THE SMITH SISTER'S COWS

 

I admit we must all bow to the will of genetics, such as when you come upon the Smith family of Glastonbury, Connecticut.  Zephaniah Hollister Smith graduated an ordained minister from Yale, but he gave it up because he did not believe in mixing prophets with profits. Allegedly he excommunicated his entire Methodist congregation, and they returned the favor. Swinging to the other extreme Zephaniah then became a successful lawyer. 

His wife, Hannah Hadassah Hickock Smith was a linguist, a mathematician and a poet -  all the more amazing an achievement since she lived in the second half of the 18th century when women were little more than chattel. The couple shared a fascination for astronomy, a passion for the abolition of slavery... and five girls.

Eldest daughter was Laurilla Aleroyia Smith, born in 1785, who painted portraits in her own studio just down Main Street from the family home. She also taught French in nearby Hartford, and taught both Art and French at Emma Willard's School in Troy, N.Y.

Next eldest was Hancy Zephina Smith, born in 1787. She was of a mechanical mind. She built her own boat, and invented a machine to shoe horses.  She was also a devout abolitionist. She died of whooping cough in 1871.

Then there was Cyrinthia Scretuia Smith, born in 1788 with a green thumb. She raised fruit trees, grapes, strawberries, and grafted her own varieties of apple trees. In her free time she was also a scholar of Latin and Greek literature. But the real revolutionaries were the two youngest girls.

They told an amazing story about Julia Evelina Smith (born in 1792.) While trapped during a long stage trip with the Chancellor of Yale College and a professor, “Miss” Julia felt insulted when the two men began an animated conversation in French, ignoring her completely. After listening for several minutes, Julia spoke up, saying “Excusez-moi, mais je comprends le français.” Without an acknowledgement of her presence, the two men immediately shifted their discussion to Latin, whereupon Julia interrupted again; “Excuse mihi , EGO quoque narro Latin.” The intellectuals were appalled at the continued interruption and shifted to Greek, and Julia responded with “Και κατανοώ επίσης ελληνική". Finally the Chancellor spoke to the lady directly, demanding, “Who the devil are you!?”

She was a singular woman.  She taught Euclidian Geometry at Emma Willard's School for women during the 1820's. And Julia also spoke and wrote in Hebrew, and had been conducting her own study of both the Old and the New Testaments. 

You see, in December of 1843 many of Smith's neighbors had expected the world to end, and Julia taught herself ancient Hebrew and Greek so she could read the bible in it's original languages, so she could figure out for herself why it had not.

The  youngest sister, Abby Adassah Smith (above. born in 1797) was the quietest of the five, and much to everyone’s surprise (including herself) was perhaps the best public speaker of all. It seems a pity to point out that none of men in the area seemed to have been bright enough to garner any of the ladies’ interests in marriage,  

It also seems a pity that of this entire family, all of them independently financially successful, intellectually powerful and culturally sophisticated, only the father, Zephaniah, was politically empowered. And when he died, on 1 February, 1836, the richest, best educated family in central Connecticut, was no longer allowed to cast a single vote in elections.  

This oddity lay simmering beneath the surface until November of 1873. By now most of the members of the Smith family had gone on to meet their maker - and probably correct him on few items. 

That left only Julia,  now aged 82, and Abby,  now aged 77, remaining to carry the Smith genetic code. 

It was then that the male officials of Glastonbury made the decision to raise the property tax assessment on the Smith farm (above)  by $100. The sisters would have no trouble meeting the obligation, but the increase bothered Abby, and she looked into it. 

What Abby Smith discovered was that in the entire town, only three properties had suffered the reassessment; the Smith farm, and the properties of two widows. Not a single male property owner had been reassessed. 

Abby was so incensed,  she wrote a speech, which she delivered at the next town meeting.  She said, “…here, where liberty is so highly extolled and glorified by every man... one half of the inhabitants…are ruled over by the other half...All we ask of the town, is not to rule over them as they rule over us, but to be on an equality with them.”

Well, the male citizens at the meeting responded to Abby's speech in the same way the Yale Chancellor and professor had responded to Julia. They ignored the little lady. So, the sisters decided more radical action was required. 

They publicly announced that until they received representation (the right to vote), they would no longer submit to any additional taxation. Oh, they paid their property taxes each year, and promptly, but they refused to pay the $100 reassessment.  

In response the tax collector, Mr. George C. Andrews, seized seven cows from the Smith farm. The bovines were almost pets of the Smith sisters -  named, Jessie, Daisy, Proxy, Minnie, Bessie, Whitey, and Lily. The cows were valued well beyond the $101.39 additional tax bill. So the determined sisters dispatched an agent to buy the beloved pets at auction, paying far in excess of the tax bill to save four of them. The remaining three were sold at auction, although I doubt they proved to be worth the price since none of the cows were willing to be milked unless Julia was present.

Meantime, the Springfield Massachusetts Republican newspaper reprinted Abby’s speech, and it was picked up and reprinted in newspapers nationwide. The story was even repeated in Europe. It was, wrote one newspaper, “A fit centennial celebration to the Boston Tea Party.”

In April Abby was denied time to speak again at the next town meeting. So she climbed on board a wagon (above) out side and delivered her remarks from there, this time heard about equally by men and women. When tax time came around again, the sisters still refused to pay the additional assessment. 

This time Mr. Andrews seized 15 acres of Smith pasture, worth about $2,000. And this time he moved the location of the auction at the last minute, so the sisters could not even buy back their own land. The valuable property was bought by a male neighbor for less than $80.  

In response the sisters sued Mr. Andrews in local court,  and they won. The court ordered the property (and the cows) returned to the sisters, and fined Mr. Andrews $10. The city appealed, and the case began the tortuous climb through the courts. In the midst of this trial, Julia married 86 year old Amos Parker of New Hampshire. She was the only one of the five sisters to ever marry.  I'm sure the city fathers of  Glastonbury were expecting the ladies would die before their case reached the state supreme Court, but the ladies had good genes, and they were still breathing in November of 1876, when the court handed them a total victory. The city could either grant their right to vote or pay for the seized property.  The city finally accepted it had been beaten by two very smart lady spinsters and paid up, to avoid letting women suffrage.  

Julia wrote an account of their adventure, “Abby Smith and her Cows”, published in 1877. That made the sisters famous, and they spoke at suffragette meetings, until Julia’s (below, left) death in 1878.  

Abby (above, right)  followed her in 1886. But women still could not vote in Connecticut until the 19th Amendment to the National Constitution was officially passed, in August of 1920. The Smith family home was finally made a National Historical Landmark, but not until 1974. 

The story of  Julia and Abby Smith, and their cows, ought to be considered by members of the modern Republican Party. who would seek to deny citizens the right to directly influence their government. But along with that right comes the obligation to support the government, which wealthy conservatives currently also deny.  You can deny the connection between those two elements of democracy until the cows come home.  But, as these two brilliant women pointed out, both the right and the obligation are essential to any future of America.  You can advocate the destruction of the political system for only so long, because if you succeed in destroying it, you lose everything.

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KILLER POLITICS

 

I don't think you have to be crazy to be a politician, but a little screwball logic never scared away a base.  On the other hand you don't want voters suspecting you might be completely loony. And navigating a path between those two alternatives can be tricky when you build your career on being crazy.

For example, in the 1980's a 5'1” tall combative obsessive/compulsive fire cracker named Ruthann Aron (above), born Ruthann Greenzweig, who  dreamed big dreams.  Always big. Her father, 

David Greenzweig, had owned a diner in the Catskill resort town of Fallsburg.  Ruthann earned advanced degrees in both microbiology from Cornel and a law degree.  A college boyfriend remembered, "If she was angry, you knew it... There was nothing left to the imagination."  

Ruthann was even admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court - although she never did. Instead she took a quicker route to wealth, earning millions by developing shopping centers. She didn't make a lot of friends, of course. Just a lot of money.

Her urologist husband Barry (above), the father of her two children,  admitted at the time, “She gets in people’s faces in a very straightforward way and doesn’t tap dance too much.”  He should know, given his repeated affairs.  

But the definitive chapters of Ruthann's story really begins in the “Washington, D.C.” adjacent enclave of Montgomery county, Maryland (above), one of the richest and best educated counties in America. Everybody here, it seems came from some place else – the county was even named for a Revolutionary War hero who never set foot in the state. This is one of those big ponds where little fish either get eaten or grow big  And in 1994 it had not voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan retired. 

As Barry Rascovar noted for the Washington Post in mid-August of 1994, “...the last time there was a truly contested GOP Senate primary was in the early 1960s.”  It was here that our diminutive mother of two faced her first public test when, after just two years on the County Planning Board, Ruthann Aron decided to run for the United States Senate. She was a pro-choice member of the John Birch Society, who boasted, "I'm not a career politician. I'm a businesswoman."  She was also a killer.

It was a clever move. The dysfunctional Maryland G.O.P had little hope of beating the popular Democrat, Paul Sarbanes (above) who had held his U.S. Senate seat since 1976 and seemed a shoe-in for re-election. Even if she lost the primary, Ruthann could still lay a foundation for a future in politics.

The only drawback was that there were seven candidates vying for the Republican nomination, so Ruthann decided to stand out, by attacking her best known fellow Republican opponent, the  multimillionaire candy heir, ex-Senator from Tennessee, and ex-GOP Chairman, the handsome Bill Brock III.

Ruthann spent nearly a quarter of a million of her own dollars buying radio ads, in which two “hillbillies” laughed about the way Maryland voters were being fooled by the “tax-raising, carpetbagging, career politician”, Senator Brock (above).   The ex-Senator chose to not even mention Ruthann in his few radio ads. No since giving the little lady free publicity. 

Then, a poll released Labor Day weekend found Brock leading, as expected, but with just 23% of the vote. And in second place and well within the margin of error for a tie was Ruthann, at 20%.

With just two weeks to go before the primary, Brock decided he could no longer ignore the tiny upstart, and called an afternoon press conference for Thursday, 8 September, 1994, on the Rockville courthouse square (above). His stated intention was to attack his female opponent. That was sure to draw the media.

As the Baltimore Sun noted, “The minutes preceding yesterday's news conference had the feel of a mock thriller....About 2 p.m. the (Ruthann) Aron camp entered...About 10 minutes later, Mr. Brock arrived with his contingent of sign-wavers.” 

Neither Senator Block (above), nor his supporters had expected Ruthann to make a personal appearance. The Washington Post observed, “As reporters and photographers soaked up the awkward silence, the two camps stared mutely, and the whirring of (film) cameras was all that was heard.”

With the "little lady" just a few feet away, Senator Block decided to tone down his attacks, but retired Congresswoman Marjorie Holt (above), fired the shot across Ruthann's bow, describing, “...the aura of fraud and breach of contract that constantly surrounds the other candidate.”  After that,  the press conference devolved into two competing impromptu verbal slug fests,  during which Brock built on Holt's charge. According to the Post, Brock said, “She has been convicted by a jury of fraud, more than once," 

The reporters were having a ball,  bouncing "between the two candidates like pin balls.” Brock backed up the theatrical press conference with a quarter of a million dollars in new radio ads, 800 ads in just 5 days, claiming that Ruthann had been convicted of fraud “more than once”, and had to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines”. Said his narrator in the ad, "Before Ruthann Aron starts attacking anybody, maybe she ought to look in the mirror.”

On Tuesday, 13 September, Ruthann lost the primary by 50,000 votes. Even worse, a poll released just before the election showed that rather than laying a foundation for her future, her campaign style had raised her negatives within the Republican Party to 16%.  Her reputation was not even helped when Block was easily beaten by the Democrat Sarbanes in the November general election. So, finding herself in a hole, Ruthann decided to keep digging.  She sued Brock for defamation of character. No politician had ever done that before.  I wonder why?

It took over a year for what the Baltimore Sun called Ruthann's “frivolous lawsuit” to work its way to trial, which it did in early 1996. As the Sun described the testimony, “Jurors have been schooled in subliminal suggestion...the role of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in an effective campaign commercial....harked to the tonal difference between a major chord and a slamming jail door, listened again and again to the definition of "Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment" (Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican) and been told that staff members look at members of Congress the way undertakers look at corpses.”

Chief witness for Brock was Arthur G. Kahn (above), lawyer in a 1984 suit against Ruthann's real estate company, Research Incorporated. he compared Ruthann to an octopus. When it was attacked, he said, "... it emits a dark fluid, a black fluid,  and it escapes in the darkness and muddies the waters." More specifically, Kahn testified that Ruthann had betrayed investors in one of her shopping malls. 

The mall had never been built, because before it could be Ruthann sold the rights to the project to a third party for $200,000. And kept that money. The jury decided she  had violated her agreement with the investors and awarded them $175,000, which Ruthann paid only after Arthur Kahn agreed to request the judge wipe the verdict from the record.  Which the judge had done.  

It had been a civil suit. Ruthann had lost it, but there had been no conviction, and the civil verdict had been wiped away, so technically what Senator Brock had said at the press conference had been a lie. But ...

....this new jury decided that was splitting hairs, and, besides, my bet is they just did not like Ruthann very much. Who did? Her own father, who had been murdered during her campaign,  had written Ruthann out of his will. "I specifically and unequivocably leave absolutely nothing for my daughter...and direct my executor to reject any claim that she may make..."

So the jury found for Brock.  That made two defeats in one election for Ruthann, making her double-dog-gone done in politics And that should have been the end of Ruthann Aron's political dreams,  unless she had thrown herself into charity work or earned a Nobel Peace Prize or saved a sinking sack of kittens. Instead she switched to the Democratic Party and raised the curtain on what was supposed to be Ruthann Aron, act two. 

Instead, on Saturday, 7 June, 1997, Ruthann Aron was arrested for hiring a hit man to murder her old nemesis,  Arthur Kahn., and, as an afterthought, her own husband Doctor Barry Aron, who had finally asked for a divorce. 

The little lady had walked into the lobby of a Marriott Hotel, disguised in a trench coat, a wig, a floppy hat,  dark glasses and carrying the $500 down payment for a double murder. She must have looked like a munchkin spy. On tape she spelled out the names of her intended victims. "Last name A, like apple, R-O-N, first name B like in boy, A-R-R-Y", she was heard saying on tape.  The hitman/cop asked if Ruthann wanted her husband's death to look like a traffic accident,  Ruthann replied, "If it would pass muster". Ruthann then called her husband to ask what he wanted for dinner.  It was an open and shut case. Mostly shut.

Ruthann insisted at both of her trials (the first jury hung, 11-1 for conviction) that she was crazy. Nine doctors argued she had a borderline personality disorder, had suffered a brain injury as a child, had 

been molested by her father since the age of seven.  But explaining her vindictive personality, her maniacal approach to interpersonal relationships failed to justify two counts of conspiracy to commit murder.  Let's just say she was nuts and let it go at that.

The ten women and two men on the jury found Ruthann guilty of all counts. At her sentencing Ruthann's lawyer pointed out what her brief career in politics had cost the little lady. "She's lost her credibility, her reputation, her family as she knew it, her dignity, her lifestyle, her husband, almost everything she had”, he said.  She still got three years in jail,  with a suspended sentence of ten more years hanging over her head. Barry the urologist not only filed for divorce, he sued Ruthann for $7.5 million. So she counter-sued him for $24 million. Some people never learn. 

After she got out of jail in 2001, Ruth Ann moved to Florida, and changed her last name to Green.  And then, throwing off whatever cloak of anonymity she now had,  she wrote her autobiography, in which she blamed everything on Barry. She called her self-published book, “Corrupted Justice: A Killer Husband,”   The jury didn't buy it, why should anybody else? 

And that is the end of the sad story of Ruthann  Aron-Green, She is still worth between $1 and $5 million. Her son died in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.  Her daughter no longer speaks to her. The lesson from our little tale of this little lady is that if you sleep with a politician, you may or may not find love, but you will defiantly get screwed. Those people are nuts.

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