PIXIE IN THE IRON MASK

 

I have some shocking news for you. The man in the Iron Mask was not Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, if you bother to think it through,  an iron mask is pretty impractical. What happens if you should drool in your sleep?  Eventually you would be rusted shut?

It was a cloth  mask. And he was not the twin of King Louis XIV or any other Louie. Who he was seems to have been mixed up in what is called “The Affair of the Poisons” which is a morality tale of a cute little love-sick tramp with the affinity for “inheritance powders”, and her amoral boyfriend.

Throw in the King’s mistress for a little spice, and you have a recipe for what Alexis de Tocqueville called “L’Ancien Regime”, and what in modern terms we would call a soap opera of the rich and infamous. It leaves me wondering why the French waited so long to start chopping off heads.

We begin in 1659, with a little tramp named Marie Madeleine Margherite D’Aubray Brinvillers (above). We’ll call her Maire for short. I don’t think she’ll mind. Marie was a tiny pixie-doll of a woman with sparkling blue eyes who seems to have committed no major public sins until she was about thirty.

That was when her husband, a colonel in a cavalry regiment, (above) introduced her to a handsome Captain named Godin de Sainte-Croix, to whom the husband owed a whole bunch of gambling debts. Hubby had to move out of the country to avoid his other creditors, but he left Marie behind,  as a sort of payment on account for Sainte-Croix. 

Marie didn’t seem to mind the arrangement, and neither did Sainte-Croix (above). Except, as much fun as Sainte-Croix had with little Marie, she wasn’t making him any richer. Where, oh, where was Sainte-Croix going to find enough money to live in the style to which he wanted to grow accustomed to?

Sainte-Croix then developed a multi-step plan. Step one was to encourage Marie to do some charity work. Step two was for Sainte-Croix to make the acquaintance of a man with a knowledge of chemistry. He met this man while being briefly held in prison, a man known only to history by the name of “Auguer”.

Now, in the days before CSI the only way to prove poisoning - as opposed to just an unhygienic cook - was to catch the suspect pouring poison on the food, or to get him or her to confess.

This is why torture was so popular for so long. It never failed. No matter whom you arrested, ten minutes with the prisoner's testicles caught in a vice, and you could get them to admit anything.

Of course, if your suspect was too connected to be tortured, the only alternative was to lock him up while you slowly collected evidence. That might take decades. And during that time witnesses could be bought off, killed off, or just die of natural causes. Politicians could retire. Investigators could get promoted, or fired, or die of old age. Or be poisoned. People dropped dead all the time in 17th century France. The staggering death toll made for the convoluted plots of some very popular French novels and plays.

So when poor people started dropping dead at the hospital where Marie had volunteered as a nurse, nobody took notice. They were poor people. In 17th century Paris the streets were littered with dead poor people. It was the perfect time and place for a serial killer, such as cute little Marie.

In 1666, after Sainte-Croix had perfected a formula of arsnic and murcury, he supplied it to his mistress. And the darling little Marie. had no compunction about slipping the poison into her father’s lunch (above). He died suddenly. And his little darling inherited a little money, which she and Saint-Croix burned through in four short years.

So in 1670 Sainte-Croix returned to his lab and cooked up another batch of inheritance powder (above), and Marie shed more tears when her two brothers, one after the other,  suddenly dropped dead. Marie inherited a little more money. By now, all the heirs in the Brinvillers family were getting nervous. Her only surviving sister hired a food taster.  But still nobody suspected the little elf, the little pixie, Marie Brinvillers. She was too cute. Cute people can’t be serial murderers.

But they can be poor. To avoid this horrible situation, the resourceful Sainte-Croix returned to his workshop to prepare a food additive for Marie's own mother. And that was when the unexpected happened.   The greedy mastermind of the entire slaughter accidently poisoned himself (above). Mon Dieu! Cele semble suspecte?!

The cops were brought in. They uncovered a hand written confession by Sainte-Croix (above) Evidently the captain did not entirely trust his little pixie partner, and left behind a list of name and dates of satisfied customers he had directed to the mysterious chemist, and plenty of evidence against himself and Marie - bills for chemicals, servants paid off, and dates of deaths of Marie

s family members. 

The list of lucky orphans sent to the chemist included Madame de Montespan, who was Louis XIV’s mistress – which in pre-revolutionary France was almost a cabinet position - and the Duchesse of Orleans, Louis’s sister-in-law (above), and...Marie Brinville.  

And, of course, some buzz kill read the list to the King.  Marie panicked. The cops were not going to torture the King’s mistress, or his sister-in-law, but they would have no hesitation about putting a lower level nobility like cutie like Marie on the rack. 

She ran off to seek protection with her husband in exile in London. But she was now infamous and hubby decided it was better if he had nothing to do with her (above). So Marie signed herself into a convent in Liege, Belgium.

This placed the pious nuns running the convent in a moral bind. They were sworn to provide sanctuary to all who asked for it and who sought forgiveness by confessing their sins, but...on the other hand, how do you solve a problem of a homicidal lunatic like Marie?   was, how do you solve a problem like Marie? How do you catch a serial killer and pin her down? How do you keep your convent running when you are short of money? The good sisters consulted scripture and their account books and after due deliberations decided to rat out their diminutive guest.

The nuns allowed a cop disguised as a priest to enter the convent, and while offering solace to the troubled little lady, he escorted Marie on a walk, right out the front gate and off church property, where she was immediately arrested (above).

It is not a happy ending for our little heroine. Marie was brought back to Paris in chains, tortured for a confession (Above) i.e. waterboarded), tried in secret, and on 16 July, 1676 she was forced to drink eight pints of water (more waterboarding)… 

and then they dragged her to the place of execution, and cut off her hair (above) and at last... 

...mercifully she was beheaded. And just to be sure, they burned her corpse. And that is how you solve a problem like Marie.

It looked like all hell was about to break loose in France. The cops now had Marie's confession and Sainte-Croix's list, both naming lots and lots of well known and well connected nobility. But just before the case broke wide open...Louis XIV (above) ordered all further investigations to be closed. And being the King, his orders were obeyed. He shut it all down. Can't imagine an American President behaving like that. Can you?  Nobody ever asked Madame Montespan or the Duchesse of Orleans how their names came to be on a list of people who had bought “inheritance powders”. Or if they had ever used them.

And shutting down the investigation also left unanswered another set of unpleasant questions: who was Msr. Auger, really? And what did he know? Had he ever talked with Marie (above) And more importantly, did he have any plans to write his biography or maybe a 'how to' book?  Was he the man in the Iron Mask? And what does any of this have to do with Leonardo DiCaprio?

Nothing: like I said, the “Man in the Iron Mask” was really the “Man in the cloth  Mask” and cloth  just sounds too fey for the title of a novel. And in any case, the Auger was not the guy in the mask - I don't think. But if you are of a novel mind set you might ask yourself a few additional questions.

Like, why would the King of France keep someone locked up in one prison after another -for decades? Why not just kill him and get it over with? Could such a convoluted plan even hope to work? James Bond villains have simpler plans than that.  If you ask me this story is mostly a fantasy invented by Alexander Dumas.  But was not the truth just as entertaining as the myth?  Not to Marie's relatives, or, in the end, to Marie of course, But it was for me. Was it good for you?

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SENATOR WETBACK

 

I prefer to refer to him as Senator Wetback. His real name was Patrick Anthony McCarran, and this bitter xenophobic, contemptuous narcissistic windbag, represented the very worst in the American character. In other words, you're average politician.

He  preached fear of the future, fear of our enemies,  fear of our friends and even fear of ourselves. It was Pat McCarran who gave the Health Insurance Industry their protected anti-trust status, allowing them to collude in setting drug prices.  It was Pat McCarran who fed America’s vile dead end phobia of Latino immigration.  

It was Pat McCarran who used the Senate of the United States to bully and terrorize loyal American citizens. It was Pat McCarran who turned Joe McCarthy’s bungling histrionics into the best weapon the Communists had in the cold war. In short, it was Pat McCarran who planted the seeds of the poisons politics that Donald Trump would harvest.

Pat McCarran was born the same year that George Custer died on the Little Big Horn; 1876. He was raised on an isolated sheep farm outside of Reno, Nevada, 15 miles from his nearest human playmate. He remained an isolationist his entire life. He attended the University of Nevada Law School, but had to drop out when his father was injured. Pat would later pass the bar, studying on his own.

As a new lawyer Pat McCarran made two big mistakes. The first was in 1907 when Nevada Governor John Sparks (above) offered the thirty year old an appointment as a judge. But Pat’s paranoia drove him to reject the appointment. He later admitted ruefully, “That was the first and only appointment that was ever offered to me.” 

His second mistake was when he served as counsel in a divorce case, Wingfield v Wingfield. The husband, George Wingfield (above), was the Democratic political boss who ran Nevada politics. And by representing Mae Wingfield, Pat McCarran earned the undying enmity of the Nevada Democratic Party leadership. 

Of course, his personality had something to do with people's reactions to him. When he tried to run for the U.S. Senate in 1908 he was black balled. One party leader noted, “His reputation as a double-crosser is too well established throughout the state.” Twenty years later the black ball still denied him a nomination for a Senate run.

Pat McCarran was finally allowed to run for the for U.S. Senate in 1932, at the age of 56, primarily because nobody else wanted what seemed like a useless nomination. The Democrats had been the second party in Nevada since the civil war. But in the general election this “ rotund man with a double chin, wavy hair and a high-pitched voice, who often says "My hide yearns for the alkali dust and the desert"— was swept into Washington on Franklin Roosevelt’s coat tails. Pat then proceeded to spit on those coattails.

The new Junior Senator from Nevada (left - second row) opposed every element of the New Deal. “The innovations of executive power, indulged in by Jackson, promoted by Lincoln, expounded by Garfield, declared righteous by Roosevelt and philosophically promulgated by Wilson, appear to have been but forerunners, rivulets, as it were, contributing to a flood that now sweeps on, submerging the Utopian doctrines and theories of Jefferson and conferring unheard of and unfettered expansion to the executive”  That kind of rhetoric got him re-elected in 1938 with 73% of the vote.

Now secure in his seat, McCarran made speech's along side fellow Catholic Charles Lindberg, preaching isolationism and antisemitism. “I think one American boy, the son of an American mother, is worth more than all central Europe.”  He condemned Roosevelt’s supposed “secret plan” to push America into WW II.  

After Pearl Harbor, it was McCarran's desperate attempts to justify his prewar opposition helped give birth to the conspiracy myths that FDR had purposefully ignored Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact it was McCarran's stinginess over military budgets that left the Army and Navy short planes and radar to intercept the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, however, Senator McCarran made certain Nevada got it’s share of war spending, including the third largest manufacturing facility built during the war, Basic Magnesim’s  $140 million plant, built at full government expense, and the town of Henderson, built again at government expense, to house the plant’s 15,000 workers. Pat won re-election in 1944 with 68% of the vote.

The war and time made Pat McCarran one of the nation’s most powerful senators, by making him one of its most senior Senators. By 1945 he had become the new political boss of Nevada, the new George Wingfield. Pat even filled the U.S. capital building with so many graduates from Nevada Universities that they became known as “McCarran’s Boys”.  And after a couple of years working in Washington, many of the “boys” became part of the McCarran political Machine, back home in Nevada.

Pat McCarran handed out just as many “black balls” as he had been handed. Federal Marshal Les Kofed explained to the Senator that Federal law prevented political appointees like him from making speeches in support of a local politician. Marshal Kofed explained, “Out of a clear blue sky, shortly thereafter,…I received a call from the chief deputy at Carson City, that a new marshal had been appointed, that I had better come in and turn in my keys.”

By 1950 Time magazine had begun describing the 73 year old Pat McCarran as “pompous, vindictive and power-grabbing”. According to the magazine he “staged a one-man committee filibuster against an “Emergency Immigration bill” to admit (250,000) D. P’s to the U.S  

The D.P.’s were Displaced Persons, who had survived the Nazi death and work camps, but whose identification papers had been lost or destroyed by the Nazis. They were people without homes or a nation willing to accept them.  What concerned Pat McCarran was that many of them were Jews. He argued that the “Emergency Immigration Bill” was supported by a particular “pressure group” with “unlimited money” - code words for Jews.

The DP bill had the support of President Eisenhower. But when it was first introduced into a subcommittee in the spring of 1953, Senator McCarran “demanded” a ten day delay while his wife sought medical treatment. When “Senator Wetback” instead surfaced in Los Angles, holding hearings for his own Senate Security and Intelligence Sub Committee, and asked for three more weeks of delay, the immigration bill hearings finally began.

Three weeks into the hearings McCarran managed to snooker the Judiciary Committee (parent committee to the subcommittee) into voting to delay any further action by the subcommittee. When most of the Senators realized they had been tricked, fisticuffs almost broke out. It took a week, but the delay was eventually overturned. Still, in the end, McCarran managed to kill the bill. And tens of thousands of desperate people were turned away from America's shores because of one bigot.

In June of 1952 Pat McCarran co-sponsored a rewriting of immigration law, declaring that “…we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated..." More code words for Jews. "Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain… I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.” He could have had the same speech writer as Donald Trump, except McCarran, at least, knew lots of multi-syllable words.

Next came the program which, for me, earned the Senator his nickname, “Operation Wetback.” That  really was its name, and it was launched in 1954 after Senator McCarran’s prodded the bureaucrats of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The program contrasted with the ten year old “Bracero” system, in which Mexican recruiters contracted to supply workers for American farmers and railroads.

By 1954 some 300,000 Mexican citizens were legally working in the United States on temporary “Bracero” visas. Few stayed in the United States at the end of their contracts, because their salaries were paid to their families, back in Mexico. However those programs, which protected worker’s rights and wages, were disliked by employers. Racists forces in Texas had prevented that state from participating in the program for five years. 

But in 1954 this successful program was killed, in favor of mass deportations - the same approach promoted by Donald Trump, and producing the same outcome - rising food prices because of a lack of field workers.

The INS would later claim to have expelled 1.3 million Mexicans (not the 13 million claimed in recent mythology) under Operation Wetback.  But a closer examination of the data shows the service could only prove some 80,000 were expelled. The addition half a million were an estimate of those who left the country out of fear, but the number was more hopeful than accurate.

The U.S. Army successfully resisted joining Operation Wetback, and in an internal report written later carried the notation, "Thank goodness"   The program ended abruptly when seven “illegals” being deported by ship, drowned while trying to swim back to the American shore. The crew of the steamer transporting them then mutinied against their captain, and against the entire program.

But Pat McCarran’s most powerful weapon was his anti-communism. In this he was merely echoed by Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarran also supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to the point that he was called “The Senator from Madrid.” 

He was an equally fierce supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek, after Chiang and his supporters were driven out of mainland China and retreated to the island of Taiwan. So rabid was McCarran's defense that it was not until Richard Nixon visited China in the 1970’s that some sanity and common sense return to American Asian policy.

The McCarran’s Internal Security Act (of September 1950) required members of the communist party to register with the Attorney General. So onerous were the details of the act that between 1965 and 1967 almost all of it was ruled unconstitutional.  Walt Kelly, who drew the popular "Pogo" comic strip, chose to memorialize McCarrain with "Mole J. Macarney", a blind, paranoid mole , who spread tar on everything and everyone he touched.

Pat McCarran died of a heart attack in September of 1954, proving once again that politics is not about being right. It is about being re-elected. To most politicians, nothing else matters.

  - 30 -