THE PETER PAN PRINCIPLE

I assume you have heard of the most famous work by Dr. Laurence Peter, who created "The Peter Principle.” It states that in any hierarchy “every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence”. Well, I have observed a related behavior in human males which I call “The Peter Pan Principle”. 

Peter Pan was the theatrical character, the boy who never grew up, and my theory postulates that some males emotionally stagnate in adolescence.  And my example is the life long adolescent, Arthur Brown , second cousin to Calvin Coolidge, and a man whose dramatic life reached its pinnacle on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and its nadir ten years later and a block away, on the floor of a hotel bedroom. To put it another way - Arthur Brown slept his way to the bottom.

Arthur  (above) grew in up in the 1840's on a Michigan farm, with two older sisters - he was a baby Moses floating on the estrogen Nile. Family friends generously described him as possessing a “keen intellect” but less perceptive on “moral issues”.  

When Arthur was 13 his progressive minded parents dragged him to the center of Ohio so that his older sisters could attend the Unitarian funded Antioch College (above).  And Arthur eventually entered that institution as well.   As was to be expected given its progressive coeducational provenance, the academic standards at this institute of higher learning were high, while the standards of discipline were a bit fuzzy. 

The students did not pass or fail, they instead received a “narrative evaluation” for each class. It was the perfect environment for Arthur, giving him easy access to mother figures and women he could manipulate. In short he seems to have been confused as to the advice of the school's first President, Horace Mann; “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

After graduating from Antioch, Arthur earned a law degree and spent the Civil War years back in Kalamazoo Michigan, building a successful criminal law practice, marrying, and fathering a daughter. And when his mid-life crises came, Arthur's response was almost pre-ordained. 

He fell in love with a younger woman - Ms. Isabel Cameron (above), daughter of the powerful Republican State Senator, David “The Don” Cameron, and wife of a clerk.  Arthur bought his new mistress a horse and buggy, and rented her a house. 

Now, no rational person would have expected to keep such a high profile romance secret in a town of just 20,000. And one night in 1876 Arthur's offended spouse surprised the loving couple in his law offices. Mrs. Brown was armed with a loaded revolver, but luckily she proved a poor marks-woman. The entire town sided with the wife when she threw Arthur out on his ear.  The man-child Casanova now moved to Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, evidently under the mistaken impression that Mormons were open to open marriages. 

Arthur was expecting to be appointed the U.S. District Attorney for Utah, but the pall of smoke from the Republican bridges he had burned in Kalamazoo obscured his prospects. So he opened a law office at 212 South Main Street in Salt Lake City (above), where he quickly duplicated his Michigan success. The local newspaper judged Arthur to be “a good hater,.” and described him as “Gentile in faith, but a Mormon in practice.” Little did they know. 

By 1879, when he was rejoined by the still smitten Isabel,  Arthur (above) was a millionaire. And the instant his Michigan divorce was finalized, Isabel became the second Mrs. Brown. Arthur bought a fine house in the fashionable section of South Temple Street, and, in time produced a son - his second -  whom they named Max. 

In 1894 Arthur was sent to Washington as one of Utah's  first two senators. The New York Times described him as “an intense, bitter partisan...Always pugnacious...”  His honorary post ended after only one year, and he did not run for election. He returned to his profitable law practice and his family, in that order.  In 1896 Arthur was a delegate to the Republican National Convention held in St. Louis. 

And it was there he met his next mistress (that we know of), secretary for the local Republican party, Mrs. Anne Maddison Bradley (above). He was 53, and she was 23.  It became apparent that Arthur had a type - younger.

Annie was the editor of the Salt Lake City Woman's Club magazine, a member of the Woman’s Press Club and the Poet's Roundtable. She was also a charter member of the Salt Lake City Unitarian Church. She was everything a rich Unitarian might seek in a mistress, if you overlooked her clerk husband, Clearance A. "Ned" Bradley and their two children.  But wouldn't that just make her more likely to be discreet? 

The convention (above) nominated William McKinley on the first ballot, allowing Arthur and Anne to consummated their affair so quickly that Arthur overlooked yet another impediment to his new mistress - a vine of insanity intertwining several roots of  Madison family tree.

Back in booming Salt Lake City (above), Annie at once separated from her husband, Clarence. He started drinking to excess, and then gambling to excess. A couple of years later Clarence conveniently ended up in jail.  Anne testified later that Arthur then “...began coming to my house at very unseemly hours, and I told him it must stop, but he answered. 'Darling, we will go through life together. I want you to have a son' and after several months we did.”  

Arthur Brown Bradley (above) was born 7 February, 1902. Shortly thereafter Arthur took a suite at the Independence Hotel. He informed Isabel - remember wife number 2? -  that he was going to file for divorce. He even took Annie with him on a trip to Washington, D.C,  staying in adjoining rooms at the Raleigh Hotel, just behind the Capital, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 12^th street.

When the divorce papers arrived back in Utah, Isabel was finally spurred to action.  When hitting Arthur with a horse whip did not dissuade him from seeing his mistress, Isabel had both Arthur and Annie arrested and charged with adultery - four times in six months.  The Salt Lake City “Desert News" was present at the last arraignment. Said the News, “Arthur Brown On the Rampage...Says He Was Knocked Down By an Officer.” 

Arthur accused the police of notifying the newspapers in advance of his arrest - it was probably Isabel - and denounced the arrest of Annie -  in a very loud voice. “They dragged her through the streets", he shouted, "One on each side of her. Armed to the teeth. Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!” 

Judge Christopher Diehl asked Arthur, “How do you expect to keep such things out of the papers when you yell so you can be heard for two blocks?” Eventually the headlines would read, “Arthur Brown Goes Scot Free.”  But all the dramatics took a toll on Arthur's reputation and his income.  

His last arrest forced some reflection and re-evaluation upon Arthur. He moved back into the house on South Temple (above) with Isabel.  Annie was offered a house of her own and $100 a month to stay away from Arthur. To Arthur's great surprise, she turned it down. 

And a few months later Arthur slipped away to meet Annie in room 11 of the Pacific Hotel in Pocatello, Idaho.  Their passionate reunion was interrupted by Isabel banging on the door. Arthur admitted his wife, at the same time asking his law partner - what the hell was he doing there? -  to please, “Come in, I don't want to be left alone here with them.”

Annie, the mistress,  began civilly enough. “How do you do, Mrs. Bradley? I have wanted to talk to you.”  But Isabel's first instinct was not for conversation. She clamped her hands around Annie's throat and began throttling her. 

The men separated the combatants, and the women spent the next several hours screaming accusations at each other, while Arthur cringed in the corner, if not in the center of the room, then still the center of attention. Come the dawn, Isabel returned home and Arthur Brown stupidly gave Annie a .32 caliber revolver, should Isabel seek a second confrontation. It seemed Annie had won.

But upon Annie's return to Salt Lake City, Arthur's law partner informed her that Isabel and Arthur had “reconciled”.   The offer of a house and weekly stipend was renewed, and Arthur now pointedly denied his paternity of Annie's son, Arthur Brown Bradley.  And being three months pregnant with yet another gift from Arthur, Annie reluctantly agreed to cease and desist any contact with the adolescent lawyer.  She gave birth to her second child by Arthur, on 24 November, 1903.  But to prove she had not given up on her obsession,  she named the new child Martin Montgomery Brown Bradly. 

Despite promises to his wife, Arthur maintained a discreet contact with Annie, at least until August of 1905, when Isabel died of cancer. Abruptly the path seemed cleared for Annie and Arthur to marry. But they did not... that is, Arthur did not make any offer of marriage.

He was 63 years old now, and already had another mistress, someone closer to his own age for a change,  She was Ms. Annie Adams Kiskadden (above, left). She was the mother of Maude Adams (above, right), Utah's famed actress, best known for originating the stage role of Peter Pan. 

If she did not know about the past mistress, Annie Bradley must have suspected this one. She was now 33 years old herself, divorced, the mother of four, and had no income. Swallowing a little more pride she asked her millionaire boyfriend for $2,000 to start a new life.  Arthur Brown ignored that request, but did present her with a one way train ticket to California for herself and the children. Then he left for Washington, D.C. 

This slap in the face finally snapped something in Annie, just the way something had snapped in the two previous Mrs. Browns, one after the other, before her.  Annie traded in her ticket for herself and her sons to California for a one way trip for herself only to Washington, D.C.

Annie arrived in town on Saturday, 8 December, 1906. As she expected, Arthur was registered again at the Raleigh Hotel (above). Annie registered as Mrs. A. Brown, and took the room next to Arthur's. 

Conning the maid into opening the connecting door, Annie searched Arthur's room until she found letters from Annie Adams Kiskadden, which discussed marriage plans. No one should be surprised that after waiting for Arthur's return, Annie shot him with the very gun he had given her for self defense.  I guess you could say that's what she used it for.

What can you say about a man who keeps inspiring the women in his life to shoot at him? Once might be an accident,. twice might be an unlikely coincidence - but three times? And the last time, he supplied the gun!  When the hotel manager bent down over Arthur (above), he said only, “She shot me.” As if he was surprised. 

Indeed, she had. Judging by the powder burns on his hands the Unitarian gigolo was reaching for the gun when Annie pulled the trigger. And six days later the gentile polygamist  died -  13 December, 1906. His obituary in the New York Times noted with faint praise, that Arthur had been “intensely loyal to his male friends.” 

As final proof of his childish character, Arthur's will renounced both of his sons by Annie. “I expressly provide that neither or any of them shall receive anything from my estate.” It almost makes you wish he had lived, so somebody could have shot the S.O.B a fourth time.

A  jury agreed. Annie had entered a plea of “temporary insanity” but almost on the first anniversary of the shooting, and after just nine hours of deliberations, the jury instead found Annie simply not guilty. The misdirected Juliet walked out of the court room a free woman. 

Annie returned to Salt Lake City (above) and opened an antique store called “My Shop” And she made a success of it, running her own business, raising her two sons by Arthur on her own, until her death on 11 November, 1950.

Thus the life of Arthur Brown, who never seemed to get any older than he was at the age of twelve. And don't we all know at least one like guy like that? 

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TOTALLY INSANE Dan Sickles Pleads

 

I doubt Senator Daniel Sickles was temporarily insane when he murdered his good friend, Phillip Key. But then his jury were never told what a whoring booze-hound Sickles was. They were only told what a whoring booze-hound Phillip Key was. In the vernacular, Dan Sickles wasn't crazy, he was just an arrogant jackass.

Before he was even twenty, Daniel Sickles (above) had been indicted for fraud. Still, his criminal career didn't really get started until he was 26 and passed the New York State bar exam. He served a one year term in the State Assembly, when he joined a N.Y. delegation tour of London, where he introduced his mistress, Miss Fanny White (under an assumed name) to the King of England. Back in the United States, in 1852, Daniel met his legal lady fair, Teressa Da Ponte Bagiolo.  And God help her.

Teressa Sickles (above) was the perfect political wife. She was beautiful,  sophisticated and charming. She had very wealthy parents. She spoke five languages. However, all this merely proves that a smart woman is just as likely to have terrible a taste in men as a dumb woman. Terresa’s only excuse in marrying Daniel (against her parent’s wishes) was that the poor child was just 15, when the 34 year old Daniel seduced and married her. She was three months pregnant when, in 1853, she and Daniel were married a second time, at her parent’s insistence, by the archbishop of New York.  As if organized religion was going to fix this disaster of a pairing.

One contemporary compared Daniel's morals to a rotten egg.  In 1856 Daniel was elected to the New York State Senate, which shortly thereafter censured him for giving a tour of those august chambers to Miss White, who was at this time identified as the operator of a popular N.Y.C. bordello. And when Daniel was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1857, and he and Teressa  moved to Washington, D.C.  At the same time he  maintained a suite at a Baltimore Hotel for his assignations with Fanny White, and  the "soiled doves" in her employ.  You see, Congressman Sickles was Miss White's primary financial backer and partner.

Shortly after the legal couple moved, Daniel was introduced to Phillip Barton Key, and the two struck up a friendship of kindred spirits. Key was living proof of the old adage about fruit never falling very far from the sapling. Phillip’s father, Frances Scott Key, had been so familiar with a certain popular drinking ditty (so difficult to sing that it was used as an 18th century sobriety test), that on the fly he converted it into our national anthem, translating “And swear by old Styx, that we long shall entwine, the myrtle of Venus and Bacchus’ vine” into “Oh, say, does that star spangled banner yet wave, Ore the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Phillip was forty-two year old widower at the time, with six children, and “the handsomest man in all Washington society”, according to Mrs. Clement Clay, the biggest gossip in a town that still lives on gossip. At six feet tall, Phillip had “sad eyes and a languid charm” (according to Edward Pinchon who wrote a bio of Dan Sickles), and his “…fine figure, fashionable air, and agreeable address, rendered him extremely popular among the gentler sex”, according to Felix G. Fontaine, who wrote “The Washington Tragedy”. Key was also the Federal District Attorney for Washington, and thus a good man to know for anyone who might anticipate developing legal problems. Daniel had so far made a career out of developing legal problems, so he decided that Phillip Key was the perfect man to escort Teressa to Washington social functions while Daniel was “relaxing” in Baltimore with Fanny White.

Friends tried to warn Daniel about Phillip’s reputation, and in March of 1858 Daniel had a confrontation with Phillip concerning accusations that were already bubbling up about his intentions toward Teressa. But Daniel came away from that meeting convinced that Phillip could be trusted. Evidently, Daniel assumed that Teressa could also be trusted.

Maybe the twenty year old girl was just fed up with Daniel’s philandering, and maybe it was payback. But whatever her motivation, according to Terressa’s own confession, “I did not think it safe to meet (Phillip) in this house, because there are servants who might suspect something….He then told me he had hired (a) house as a place where he and I could meet. I agreed to it.” The assignations took place at 888 Fifteenth Street in Washington, between K and L streets, in a run-down racially mixed neighborhood just around the corner from the Sickles’ rented home. “There was a bed in the second story…. The room is warmed by a wood fire. Mr. Key generally goes first… I went there alone.” And there, confessed Teressa, “I did what is usual for a wicked woman to do” Occasionally they also took carriage rides to various cemeteries, where, according to the coachman, “They would walk down the grounds out of my sight, and be away an hour or an hour-and-a-half.” Whatever they were doing out of sight, it was not enough, evidently, to wake the dead, or Daniel.

The torrid affair between Teressa and Phillip was one of the best known secrets in Washington, which has always been, at heart, the provincial Southern village it started out as. And it was only a matter of time before some moralizing busybody felt the need to drop Daniel an anonymous letter telling the whole sordid truth.. The dreaded day came on Thursday, 24 February, 1859. Daniel showed the note to a another friend, George Wooldridge, and then “put his hands to his head and sobbed in the lobby of the House of Representatives.”  Crocodile tears if ever there were any,

On Saturday night, 26 February, 1859, Daniel confronted Teressa in her bedroom (they had separate sleeping arraignments, on different floors, even when he was sleeping at home),  and he forced her to write her confession in her own hand. This would later be reprinted on the front page of Harper's Weekly, a national newspaper.  At about two the following afternoon, as Daniel was being comforted by another drinking buddy, Samuel Butterworth, in his own parlor, he spotted Phillip Key walking slowly back and forth on the street in front of his house on Madison Place, waving a white handkerchief in the general direction of Terressa’s bedroom window.

Daniel took the time to put on an overcoat, dropped a revolver and two derringers in the pockets, and went charging out of his Madison Place townhouse. He caught up with Phillip at the corner of Madison Place and Pennsylvania Avenue, just across the street from the White House. Daniel bellowed, “Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my bed. You must die!” Thereupon Daniel pulled a derringer and fired. Not surprisingly he missed. 

Phillip, who until that instant was unaware the affair had been discovered, grabbed for the gun, which was pointless since it was a single shot weapon, and the two men struggled for a moment while a dozen witnesses gasped in amazement. Phillip finally broke free and ran across the street, throwing a pair of opera classes to cover his retreat, and hid behind a tree.

Daniel followed, and produced a second derringer. This second shot hit Key in the thigh. The playboy dropped to the ground, begging, “Don’t shoot me”, and shouting, “Murder.”

Daniel finally pulled his revolver, and his third shot hit the tree. But the fourth shot, delivered point blank over the prone Phillip, blasted a hole in his chest as big as a silver dollar. The fifth shot misfired, and witnesses managed to restrain Daniel from delivering a ‘coup de grace.’ Not that it mattered; Phillip Key would soon be dead. Explained Daniel, when he was arrested, “He deserved it.”

It was the trial of the century! The prosecutor spoke of the “echoes of the church bells” still lingering in the air” while Daniel pulled the trigger over and over. The eight defense lawyers reminded the jurors that Daniel was “…in a state of white heat, (which) was too great a state of passion for a man to be in, who saw before him the hardened, the unrelenting seducer of his wife”.  After a twenty day trial the jury was out for only an hour. A hundred fifty people attended Daniel’s victory celebration. He had been declared, officially, temporarily insane.  The first such plea successfully delivered in an American court, and one of the few times it has ever worked.

The only hiccup occurred after the trial when Daniel publicly forgave Teressa. The public, which had supported the heel, now suddenly turned on theirs and attacked Sickles.  Americans were not offended at the murder, but at the show of marital compassion. Washington and New York society cut him dead. Daniel would have been condemned to die in obscurity, remembered only as the first defendant to use the temporarily insanity defense in America, but the outbreak of the civil war saved his reputation.

Being a Union supporting Democrat, Sickles was too valuable to be shunned, and he was used to enlist German American soldiers, and even rose to command one third of the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was there that Sickles almost cost the Federals the war, and had his right leg (above) shattered by a Confederate cannon ball. Being a general's leg, the limb was held in the national archives, where Sickles came to visit it every year on the anniversary of it's loss.   

Poor Teressa (Above, post trial, and looking very unhappy)  barely survived that war , succumbing to tuberculosis on 5 February, 1867, at the age of thirty-one. She was buried with her parents, back in New York; free at last from her insensitive and violent husband.

The old reprobate was then appointed ambassador to Spain, where and when it was rumored he seduced María Isabel Luisa de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias, also known as Isabella II, Queen of Spain - deposed (above). 

At the age of 50 Sickles did remarry, again to another deeply religious girl - this time to the orphaned 23 year old Carmina Creagh (above). She quickly produced two children for Sickles and then dutifully settled into her new cloister.

Back in New York, Sickles (above, with Carmina walking behind) occupied himself by raising money for a Gettysburg memorial for his New York troops. But after a few years it was evident he had pilfered $27,000 from the funds. There was talk of having the old reprobate arrested over the theft, which would have been a public relations nightmare for his fellow crooks at Tammany Hall, and cooler heads prevailed. He was merely removed as head of the fund raising commettie.

In March of 1914, there were rumors that Daniel had finally died. A reporter for the New York Times placed a telephone call to his mansion on Fifth Avenue. Daniel answered the phone himself. He had never felt better, he told the reporter, and denounced the rumors as a “damn lie.” 

Two months later Daniel Sickles suffered a stroke and really died. Proof again, the good die young. He was buried with all the honors he did not deserve. All past indiscretions were forgotten, if not forgiven. And I believe that for every second of his 91 years of life , Daniel Sickles was totally and completely insane. There was absolutely nothing temporary about his mental condition, no matter what the jury said.

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