When James G. Blaine went to war
with his son's ex-wife in the national press, he had no idea that two could
play that game.
By April White and animation by Jordan Kay, Politico, 6/17/2022
04:30 AM EDT
April White is a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She is the author of The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier, from which this is adapted.
James G. Blaine, Sr. readied himself
for the political battle of his already contentious career. The secretary of
state would challenge Benjamin Harrison — the sitting president and a member of
Blaine’s own party — for the 1892 Republican nomination. James was a seasoned
campaigner and a gloves-off political brawler; he had vied for the presidency
three times in the previous two decades. But he was not prepared for his true
opponent that election year: an aspiring actress named Mary Nevins Blaine.
When the two had first met in 1886,
Mary was not a threat to James’ political ambitions, merely a nuisance: At the
age of 19, after an 18-day courtship, she had eloped with James’ 17-year-old
son, Jamie, a boy he described as the “the most helpless, least responsible” of
his children. The union, which both families publicly objected to at first, had
been a source of much tittle-tattle as James toured the country that fall
rallying support for Republican candidates. But soon, the public embraced the
handsome young couple, even if James’ wife, Harriet, never had.
The impulsive marriage could,
perhaps, be forgiven, but Mary’s decision to seek a divorce five years later —
with a presidential election looming — could not be. That was a scandal that
could torpedo a presidential campaign. James’ political brand was predicated on
an unassailable private life. Faced with the scandal, he considered his options
and chose silence. The family would not feed the media frenzy.
But James had underestimated Mary as
a foe; the young woman knew how to use the newspapers to her advantage as well
as any political pro. When he finally recognized her skills, he launched his
own PR offensive in response. Their front-page fight reveals a lesson that is
even more pertinent in the social media era than it was at the time: Once a
story has been aired publicly, there is no way to know who will seize control
of it. And the winner is often the one you least expect.
Divorce was the one of the central
culture wars of the United States at the turn of
the 20th century. Efforts to limit legal access allied the country’s clergy,
large swaths of its political and judicial classes and many of its social
leaders. For them, at this moment of rapid social and economic change, the
stakes of the divorce debate were no less than the future of the American
family, the very building block of the country itself. On the other side of
this battle were those who did not want a fight. They wanted nothing more than
release from their marriages.
A divorce was all Mary wanted, but
she could not end her marriage quietly in a country of disparate divorce laws
and an adversarial system that required one spouse be found guilty of a breach
of the marriage contract for the other to be freed. Her divorce would be a
front-page saga — some of those stories quoting Mary herself — that tarred both
the Blaine and Nevins families, and it would unfold in the unexpected epicenter
of the country’s divorce crisis: Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In 1891, South Dakota had some of
the laxest divorce laws in the country, and Sioux Falls had the nicest hotel
for hundreds of miles. And so that spring, Mary made the four-day journey from
New York City for a divorce that law and society would deny her at home. She
would become known as one of the first of the “divorce colony,” a coterie of
unhappy wives — for it was the women among the divorce seekers who caused the
most consternation — whose personal decisions to leave their husbands forced
the issue into the national conversation.
Mary lived in Sioux Falls with her
three-year-old son for almost a year — the state law’s required 90 days to gain
residency and then the months it took her case to make its way through the
courts. Throughout that time, the intimate details of life in the Blaine family
played out in the newspapers. In court filings, Mary accused Jamie of
abandonment and neglect, but the headlines painted a portrait of a wayward boy
spoiled by his family and forgiven for every blunder.
Jamie had been widely known as the
black sheep of the Blaine family since he had been kicked out of at least three
preparatory schools for, the newspapers gleefully reported, drunkenness, petty
theft and dalliances with the chorus girls. At 23, his continued bad behavior
ensured the Jamie was not welcome in good D.C. society, but his father still
seemed determined to ignore his son’s drinking, flirting, fist fights,
inability to hold a job and crippling debt.
James had begun to gear up for a
fight, sending a private investigator to pry into Mary’s life. When Mary
appeared in a South Dakota courtroom in February 1892, some 250 people turned
out to watch what was sure to be fiery divorce proceedings — but the Blaines
did not appear in court. The family acquiesced to the divorce in hopes of
forestalling further gossip.
The approach did not work. When the
judge awarded Mary her divorce decree, custody of her son and alimony, he also
delivered a stunning rebuke not just of Jamie — “reprehensible,” with a
“hardness of heart” and “reprobacy of mind” — but of the entire Blaine family
for its role in climbing divorce rate. From the bench, in front of eager
reporters, the judge declared, “the cause of the estrangement and separation,
so far as the court is able to judge from the testimony, was the unfriendliness
on the part of the family of the defendant.”
James G. Blaine Sr. was a master
orator. On the stump, he commanded attention
like a leading man standing in the spotlight. But before he was a politician
with a national platform and the ability to draw thousands to a rally, James
had been a journalist, and he still often turned to the pen to make his case.
In his Senate days, James had pioneered the art of the Sunday night news
release. Knowing from personal experience the difficulty of filling the Monday
morning edition after a quiet weekend, James picked that moment to send
statements or share his correspondence with friendly papers sure to print them
as news. In this way, his voice reached not thousands but millions. Over the
years, he used this platform to inform the public about his travel plans, his
health and his candidacy for high office.
In the days after Mary received her
decree, James sat down again to write. James had stayed mum while his family’s
private matters played out in the papers, but silence had not proven to be a
winning strategy for the man known for his conversational excesses. The
statement of the court made clear to him that he had underestimated Mary and
the effectiveness of her story. And so, on Sunday, February 28, 1892, James
released “a personal statement” to the press. The next morning, it filled two
full columns on the front pages of the country’s newspapers.
The Blaine family had been maligned
in a South Dakota court, but James would appeal the ruling to the court of
public opinion. With the love letters that Mary wrote to his son in the early
days of their courtship as evidence, James penned an indictment of the young
woman — and any woman who would avail herself of the courts to find freedom
from her husband.
James’ youngest son’s behavior —
enough to “turn the feelings of every moral man in the country,” Mary’s lawyer
had warned — had given Democrats ample ammunition against candidate Blaine, and
now James sought to change the narrative.
James G. Blaine Sr. sits for a
portrait on July 18, 1884. | Boston Hardy via the Library of Congress
James claimed Mary had tricked his
son into marriage: “It was thus that a boy of seventeen years and ten months,
in some respects inexperienced even for his age, was tempted from his school
books and led to the altar by a woman of full twenty-one years” — Mary was only
19 on her wedding day — “with entire secrecy contrived by herself and with all
the instrumentalities of her device complete and exact.” And he wrote that
“disaster is the only legitimate conclusion” of such a union. As for Jamie,
James shrugged: “When his youth, his uncompleted education, his separation from
the influences of home, the exchange of a life full of hopes and anticipations
for premature cares and uncongenial companionship, are considered, I hold him
more sinned against than sinning.”
James likely expected that to be the
last word on the divorce that plagued his family name and his political
ambitions, but two days later, Mary released her own carefully crafted open
letter. “I acknowledge your well-rendered, richly deserved fame as a diplomat,
and appreciate fully the weight which your utterances possess — as fully as do
I appreciate my own weakness and my total inability to cope with you in a
personal encounter but I shall expect from you that considerate and honorable
treatment which I am sure your keen sense of equity and fairness will dictate,”
Mary wrote. “The powerful man of a great nation will surely accord to a weak
and defenseless woman her full meed of justice.” She issued an ultimatum: “Have
the kindness to publish in connection with your statement the full text of the
letters you have quoted from. Do not, like a shrewd and unprincipled person,
select only such pages as may be needed to make your case,” she wrote. She gave
him 10 days before she promised to publish Jamie’s letters to her in full.
It was a risky game of brinkmanship
with the country’s top negotiator, and Mary still had a lot to lose. She had no
source of income except the alimony Jamie, pleading poverty, was unlikely to
pay, and any prospect of a future on the stage — or of finding a respectable
new husband — hinged on rehabilitating the reputation James was further
destroying. But with her legal obligations to the Blaine family dissolved, Mary
was no longer powerless, and she was not a good enough actress to fully obscure
that truth. “I wish it distinctly understood by you,” she wrote to James, “that
I am not asking sympathy. I respectfully demand justice.”
To the disappointment of those
anticipating the showdown as if it
were a prizefight, Mary’s deadline passed without a word from either the
Nevinses or the Blaines. The letters Mary had demanded James publish in full
remained hidden, as did those she had threatened to release. They had seemingly
fought to a draw. Each had inflicted serious wounds on the other’s reputation
and prospects; it remained to be seen if those blows would prove fatal. It had
all sent Mary to her sick bed again with nervous prostration. James was felled
by the grippe and sweated through dangerously high fevers for several days.
Both had suffered self-inflicted
harm too. James, friends reported, was “extremely sorry that he ever attempted
to wash his family linen in public.” He had released his tirade on Mary without
consulting these friends, and they believed he had made “one of the greatest mistakes
of his life.” Political observers were surprised by the tactical error the
consummate campaigner had committed. In his tirade against Mary, James had also
attacked the country’s Catholics, a valuable voting bloc already wary of the
candidate. Even those who understood James’ need to defend his family opined,
“Nevertheless, it is true in such cases that ‘silence is best and noblest to
the end.’”
James turned his attention to
Minneapolis, where the Republican Party would gather in early June to select
its nominee for the 1892 presidential election. On June 4, James resigned from
President Benjamin Harrison’s cabinet in preparation for his campaign. He had
carefully orchestrated the convention, filling the leadership positions and the
hall seats with boisterous supporters. When his name was put forward, a roar of
support went up. For 60 seconds, the proceedings came to a halt as feet stomped
and hats and handkerchiefs waved to the chant of “Blaine! Blaine! Blaine!”
Later in the proceedings, when another supporter rose to extol James’s
candidacy, the room echoed with the Blaine name for a full 30 minutes.
Although Blaine had carefully
orchestrated the convention, filling the hall with boisterous supporters, the
Republican Party decided to renominate Benjamin Harrison for president. |
Harper's Weekly via the Library of Congress
But the pageantry wasn’t enough. The
party decisively renominated Harrison. James would not be president — and he
would never escape the shadow of his son’s divorce. At the height of the
convention, with thousands cheering his name, James was forced to deny a very
detailed accusation about the letters Mary had sworn to publish. It was said
that months of negotiations between a Nevins family representative and
Secretary of War Stephen Elkins, a longtime Blaine confidant, had produced a
settlement. Multiple sources insisted that $65,000 — raised by Richard C.
Kerens, a Republican politician from Missouri, and five other dedicated Blaine
men — had purchased the potentially damaging letters. James challenged the
story.
On June 8, a Wednesday night, he
released a letter addressed to the editors of the New York World: “Will you
please state in your columns that it is utterly false that I, or any one for
me, or in my name, ever paid or offered to pay, Mary Nevins Blaine, or any one
for her, 1 cent, or any other sum for any alleged letters she holds.”
The truth of the situation never
came out, but that mattered little to the public. In the campaign between the
divorcee and the diplomat, Mary was declared the winner.
From the book THE DIVORCE COLONY by
April White. Copyright © 2021 by April White. Reprinted by permission of
Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book
Group, Inc., New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/17/divorce-colony-book-excerpt-april-white-james-g-blaine-00038679
