Professor Alice Kober  (above) took the lead in the search, and methodically cataloged the 90 plus signs used in “Linear B”, discovering the triple suffixes (as in English “Britain/Briton/British”) which seemed to connect the symbols on the fragments. At first, like Evans, Alice thought the mystery language must be “Minoan”. But near the end of her brief life, Alice decided it could be Etruscan. But when she died in 1950, the problem was still unresolved.

Michael Ventris had been familiar with Linear B all his adult life. When he was 13 (above) this “pleasant and humorous, if solitary boy” had encountered Evans at a museum exhibit, and impudently asked if it were true the language was not yet deciphered.

In 1940, at age 18 he had published his first academic paper on Linear B. In 1948 he got his degree in architecture, but he also met Professor Alice Kober, who was visiting  Oxford University, and later corresponded with her. They did not like each other, but Michael cut off the communication only because he was trying to concentrate on architecture. But then, as his Bauhaus minimalist work was falling out of favor, Michael found himself surrendering again to his obsession with decoding Linear B.

Languages always came easily to him. He was raised for a time in Switzerland, the mountain nation with three official languages. Michael was proficient in Spanish, French, German, Polish, Italian, Greek, Ancient Greek and Latin, and, after just one week of exposure, he was participating in conversations in Swedish. But he was having no luck decoding Linear B. 

Then, one evening, while his wife was preparing for a dinner party, the frustrated architect turned to Alice Kober's triplets, and it occurred to him to apply them phonetically to place names, but not in Etruscan but in ancient Greek. What if, he wondered, the first character in a particular triplet was pronounced as “ko”, the next “no” and the last for 'so”? Could it be that simple, that obvious: Knossos? Just then the guest arrived and Michael had to leave his work.

But while his wife was preparing to serve the desert, Michael Ventris stole back to his study. Abruptly the triplet names of several other sites on ancient Crete fell into place. With a start Michael came to the realization that the language of Linear B was not Minoan, or Etruscan, but Greek. Arthur Evans had been wrong. Alice Kober had been wrong. All the hundreds of linguists who had studied Linear B before him had been wrong. 

The truth was so obvious it might have been uncovered decades earlier, except for Arthur Evan's (above) immediate determination that it could not be Greek. Evan's so dominated the study of Knossos, that his fundamental assumption had even confused Alice Kober. Michael returned to the party and shared the excitement with his guests. He did not tear his clothing. But one of the dinner party guest happened to be a producer for BBC Radio, and the next day she put Michael in front of a microphone to share his excitement with the world.

It should have inspired an earthquake of coverage. But 1 July, 1953, the day Michael Ventris walked into the BBC Radio booth and announced his solution to the Linear B puzzle, was the day after Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England, and the same day news broke that a month earlier, on 29 May, 1953,  New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had peaked Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

It did not help that once Linear B was decoded (above), it related no great epics of heroes and gods. The translations merely recounted the inventory of storage rooms, the numbering of everything from livestock, to drinking vessels and furniture, to grain and grapes. It was the tax receipts. But...

"... Because of finger and palm prints and writing styles left by the authors, we now know there were only 100 scribes writing at Knossos, and another 32 at Pylos. These numbers are so low they suggest a religious order restricting access to the knowledge of writing. The priests scribes kept a running total (the first word deciphered by Evans in the 1920's) in the soft clay, wetting it to add and subtract from the inventories. The tablets and their counts would not be fired, and the numbers set in stone, until the palaces containing them burned down, in the Bronze Age Apocalypse of Minoan culture, some time after 1375 B.C..

Two weeks before his terminal accident, Michael Ventris wrote a letter to the editor of the Architect's Journal, the publication of the Architectural Association. Michael was leaving the field, explaining, “I’ve come to the conclusion that...you’d be justified in writing me off...All I can ask you is to temper your justified anger with a little compassion.” It was almost as if Michael had assumed the role of Utnapishtim, and was appealing to his god for understanding. 

Two weeks later Micheal Ventrs was dead. And his achievement and his passing are both proof that for the last 5,000 years and probably the next 5,000, all humans are on the same journey. It is not our achievements or our failures, or our insights or our false assumptions that bind us together, not our gods, or our nations, nor even our dreams, our nightmares or aspirations. It is the journey itself.

And that is why the study of Archeology, and Linguistics and psychology, are all important only because they provide perspective about the journey. Utmapsihtim, and King Minos, Arthur Evans and Edmund Hillary, Queen Elizabeth II, Dorothea Ventris, Karl Jung, Alice Kober – they are all fellow travelers, heading to the same destination - oblivion. Best celebrate the trip.

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